Chris Ward

It's because working conditions and wages are terrible. Even with a number of years experience you may only get a little over minimum wage. Most restaurants still work split shifts too, which doesn't encourage young people to enter the business. The first job offer I find on the national jobs site here is for a patissier with qualifications which take 5 years to get, and also with five years experience, for which they're offering 1800 per month which, after taxes, works out at 1386 euros a month. Which is a bit less than I was getting with a two year qualification and 7 years experience in 2010.

180 is about as high as i'd ever go with any oil. What are you doing with yours, defending your castle and pouring it over the invaders?

Not always the good stuff, I understand though - isn't cheese made from raw milk banned?

Alternance it is in French, yes. Except I often ended up working my days off and going into the restaurant after school too - sometimes finding a day's worth of dishwashing waiting for me at work! The Cordon Bleu is expensive - I've a friend who's starting there this month: €49 000 for the main course plus find your own accommodation! I can't see how you can earn that back ever as a cook, it's about three years' wages.

1. Figure of 8 means you cover all of the pan - all the sides plus the middle. Going round and round you miss the middle, side-to-side you miss the point where the sides meet the bottom. 2. Yes I did! Her name was Rashid, a terrible cook who swapped out my stuff several times before I caught her in the act.

Really? Wikipedia says it's 207°C, 405°F - what are you trying to do with it??? I deep fry sweet potato in it sometimes at 180°C! https://www.google.fr/search?q=smoke+point+of+olive+oil&oq=smoke+point+of+olive+oil&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i60l3.3294j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I have a cheap mixer. Use good quality oil and mix in short bursts but don't be afraid to keep going. Or do it in a blender. The oil isn't heated but anyway olive oil has a high smoke point. Why start with a neutral oil?

This is a very simple sauce, condiment if you will, that I use mostly on Trilogies but which also goes very well with carpaccio of beef, tomatoes on their own or more or less any place where you find a need for something a bit vinaigrette-y. And best of all it's really simple to make. Buy a basil plant or, if you're a gardening whizz, grow one. Go on, I'll wait. Tum te tum. Ok. Now, pull of the leaves. You can leave the tiny stalks attached to the leaves but nothing more. When you have a container full of leaves, add about 4 cms of olive oil and a small pinch of salt, then whizz it up with your cheap stick mixer. Add more olive oil as you go. Keep mixing until your mixer feels to hot, then taste the oil. You can add a fair amount of oil - I reckon one plant's good for about 250-400 ml of oil. You can use it as it is, or add lemon juice or another acid to really transform it into a vinaigrette. Add parmesan too and it goes well on crunchy salad leaves or beef carpaccio. It'll keep a bit in the fridge but be careful, you're smooshing all sorts of bugs into the basil which could harm you.

10: Quiet for the time of year, and wondering what's next? It’ll soon be Christmas and although the season has wound down completely and we have no more than a couple of rooms occupied in the hotel at any one time (if any at all), we're still fairly busy in the restaurant with Christmas lunch and dinner groups. December was supposed to be quiet because the directors didn't bother employing a sales manager this year, intending to do all the publicity themselves, something they then forgot to do leaving us with no reservations. In the end it turns out that everyone wants to celebrate Christmas in our restaurant. Last week I worked every day as normal, after a week in the UK with my lovely, indefatigable gurus Steve and Caroline (thanks!) which WAS a lot calmer than we'd expected, so we ended up eating and drinking in pubs and (French-run) restaurants instead - Pebble Beach is highly recommended, although you pay UK not French prices for French food - venison especially highly rated). Last Friday was the last Soirée Vigneron of the year, a Caviar/Foie Gras/Truffles/Lobster special for €100 a head, AVC compris (Aperitif/Vin/Café included). Chef had devised special 'menu dégustation' to go with each of the seven wines brought along by the various wine producers, which means seven courses, two with 'doublures' - under-plates. This is important to me because, with 50 covers, that gives me an extra 100 plates to wash. Thank you, Chef. Although it's not as bad as our old Dutch Seconde de Cuisine who managed to find a way to use four (count 'em! 4!) plates for one dish during the summer. I've refused to tell Chef how she did it because he'll only go and do the same. So we finished at about 1am on Saturday morning; Chef came into the Plonge and stuck his hand into the water in the dishwasher and said, "Hmm, what's this?" Now, the machine's been a bit dicky recently and the repairman's been out a few times; right now it's over-filling with water on occasion, and at this moment there was about a two centimetre overfill. I told him this, and he said, "No, I mean why have you emptied the machine and refilled it?" I hadn't, and told him so. "Yes, but this water's clean!" he said. That, I explained, is because I don't put anything dirty in it. I wash everything first in the sinks, I said. "I know," he replied, "but after all the covers we've done I thought it would be at least a little bit dirty" It wasn't, but then I'm a good dishwasher (please imagine a self-effacing grin here). In the kitchen I don't just want to do the best that I can do, I want to do the best that ANYONE can do. Which is why I wasn't happy with the Hollandaise sauce I did for him last night. We're currently down to two stagiaires, from the four we've had for the past three weeks. Only one of them, the German (natch) was any good; right now we have a chatty Portuguese grand-dad and the usual French teenager in the patisserie (although this one does show some signs of waking up now and then); the rule with stagiaires is that two do half the work of one regular cook, and four do a quarter of the work of one cook between them. So while Chef was busy showing them how to cut grapes in half to decorate the dessert plates he asked me to make a Hollandaise for the lobster he was serving last night. At cookery school we do this over a bain marie, but in the kitchen it's direct onto the hotplate. You keep the saucepan at the right temperature as you're whisking up the egg yolks (six, in this case, with a tablespoon and a half of water) by holding your hand on the side of the pan; if you smell burning flesh, it's too hot. You whisk in a figure of 8 until you can clearly see the bottom of the pan, then you ladle in the clarified butter (one Pochon - a small ladleful - per yolk) slowly off the heat. Now, I started on the butter when, as at school, I could CLEARLY see the bottom of the pan as I drew the whisk across it; but Chef checked one ladleful of butter in and said the yolks weren't foamed enough. Still, we checked to see if it would glaze by putting a spoonful onto a torpille (a torpedo-shaped metal serving plate) under the salamander, and it came out fine. So, OK, continue with the butter but next time foam those yolks more. And in the end it was a good Hollandaise, the junior French stagiaire told me so (jealously, I have to add, he hasn't been let anywhere near the stoves in the two weeks he's been here to do anything other than burn milk). Because Chef is the only proper cook left in the kitchen (we have no Seconde and the Chef de Partie des Entrées left three weeks ago) I've been getting to do more and more of the advanced prep and even some of the cooking, which is fine by me; beats washing up anyway, although I do still have to do that at the end of it all. For the soirée Vigneron I got to prep the lobster and the foie gras, and de-bone the filets mignons of venison that were served as the main course and de-skin the two joints of poitrine, pork belly, that we used to lard the filets - something I've actually already done at school - it's not too difficult if you remember (a) to keep the skin pulled tight and (b) not to cut yourself. I enjoy all that sort of stuff a lot, enough to make me think that I'd enjoy working garde-manger in a large brigade; but then I do a bit of patisserie and enjoy that a lot, too. And then I also get to work the hot side and enjoy that as well. After a year and a half in professional kitchens I've gained a lot of experience in a variety of bits of the job and don't know if I want to specialise or not. I’m thinking of doing a second year at school, assuming I get my Diplôme this summer. They offer a CAP in Patisserie or Traiteur-ship, and the idea of both interests me. For one crazy moment I thought of doing both at the same time, since they're taught on different days, but I've come to realise just how much more tired I've been since September than I was even during the height of the summer. The problem is that, with two days off a week, I've been spending one of those days working in a kitchen again, effectively giving me just one day off per week. And since September the restaurant has been closing mostly only for half-days at a time, so often I've been going in to work on Monday evenings after school, giving me 17 or 18 hours out of the house at one go, and then only two half days during the rest of the week to recuperate. Which really isn't enough, and now I'm just completely knackered. Yesterday the restaurant was closed for the midday service and I'd intended to spend the day working on the repainting of our new front room. But after I'd gone out for bread and eaten some breakfast I found I was literally incapable of doing anything else at all other than lying in bed and, at most, reading a little. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak, unfortunately. The restaurant officially closes from December 23 until February 14, and doesn't re-open fully until March. Even then I don't know what I'm going to be doing; I certainly don't want to do another full season as plongeur, but would love to go on working with Chef because he's been so good to me. I've learned lots and lots and he's a great teacher, but (a) I don't know (and nor does he) if he'll have a budget for a Commis Chef and (b) in any case I'm not experienced enough to do that job in that restaurant, in my opinion; I'm certainly not experienced enough to do, for example, the entrées, where he will almost certainly have a budget to hire someone. And, while he'd probably love me to come back to the plonge I, as I say, don't want to do that; I may come back a bit at the start of the season if I haven't found anything else, but I don't want it to become a regular gig. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed doing it for the past year, but there's other aspects of the job I enjoy much, much more and, frankly, a year washing up is enough.

9: Puffing and panting Once again Chef (restaurant – as opposed to Chef (Ecole)) came up trumps by getting me to make a few kilos of puff pastry in advance of this week’s school session. Normally in the restaurant we use bought-in sheets of frozen puff pastry, one of the very (very very) few ready-made things we use, for several reasons: It’s good quality; it’s not expensive; and we don’t have a chef-patissier. Chef spent three months at the start of the year looking for a decent patissier, and even thought he’d got a good one signed up until, at the last moment he instead accepted a full-time contract in a restaurant on the Cote d’Azur in one of the Palace Hotels down around Nice. There is a HUGE lack of cooks in the entire French catering industry – not just in restaurants. Overall the country is about 70,000 cooks short, and good patissiers are worth their weight in truffles, the real ones not chocolate ones. We were offering a large salary and good benefits but someone even richer offered him more – so, if you fancy working in France, bone up on your pastry skills – there’s work waiting for you. The only caution I’d offer is that its virtually essential to speak French at least a bit, simply for your own comfort. We’ve had stagiaires who didn’t speak French and, luckily for them, my Chef is easy-going and prepared to work his schoolboy English, but they’re not all like that. There are, unfortunately, chefs too stupid to realise that in a market where there’s a lack of talent you have to treat the talent you can find nicely – which is how come I was able to have a blazing row and quit my last job with a chef traiteur in front of a shop full of customers (“Je m’en fous de ce putain de merde de travail! Je démission!”) and walk into a good job the next day. So, a couple of kilos of puff pastry last week gave me a head-start on doing it at school this week and, again, an interesting insight into different techniques of doing things; at the restaurant I mixed the détrempe, the flour and water mixture, in a big bowl; at school it’s direct on the worksurface, which made more mess for no apparent gain. We also used margarine at school instead of the ‘beurre fin’ (butter with less than 16% water content) at the restaurant. The margarine was easier to work but gave a much poorer quality taste at the end. But it is cheaper. We used the puff pastry to make some sardine tarts, so we also got to practise our fish gutting skills again; a Chef I know in England has told me about his old Portuguese kitchen porter who could disembowel and de-bone a sardine just by running his thumb up along through its guts and then ‘sort of twisting it’, but I can’t work out how to do that so have to stick with the knife technique I do know. A quick ‘tomate fondue’ (sweated shallots, concassé of tomatoes and a touch of garlic all stewed together) makes a base and finishes off a simple tart. We start the afternoon with another ‘droit’ class, business administration; this is the most boring thing we do – the teacher, who normally teaches recalcitrant 16-year-olds, thinks that the best way to teach us anything is to read stuff from the text book at dictation speed so we can copy it down into our own exercise books; I’ve short-circuited this process by simply buying the text book for myself and I read along with her. As our final exam will be based exclusively on exercises drawn from this book, most of us have started using this class as a time to tidy up and correct our recipe books. Or for having a nap. More interestingly we do a mayonnaise this afternoon, our first ‘sauce émulsionnée. I’ve made it a fair few times in my life before but today it just does NOT want to work. No obvious reason why, it just won’t take and stays runny. My cooking partner wants to throw it away, but I show him how to take another egg yolk and use the runny rubbish as if it were oil, and this time it works fine. Chef was impressed I knew how to do that, too. The rest of the afternoon we spend making a ‘tarte fine aux pommes’, a posh apple tart with the other half of the puff pastry we made this morning. A ‘tarte fine’ has crème patissière on the pastry base and then poshly-sliced apple on top. Again, it’s all about knife skills, cutting up apples into thin slices rather than giant chunks, which is much harder than non-cooks think. But my workstation partner, who never, ever cooks apart from in our lessons, has a hard time doing this sort of stuff because he simply never handles a knife anywhere else. He’s only doing the course because it gives him a wage increase at work (he works in a hospital canteen ‘conditioning’ the food prepared elsewhere, i.e. freezing/defrosting/reheating it for patients and never gets to cook – nor does he want to. Eating at his home is done via a microwave, takeaways or in a restaurant) and while I get on great with him and like him dearly, it’s maddening to be always next to someone for whom food is just fuel and cookery simply a way to get a pay rise rather than make something others want to eat. We put our tarts in the cold room to chill while we clean up and then chef gives us our marks afterwards. I only get 7 out of 20 which is very disappointing, until I realise that someone has swapped dishes with me to get my 15. Hmm. Something like this happened the other week when I got marked down on some vegetables we'd turned, but I didn't think anything of it at the time. Still. Then this evening they have a big group in the restaurant and Chef has asked me to come in to work, so I cycle up there from school. It turns out to be a bit more difficult than I thought it would be to do this, since one part of the route is along a dual carriageway flyover with no pavement, so I get badly shaken about by passing lorries. In the end, I get there just in time for the staff meal – roast chicken and ‘pommes de terre coin du rue’ (potatoes cut in quarters lengthways then into a large dice, sautéed very quickly with some chopped garlic and parsley and bunged into the oven for 20 minutes – the name means ‘street corner potatoes’), one of my favourites and Chef’s, too. He suffered during the summer when our (Dutch) Seconde de Cuisine (or Sous-Chef) always cooked potatoes and roast chicken on his days off so he never got to eat them. Now every time we have potatoes everyone makes a point of moaning about how they can’t face any more because we ate so many over the summer; it never fails to get him going in a good-humoured sort of way, so it’s worth the effort. The 47 covers don’t finish eating their puddings until gone midnight and I have to wait for their dessert plates but can leave the waiters to put their coffee cups and saucer into the soaking bowl to finish overnight and get home just before 1 am. I left home at 0715 this morning, so it’s been a long day. Delphine, my girlfriend (she’s a florist in Orange about 20 minutes up the road) is already fast asleep, and I manage to get into bed without fully waking her. Luckily for me she’s very understanding about this sort of thing and works public holidays and weekends herself, so restaurant hours don’t bother her at all. I’m a lucky chap.

Post 8 - Top marks for my first presentation In my diary today I wrote, and I quote: “Journée excellente à l’école aujourd’hui; Filets de Rouget, sauce bonne femme avec légumes glacés à blanc”. I didn't realise I'd written it in French until I read it later. I’ve started speaking and thinking in French almost all the time, even when I write my diary. Apart from half an hour on the ‘phone to my mother every Sunday I almost never speak English at all these days. We were due to cook more Merlan at school this week but they didn’t have any, unfortunately, so we got rougets - the cheap kind, not the ‘de rochers’ type Chef buys at the restaurant, which have pointy, not rounded noses. The pointy-nosed ones live in among the rocks where they feast on whatever lives inside the cracks in the stone, hence the usefully pointy noses. They taste better as a result, so check your rouget’s nose before buying. On average I clean (de-fin, scale and gut) about a hundred rougets a week in the restaurant, so cleaning and filleting 10 today wasn’t much of a hardship, really. We were supposed to do three or four each, but school Chef knows I know how to do fish so he gave me all the extra left-over ones to do. Which I enjoy doing anyway, so that’s fine and I’m pleased he has confidence in me to make me do them. To go with the rougets we learn sauce Bonne Femme. It’s made with a “réduction glacé”, a reduced glaze of the fumet de poisson, the fish stock we made with the rouget bones and a handful of onions, shallots, leeks, vegetable trimmings and whatever you can scrape from under your fingernails. A glacé means reducing the cooking fluid (after cooking the fillets for seven minutes in the oven in the fumet) down to a syrupy consistency, then monter it au beurre – stir in lots and lots of butter (a hundred grammes in about 50 ccs of fumet). We also had to cook three vegetables to go with the fish: carrots, turnips and more courgettes all “turned” - cut into pleasing shapes. The same shape for all three, of course. With minimal waste, too. You not allowed to start with a 100 gramme carrot to make a single, beautifully-turned 15 gramme presentation piece, and they all have to be 2.5 centimetres long, oval-shaped and with no blemishes. Today is also the first time we’ve had to present our work on a plate to Chef, and I’m extremely pleased to have got great marks for everything except for my courgettes, which apparently didn’t have enough salt in them. Chef is a demon for salt, however, and ‘enough’ for him is ‘blerk!’ for normal people, so I’m not too worried about that; still, know your client and cook accordingly. His problem is that he’s a smoker, and smokers really can’t detect ‘correct’ quantities of salt - they need about half as much again as everyone else. He marked us plus or minus on seven criteria – overall presentation, cleanliness of the plate (ha! I was the only person who thought to wash their provided plate before serving, and then to heat it up in the oven), warmth of the dish, taste of the fish, sauce and vegetables. I got a plus in everything except the courgettes, which he marked plus-minus, and the overall presentation which got a double plus plus as the most original of the day. Cool. I served it with the two fillets back-to-back in the middle of the plate, vertically, with the veg (two each of three veg – carrots, turnips and courgettes) arranged along the sides like rays of sunshine, the sauce at either end but not between the veg, then a long line of chopped parsley dribbled vertically up the plate and right over the edges. Looked nice I thought, anyway, and so did Chef. We’re supposed to go for height, too, but I’m really not into building towers and propping fish fillets up with lumps of turnip. I'm happy with my masculinity as it is, thankyou, but still, know your client. Especially when they want you to dribble chopped herbs across your plate - very old-fashioned these days, says my Restaurant Chef. He wants single, appropriate leaves poised delicately on dishes, not large amounts sprinkled willy-nilly on plates. It’s here that cooking resembles my previous career, journalism; in principle in both jobs you’re writing or cooking for a large audience of consumers. In practise, you’re cooking for one person, your editor or chef. S/he is the person who decides what the consumer wants, and it’s your job as the writer or cook to match the vision of your boss. Only when you get to be an editor or chef do you get to decide what the punter wants.

Yeah, but American cheese is so horrible generally speaking. lol. Wikipedia says there are up to 450 'official' cheeses in France, but it's probably in the thousands with every local goat farmer selling a variation. Our local Saturday market has half a dozen different farmers selling theirs.

It's actually not really that hard to do, just time consuming. It takes ages to cut the strawberries properly. You start around the outside and work inwards and it's fairly automatic that they look nice. It just takes an hour. Well, 30 minutes perhaps.

Me too. My next step was a really good one, too!

Exactly. French people find this idea literally incredible.

That was exactly the problem! Same teacher, same lessons.

Post 7: Overworked at school I was on quite a high after last week’s class, to be honest, despite being told that my jogging bottoms are not smart enough to wear in public. This week brings me right down with a large bump.It didn’t help that I’d spent a great weekend welcoming old friends to Avignon, showing off my new cooking skills to them; they were all very complementary and I was feeling pretty good about my work. It didn’t help either that I’d woken up this Monday morning with an absolutely terrible cold,Everyone was either off sick (six out of 17 of us), or should be off sick (me, Eric and David to name just three) or in a really foul mood (absolutely everyone, Chef included and especially).
We spent the morning from 9 to midday doing what should have been about half an hour’s work which we didn’t finish until gone 1215 because Chef decided at the last minute to get us to do some goujons of the merlan fish we’d been preparing, and make a tartare sauce to go with it. By ‘last minute’ I mean five to twelve; we’d spent the morning just cleaning the merlan and making pastry.This meant that there was a HUGE queue at the canteen for lunch. Luckily I’ve mastered the art of queuing French-style, so I dragged Eric, David and Laurence along behind me and just pushed in at the front; luckily, again, we’re all elderly persons so the teenagers in the queue don’t have the courage to say ‘boo’ to us. Either that or they thought we were teachers. And anyway, we needed to be at the front to give us time to go and get a coffee afterwards.Most of the pupils at the cookery school are teenagers going through their normal high-school years, just with added cooking. They do classes in maths, history, physics, English and so on and also spend a few half-days a week learning how to cook. We’re supposed to be doing their entire full-time, two-year curriculum in one day per week over one year, and in fact we learn that we do more TPs - Travails Pratiques or practical work - per week than they do. Sometimes they go a fortnight without lighting a gas burner, the poor things.Every week Chef gives us an hour of classes about cooking - well, sort of, it usually descends into a discussion about whether or not Puy lentils are really superior, is Métro (a big restaurant wholesale chain) or Auchan (a regular supermarket) cheaper, and the best way to cook a coypu - and then an hour with another teacher, either about ‘hygiene’, basic catering hygiene, or Droit, business administration. This week straight after lunch we had ‘droit’ which is frankly the most boring class I have ever taken, and I used to get Old Tom for Physics classes, so I know what I’m talking about here.Today, we had to fill in a stationery order form. Yep, an order form for stationery. I am not making this up: here’s a Post-It note from your boss saying he wants pens, pencils and stuff, so fill in the stationery order form. (OK get in the zone, imagine you’re a stagiaire in an office, right? OK, are you in the zone?) Absolute nonsense..After that Chef clearly had Something Else he needed to be doing somewhere other than in the kitchen with us, so he loaded us down with a good five or six hours worth of work to finish between 2pm and going home time at 6pm, recipes and techniques we already knew so we didn’t need to keep asking him how to do stuff.So we did lemon meringue tart and fish mousselines and braised endives and turned potatoes (pommes chateau, in fact; all the same size with seven equal sides) and made fumet (fish stock) and reduced it down for a sauce and peeled lemons ‘à vif’ and cooked who knows what else and didn’t finish until half-past six. Then Chef told me my sauce was a ‘funny colour’ and gave me a minus mark for it without tasting it - or anything else - on my plate, so I just walked away and left him to throw it in the bin. The sauce, let me tell you, was absolutely delicious and the EXACT same colour as David’s, which was ‘perfect’.

Post 6: First day at school After weeks of preparation, months of planning and a couple of years of thinking about it, my first day at cookery school finally came and, just like in the restaurant, went in a fast-moving blur of put your stuff here, cut that, boil the other and find yourself a saucepan. The biggest disappointment of the first day was that we weren’t allowed to eat what we cook - it goes to the school staff canteen or college brasserie the next day. And not much technique was taught either – “slice those apples,” Chef said, as we made a tarte fine aux pommes this afternoon; I knew how to slice them nice and fine, but the chap sharing my workstation was basically just quartering them to fan out on top of his apple tart. “It’s quicker that way,” he said. Erm… peel, core and halve your apple, turn it flat side down, convert to slices using your biggest (or smallest, depending on what you have to prove…) knife. So Day One, Lesson One is exactly what you’d hope from a French catering college - we started the morning making fond de veau, veal stock, a real mainstay of traditional French cuisine. Take five or ten kilos of washed veal bones (some even boil them, but that’s exaggerating in a kitchen where you have far too many commis), cut into 4-5 centimetre lengths (butchers with bandsaws are handy here), add some roughly chopped carrots, onions and any other bits of vegetables you have lying around, some parsley stalks and a bouquet garni of herbs (thyme, rosemary, a bayleaf all wrapped up in a bit of green leek leaf and tied around with string), cover with water and set to simmer very gently on the back of the flat-top of the stove for 5 − 8 hours. Don’t let it boil fiercely, you’ll emulsify all the scum and fat together and end up with grey stock. Skim off the grey scum and fat that collects on the surface from time to time. When you’re fed up waiting for it to finish, or you just have to go home, let it cool down (it helps at this point if you have a blast chiller), filter it and use it at will. You can reduce it down which helps with finding room to store it all. It makes a great base for soups and sauces - its gelatinous qualities will add a superb unctuousness to everything and really improve what we’re now supposed to call ‘mouth feel’, I understand. We had our first classroom lessons today, too; an hour on cookery theory with School Chef, and an hour of, today, ‘hygiene’, which is apparently more than just ‘wash your hands.’ Microbes, in fact, are really, really tiny organisms which can breed very, very quickly. I know we have to make allowances for the fact that this content is normally aimed at bored 16-year-olds, but still…Next week we have ‘Droit’, Law. Let’s hope it’s more interesting. We make tartes fines de pommes this afternoon, complete with that non-lesson on how to slice apples in a manner which could be called ‘fine’. My pastry, as usual, is just ‘meh’; I’ve never been good with pastry, my hands are too hot, but I can do the compote de pommes and the apple slicing and peeling with panache (which, it turns out, is French for ‘shandy’). The compote and nicely sliced and arranged apples cover up the horror that is my pastry, and we’re done. We clean down the kitchen together, hosing the floor with the special hosepipe like in the restaurant - it adds cleaning solution automatically, then we scrub and squeegee clean after washing down all the work surfaces. Another group of us wash up the pots and pans - I try not to do this one since it’s what I do all day at work normally. Chef catches up with me as I leave the administration building. A lean, worn-down sort of guy (lots of good chefs have this pared-down appearance) with a shock of once-gingerish hair, he seems nice enough but he tells me off for turning up in my cycling clothes – trainers, jogging bottoms, anorak – and said I should be arriving in a suit and tie after cycling 5 kms from the centre of town. “But it’s only 50 metres from the gates at the entry of the school to the changing room and we stay in our kitchen clothes all day,” I say. “Of course I’m gonna put on a suit and tie for that distance!” I joke. “Well, I do,” he says - and it turns out, he does! He tells me that he lives not far from me in the middle of town and cycles down on his boneshaker, loaded with kit and books, in a suit and tie. And there he is standing in front of me in a jacket and tie, heading for his bike. “It’s the school rules - when on campus you should at all times be either in ‘tenue de cuisine’, cook’s whites, or ‘Smart apparel’. My cycling gear, he informs me with a superior air, is not ‘Smart’. “Yes, Chef,” I lie because you never say ‘No, Chef’. I’m not really going to do that. The only suit I own now is of the monkey variety, i.e. A dinner jacket and I’m not planning to wear that on my bicycle even for a bet. No one says anything else to me for the whole year, but Chef cycles past me in a stately fashion every week in his tweed jacket and tie, me in my scruffy track suit and trainers. Perhaps I lack the dedication needed to be a really good cook, let alone chef; if I were better at this I wouldn’t hesitate to slip into a little something from Saville Row and cycle five kilometres in it, before donning my immaculate whites. Then again, most of the chefs I see on the telly are scruffy, bearded monsters wearing watches, of all things, in the kitchen (watches catch on saucepan handles and bring your precious ingredients crashing to the floor). Both my chefs in Avignon are old-school; neither of them has hardly ever had the time to watch the cooking Channel, let alone be aware of celebrity chefs. And it’s an attitude I’m not against. I just don’t want to cycle to school in a suit.

I worked in restaurants here in France and also in private service for 7 years and had to stop when my carpal tunnels wouldn't let me work any more. I'm glad I stopped when I did now, but at the time it was hard. Now I earn three times as much as when I cooked teaching and it's another great career. I teach English and 'Professional culture' to people who are doing degrees and masters to become hotel and restaurant managers, and their universal attitude is that Cooks Don't Matter - until they have to go and do their practical weeks in the school's kitchens. Then they gain some respect for the cooks, but still not enough. And they learn in their economics classes that it's really, really hard to make money out in the restaurant business. The last place I worked was a 100 room hotel which had a restaurant, and the owner was happy if the restaurant broke even. We did 100 covers per service with three staff - the chef, me as second and a dishwasher. Menus du jour and à la carte and man we had to run to get through every service. Also as it was a chain there were VERY strict rules about never doing any overtime, everything into your programmed 8 hours per day. Ultimately it all comes down to customers not being willing or able to pay the real cost of putting the food on their plates; even in my last job - with 7 years experience - I was earning so little that I was entitled to state handouts which were the equivalent of an extra 3 months salary per year. So people won't pay for it on their plates and have to pay for it through their taxes. I'm always amazed when I see shows about restaurants in the US which have so many staff - 7 line cooks for 40 covers? Seriously? I've only once worked in a restaurant which had that many staff, and that didn't last for very long. Almost everyone I know who worked in the business with me has moved out of the industry completely or sideways into sales or other businesses. You can't do this job if you have - and want to keep - your family.

Welcome! Lots of lamb recipes perhaps?

Post 5: Going to school After quitting the traiteur I worked part-time, on and off, at Les Agassins as a dishwasher. At first it was cash in hand and then I got a contract for 6 months to work the summer season. The pre-season work was very interesting since it was mostly just the chef and me working together to do everything. So I got to work not only the plonge but also starters and patisserie, with a lot of prep for everything thrown in. This is what I wrote about it at the time. Starting work at Les Agassins was a lot of ‘hurry up and wait’. The restaurant closed for Christmas and New Year with a few groups booked in here and there until Valentine’s Day, when the hotel and restaurant opened - still part-time - for the new season. It wasn’t until towards Easter that it was open seven days a week, and by then I was really into the swing of things. Steve and Caroline, two professional cooks whom I’d met via the old Dr Keyboard computer help column I wrote in The Times, had given me some great advice on how to run my plonge - essentially, make sure you run it, not the waiters who will do the least they possibly can in order to get back out as quickly as possible. Act like a Chef de Partie de la Plonge, they said. So I did, insisting they, and not I, scrape their plates free from food (and bollocked them like a certain traiteur from Nimes when they didn’t), organised things to suit myself not anyone else, and made sure everything was thoroughly clean when it left; there’s nothing worse than having Chef come back into the plonge with a plate still encrusted with last night’s specials. I’d more or less given up on the idea of going to any sort of catering college, the two I’d looked at seriously were demanding (a) all my money and (b) all my time giving me (c) no time to earn more of (a). Then Chef pointed me at the local school, l'Ecole Hôtelière d'Avignon (EHA) to give it its full name, where he did some work as an examiner. It had a decent reputation, I could go one day a week under their ‘Formation continue’ program and, best of all, it wasn’t ludicrously expensive. Well, expensive enough that I ended up selling my beloved BMW to pay for the year, but meh. I had a pushbike and lived in the middle of a city where you can walk to anything interesting from my town centre apartment within a quarter of an hour, so a car was a needless expense anyway. Also, I had no money, earning minimum wage as a washer-up anyway. So I signed up. Starting in September 2005, I spent every Monday from 8am to 6pm at the school, which turned out to be a 30 minute bike ride south of town. I could have Mondays off, Chef said, and Sundays too so that’d fit in well with my work week. Well, unless he needed me to come in to work, obviously. But that’ll only happen not very often. Promise. Sorted. The school sent the list of equipment I’d need to learn stuff there, some of it incomprehensible. A canneleur? Douille? Spatule en exoglass? And no one but no one, Chef at work, my future teacher Chef and the bloke at the knife shop included, knew what a ‘Cuillère à racine’ was. We were to wear proper kitchen whites, safety shoes and ‘calot’ or hat (the sort they wear in McDonald’s) at school and the list of knives was sensible: Eminceur (25cm chef’s knife), Filet de sole (for filleting fish), désosseur (de-boner), Office (vegetable knife), Econome (vegetable peeler), Canneleur (for carving grooves in carrots - seriously), Fusil (steel for putting edges back onto knives). We’d need a Verre mesureur for measuring liquids and I added my electronic kitchen scales, scissors, the famous set of four ‘douilles’ which turned out to be icing nozzles, a paintbrush, scraper, the ‘spatule en exoglas’ which translated as a plastic stirring spoon, a fouet à sauce (sauce whisk), a fourchette (the sort of fork you use to hold down the Sunday roast while carving it), an Aiguille à brider (chicken-trussing needle, now replaced by elastic bands), a regular spoon and fork and the famous Cuillère à racine which, the consensus had it, was a melon baller. I already had the clothes and Chef kindly gave me a vegetable knife, the needle and some other stuff. I bought a new Eminceur and désosseur from the knife shop in the centre of Avignon (Spanish Arcos knives for the knife geeks amongst you) and a filet de sole (Sabattier, rubbish) from Metro and I was good to go. Day One, bring it on!

An old chef's maxim was "Hold your hand on the side of the pan. When you smell burning flesh it's too hot. "

The rule-of-thumb when I worked here (and I haven't worked in a restaurant professionally for five years now) was three days for anything containing seafood or dairy, five days for anything else. That said, the first place where I had a paid job the chef (it was a caterer, not a restaurant) would deliberately buy stuff that was on its expiry date from his suppliers as it was cheaper, then either do everything to move it immediately or cook it to give it a longer shelf life. For example, yoghurts on their expiry date would be mixed with sugar to, allegedly, give them another three days; eggs on expiry would be hard-boiled to give them another five days. It seemed pretty shady to me at the time, and does now, although I'm increasingly wary of manufacturers giving short expiry dates to move their products. At home now I apply the 3/5 day rules to most things.

Post 4: Moving on WARNING: Contains some strong language towards the end! I worked with Franck and Isabelle at La Grange de Labahou every Thursday - sometimes other days, too - for six months before I had the confidence to believe their urgings to go out there and get a proper, paying job. During those months I'd come in every Thursday morning at 9 am and they would already be hard at work - they live in the flat above the restaurant with their two young daughters so don't have much of a commute. I'd finish at about 2.30, have lunch with them, drive home, sleep for an hour and then come back at 6 to find Franck and Isabelle already working hard. We'd work until about 1030 or 11 and I'd go home to crash, usually until midday the next day. And I'd marvel that they did that day after day after day. They closed Tuesday evenings and all day Wednesdays and took a couple of weeks holiday every November, but had already been working to the same rhythm for 18 years when I first met them. This was back in 2005 and they're still doing it now in 2016 and show no signs of stopping before they retire in another 20 years or so. Yet somehow the fact that I needed almost a whole day to get over working one day a week with them didn't put me off looking for a proper job as a cook, and it didn't take me long to find one.There are, I now know, a lot more jobs in French restaurants than people who want to do them. I had sent off two CVs with accompanying lettres de motivation. Letters of motivation - cover letters - are more important than CVs in France; a CV lists bald facts - where you worked, when, how clever you are as measured by how many exams you've passed. The lettre de motivation explains - quelle coincidence! - how this job, yes this very job is perfect for you and, what's more, how - quelle coincidence incroyable! - you happen to be the perfect, yes the very perfect candidate for which this employer has been so tirelessly searching! Amazing! The Michelin gaff I applied to never replied, but I got an interview with a Traiteur-restaurant (caterer) in Nimes as a plongeur, a kitchen porter. When I recounted all this to Frank and Isabel at Labahou, though, they expressed surprise that I should consider myself a humble plongeur - why, I'm at least a commis chef in terms of experience and what I've accomplished with them, they say very flatteringly. I don’t feel that confident though, fearing that a chef would want a commis to be able to make him a roux sauce, perhaps, or fillet a salmon or something I’ve never done before. Pfft, says Franck, most commis I’ve met have no idea how to do those either. Hmm. I go to see the traiteur anyway and, in retrospect, I can see that he was much too keen to take me on. I should have paid more attention to his story about how the person whom I was replacing - also, apparently, English - had to rush back home because of his sick mother, or his divorce, or something equally complicated and unclear. But at the time I was flattered by his attention, flattered at his interest and very interested in his promise to put me through catering college the following year whilst still working for him. Also, he knew a bit about rugby. It went wrong, of course, almost from the first day. He was both an outrageous liar - there was never any chance of him putting me through catering college - and he had an absolutely frightening temper, the sort of temper that would make Gordon Ramsey quake in his steel-toed shoes. In short, I got bollocked for absolutely everything I did. Everything. For example, one day as we were standing behind the counter of the canteen I ran for him in a large food processing company, he asked me to pass him a packet of paper serviettes from under the counter. I bent down and picked up one blue and one red packet, asking which he wanted? He chose the red and I put the blue packet back where I'd found it. « Why are you putting those serviettes back there? » he screamed at me. « Because that’s where I found them, » was apparently not a valid response. In fact, the simple act of putting serviettes back where I’d found them turned out to be a crime whose heinousness was right up there with putting cod in bouillabaisse or eating well-done steaks. He also had his foibles, but they were the good part of the job. We were told to leave lights on and taps running because his deal with his landlord meant he didn’t pay electricity or water bills, but transport absolutely everything larger than a cheese sandwich on a trolley in case you drop it; peel kiwi fruit with a spoon; don’t use tea towels for anything other than taking hot stuff out of the oven and instead carry a damp cloth everywhere with you to wipe up and use paper towels to dry afterwards. To start with I thought my duck’s back/water mentality would see me through, having been bollocked and shouted at by everyone from tabloid newspaper editors to Lord Lieutenants Of Montgomeryshire in the past. But he wore me down. Him and his sous-chef who just didn’t like me for reasons never really explained, although I suspect he was jealous of my car (I still had my BMW from my high-paying days as a journalist on expenses) and annoyed by my lack of the talents they wanted me to have. Whatever the reasons he spent his whole day criticising, bollocking and carping at me, teaching me that, in fact, I can only take so much of being treated like an asshole all day, every day before I have to give up. Things like watching me do something and then, 30 seconds before I finish it, appear to tut that I haven’t already finished. I started at 8 every morning - getting up at six - by finding seven or eight salads composés (either bought-in ones or something I made myself from whatever I could find) for the 'self' (self-service canteen) next door to the kitchen where we did about 30-40 covers a day. This wasn't as easy as it sounds as quite often there weren't any lying around and the S-C, who was in charge of these things, jealously guarded them for, well, for himself I guess. I learned plenty of weird and useful stuff, too. Like how to peel a melon, for example. Peel a melon? Oh yes, peel a melon. Lay it down longways, cut off the two ends; stand it up on one end and, as always, using the HUGEST knife you can find (chefs here always work with the HUGEST knives they can find, as opposed to Labahou where they worked with the smallest) cut down the side, following the contour. Repeat with all eight melons you're currently peeling, then portion. I learned how to make three gallons of mayonnaise at once, hard-boil 96 eggs at a time (hint: use a steam oven) and learned how to wash lettuce all over again. And how to stack lettuce leaves vertically in polystyrene boxes. I am not making this up. And then there was the Vacuum Packing Machine, the second bane of my life; it was almost impossible to seal anything up and get it right and not wrinkle the bag - it once took me an hour to do four bags of veal in Sauce Forestiere, much to the S-C's amusement. The problem is that you mustn't have any oil or grease along the seam so I had to spend ages and ages wiping and wiping it with bits of paper towel. Which, of course, is a waste of my time according to Chef. And a waste of his good paper. I ultimately discovered that both the Chef and Sous-chef had been away on a THREE DAY training course learning how to use the sous-vide machine, three days which translated into a two-minute lesson for me from the S-C. And a one-minute lesson contradicting all the major points by the Chef. It was experience, and I was learning, learning a lot, not least about working with assholes. I learned how to work quickly and cleanly; how to spend nine hours a day on my feet; new techniques; new recipes. And I was proud of myself for sticking with it - I even turned down an interview with another restaurant just over a month into the job, telling myself that the learning curve was flattening out. Pfft. It was Stockholm Syndrome. I realised one day towards the end of my second month when, over a traditionally short lunch break (we got about 10-15 minutes a day) I had an interesting conversation with Chef about Swiss rubbish collection methods (they weigh your rubbish there). I was pathetically, tragically pleased to have had a real conversation with him and to have made him laugh. I felt like a puppy-dog performing tricks, eager to please and coming back for second, third and fourth beatings afterwards. The truly remarkable thing was that I still wanted to go on being a cook after everything he did to me, unlike poor Cedric the work experience ‘stagiaire’ who came down to Nimes all the way from Paris for a month learning how to cook. He left in tears after four days, bollocked beyond belief by Chef and the Sous-chef for, well, for existing mostly. But I was not learning how to become the sort of cook I wanted to be with this traiteur so I started applying for jobs again. My first interview in Avignon, where I was now living for various ludicrous romantic reasons was, it turned out, for a job as a restaurant manager - sort out the ordering, make sure the chefs in the three (rather posh) restaurants the bloke owns have what they need, keep an eye on the table napkin levels, that sort of thing. Shame really, these are three very nice restaurants but this job was way outside my competency and experience, and it's not what I want to do at all, although the owner thought my previous life as a journalist suited me eminently to the task. What? OK, right. More jobs than staff in this profession, remember that. The next interview went better, in one of the city’s posh gastronomic hotel/restaurants, La Table des Agassins a few minutes outside the city walls. Chef kept me waiting half an hour, giving me plenty of time to study the menu on the wall in reception - pigeon, Provençal and pyramid are the words that stick in my memory later. He seemed nice but I wasn’t sure he liked me enough. So on Friday I was enguelé (I do love that French word: engueler, to bollock someone, to mouth off about them. Comes from the word 'guele' meaning mouth or throat - i.e. to give someone a right mouthful. Lovely) for taking more than five minutes to drive 25 kilometres; for putting too much vinaigrette on my tomatoes at lunch (the tomatoes I was eating myself, note, not the tomatoes I was serving to someone else); for cutting potatoes into exactly the same size and shape chunks demonstrated by the sous-chef; and for leaving at the end of the day before the chef himself. I was tempted, when he demanded to know where I was off in such a hurry, to tell him the truth, but didn’t. In fact I was off for a trial evening as plongeur/aide de cuisine at the Table des Agassins in Le Pontet, just outside Avignon. Two minutes up the road from where my then girlfriend lived, in fact, and therefore dead handy in many respects. The cars parked in front of the hotel ranged from top-of-the-range S-Class Mercedes (the big ones that Voom! by you on French motorways) to Ferraris and Porsches. Yes, that sort of hotel and restaurant: gibier du saison, heavily-worked fresh foie gras, dôme de chocolat, pigeon something, a wine list which comes plastic-coated to make it easier to remove the dribble. That sort of place. Gastro, as in Gastronomic and where chef Jean-Rémy Joly is regarded by his peers in the Disciples d’Escoffier group (entry by invitation only and no, I’ve never been invited) as one of the best in the region. Anyway; park your rotten BMW round the back where no one can see it, says the chap in the chef's outfit who turns out to be David, the seconde de cuisine and a very decent chap, even if his chef's whites are black with white piping. Change over there and follow me into the kitchen. Chef shows me round: this goes here, that goes there, and the other stuff goes (here we plunge through the bowels of the boiler room) here in the economat, the pantry. This is where the tins and jars are stored, and straight away I think I'm going to like him because he has laid in a large supply of Savora mustard. Yum, my kind of guy (I've loved Savora since I first ate it at the age of about 14 during my first stay with the Boisson family in Nice). And on to the plonge, another good word. A plongeur is either a diver (as in scuba, deep sea, what have you) or a washer-up; the effects are much the same - you get soaking wet and go round the bend. Usual deal, he says, professionally speaking: two giant metal sinks already filled with pots, two giant plastic soak bowls already filled with plates, a couple of metal tables, an automatic dishwasher, a few scraps of cloth, the remnants of a green pan scourer and a few whisps of a metal scourer. Par for the course. This is the produit - washing up liquid- this is the javel - bleach - make sure you give the silverware a good polish when you dry it and tasty morsels of meat left over go into this ice-cream container for the maitre-d's shitsus. And oh, says Chef: very sorry about this but the management say I can't pay you for tonight as it's a trial - I understand if you want to go now. I stay. And oh, he says, the position isn't actually vacant - the young girl doing it at the moment won't make her mind up if she wants to stay, so I'll let you know. OK? Hmm. OK. So. Fill the sinks with the hottest water going and off we go, stopping only four hours later when it's all finished. I sweat buckets, really buckets, until the maitre-d' tells me it’s OK to open the window and that cools things by a good two degrees. The procedure is mechanical enough: soak everything as quickly as possible in boiling water, scrub with the metal scourer (except for the seconde's precious new non-stick pans), onto the racks, through the machine, out the other side for a good wipe and polish and then wander round the kitchen for 10 minutes wondering where the hell they go. And then four hours later it’s all over, ‘On a fait un service,’ the seconde tells me and shows me where to find the disinfectant hosepipe (no ordinary water in the hosepipes of French kitchens you know), hose the floor down, raclette up the mess left by the previous plongeuse behind the cupboards and articles on the floor…and rest. So, 11.30 and only me, Chef and the maitre-d' are left. Sorry I was so slow, I say. Not at all, he says, I expect the plonge to be finished between 2330 and midnight, you've finished at 2330 and, to boot, you've done a good job. In fact, he adds, you've done such a good job I've been going through the stacks of plates in the kitchen to add in the ones the current plongeuse hasn't cleaned properly so you could re-do them. And, he adds, I'm going to pressure her to make her mind up and go so I can give you the job. And oh, he adds, as he walks me back to my car, sorry again I wasn't able to pay you for tonight but you know management. Here, he says, take this - and he pulls 20 euros out of his own pocket and gives it to me. I like this man. Not only is he kind and generous, he didn't come in once during the evening and shout at me for washing up the wrong way, or for putting too much vinaigrette on my tomatoes. I'd like to work for him - fingers crossed that woman ups-sticks and lets me have the job. But I had to go back to the traiteur the next day, for more bollockings and a real kick in the face: we’d sprouted a second stagaire, a cookery student on work experience; such a post was promised me when I was first hired - now I'm told I can do it when they've finished - in two year's time. Ha. I don’t expect to be here in two years, I want to say. But don't. The second stagaire appears to be called Cyril - at least, he responded to that name when the S-C used it. Unfortunately for him he has my physique, not that of young Sabrina, so he isn't going to get away with everything like she does. "Doesn't she have lovely eyes," the S-C says of Sabrina, the female commis who hates her job so much she's almost always off sick. Anyway. I'm still hoping the Chef from Avignon will call me and give me the job; he seemed nice enough, and I don't imagine many chefs reach into their own pockets to pay their plongeurs. But then I think I'm coming down with Stockholm Syndrome, and I don't think Vitamin C is going to help with this one. I started making jokes with the S-C and discussed the football - even pretending I could give a shit about it - and, at one point, made a pointed remark against young Cyril. Which is more worrying. The culture of bullying made me actually shout at the S-C yesterday, when he engueuled me because the chef engueules him for things he hasn't done. "Both you and he are always bollocking me for things I haven't done," I told him. "The chef bollocks you, you bollock me and none of it's down to me! That's how life is here!" I seemed to actually give him pause for thought, because instead of just shouting at me he said, "Really? Do you think so?" And since then he was actually quite nice to me, asking me to do things rather than shouting and asking my why I haven't already done them. So I found myself feeling ultimately quite depressed when I realised this, and that I've started to fall victim to whatever the kitchen equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome is - Plonge Syndrome or something, perhaps. But I did refuse to pass on a bollocking to young Cyril who had, in fact, caused me a lot of grief. He'd done the mise en place for the self-service cafeteria which I look after at lunchtime; or rather, he put together the trays of salads, puddings, cheeses and so on and I did the mise. However, he'd done no new puddings, no new cheeses and some pretty ropey salads. So as I was sorting all this out, trying to bring out the hot dishes and do my other work too Chef found me in the middle of it with plates and trays and salads all over the counter - and punters already arriving. Now, if I'd been him I'd have plunged in, scraped together some desserts, smiled at the punters and gone and pulled the hot plates out of the oven. Instead, he pulled me aside and bollocked me for the state of the counter. Who, he asked, is responsible for this? I told him I didn't know but thought that Cyril had done the trays that morning. So off he marched and I heard him bollocking the young lad, including the memorable scream, "You must reply to me when I'm talking to you!" Memorable because replies are the one thing he doesn't want to hear and, if you do start saying something, he'll hop from foot to foot with his hand in the air as if he were a schoolboy trying to attract teacher's attention. So then Chef bollocked the S-C for not looking over the trays that morning and then the S-C came to bollock me for not putting them right sooner. Which is when I told him that bollockings for no good reason were a way of life here and I was surprised he wasn't used to it. "Right," he finished, "so now you can go and engueule Cyril for dropping you in the shit." I refused and said it wasn't my place to do that, that Cyril had only been in the job for three days and I remember very clearly, from just five weeks ago, how bloody hard it is to remember everything you're expected to do. Then over lunch I said to Cyril, "I understand Chef may have mentioned to you how to improve the mise en place for the self?" He had, Cyril replied. "Cool," I said, and left it at that. I felt quite brave. And then I let myself down by moaning to the S-C that Cyril had only laid out 20 desserts for 35 punters. I felt ashamed the moment I'd said it, but it was too late. And then the S-C said that was absolutely fine! What a wanker, I'm sure they're all really called Kafka and/or the place is lined with hidden cameras and I'll be the star of an hilariously stupid "How idiots fall down in kitchens" TV reality show any day now. I was struggling by the end. The sheer relentlessness of the engueulements was like a tidal wave; they came so thick and fast, I couldn't believe they were happening myself - and I was the one standing there, trying to breathe through my mouth so I don't smell the garlic on Chef's breath as he explains, once again, how I'm stupid. So Friday I walked into the traiteur shop we had in the centre of town after arriving in the delivery van from the kitchen (which was a couple of kilometres away on an industrial estate) carrying two trays of little dishes of mussels, prawns and something else in a yellow sauce, one on top of the other. Mme Chef took the top one off me as soon as I walked through the door, saying "I'll put this in the window straight away". On top of the second tray was the fiche explaining what was in it and what it was called, which Mme Chef had seen as she took the tray off me. It was there because it was windy and if I’d left it on the top tray it would have blown away. Then a customer walked in as she was putting the dishes out and said, "Ooh that looks nice, what is it?" Then Chef appeared in front of me and pulled me to the back of the shop. "Why haven't you told Mme Chef what's in the dishes? Now we're in the embarrassing position of not being able to tell a customer about a dish and it's YOUR FAULT!" He didn't want to hear me saying that Mme Chef had already seen the the fiche and that it was there, RIGHT FUCKING THERE IN FRONT OF HIS FUCKING NOSE. Jeezus. If he'd taken the time he spent bollocking me and instead had glanced at the fiche - it had about six words on it - he could have taken two paces forwards and told the customer what was in the dishes. But no. Engueulements are more important. "It's a question of communication, Monsieur Chris, you are the link between the kitchen and the shop, you are the one we rely on, it's up to you to transmit the information between us to ensure the smooth running of this place, to ensure that our customers who are the ones who put the food on our plates, who pay us - even if it's not very much (later in the day I delivered a pizza, a pain surprise - a country loaf stuffed with olives and grated carrots - and two boxes of sausage rolls to a customer, along with the bill for €107) - so we rely on you to keep them informed." IT'S RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOUR FUCKING FACE YOU STUPID IDIOT. If you leaned forward your nose would touch the piece of paper. If I had a third hand I'd pass it on to you right now. If you hadn't dragged me to the back of the shop I could have told the customer myself. Still. Then he arrived at the kitchen at lunchtime in a really, really foul mood and screamed at everyone about how they weren't obeying "The rules". And I mean really screamed, worse than anything he's done before. Perhaps he just isn't getting laid enough or something. I hope so. Either that or someone's replaced his lithium tablets with acid. Hydrochloric, I hope. Then chef from the posh restaurant at Le Pontet where I did the trial I liked so much a few days before left a devastating message on my batphone; his young plongeuse had decided to stay on so he couldn't offer me the job but would be in touch if he needed someone in November. I rang him up that evening and asked if that meant his plongeuse wouldn't stay in November. He said no, she wouldn't as it would be part-time, busy for a few days with groups and then nothing for a few days. I told him I'd be available then and would call him in a couple of weeks. Shit. The next few weeks were very, very hard; some days I got strange compliments, but mostly it was sheer, unrelenting bollockings. Very, very dark days indeed. I dropped my CV into the best restaurants in town in the hope that one of them may be looking for someone, but nothing moving. I rang Le Pontet again two weeks after the trial and asked him if he was going to need someone in November. He didn’t - but he will need someone for December! And that someone is going to be me! Hurrah, I'm outta here! OK. December. Shit. I’d planned to work for the final month after giving in my notice in a polite and formal manner. I drove to work with my letter of resignation beside me early in November after speaking with Le Pontet, planning a little speech. And then I ended up quitting in screaming anger instead. In fact, it all ended at ten to nine in the morning with a huge screaming match in the middle of his shop in front of the other staff and a couple of customers. With me hurling the keys to his delivery van to the ground and screaming that I'd had enough of his putain de job and his putain de bollockings, I'm off. I did all my swearing in French, too. I'd planned to explain that I didn't like driving the delivery van half the day, that I want to do more gastronomic cooking, and that whilst I know I don't have to give any notice according to my contract, I'm doing the honourable thing here by giving Chef a month’s advance warning that I'm off. It all started falling apart when I got into the kitchen and started loading the van; there were interminable extra bits to cram in and there was barely room for all that I needed, especially as the S-C kept coming up with more boxes to 'Pack carefully, mind you' and Chef called from the shop asking for a couple of boxes of the prawns I'd carried back from there the day before but which he now decides he needs after all. But that was OK; what really started to piss me off was that the S-C kept calling me 'François' - even when I'd told him that my name is still Chris as it has been all my life. François is the other chef who started working at the same time as me and who quit on Thursday, the second person to go since I started on September 13, two months ago; the first one was one of the stagaires, the work experience students who only lasted a week. François crashed and burned after a huge row with Chef during which he, apparently, threatened the boss with a knife. Sounds cool. Anyway. Into the van and up to the first delivery, the shop. I had the usual two deliveries in Nimes, the delivery in Vauvert and then back to the kitchen to pick up three further, big deliveries for the centre of Nimes. All the deliveries must be finished by noon when everyone wants to eat, of course, so time is tight and there's no room for mucking about. It's not going too badly until Chef spots that one of the boxes I'm carrying is dripping across the shop floor; the S-C has packed those heavy prawns on top of a delicate carton of jus d'agneau. So, everything has to stop while Chef lectured me on how this had happened before, how it was my duty to inspect every single box I put into the van to ensure that this didn't happen, how the business is now ruined and we were all going to be put out onto the street because of my stupidity. I did try asking him if he could do the bollocking later on, sorry, I know this is a mistake but I'm in a real hurry now. But this was not a bollocking, it turned out, this was part of my training, my on-the-job education into how to be a better cook. When I protested that listening to this now, right now, was going to make all the deliveries late he shakes his head in exasperation and starts again at the beginning. I’d promised myself the previous evening, after yet another day of Kafka-esque bollockings, that if he did it one more time I was just going to walk out on him. So I took a deep breath - and listened politely then went back to the van to collect the rest of the delivery. After all, the shop was full of customers and I didn’t want to upset them. Where did I get the strength to stay? I've no idea; the courage of the stupid, I guess. After I’d got half the delivery carried in he told me that the dozen large delicate porcelain plates of charcuterie scattered across the walk-in fridge had to go back to the kitchen before I did the rest of the deliveries. Good grief. So I started tucking them into delivery crates and carrying them out to the van. Back in to the fridge Chef had placed two plates on a large oven grill and was putting them into a cardboard box. But, he warned me, be careful because they will slide around like this, and he demonstrates how they can move. Ah, right, I said and looked around to see if there's anything I can use in the fridge to wedge them in. What are you doing? he asked. Look at me when I'm talking to you. Sorry, I said, I was just looking for something to wedge them in with. There is nothing in here like that, he shouted, look at me when I'm talking to you! This is important, this is how you learn! So I look at him while he said hmm, perhaps we could put some film around them to hold them on to the grill, so I picked up the box and started to back out of the fridge. Where are you going? he said. I'm going to find some film, I say. But I haven't finished talking! he shouted. Look at me while I'm talking to you! Chef, I say, I'm sorry but I'm in a real hurry today, I've still got to finish unloading the van, I've got to get these plates in, you want them wrapped in film now, and I've got all those deliveries for midday too, I really don't have time to listen right now, can we do this later on please? By now we're both outside the fridge in the middle of the shop. All four members staff are standing round watching, as are two customers. It is ten to nine in the morning. But Chef, I protested, you know how we're busy today, if we discuss all this now then I'm going to be late with those deliveries and you're going to be bollocking me later on today for that, too. IF YOU'RE GOING TO GO ON LIKE THIS THEN WE CANNOT WORK TOGETHER! he screams at me. FINE! I shouted back. I put the box of plates down on the ground and pulled the keys to the van out of my pocket and offered them to him. Here you go, I say, I resign. Oh no, he said, not like this, we're not going to go on like this! and he threw his hands up as if I was pointing a gun at him. I am fucking sick and tired of all this shit! I shouted back at him, and threw the keys on the ground at his feet and stormed out of the shop. He and his wife both shout at me to come back while the customers look on in bewilderment. I am sick and tired of this fucking job! I shouted as I went through the doors. And then I was out on the pavement and free! Hurrah! And then I realised that, while this may have been a cool moment and an Oscar-winning way to quit a job, I've done it six kilometres away from the kitchen where my car is parked. Oh well, a brisk walk will be good exercise. Two minutes later my batphone rings; it's Mrs Chef and she's asking me to come back, I misunderstood, Chef wasn't bollocking me he was just explaining to me how to do things, don't leave us in the lurch like this with all these deliveries, come back now. Ha! YOU LOSE! I wanted to shout down the phone at her, YOU need me more than I need you! YOU LOSE! But I didn't. I said that there was nothing to explain, that I was sick and tired of these stupid no-reason bollockings every day, I'm not coming back. She started to protest, but I say no, that's it and I hung up on her while she was still talking. I was so proud of me. And I noted that, as always, this was all my fault, I was the one who had misunderstood him, I was the one who’d made the error, it was up to me to come back and apologise and learn the error of my ways. Fuck that. I did wonder what I would have done if Chef himself had rung up and said Sorry, didn't mean to get carried away there, let's start over. But then he's not that sort of person, he never makes mistakes and nothing is his fault. It took me an hour to get back to the kitchen where the S-C could care less. Yeah, he admits, Chef has a problem with anger management, with controlling his 'nervosité' - it's because his missus bollocks him all the time, the S-C reckoned. She bollocks him, he bollocks us. I changed my clothes and left. And it did feel good.

I made pancakes - crêpes - last night, always popular with my daughters. I think of ‘pancakes’ as being the thick, stodgy affairs my mother cooked on Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras) when I was a kid, or those things served in American diners. Which are fine and which I love with maple syrup and butter and bacon, but crêpes are finer, more delicate. At catering school we used to compete to see who could make the most from a one-litre batter (that is, a batter made with one litre of milk, not one litre of batter itself). I managed 28 and a half; David, my arch-rival at school, managed 32 but only by cheating – some of his crêpes were undersized and full of holes. So I won. The recipe is pretty simple: 1 litre of milk, 450g flour, a pinch of salt, 50g of sugar, 6 whole medium eggs and 50g of melted butter. If you do this properly and your catering school teacher is standing over you, you cream together the sugar and eggs and gradually stir in the flour and salt, and then the milk and butter; if he’s not watching you dump everything in the mixing bowl at once and whisk it all together. I then leave it for half an hour and give it another going over with the electric whisk – until all the lumps are gone. Next, cooking your crêpes. Many will know the maxim that “the first one always sticks” and has to be thrown away; this is either because your pan isn’t hot enough, or because you didn’t add a little oil to the pan, or both. Basically, get your pan hot – leave it to warm for at least five minutes – and then just before adding the batter wipe it over with a paper towel dipped in your oil/butter/fat of choice. I use a mix of butter and sunflower oil and never have any sticking. I have a 5cl ladle which is the exact size necessary for one crêpe, but don't be afraid to add in a bit too much batter and swirl it around the pan before tipping out the excess - just don't make them too thick or they'll taste claggy. And then it’s just a question of churning them out. Keep two pans going, more if you have them, and don’t let your attention wander. Also, don’t have your stove too hot – on my electric hob the rings are at 7 on a scale of 1 – 9, which means the crêpes get about two minutes each side. Stack them up and serve them with, well, whatever you like; Nutella’s a big favourite here as is a sugar/lemon mix; sometimes they go for butter and maple syrup, too. And chantilly cream, obviously. This is a half-successful attempt at chantilly cream – it was hot (over 30°C today) and I hadn’t chilled the cream, bowl or whisk as I’d normally do as a matter of course. The problem when it’s hot is that the cream separates quickly into a solid and milky liquid, but it still tastes good albeit a little heavy. Bon appetit!