Chris Ward

I'm afraid I still don't see the problem with keeping things in jars. It's OK presumably for jam - I've never seen that being sold scooped out of a bucket at a market. Selling anchovies 'loose' would be illegal now, for very good hygiene reasons. Scooping things out of buckets on the floor is intrinsically unhygienic, we've learned.

They make the kids at the school where I teach do that. It's not a great way to get the knives you want or need. One or two at a time. Nowadays I use a small vegetable peeler and my 25cm chef's knife, and that's about it.

27: A white exam. More omelets this morning, followed by an ‘examen blanc’ this afternoon. ‘Blanc’ as in ‘pretend’ – so a ‘mariage blanc’ is a fake marriage undertaken for the purposes of gaining French citizenship, a ‘nuit blanc’ is a sleepless night and so on. The omelets are interesting because we get to use poitrine salée, salted pork belly or streaky bacon, as we say in English. The French have a cut of cured pork called ‘bacon’ which isn’t bacon at all; it’s more like dried ham, similar to but drier than prosciutto or Parma. Bacon as in sandwiches can be bought but is usually sliced so thinly and so filled with water that if you try to fry it you end up with shoe lace-sized strips of tastelessness. In the restaurant, and at school today, we’re provided with 30 cm square chunks of salted pork belly. At the restaurant we cut it up to make lardons, bacon bits, so I’ve done this lesson already – as so often now, my restaurant chef prepares me at work the week before school by putting items on the weekly menu or staff meal list so I can practise beforehand. So I’ve already skinned and chopped up my fair share of poitrines this week, and have learned how to remove the skin pretty efficiently with my new désosseur, my deboning knife. I now own several knives, in fact; the désosseur, a 25 cm chef’s knife – both Spanish Arcos brand knives with which I’m very pleased indeed. There’s a good Coutellerie, a knife shop in Avignon just round the corner from Les Halles indoor market and the coutellier gives sensible advice and doesn’t simply recommend that you buy the most expensive knives he sells. I explained that I was starting at cookery school and wanted something durable, decent and above all cheap and he showed me the Arcos range. Spanish steel is, he says, very good quality, plenty of carbon to make sharpening easier but not so much that the blades rust. So Arcos it is. I’m less pleased with the Sabatier filet de sole knife I picked up in Metro while shopping with Chef one day. Sabatier has a good reputation, in the UK anyway, but in fact there are different grades of knife made by different branches of the Sabatier family. The filleting knife I bought simply won’t keep an edge, even with enthusiastic use of a good steel (‘fusil’ in French, the same word for rifle – it comes from the name for the ramrod used in the past to ram gunpowder and bullets into muzzle-loading guns) so I’m going to buy a new one one of these days. All of which is academic because, even though I knew I’d be skinning pork belly this morning and doing an exam this afternoon, I’ve left all my knives at home. Duh. I realised quite early on during the day – when I started setting up on my workstation, in fact – and initially resolved to catch the bus home to pick them up. But then I’d miss the morning, so borrowed knives here and there and ended up with enough blunt objects to keep me going. Why don’t people sharpen their knives? I have friends in the UK who bought a hugely expensive set of foreign knives – German, Swiss, Japanese, whatever – that have never been sharpened. I scared them by sawing at my wrist with the unsharp edge once, wondering how on earth I was going to kill myself with something so blunt. Anyway. Omelets and lunch out of the way it’s exam time. Chicken chasseur, tarte fine aux pommes – chicken in mushroom sauce and posh apple tart. Which calls for a decent-sized knife to cut the chicken into portions before frying it off, a sharp knife to slice mushrooms and the same sharp knife to peel and then thinly slice the apples. Oops. But I get through on borrowed knives and turn in my dishes. The format of the afternoon is similar to how our proper exam will run later this year: we’re given the recipes and a box of ingredients and told to get on with it, and are judged on lots of criteria. ‘Travail propre’ – work clean – is a big credo instilled in me by both my current chefs, and it’s something for which you can easily lose marks in the exam itself so I spend a fair amount of time just making sure my work surfaces are clean and tidy. We also get judged on our planning and the order in which we do things – so don’t start cutting up the meat, then do the apples, then back to the meat, then the veg. Do it all in a sensible order. But what is the correct order? We all spend the first few minutes of the exam pretending to write out a menu plan of what order things need to be done, but in reality we’re all furtively looking around wondering what everyone else will do. I start by cutting up my chicken and frying it off, and cutting up my veg while that’s happening. But when I look around about half the class are making their pastry first for their apple tart. Erk! Should I have done that first? Me and the others who’ve commenced with the chicken are obviously having doubts – as are those doing the pastry first. I plunge on with my plan, getting my chicken and veg fried off and into a casserole dish ready for the oven, then make my pastry and, while it’s blind baking, cut up my apples. Which I now see could be the wrong order – pastry, apples, veg, meat would be a more intelligent use of my cutting board. But then I wouldn’t be able to fry off my chicken while cutting up my veg. All this, I have come to realise, is a large part of what working in a professional kitchen is all about: planning, planning, planning. Checking through your ingredients box while reading the recipe to make sure you have everything you need, working out the most sensible order in which to cook things, making sure the cooking order gets everything onto the plate at the same time without keeping the vegetables cooked and waiting for the meat to arrive. I want it to be intuitive, but it’s not, certainly not at the start anyway. I have most trouble with the tarte fine – the apples should be sliced millimetre-thin and laid in pleasing circles on the surface of the tart, but slicing millimetre thin isn’t easy at the best of times. It’s less easy with a blunt, borrowed knife. Talk about failure of planning! Argh! But then I look around and see that some of my classmates aren’t even trying to slice their apples thinly, they’re just cutting their apples into eights. Man, does that look ugly, by comparison my tart is a work of art. After four hours of cooking we have 30 minutes to present a plate for each course, with points awarded for similarity to the photograph of the plate in our official text book. Which, of course, we’re not allowed to consult. So I get the sauce wrong by putting it both on and around the meat, my carrots are turned wrong – I’ve tried to be a smart arse and done the cut we use in the restaurant rather than the official one – and am reduced a further point by putting a sprig of parsley on top. Pretty? Not sanctioned. I end up with 13 – out of 20. For incomprehensible reasons the French almost always mark out of 20 rather than giving a percentage. Recently a stagiaire at the restaurant asked me what sort of mark Chef would give him at the end of his stage with us. “Four or five,” I replied. “Ah,”, he said, “here in France we mark out of 20, not 10.” “Oh,” I said, “I was marking out of 100.” Poor lamb, he believed me too. Stagiaires are so gullible. So. 65%. Not very good, I think, and only third-best in class. Then Chef spoils it all by saying that he’s marked us more severely than we would be marked in a proper exam. And then telling me that he’s marked me even more severely than the others because ‘I expect more from those like you who are capable of doing the best work’. Right. So that’d be, what, a 19 or 20 out of 20 in my real exam then? Neat. This may not be the effect he was trying to achieve. As for the correct order in which to do things, he’s cool with starting with either the pastry or the meat. The idea is to make us think about doing things logically and to have reasoned our way through why we’re doing them like that, not to say that there is a right and wrong order. Although he himself would have started with the pastry, he says. Harumph.

Will do, I'll be going to the market again on Saturday which is most interesting; supermarkets are supermarkets, right? Check the post on Tapenade to see a collection of jars - someone elsewhere and perhaps here wondered why I never buy fresh food....well Olives, capers, anchovies are all preserved....

First, it's a quick and easy tapenade. Second, I'm not sure where else I'd get them from. They're all preserved ingredients, and you need a container of some sort to keep them in. Paper-wrapped artisanal anchovies don't do so well...

This is a very old, very Mediterranean dish - squished up olives, garlic, anchovies and capers. Cato the Elder wrote about it; the Greeks probably had it, too, since the Romans nicked many of their recipes from them. Now, it's a Provençal dish - tapenade comes from the Occitan word Tapenas, which means capers. So don't let anyone tell you the capers are optional. Originally the olives would be squished up in a pestle and mortar; now I do it with my trusty stick blender. I take one jar of green olives, 500g dry weight (it's about a kilo with the water inside too - I drain out the water, obviously). To this I add a jar of anchovies (100g), the oil inside as well; half a jar of capers (30g of capers), and two - four cloves of garlic, depending on how old the garlic is and how many of my wife's aunts vampires I need to repel. All this gets squished down into the olive jar with the stick mixer. I drizzle in some olive oil - just enough to get it moving, really, otherwise it becomes a dipping sauce rather than a spreading paste. Say, 25-50ml. This is my favourite olive oil, the 'intense' Picholine from what used to be called Moulin des Costières and is now the Oliveraie Jeanjean. It's sipping-quality olive oil, not for glugging or quaffing, at around €25 a litre. Keep mixing with the stick mixer until it forms a fairly smooth paste. Some people like lumps in their tapenade, some like it to be completely smooth. Up to you. Some people add other things to their tapenade: onion, herbs, lemon juice, brandy - as I've said before, peasant foods like this, bouillabaisse, cassoulet, tartiflette and all the rest are made with whatever you have lying around at the time. Spread it on croutons. I make mine by slicing up baguette or, here, some of the fennel and sesame seed loaves I made yesterday, adding a little olive oil, some herbes de Provence and a very little salt, then baking them in the oven at 200°C for 20 minutes, turning the baking tray once to ensure they're evenly coloured. I usually make tapenade with green olives simply because they're the easiest to find which have already been de-stoned, but in fact I prefer black tapenade personally. Black olives have more depth of flavour for me, but they're less common and more expensive. Black olives are more expensive as they stay on the trees for longer - black ones are riper than green ones. But leaving them on the trees costs money (time=money, remember) and also runs a greater risk of them being hit with a frost, which ruins the harvest. Note also that properly cured 'black' olives are usually violet-dark purple in colour, not midnight black as you often see them in shops. Those that are very black have often been coloured with food dye. We do get olives from the tree in our garden and I try to let them go black normally before curing them. But that's a story for another day. Today, it's tapenade on a crouton with a glass of Muscat before Sunday lunch.

Usually things like this taste more 'eggy' if you use whole eggs, so try using just yolks. I use 3 eggs in my recipe, you'd replace that with 6 or 7 yolks. Also, cream instead of milk, and double cream (40%) instead of single (30%). Also 'Mountain milk' is reputed for its high quality here, it costs about a third more than regular milk. It comes from cows which graze the high pastures in summer which give them lots of good vitamins and minerals. This leads to good mountain cheese (Emmenthal, Gruyere, Beaufort) but you should be careful buying it to make sure it's from summer milk. So buying now you'd buy 24 month aged cheese, but in February it'd be better to buy 18 month aged cheese to guarantee it comes from cows which have grazed on fresh grass, not the dried stuff they eat when they're penned up for the winter.

It is VERY common here. Every restaurant I worked in, including really gastronomic, high-end ones, buys in sheets of frozen puff pastry - big ones about 40x70 cms. I wrote about how I mistook one for a plastic chopping board back in the first or second post I made in this thread. Frankly, it's impossible to tell it from good home made, and easy to tell it from bad home made. It's sold in every supermarket too, cheap stuff with vegetable oil for about 50 cents, the good stuff with butter for about €1.25. If I had to make it, I'd never make it it's too much of a faff. It's about the only pastry I use anyway. It tastes lighter when you cook it. Well, to me anyway. And the advantage of buying puff is that you can use it as puff or, by pricking lots of holes in it, use it as a sort of brisée. And it works fine for sweet and savoury. And you can tell people you spent hours making it and they'll believe you.

Bruce Feirstein's book* came out while I was at university. It was a something of a shock, really - I quite liked quiche, so was a bit disappointed to discover that it made me an unreal man. I shrugged off the pain and the hurt eventually, though, and have been making and eating quiche ever since. It's originally German - 'Quiche' comes from the German word 'Kuchen' or cake - but from the part of Germany which is now French and called Lorraine, hence Quiche Lorraine, an open flan with smoked bacon. Add onions and it's Quiche Alsacienne, also a now-French part of Germany. Whatever; it's really easy to make, especially if, like me, you cannot be faffed to mix flour and water and some fat together to make pastry. Frankly, a euro buys very nice pastry of many kinds here so I'm right out of faff when it comes to pastry. I usually make two at a time, because. Well, because everyone in the family loves it basically and if I only make one there's none left for me by the time I get out of the kitchen to the dining table. I unroll the bought puff pastry into a round baking tin, using the paper it's wrapped in to line the tin, then ensure the side bits are well formed up the sides of the tin. Next, I fill it with my baking beans (some old white beans from somewhere, no idea how long I've had them now.) Ensure that you put a circle of greaseproof or silicone paper in the base of the quiche first or the beans will stick into the pastry. Ask me how I know. OK, I know because last time I forgot the lining. Bake it for 10-15 minutes - this, you can tell your less professional friends, is 'Blind baking'. I also pierce the pastry many times with a fork to allow the steam to escape - it's this expanding steam inside puff pastry which makes it rise. My baking beans about to stick to the pastry because I forgot to line the inside of the pastry with greaseproof paper. Once that's done, I take out the beans and allow it to cool while mixing the filling, and despite what traditionalists will try to insist you can add more or less anything you like. I've even made chocolate and marshmallow quiches which went down very well. This time I made an Alsacienne, with bacon and onions, and a tuna and sun-dried tomato quiche which my wife Delphine and I loved and which the girls Scarlett and Roxanne would not touch because it looks suspiciously as though it contains vegetables (6 and 8 year olds are, as every parent knows, allergic to vegetables). 200g of lardons and 200g - approximately - of onions does the job. The 'appareil', the mixture I make up in a jug, contains 200ml of cream (I use 30% fat content just because that's what's most widely sold in France, I'd use double/40% if I could find it), a healthy pinch of salt, some ground pepper and three whole eggs which all get whizzed up using my faithful stick mixer. I add 100-200g of grated cheese to the base of the tart, then spread the bacon lardons (or tuna and chopped sun-dried tomatoes or the grated chocolate and chopped marshmallows) on top of that, then finish by pouring the appareil over that. My wife's family has a tradition of spreading a thick layer of mustard onto the base of the tart whenever they make tuna quiche. Tastes quite nice, but you need a LOT of mustard to be able to taste it at all. Into the oven for 15 minutes at 180°C, turn it round 180° and give it another 5-10 minutes. Until, basically, it doesn't wobble any more in the middle when you shake it gently. It rises somewhat when you take it out of the oven and, if you can, serve it right now. Otherwise it will fall but still taste delicious. * Yes, I am aware that it was a satirical book. No, I do not think that I am unreal. Or undead. I may be unlikely, however.

26: Big cookout Normally we do a couple of recipes a week at school. Today, we do five, just to keep ourselves busy: Gnocci à la Parisienne, Millefeuilles, beignets de pommes, omelettes and pintadeau rôti sur canapé. Lots of interesting stuff there. Parisian gnocci are potatoes mashed, mixed with choux pastry batter and then deep-fried in churro-length portions. Millefeuilles are, well, millefeuilles, sheets of puff pastry interspersed with crème patissière. Beignets de pommes are apple circles deep fried in batter. Omelettes are omelets, this time with mushrooms. And pintadeau rôti sur canapé is guinea fowl roasted and served on toast. Canapé, it turns out, is not what you eat with your evening cocktails but the small slice of toasted bread on which you serve it. Who knew? Apart from every French person to whom I point out this remarkable fact, that is. Duh, they say, You Eenglish peeple, you steal all our words. French people are like that because they’re used to all their words having several meanings. The French language has the smallest vocabulary of any European language, a fact which they will vehemently deny – even when you prove it to them. They get around this first, as I say, by using each word several times over, and then nicking lots of words from English (as we nicked many of our words from the French back in the Norman invasion days). Even when they’ve already got a perfectly good French word for whatever they’re talking about – instead of using ‘grignoter’ to describe snacking between meals they now talk about ‘le snacking’. Chef’s idea today is to get us to do an entire meal from hors d’oeuvre (‘outside the [main] work’) to pudding, which sounds cool although his choice of menu wouldn’t necessarily be mine. The Parisian gnocci are popular, but then what’s not to like about any form of fried potato? And not really difficult to make either, just equal quantities of mashed spuds and choux pastry batter, piped into hot oil from a plastic piping bag, cutting appropriate lengths with scissors. Actually it turns out to be easier to do this in pairs, one squeezing the piping bag and the other working the scissors. The crème patissière for the millefeuilles is one of those recipes that looks simple – it has only five ingredients, flour, eggs, milk, vanilla and sugar after all – but which can go horribly wrong if you don’t pay attention and do it properly. It’s all too easy to end up with tile cement or yellow water with lumps in it, so keep stirring! And I discover that it’s much, much easier to cut puff pastry into interesting shapes before you cook it, rather than afterwards. And that no matter how sharp your sharp knife may be, a serrated knife is what you need for cutting cooked pastry. Beignets de pomme are also very simple. I’ve done them at home using cider instead of water in the batter, and very good they are too. Just core and slice your apples, dip in flour, dip in batter, fry, coat in sugar. We churn out a few hundred and send them on over to the school canteen so we can eat them for lunch ourselves – not that we have enormous appetites since we’ve been stuffing ourselves on Parisian gnocci, millefeuilles and apple fritters all morning. And then omelets, the last thing we do before our own lunch break, and everyone has their own way of doing these things. Meh. I like to just mix three eggs, salt and pepper, oil in the pan, nice and hot, pour in the eggs and drag mix from the outside to the centre with the back of the fork I used to mix the eggs up. When it’s setting, pop on the fried mushrooms and fold over and then fold out of the frying pan onto the plate. Being French, Chef tells me that the omelet I’ve produced it too coloured – they should be yellow not browned, he says, nul points. Huh. Our after-dinner nap is a very complicated version of the Fiche de Stock - the piece of paper we’re supposed, as good chefs, to keep showing us what we’ve got in our pantry. Apparently we can use the ‘Méthode PEP, Premier Entré Premier Sorti’, first in first out, or ‘Méthode de court moyen ponderé’ which I don’t even pretend to understand. It’s something to do with working out the average cost of stock because it all costs different amounts depending on when you buy it. Apparently. Anyway, first-in, first-out sounds much more sensible so that’s the one I’ll be sticking with. Or, more likely, just wander in, see what’s left and ordering replacements. You need this sort of documentation when you have a very large kitchen but if you’re doing 50 covers per service you just don’t need one. This afternoon we finish off jointing our pintadeau, browning and then roasting them and serving them up on slices of toast. Personally I think a smear of Marmite or marmalade is more manageable on toast than a quarter of guinea fowl, but what do I know? The toast works to mop up the juices dripping out of the fowl, apparently, and it’s a very old-fashioned way to serve up such delicacies which we have to know because all good French cooking is Very Old. Well, a century old anyway. Stood the test of time though, hasn’t it?

One of my favourites was back before this time when I was working for the traiteur. It was my job to send out meals to satellite restaurants, and one day I sent out 90 hard boiled eggs to 4 different locations. Well, I thought they were hard boiled. Turned out they were raw, as the clients found out when they started to break them open. Oops.

25: Constant errors We’ve just had our second ‘examen blanc’ – mock exam – and I got 14.5/20 for the practical, which was OK. I was aiming for 16, but lost at least one and possibly two marks because I turned in my tricornes late – choux buns baked on a small tartlet base of pate brisé (pastry) filled with sauce mornay (cheese sauce). They were late because I put them in the oven at exactly the right moment to pull them out and have time to stuff them, but some asshole put her buns in the oven after me and left the oven door open. They were fine after 10 minutes, then she put hers in and when I came to take them out 10 minutes later were still unfinished, so I was 10 minutes late presenting them. She, the idiot who did this, thought the whole affair extremely funny and told me not to take it so seriously. So I treated the whole thing as a slapstick comedy and put the remnants of my sauce mornay in her handbag. There – now that’s funny! And she only got 8.5/20, serve her right. 14.5 was top equal mark, two others got the same. I fell down a bit on ‘presentation’, as in talking about the stuff I was presenting as if to a potential client; School Chef discounts my charming English accent automatically, which isn’t fair – it’s a great selling point. No, really. Anyway. This week we did sauté de poulet au paprika (oh, you can work that one out yourself) in the morning and tiramisu in the afternoon. Now, I know a thing or two about tiramisu, let me tell you; when I worked for Frank all those years ago (well, two) at the Grange de Labahou (my first restaurant) I made two dozen tiramisus a day, and they sold like hot cakes (or cold cheese, which is what they are). So I was looking forward to a gentle cruise when Chef made us start with a Genoise, which I hate making. I cannot as usual and for the life of me, make the damned things rise. He examined my batter and pronounced it overcooked, so I made a second batch which worked fine – although Pascal, my schoolchum, made his rise twice as high. Then we made an appareil bombe, which is egg yolks montés with heated sugar syrup – heated to 120 degrees Centigrade so don’t try this one at home, children. It worked in the end, but what a bloody faff. Then whip up some cream. Then mix the cream and appareil à bombe. Then slice your genoise horizontally twice and stack it up in the mold with mix between, chill the whole thing in the blast freezer and decorate with piped remains of the mixture. Still, it gave me a chance to practise my piping skills after f-ing up 36 little chocolate tarts the other day at work. I didn’t let the choc mix warm up first, so ended up with 36 chocolate squidges instead of 36 chocolate swirls. In fact I seem to make a stupid mistake every day recently; I left the mixer running while trying to warm up some butter and then had the whole machine waltz across the floor, spreading goodness (as in cake mix) all over the floor; yesterday instead of thinly slicing up some kiwi fruits I cut them, as Chef described it, into ‘Escalopes’; I forgot to put the baking powder into the cakes I was making, although did remember before I put them in the oven so was able to re-mix them after scraping six dozen madeleine cases clean. It goes on, and yet Chef still wants to employ me as a Chef de partie. We’re testing two new potential plongeurs next week over Easter. Which is a good thing, really, I need to move out of the plonge if only because I have a hankering to end a shift not completely soaked to the skin. Last Friday I worked most of lunch just in the kitchen, cranking out 37 covers with Chef. Which was fun and I coped, but because there’s only two of us it’s really hell on wheels (well, from my point of view anyway; for him it’s a stroll in the sun with a cigarette-and-coffee break). I kept up with the orders and remembered how many to turn out and plate up (not difficult, with only two starters on the lunch menu). I do have difficulty with things like cutting up tomatoes (and kiwis)into slivers of exactly the right size, which is, I’m hoping, an experience thing. I used to have problems keeping up with orders, but even listening in from the Plonge I can keep up now. We’re still looking for a new Second de Cuisine; we had a young chap lined up but he decided to stay where he was one hour after he was due to sign a contract with us – we were just a bargaining chip, in my opinion. Apart from Work, Delphine and I went to Saintes Maries de la Mer for a couple of days last weekend, staying in the very nice Hotel Méditerrannée (delete rs, ns and es as appropriate). I had fish soup and moules frites two nights in a row, which was nice, and amusing to see how they’re done now I know how to do them professionally myself; the first moules were excellent but the soup was tinned and thinned with too much water; the second soup was very good but hadn’t been écumé – skimmed – enough during the cooking process, leaving a film of oil on the surface. The second lot of chips were too well done, and the moules hadn’t been cleaned properly – there were bits of beard all over them. Nice little town though, a real end-of-the-world place which will disappear one day if global warming isn’t nonsense after all.

24: A microbiological initiation A microbe, our teacher tells us in our ‘Hygiene’ class today, is an infinitely small living being visible only through a microscope. I want to tell her that anything that is ‘infinitely’ small is, by definition, not visible through anything, let alone a microscope, but desist. No one likes to be corrected by someone older and wiser than they are when they’re pretending to teach 16-year-olds. Which is one of the recurring – indeed, perhaps the only – problems I have with this course. That is, it’s really designed to be done by young adults stepping out into the world for the first time, not smart-arsed 46-year-olds who are already more highly qualified, not to say intelligent (and modest to boot) than their teachers. But classes on hygiene, as it’s called, and law and so on are part of the course and will come up in the exam and so yes, they have to be done. What is also annoyingly becoming clear is that I will also have to do all the other exams the 17-year-olds do when they take their cookery exams, i.e. in French, maths, geography, history and so on. When I signed up for this course last year I was told that, since I already have a higher exam qualification in the UK (my degree, in fact, poor excuse for one though it was) I would be excused all but the cookery exams. Now, it turns out, the French educational system farts in the general direction of the English educational system and refuses to recognise it, and in particular a ‘Degree’ from the so-called ‘University’ of London, as in any way worthwhile whatsoever. “Ah doo nat recognaize yorr deggree,” it says in its heavily-accented English, much in the style of the French soldiers in that Monty Python film. I can appeal, of course, a process which will (a) take for ever, (b) cast a bad light on me and (c) will be won by the French so I might as well do the other exams and get it over with. As Delphine says, even if they agree now to recognise my English Degree they could decide not to in a few years’ time and take my CAP away, so just knuckle down and do the other exams. The problem is that the other adult education students in my year come in on Tuesday mornings to study these other subjects (the teenagers are at school full-time and take two years to complete the course) and I now have to glean, second-hand from them details on exactly what these examinations may be about. This one will run and run. Like some of the cheeses we start talking about amongst ourselves in our hygiene class. It’s usually Eric who starts these discussions – he’s a bit, but not much, younger than me and runs his family restaurant just outside Avignon. He often manages to get our Hygiene teacher going on another subject than the one she’s teaching us (how much more fat there is in a tablespoon of mayonnaise than a tablespoon of vinaigrette is one of her favourites) and the ensuing discussions often serve to wake us all up. Which is not necessarily a good thing, but anyway. The important thing we take away from today’s class (says our teacher) is that MOs (Micro Organismes) have five conditions essential for their life: something to eat, particularly proteins; at least 40% water in their environment; an agreeable temperature of 37 degrees centigrade; neutral pH of 7; and either an oxygenated atmosphere for aerobic bacteria or a lack of it for anaerobic ones. I, being a clever dick, think about those bugs that live inside volcanic vents in the ocean, inside frozen food and elsewhere these conditions don’t apply, but that’s just me being a clever dick. For the purpose of this exam, bugs like the conditions that apply inside our bodies, full stop. Today’s cooking is a Gibelotte de Braconniers, essentially a poacher’s stew made on this occasion with rabbit. I’ve worked with rabbit a fair bit in the past; at my first restaurant we made rabbit terrine by stewing rabbit thighs with a few onions and then picking off the meat to stuff into ramekins, topping them up with the cooking juice and thyme laced with gelatine and allowing them to set. At my current restaurant chef sometimes puts rabbit on the weekly menu and I’ve had a go at cutting them up a few times. Today we learn how to divide the body into six portions (some of them fairly mean ones it has to be said, there’s not an enormous amount of meat on a rabbit after all) and David impresses us by producing a series of côtes de lapin, rabbit chops which they serve as amuse bouches in the restaurant where he works (which is even posher than the one where I work). Hey David, no one likes a smart arse… This afternoon is a ‘Charlotte aux fruits confits’. The ‘Fruits confits’ turn out to be tinned strawberries, which is not what I thought it would be - I was envisaging delicately preserved slices of quince and kiwi glistening with a light coating of sugar. Charlottes are cream puddings set either by the addition of fruit or gelatine and, to be on the safe side, we use both, and they work fairly well since most don’t turn out too runny and several are definitely edible. And it’s good practise for me since it’s Delphine’s birthday this weekend and we’re celebrating at home in Avignon by inviting the family round. Delphine wants a charlotte – she’s celebrating in conjunction with her brother who’s birthday comes soon – and traditionally they have a charlotte, so I’ve promised to make a gigantic one. We finish off the day making something much more interesting – salmon profiteroles with beurre blanc. Beurre blanc – translating it as ‘white butter’ doesn’t really have the same cachet does it? – is a favourite of mine, easy to make, great tasting and it seems to impress people a lot. Every time I go to see Nick and Amanda in London I have to make it for them, with Amanda practising hard to perfect it herself. Here’s a tip: you can’t keep it in the fridge and use it again the next day, Amanda… Of course, this being France and the recipe only having four basic ingredients – chopped shallots, wine and/or vinegar, salt and butter – the inverse square law of arguing about how to make it applies. That is, the less ingredients something has, the more different ways there are of making it. The arguments in class centre around how the proportions of wine and vinegar change depending on what you serve it with. Me, I just go for a 50-50 split but this is, clearly, the Easy, Foreign way out. What if you’re serving it with sole? Salmon? Surely you need more vinegar with the salmon… The salmon profiteroles are simple by comparison: poach the salmon in a little cream, season, stuff into the choux buns you made earlier. Choux buns I do enjoy making, especially now I’ve got over the temptation to cook them too little – they always need more time in the oven than you think to dry them out properly. For which you also need an oven with vents that open to let the steam out – this may be why my choux buns don’t work at home, the oven is sealed shut and keeps all the moisture inside, preventing your choux from stiffening suitably. Now there’s a tip…

Although I live in France and trained here as a professional chef, one of my favourite cook books for the basic, brasserie-type French recipes is Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. The recipes work, they're easy to follow and it's an entertaining read in its own right. Other than that, THE reference is my catering school text book, 'La Cuisine de Référence - Techniques et préparations de base, fiches techniques de fabrication' by Michel Maincent-Morel. It's the set text recipe book for all professional cookery schools in France, but it's not an easy read. It's all in French, to start with, and there's no index either so it can be hard to find a specific recipe. But this is cooking as done by Escoffier and the generations that followed.

I was a good amateur cook, cooking for friends and dinner parties and family. Cooking in a restaurant is exactly the same except you're doing a dinner party for 20, 30, 50 people who all want different dishes. And you're doing it twice a day. And they're paying you to get it right, they're not going to say it doesn't matter if you eff it up. So, in fact, professional restaurant cooking is nothing at all like home cooking. Nothing is the same. Everything you know is wrong, right down to peeling onions and washing plates. As has been said above, nothing beats experience. Get a job as a dishwasher, many restaurants need one. Do that well and a good chef will let you move up, encourage it even. A bad chef will let you onto the line/be a chef de partie straight away because you cook a mean lasagne for your family. Good luck.

It's a good way to get the girls to eat eggs, too!

Normally I make a dozen, it just happened that I had the proportions to make this many. We ate 4 yesterday, 6 so far today - my daughters love them and would eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I made enough. You can keep them for 3-5 days, here they're doing well to last 2.

Ah ok. It's just a ridge in the pan.

No, the whole pan sits on a grid in the oven. The ramekins themselves have a slightly concave bottom which allows for a pocket of water, and the system seems to work well. If i were poaching, say, a foie gras terrine in a bain marie then yes, I would use a grid in the bottom of the pan.

So let's get the history out of the way: No, it wasn't invented at Cambridge University in the 19th century; it existed at least as far back as the 17th century in France, Catalan, Flanders and elsewhere. Because frankly, the idea of mixing together eggs, milk and cream isn't something that takes hundreds of years of thought to come up with. And yes, some people call it 'burnt cream'. Some people also eat burgers while walking down the road. There's a line, somewhere, between crème brulée, flans, crème patissière, custard, crème anglaise and all the other set creams. Not to mention pana cotta, custard cream and so on. I have two recipes for crème brulée: a refined one using just egg yolks, cream and sugar; and this quick and dirty one which is, I confess, more like a flan than a real crème brulée. Whatev. This one calls for a dozen whole eggs - not yolks separated out, whole eggs; I told you this one was quick and dirty - 1.4 litres of cream and milk mixed in whatever proportions you like - I used 40cl of cream and a litre of milk this time - 200g of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. I put a pinch of salt in lots of things. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whizz them together with the mixer of your choice. I used a hand-held stick mixer this time. You just need them all combined together. I then pour this mixture into a jug as it makes the next stage, pouring into ramekins, easier. These quantities gave me enough mixture for 18 ramekins. I set them in a baking tray and add boiling water to the tray, about halfway up the sides of the ramekin. This bain marie ensures that the crèmes don't burn on the bottom - water keeps the temperature to a maximum of 100°C. Top tip: put the bain marie as close to your oven as possible, then add the water to save carrying a heavy, boiling hot pan across your kitchen. They go into a warm oven at about 150°C for 20 minutes when I turn them around to ensure they cook evenly. I check them again after 20 minutes to see if they're set - just shake the baking tray gently to see how they wobble. If the mixture in the centre of each ramekins wobbles more than the outside, they're not quite cooked yet. When the mixture wobbles as one, they're done. If the tops are starting to brown and they're still not set, cover with aluminium foil to stop them browning further. This time it took 45 minutes for everything to be set properly Once cooked, remove them from the oven and the bain marie and allow to cool before refrigerating them. Just before serving, sprinkle a half teaspoon or so of sugar on top and caramelise it with your blowtorch - I now use one which uses cigarette lighter refill fluid, although I've used regular plumbers' ones before. Allow the caramel to cool and harden before eating. You can flavour the crème with many different things: I've used basil, rosemary, lemon verbena, lavender and other herbs from the garden many times. You heat up the milk and/or cream with the herb in it and allow it to infuse for an hour or so before making the crème. You can also add fruits in the bottom of the ramekin - strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, banana, whatever takes your fancy.

23: Household cabbage French bureaucracy is complicated for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it’s charged with keeping French bureaucracy going. In the UK, 11% of the workforce works for the government in one capacity or another – policemen, nurses, bureaucrats, whatever. In France, the percentage is 24%. Twenty-four percent! A quarter of the workforce which does nothing productive at all, just spends its days providing fodder for the nation’s stand-up comedians and moaners. Blimey. So today at school we spend an hour learning about the French judicial system which, according to the bureaucrats who organise the French educational system, I need to know about before I’m safe to unleash on the omelette-and-chips buying French public. Like much of the civilised world, French government is divided into Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches (are you asleep yet? Try reading this in a hot, stuffy, sunlit classroom after getting up at 6 am, working in a hot kitchen all morning and then stuffing yourself with stodge at lunchtime) and the separations thereof “As detailed in the 5th French Constitution of 1958, the fundamental text of the Republic, of the state of law and democracy,” I noted before nodding off. And then I woke up and drew a huge diagram of the French judicial system, the eight tribunals and all the rest of it. Blimey. No really, blimey. Anyway. Luckily this morning was much more interesting. The cookery we learn at school is very traditional; the recipes largely date back to Escoffier and the early 20th century, some beyond that to Careme or earlier. It’s the basis of French cuisine from which everything since has sprung – this is how Escoffier made a fond de veau, veal stock, no one has found a better method so this is how we do it now is what we are told at school. The French are, quite rightly in my view, very proud that their cuisine is the foundation of most cookery in the Western world and, naturally, insist that theirs is the best version of it available. In a way it’s reassuring; these methods have been tried and tested by generations of chefs over more than a hundred years so they work and work well; equally it’s discomfiting to realise that, if your recipe doesn’t work it really is your own fault and it’s really you who’s done something wrong. I am most discomfited by things which are supposed to rise and foam, everything from whipped cream to bread. So today I have the cold sweats as we approach the pâte à brioche which we are going to use to make a favourite snack dish of many French people, the saucisson brioché, sausage in a (brioche) bun, i.e. posh sausage rolls. Frankly I’d much rather make the saucisson, a process that interests me much more than baking simply because I know I can do it. I’ve already written about how Pascal, the nice chap with whom I share a workstation at school, whips my cream for me while I cut his potatoes into pretty shapes. My inability to make things rise extends to bread too I’m sure, since every time I’ve tried making it myself at home – either manually or in a bread machine – I’ve managed to produce only doorstop-quality lumps of flour and water so unleavened the ancient Israelites would be proud of me. Although if one of my loaves fell on them out of the sky they’d end up with concussion rather than a decent feed. I have no idea why I can’t make bread or decently-risen cakes; I have warm hands, I have acid sweat, I am stupid – all are possibilities and, indeed, true in at least two of the three cases. The fact remains that, in the rising stakes, I’m a non-starter. So brioche, Chef Garnier assures us, is easy. Anyone can make it. It’s almost as easy as profiteroles, he says. My profiteroles always end up as flat as my Yorkshire puddings, I tell him, and have no reason to think that my brioche will be any different. We’ll see, he says. The lesson starts with a discussion of flour types; today we’re using what is known in France as Type 45 or Farine de Patissier, since it is very rich in gluten, the protein which gives it the strength to stay up once it’s risen. “This is very white flour,” he tells us. “Even whiter than English skin.” Har har, who would he tease without an English guy in the class? Anyway, the higher the number the less gluten the flour has, Chef tells us. Right. So we sieve the flour and form it into two adjacent rings, one large and one small. These are fontaines, which literally means fountains but translates better as wells, to receive, in the large one, the majority of the liquid and eggs; the smaller one takes the yeast dissolved in a little of the warmed milk; the large well takes the sugar and, importantly, the salt. Mix the salt and yeast and the former kills the latter and your dough will not rise. Hmm. Perhaps salt from my sweaty hands is killing the yeast? But then why am I equally incapable of making cakes rise when using levure chimique, baking powder? Anyway. We mix up the two wells separately for a couple of minutes, adding the salt, sugar and eggs to the large well before mixing the two fontaines together. The mixture, we are warned, must be neither too dry nor too humid; it must have body, Chef says, and you give it body by battering it against the steel worktop, throwing it down and lifting it up like some sort of alien blob, thumping it down to Give It Body. It’s done when it no longer sticks to the counter, apparently, but the fault in the process here is that, until it no longer sticks to the counter, it sticks to the counter. And your hands, clothes, hair, face and anything else it touches. So much for Escoffier’s great recipes. But eventually I wear my dough out enough so that it gives up (most) of its hold on me, my clothes and the worktop and I add little parcels of softened butter (beurre en pomade en petits parcelles) before leaving it to rise for half an hour at 30-35 degrees. At which point we ‘chase out the carbonic gas’, as Chef translates it (badly) for me before allowing it to rise again. Roll it out, wrap it round your sausage (Ooh Missus!), paint it with egg yolk and into the oven for 45 minutes or so until it looks just like the ones they sell in the shops. Well, a misshapen version of one they sell in the shops, one which only my mother could love and even she would be caught feeding it surreptitiously to the dog under the table when she thought I wasn’t watching. Still. Chef deems them all Good Enough to let us out to lunch and we trek off to the school canteen to eat, well, saucisson brioché. What a coincidence. I am careful to choose a slice from one not made by me and quite tasty it is too, if you ignore most of the pastry and eat the bought-in saucisson inside. And avoiding the stodge is a good idea, it turns out, since there’s that aforementioned class on the French legal system immediately after lunch. We eventually escape with our lives after a nice nap to spend the afternoon making ‘Chou de ménage’, household cabbage. What? Household cabbage, it turns out, is a cabbage cut into quarters and then used by Chef as an example of ‘Braiser par expansion’, braising by expansion whereby the delicious taste of the cabbage expands out into its cooking medium (can you spot the fatal flaw in this argument, children? Can you?) Anyway. Trim your cabbage, cut it into four equal quarters, rinse it in vinegared water to kill the beasties, blanch in boiling water for a few minutes, refresh in iced water, drain, cut off the root which you’d left to hold the whole thing together while it cooked (oops), fry off your Garniture Aromatique (onions and carrots cut into a nice macedoine), add the cabbage wrapped with bacon or couenne (the membrane which surrounds a pig’s stomach – very useful for holding together things which would otherwise float off and do their own thing – pop it into your casserole dish and cook it in the oven at 200 degrees Centigrade for an hour and a quarter. Blimey. All this for braised cabbage? Ah, but the lessons are about braising and wrapping and making a macedoine with everything the same size. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t have learned these lessons on something edible. Still. We finish off the afternoon with some Pommes Fondants, melting potatoes. The object of which, of course, is not to finish up with melted potatoes. Well, not until they arrive in the client’s mouth that is. We start with large potatoes, 7-8 centimetre jobbies which we cut in two and then turn so that they’re all the same size and with the legally obligatory seven-sided shape and then cook in a buttered dish in the oven, moistening regularly with ‘fond blanc’, white chicken stock (i.e. stock made from unroasted chicken bones – as opposed to fond brun, which is made with roasted bones) so they sit up to their waists in it. Except that, at the end of the cooking time (an hour or so) the liquid should all be just evaporated and your spuds barely coloured. So get that one right or turn your pommes fondants into pommes on fire.

22: Now THAT'S a pudding! Our weekly classes are settling into a nice rhythm now that we're over half-way through our year here at the Ecole d'Hotellerie in Avignon. We cook one dish in the morning, a second in the afternoon and have an hour-long lunch break followed by one hour of classroom lecturing in the middle. I hadn’t realised this before, but many – most, even – of my fellow pupils are also coming to school on Tuesday mornings to study maths, chemistry, French, English – all the regular school subjects that they will be examined on come the end of the academic year. I, having already done a degree at university in England (BA in Geography from University College London, don'cha know? remind me to tell you the full, gory story one day...) am excused such exams by dint of my previously-proven cleveress. Lucky me, one hour sitting in a hot classroom trying to stay awake is enough for one week. In fact, all those years ago when I did my very last public exam I had enough spare time after writing down everything I knew about the subject to calculate that it was my 50th public examination. Then, I swore that I'd never sit another examination but I've made an exception for this cookery course. We'll have a four-hour practical during which we'll cook and present two or three dishes, plus two written exams: one on cookery itself, a second on law, hygiene, nutrition and so on. Oh, and a third oral exam on business practise. Those who don't already have a higher qualification also need to take all the 'regular' exams taken by the 17/18-year-olds doing our qualification, the Certificat d'Aptitude Professionel (option Cuisine) – it's the equivalent of the UK's GCSEs and whatever qualification you get when you leave High School in the USA. So this morning we cook 'Darnes de saumon grillé, beurre blanc” - salmon steaks with a beurre blanc sauce. And since I told Chef at the restaurant that I'd be doing this today, I've been cleaning and preparing salmon and making beurre blanc for a fair proportion of the past week. I've even learned to tell the difference between farmed and fresh salmon by sight – let alone by taste. Fresh salmon, whilst available everywhere in France, is not by and large native to the country and particularly not to the south, the Midi where I live and work. But the French do set great store by Scottish salmon, even though it's currently the subject of a Major Food Scare back in the UK; everyone there tells me that you'll die on the spot or worse if you so much as sniff a Scottish farmed salmon. French people, on the other hand, will snap up the Scottish stuff whilst sniffing haughtily at the Norwegian variety so prized now in England. Even more remarkably I've recently been harangued by a keen amateur cook of my acquaintance about the fact that she can now buy organic salmon. What, as we say, TF? Organic fish? Ignoring the food mile and stock depletion questions for the moment, how can fish be organic? Well, it turns out that the organisation in the UK which can certify vegetables and beef and whatever as organic has now established criteria for the certification of salmon as 'organic' – it's all to do with what they eat (not very different to what non-organic fish eat, it seems) and stocking levels (less crowded than the non-organic ones), apparently. I'm not convinced. Especially since the august body which is offering this organic certification to fish is called – I am not making this up – 'The Soil Association'. Right. Anyway, today's 'darnes de saumon' – lazy cuts of salmon where you just chop a vertical slice through the fish without bothering to filet it – come, school chef proudly tells us, from Scotland. I say nothing. French people, once they get an attitude in their heads about food, are as stubborn as mules. AOC mules with knobs on, in fact. I, being class clever dick, have already learned how to grill salmon and make beurre blanc, thanks to Jean-Rémi Joly my chef at the restaurant who is taking great pride – and deriving much fun – from the process of teaching me how to do next week's recipe when I return from school to the restaurant every Tuesday. The fun comes when his method for doing something differs from that of my school chef, Philippe Garnier. So grilling a salmon, the restaurant way, means filetting it, removing the bones, cutting it into pretty portions, cooking it skin-side down very fast on a fierce heat for a minute or two to make the skin crisp and then turning it over in the pan and finishing the cooking in the oven for a few minutes. This is all very well and good for a posh restaurant in a four-star hotel, says M. Garnier, but for your CAP examination we will need to know how to cut a darne, not a filet, and to cook it by grilling only. Harumph, even if he is right. Here, as elsewhere in France and, probably, the rest of the world we learn to pass the exam. Also, I have inherited by osmosis the French mule-headedness about The Right Way To Cook Stuff Is My Way. So, first part of the lesson is, Clean The Grill. The grills are heavy cast-iron plates which sit on top of a couple of gas burners going full-blast beneath them, making them smoking hot – hence the need to clean them thoroughly first because, obviously, the last students who used them wouldn't have cleaned them properly. Now it's my turn to harumph – if it came through my plonge and I was responsible for cleaning it, it would be spotless whenever it was next needed. So we clean them and heave the grills onto the burners where they all start smoking like billy-o, since they're so encrusted with crud after generations of lazy, non-cleaning students have ignored them and left them filthy. I even scrubbed mine with a wire brush to no avail. But we brush the darnes with melted butter (olive oil in the restaurant, school is more traditional and less Provençal) and put two each onto the grill, where those of us who haven't been paying attention discover that (a) the grill needs to be really, really, really hot and (b) you need to have enough confidence and/or experience to leave it a good couple of minutes before trying to flip it over if you don't want it to stick and then break up into lots of little bits as you try to scrape it off. And everyone learns that although they're not listed in the official list of Things You Must Buy sent to us by the school, a pair of metal tongs are actually invaluable for picking up and turning over hot things. We also learn how to do two things at once, i.e. make a beurre blanc sauce whilst grilling salmon. I've come to love beurre blanc sauce in the past couple of weeks since I learned how to make it at the restaurant. It's one of those great sauces which are very, very simple to make but which give the appearance of being very difficult and complicated – the sort of thing only professional chefs can make. It's just a shallot or two chopped up very finely (all the bits the same size, of course – any irregular bits should be disposed of in the usual way if your chef will be inspecting them for consistency, i.e. you eat them while he’s not looking), popped into a saucepan with some poivre mignonette (literally some very cute pepper, actually some crushed black pepper, but not from a mill which makes it too fine) covered with – and here the arguments start – with white wine and/or white wine vinegar. Some say just wine, others just vinegar, others that you need secret combinations of the two. Half and half works fine for me, and just enough of the two to cover the regularly-sized bits of shallots. Reduce this down until it's almost, almost completely dry but not quite, and then whisk in some unsalted butter. Cold butter. How much? Well...the official recipe we're given calls for 150 grammes of shallots – say, three or four of them – 200ml of wine and 100ml of vinegar, and a whole kilo of butter. And, just in case you fear this won't kill your clients of cholesterol poisoning on the spot, you can add an optional 100ml of cream. Burp. The tricks are to make sure the butter is cold, to cut it into plenty of cubes BEFORE you start cooking, to whisk them one at a time into the shallots and evaporated wine and vinegar mix, and keep whisking too until it's nicely emulsified and then keep it warm until you need it during service in a bain marie at about 60 centigrade – should be good for up to a couple of hours but no longer and don't get it too hot or you'll end up with melted butter with shallots in it. At school we just poured it over the salmon and served it (well, sent it off to the teacher's cafeteria which gets all the good stuff while we poor students get to eat the muck the junior kids have been messing around with all morning). At the restaurant it's strained first to remove the bits of onion so our posh customers don't have any nasty bits to chew on, but this is a personal preference – I like the bits in the sauce and so do both my chefs. After making such a healthy, light dish this morning we get to make Now That's A Pudding! this afternoon. Well, officially it's called Tarte au riz à la Normande but if you ever saw one, you'd call it Now That's A Pudding! It's a pastry case which you fill with rice pudding enriched (burp!) with a crème anglaise (because, well, rice pudding - made with half cream, half full-fat milk - just isn't rich enough, right?). And then you cover the top with sliced apples, as if you were making a tarte fine aux pommes. Fried, naturally, in butter and flambéd with Calvados apple brandy. I'm sure there are parts of the world where this pudding would be considered a deadly weapon and possession of a slice could lead to imprisonment and a hefty fine. I do learn a neat way to make rice pudding which had never occurred to me before, though – make it like a risotto. You 'nacrer' the rice (I've never found the English word for this, it just means fry the rice in some fat – butter here, olive oil for a savory risotto – until it goes transparent) and then add warm cream and milk mixed with sugar rather than stock a ladleful at a time, and keep going until it's done. I've since found that you need to add something to give your rice a bit of flavour if you're serving it on its own to some diet freaks – lemon zest is nice, or a vanilla pod (remember to leave the pod in the mix after scraping out the seeds, the flavour's in the pods more than the seeds). And then we assemble our puddings, blind-baking the cases, making a crème anglaise and mixing it with the rice and then making pretty with the fried and flambéd apple slices (cut them on a mandolin). A pudding fit for a king, assuming that the king concerned is Elvis Presley after a six-month starvation diet. ends

21: I don't punk out Per Bourdain’s advice, although still tired after my recent illness I manage to keep up with this morning's recipe, “Appareil à Bavarois aux oeufs”. The English for 'Bavarois' appears to be 'Bavarois' – I'm already largely losing my ability to talk in English much of the time. Well, you can call it a 'Bavarian cream' if you like, but that probably means less to most people than 'Bavarois'. Although officially the French acknowledge it as a Swiss – not Bavarian – invention, it was a famous part of the repertoire of Marie-Antoine Carème, the world's first celebrity chef. Escoffier, the world's second celebrity chef, reckoned it should more properly be called a Muscovite since after the mixture was poured into a hermetically-sealed mould it was set by being plunged into a container of ice and salt. Nowadays it's easy to make such things, but a hundred years ago unmoulding such an item before one's guests must have been an impressive sight. You can make two sorts of Bavarois, set either with gelatine or with fruit pulp; frankly, to my inexperienced mind the idea of setting anything vaguely jelly-like with fruit pulp sounds beyond unlikely and our school chef is in agreement; we're going to be belt-and-bracing with both fruit pulp and gelatine. We also get into a discussion about pineapple; apparently you can't set pineapple anything into a jelly because, well, pineapple jelly doesn't set. Chef doesn't know why, it just doesn't. Later I check this out in the new edition of the magnificent Harold McGee's 'On Food and Cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen' and it turns out that pineapple contains an enzyme that breaks down gelatine's setting molecules. Use agar agar if you need to set pineapple jelly (or Bavarois). We make almond tuiles to go with the Bavarois; these I know already, I've been making them by the hundred at the restaurant for the patissier, and having lots of fun with them too. We sometimes make them slightly larger than the standard 'decoration' size and slip the burning-hot tuiles straight from the oven into champagne flutes to make them into cornets, which we use to serve the 'cornucopia de sorbets' and other desserts. Very pretty. Lunch is another unremarkable experience in the student-catered canteen until the return walk across the car park; some complete asshole of a girl careers across the pavement loaded down with a chum riding sidesaddle on the rear of her scooter and smacks straight into me from behind. Smack into my bad leg, in fact, and I go down heavily. She's hurt my leg, which is painful, but has also managed to push my whole foot about two centimetres forward in my shoe, crushing my toes against the internal steel toe cap. My foot was already swollen and painful, now I can barely get my shoe off and, when I do, it keeps on swelling. Good grief. The school receptionist takes an injury statement while a taxi arrives and ferries me to the doctor and then on home; more bed rest is prescribed. Huh. I need to work tomorrow and the two days after that, so I load my injured limb down with bags of ice and frozen peas and manage to sleep not at all. Brilliant. Tuesday morning and Delphine drops me off at work. I can walk OK now and my swollen foot has gone down enough to allow me to at least get a shoe on. I don't say anything to Chef, if I did he'd try to make me go home and end up trying to do 30 covers all on his own, so that's not on obviously. It's not as bad as it could be, anyway; the party coming in are a cheap bunch of English tourists who are eating for €15 a head. Wine included. Considering that our cheapest such menu for three courses is €25, we're not serving them the full gastronomic experience so, while it's good (we even get a couple of 'Compliments to the Chef' messages via the Maitre d') it's not what we normally do. I get a bus home after lunch and another back in the evening, and again the same for the next couple of days before just collapsing back into bed. When I've had this illness before it's laid me up for weeks at a time, so it's lucky that the restaurant is, mostly, closed at the moment and I can save my energy for going to school.

Blanquette does indeed refer to the colour 'blanc', white, and also there's an element of the word which became the English 'blanket' or covering - a white covering. There's also blanchette, a white variety of goat. I wanted to add the peas at the end just for a bit of colour! As I say, for me this meal's an exercise in technique, not in exciting the taste buds - although my students here in France now all salivate at the prospect of eating their grandmother's blanquette de veau.

20: Ridiculously white One of the things that encouraged me to take up cooking professionally was Anthony Bourdain's book 'Cooking Confidential'. I enjoyed his swashbuckling stories and formulated a plan to learn to cook and travel the world, mixing it up with fellow kitchen workers from Mexico to Mauritius, living out of a suitcase, three months here, a week there...But then this was at a point in my life where I'd declared that I had only two ambitions: either to become a pirate (which I rejected when I realised that having a leg amputated was a pretty permanent career move) or to pick a fist fight with a clown. Neither came to anything (not many clowns live in rural France), and as it happens I didn't get to travel the world either, instead I settled down in Avignon instead with the love of my life; but I did take other ideas from Bourdain, especially his maxim that 'You always go to work no matter what'. I was particularly struck by his line on the suicide of Vatel (he killed himself when the fish order didn't turn up in time for the banquet he was organising which his boss was throwing for Louis 14th): “Vatel punked out over a late fish delivery and offed himself like a bad poet. Somebody had to cover his station the next day.” So I haven't punked out, I've been at work for the past few weeks with my doctor saying I should at least rest if not check into hospital because I have blood poisoning and a leg and foot of even more elephantine proportions than normal – I'm having real problems getting my cooking shoes on and even more problems taking them off. The Work Ethic has really gotten into me and everyone else here has been regaling me with their own tales of coming to work while fatally injured; the Maitre d' worked a New Year's Eve banquet with a temperature of 104 (Centigrade, probably); Chef did two services with a broken finger and carried on working with it set so badly that it's now permanently bent at 30 degrees to the normal. Stories of stabbings, cuttings and enough blood spurtings to make a decent black pudding abound. Feh. Cooking is more fun than lying in a hospital bed eating crappy hospital food. Most things are more fun than eating crappy hospital food, in fact, which even Pascal, my school workstation companion agrees with – and he's one of the individuals responsible for cooking that hospital food in Avignon. Pascal is a great chap, as slim as I'm not, and as incapable of cooking as I seem to be able; he's doing his CAP Cuisine (Certificat d'Aptitude Professionnel – the exam we're taking at the end of this year) so that he gets to tick a box in his professional life, get a bump in his payscale and, in 30 years time, will receive a slightly larger pension than he would have if he didn't spend Mondays and Tuesday mornings in 2005/6 at catering college. The one thing that Pascal can do better – much better – than me is whip cream and egg whites; 25 years tapping at computer keyboards as a professional journalist have left me with crippled hands and wrists, carpal tunnels furred up like a McDonalds' straw stuffed with pipe cleaners, nerves swollen to the size of sticks of rhubarb; I can't whip anything with a whisk manually for more than 15 seconds at a time without having to change hands, and this is after the operations to relieve the pain in my wrists. Pascal, being a 'fonctionnaire', a French civil servant, gets 10 weeks paid holiday and a 32 hour week and has never had to do a hard day's work in his life. Not that I'm complaining, if I could get a job cooking for the French Government and become a fonctionnaire myself I'd jump at the chance; urban legend in France has it that the very, very best place to eat in the whole country is at the Elysée Palace, official home of the French President. No one there worries about the price of raw ingredients and if you want foie gras on your cornflakes, well, Chef will even make it taste nice for you. So as we were whipping cream I got Pascal to whip up mine as well as his own; I'm turning his potatoes (pommes chateau – each one has to have seven equally-sized and -shaped sides, each potato must be the exact same size as all the others) and de-boning his veal for him, both things I happen to love doing – and he's happy to find something he can do better than me anyway, so we're both happy. Until Chef arrives and castigates us for not practising the things we can't do ourselves; he's unimpressed by my argument that I will never have to whip anything by hand, being able to use electricity to whip stuff in kitchens (what happens when the power goes out? What if you're cooking in a mud hut in Africa?) and Pascal impresses him even less by explaining that all he has to do is put gastros into a steam oven for 11 minutes and check the contents are at 73 degrees when they come out (how will you do your exam if you have to debone a joint of veal?). He's right, but then Chefs are always right. Even when they're wrong. Today we're cooking a blanquette de veau, which I can only translate as 'veal blanket'. I have to confess that it isn't one of my personal favourites to eat. The idea is that everything on the plate is completely white – the meat, the sauce, the vegetables, everything. Which isn't attractive, at least not these days anyway; any cook's natural instinct is to make the plate look more attractive, add a splash of colour here and a dash of contrast there. Not with veal blanket, it isn't. You're not even allowed to put a couple of carrots on the plate to alleviate the snow-blindness. De-boning the veal shank isn't too difficult, although I wish now that I'd bought a more flexible de-boning knife when I started doing this cookery course. The one I have has a very solid, non-bendy blade from Spain which is fine for carving stuff, but doesn't really hack it, as it were, when trying to trim meat off a bone. Chef – restaurant chef – has a much nicer, really bendy knife that works more like a filet de sole, a fish filleting knife but shorter; press the blade against the bone and it just glides along to separate it from the meat. Easy. When I talk about this with my school Chef, though, he calmly takes my inflexible Spanish boning knife from me and deftly removes half the bone with just a few knife strokes; poor workmen blame their tools in French as well as in English. It's easy to get hung up on the hardware of cooking, and the chef forums I read are full of starter cooks obsessing about whether they should buy a Japanese or German knife, time that would be better spent using a cheap knife to build up their basic knife skills. But, boys and their toys and so on; what can you say? A blanquette, we learn, is meat cooked by poaching from a cold start – poché départ à froid. Cold starts allow the item being cooked to warm up gradually so that it's cooked through evenly from surface to interior – this is why you should always start potatoes off in cold water, Chef tells us, so that the outside doesn't cook more quickly than the inside and go all mushy and flake off before the interior is done. Makes sense. In this case it also stops the veal taking on anything other than a deathly palor. This is also 'cuisson par expansion' which, not surprisingly, means 'cooking by expansion'. Not of the meat itself but of its juices and flavours, from the meat out into the poaching medium; the opposite is 'cuisine par absorption', cooking by absorption whereby the cooking medium – say, a stock – penetrates the tasteless lump you're trying to make interesting. School meals in the 1970s, for example (apart from those cooked by my mother, of course). And then there's 'cuisson mixte', mixed cooking where the meat's flavour expands out into the cooking medium and the medium's own flavour penetrates the meat, as in a ragout or a daube (mmmm, daube..). Blanquette de veau is cooked in a béchamel, which I've enjoyed making since I was a kid. I learned to cook as a young teenager when my mother became a top school chef – she produced 1,500 covers a day completely from scratch (including making bread), a feat which impressed me not at all then but now impresses the hell out of me. The last thing she wanted to do when she finished work was cook for the family, so I learned to cook in self-defence really; my sister was younger than me, my father isn't a cook in any sense and so it was down to me. Béchamel I learned because I loved cheese sauce, although back then I had never heard the words 'béchamel' or 'mornay'. And my restaurant chef has ideas about béchamel too – like, cook it in the oven for an hour. It works, too – after you've brought the butter/flour/milk mix to the boil cook it in a slow oven, it makes a really creamy, silky-smooth sauce. If you've got an hour and a slow oven to spare, that is. In school our blanquettes need to be out in time for lunch to feed the hungry staff, so there's no hour-long baking for my béchamel today. While the blanquette is cooking we do some white vegetables; turnips and cauliflower 'glacés à blanc', white-glazed; this means cooking them slowly in water with a hint of lemon, covered with paper circles. No hints of colour for them. And, naturally, the whole is served with rice; just plain, white rice. The assembled plates look, well, boring, but it's a good test of technique; instead of searing and colouring everything at the highest possible temperatures it teaches us control and restraint, never bad ideas in a restaurant. But it's not a dish I'd ever serve myself, not without adding a couple of carrots at least to liven the plate up a bit. And a few peas.