How I Became a Professional Cook in France

[Chris Ward]

14: In the soups

 

There are, it turns out, rather a lot of soups. Going back to the days of Escoffier and earlier, rather than calling soup with carrots in it, ‘Carrot Soup’, the French call it ‘Potage Crècy’, named after either Crècy-la-Chapelle in Seine-et-Marne, or after Crècy-en-Ponthieu in the Somme. Both claim they grow the best carrots and the best soups, both claim Potage Crècy (and anything else containing carrots) as their own whilst declaiming the others as lesser, impostering, worthless, tasteless, rank rubbish-vendors. The French are never prouder than when boasting about the superiority of their local produce.
I mean, just look at the table we got given today; there are potages where you start with carefully sized vegetables, puréed vegetables, puréed dried vegetables, with creams and cream-liasions, consommés (aka clear potages), bisques, cold potages, regional specialities…”You need to know all the families plus one or two examples of specific soups within them,” says school Chef. So yes, we have to know that split-pea soup is really Potage Saint Germain and not just split-pea soup, that a Consommé Madrilène (served with straw-diced red peppers) is chicken consommé with chopped fresh tomato pulp in it, and that if you really want to start an argument in a room full of Provençal cooks you start telling them what to put into a Soupe au Pistou – man, the guys and gals in class went over that one for a good quarter of an hour. It’s a good job our knives were across the other side of the building in the kitchen, otherwise blood would have flowed. Not least mine for suggesting that, like bouillabaisse (fish stew), it’s really made up of whatever vegetables and herbs you have lying around. Blimey, you’d have thought I’d asked for a well-done steak.
So, over in the atelier we do a Potage St Germain aux Croutons – split-pea soup with croutons, as I think you say in English (I’m remembering fewer and fewer words of your language with each day that goes by. Désolé.) It has the washed and blanched split peas, blanched and fried lardons of bacon, leeks and white veal stock.
Then we do a Velouté Dubarry, which is ‘velvety’ veal stock with cauliflower, cream and egg yolks. With both I learned something I’d never thought of before – after mixing them with the giraffe (the large, hand-held mixer you plunge into the saucepan and which, in our industrial-sized case, is about the size of a decent pneumatic drill) and then passing the mix through a chinois, you should re-boil it again since you can’t guarantee the cleanliness of the giraffe and chinois.
This afternoon – after a singularly unappetising lunch in the school canteen of very wishy-washy cod mornay (we’ve discovered that the stuff we cook on Mondays is usually served on Tuesdays when the school director makes a big deal of eating in the canteen with the plebs instead of in the private staff dining room or the gastronomic restaurant next door where the final-year kids get to cook) – it’s Entremets Singapour. What’s an entremet? Well, the fact that the Larousse Gastronomique feels it necessary to devote nearly half a page to the subject should clue you in to the potential problem here. The word means ‘put between’ and basically, it’s anything served after the meat course. Generally it means puddings, but in big restaurants the entremettier will do savoury soufflés, pancakes and pastries plus sweet entrements like sweet omelettes, rice puddings and ice creams. But then Taillevent reckoned to also include things like oyster stew and almond milk with figs and “swan with all its feathers” in the list of possibilities, although this latter item is apparently not something we’d be expected to produce for our final exam.
Instead, Singaporean Entremets are a Genoise sponge (this is a very international dish) cut into three horizontal layers with crème patisserie between the layers. Again, I have trouble getting my Genoise frothy enough because of my RSI-ed wrists. I must think about having an operation again when the restaurant is closed in January.
Talking of the importance of regional produce, back in the restaurant we had the Frodd Squodd (Frodd is how the French mis-pronounce Fraud) from the Service Veterinaire (which is what the French call the Health Inspectors – no, I don’t know why) the other day. They were checking that our Poulets de Bresse really are from Bresse and not some hut up the road. This is very important in a country where, if your lentils aren’t from Puy, they’re inedible. Well, that’s what French people think, anyway. Same with most things – cherries, almonds, ducks, lamb, salmon (must be from Scotland – you know, that place to the North of England from which no English person would buy salmon any more as it’s all poisoned, apparently), everything has its origin. There’s even the AOC (now IGP) system to regulate this sort of thing – AOC applies not just to wine but butter, milk, olive oil, you name it.
So the Frodd Squodd spent half an hour reading our menus and checking our bills and labels and the contents of fridges and cold rooms, and pronounced us nearly clean. We need, they said, some way of indicating the origin of each mouthful of beef rather than just having a line on the menu saying it could be from France, Holland, Belgium or Germany. A blackboard at the entrance, perhaps, they suggested. Can’t see it happening, somehow. In the same way that Chef refuses to acknowledge their advice on keeping eggs (he keeps them in a kitchen annexe rather than the fridge), I can’t see us erecting a ‘Today’s Specials’!’ blackboard in the dining room.

[gfweb]

Nice stuff @Chris Ward!

Cooked lettuces can be great. I've come to love romaine halves sauteed in butter till well-browned. Nutty and sweet.

[Wayne]

 

@Chris Ward

I can still remember the first time I was served braised radishes. Delicious and transformed into something completely different.

 

 

[Chris Ward]

46 minutes ago, Wayne said:

 

@Chris Ward

I can still remember the first time I was served braised radishes. Delicious and transformed into something completely different.

 

 

Exactly. Raw radishes do nothing for me, cooking transforms them. 

[Chris Ward]

15: A side of English

 

The French people with whom I work are always smugly pleased when one of the two English-named (or so they think) dessert dishes they know of comes up. The first is crème Anglaise which they translate as English Cream and English people translate as Custard. The French make this by beating together 8 – 10 egg yolks with a little sugar, stirring in a litre of almost-boiled milk then returning the whole lot back to a gentle heat until it reaches the thick coating stage. If they’re trained professional patissiers like me (OK, five minutes’ coaching by my Chef but it amounts to the same thing) they only add half the boiled milk to the yolks and sugar, whisk well and then return it to the pan – this avoids the mixture getting too cold.
The English make Custard completely differently, I explain. They open a packet of Custard Powder – Birds in the yellow and blue and red packet is the traditional one – and add a couple of tablespoonfuls of milk from a pint to the powder along with a random amount of sugar, stirring it into a sticky goo. When the milk boils, they mix it into the goo with a spoon and then re-boil the whole lot. Birds’ custard powder contains, as far as I can tell, powdered eggs and cornflower and nothing of any nutritive or flavour value whatsoever. But it is yellow and sweet.
The other English dessert French people go on and on and on about is Pudding, pronounced ‘poodeeng’. This, they fondly imagine, is called ‘pudding’ because it’s what English people always eat for dessert after a large dish of over-roasted beef and too-boiled potatoes, in much the same way that the French live exclusively on garlic-laced snails, frogs and baguettes. Well, if you’re English or have ever eaten in that country, see if you recognise this: Take all your leftover bits of ‘biscuit’ (this means sponge cake, not real biscuits); soak them in milk; add a few beaten eggs; pour in a little rum; pour the whole lot into a terrine mold and bake in a bain marie for an hour until it’s perfect, with ‘Perfect’ in this instance meaning ‘gooey mess’. Might be nice with some custard, I suppose, but the French will insist on serving it cold.
So we do crème anglaise at school today, to go with the Genoise sponge we also make. I have problems with this once again, mostly because of my old journalistic injury – messed-up carpal tunnels. I had the left one operated on at the start of last year and it only hurts occasionally, but the one in my right wrist needs doing to return my whisking hand back to decent, frothing form. This means I find it hard to whisk stuff like egg whites and genoise sponge mixtures long and hard as one needs to do, so my sponge failed to lift as much as it should have done. This is one area where Pascal, the chap with whom I share a workstation at school, excels over me – his right hand is a blur of motion as he beats away…And again, this is one area where we do things differently at work – at school we beat the genoise over a bain marie; at work it’s directly on the hotplate.
But my crème anglaise is fine and I manage to slice my genoise into three layers despite it being Not Very Thick (thank you, Chef, I had noticed that in fact) and fill it with apricot jam (the French love apricot jam and treat it as if it were edible).
While all this is going on, our stock pots are bubbling away in the background. Stock is something I’ve sort of always known to be important, and indeed we made a pot of it during our first week at school. Now we make it every chance we get, and today we’re practicing making a fond brun lié with the carcasses of our Poulet Sauté Chasseur. Which is, in the end, a lesson in why Stuff Tastes Nicer in restaurants than it does when you try to make it at home: it starts off by being made with decent stock and finishes off by being, er, finished off with real butter.
The chickens – two of them – we learn to cut up raw, removing the suprèmes – the breasts with a wing attached to each – and the legs, complete with the ‘sots y laissent’, the ‘idiots leave behinds’s, what in the UK we call the Oysters, the small round oyster-shaped bits where the legs attach to the body. The idea is to take all the skin and flesh and leave the bones – for a fond brun.
Brun – brown – because we roast the bones in the oven first until they’re brown with a garniture aromatique of carrots, onions, garlic, tomato paste and a bouquet garni. The ‘lié’ – liaison – part comes when we add some powdered stock powder which contains cornflower. Quite why we need to do this both I and David, the only other chap in my class who’s working in a posh restaurant, agree is impossible to know so we both leave it out and get the thickness required by reduction and, if necessary, a little Maizena, regular cornflour, at the end. No no, says school chef, we need to know how to use PAI, Produits d’Alimentation Intermediare or mid-way food products (mid-way between raw ingredients and finished items, i.e. something which has already had something done to it and which needs something else doing to it to make it edible – like frozen peas). These are becoming Very Big in the French catering industry, he tells us. Indeed as I’ve said before, there’s a huge discussion going on about how the entire qualification I’m doing, the CAP, should concentrate on using PAIs instead of how to make stock. This is because the big chains like Accor who have a lot of money to lobby the government like using PAIs because they get cheap consistency of product ('product' is what chains call food) on their dining tables. It may go that way, but it won’t be me opening the packets for them.
So while my chicken portions are roasting in the oven (12 minutes for the suprèmes, 15 for the thighs) after being browned on the stove top, I make my Sauce Chasseur from the Fond Brun lié with some chopped tomatoes, finely chopped shallots, mushrooms, fines herbes, white wine and cognac. Reduced down to a decent napping consistency I then monter it au beurre to give it a really delicious taste. A handy tip this for working on sauces at home – never be afraid to whisk in a little (or even a lot) of unsalted butter to many sauces. You reduce down the liquid part of your sauce and then whisk in cubes of cold butter one or two at a time until your arteries clog up and your doctor has a heart attack.

[Chris Ward]

16: Self-examination

 

We have our first all-day test exam today, with written papers in the morning and practical this afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve done any exam papers at all for 20 years – and back then, at the age of 25, I sat in my final exam and calculated that it was exactly my 50th public exam (not counting the probably hundreds of test exams I’d sat at school and university). I promised myself on that day that I would never, ever sit another exam paper for the rest of my life.

So here I am taking my 51st exam. All in French.

The written parts are all based on previous CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionel) exam papers but only covering what we’ve studied in the past three and a half months (three and a half months already?). So there’s a hygiene paper where we get asked about the five conditions necessary for the development of bacteria (37 degree heat, water, protein and the presence or not of oxygen), a business practices paper (calculate how much money Monsieur Marsaud has left to spend after he’s paid his rent and mobile phone bill every month) and a kitchen technology paper.

The latter is the hardest for me, partly because all the vocabulary on this has been new to me this year, and partly because the photocopied photograph of a kitchen range on which we’re supposed to label everything is smudged into an indistinguishable grey mush. So that thing down the end is either a deep-fat fryer or a bain marie. I plump for the latter, and it turns out to be a sauteuse. There you go.

The practical this afternoon is what we all see as more important. It’s the only ‘failing’ section of the exam – fail any other part and you can still make up the marks you need elsewhere; fail the practical and you fail the exam completely. Which is as it should be.

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We have to produce two dishes in four hours, a chicken curry and an apple tart. We do get given the 'approved' recipes but have to check them carefully - exam setters are known for slipping in deliberate errors to try to trip you up. Tablespoons instead of teaspoons of salt, for example, or setting the oven to 300 degrees C.

As we’ve been taught, I set to writing down on the back of my exam paper which order I should be doing things in, and conclude that I should butcher the chicken, put the bones to roast and then make a stock while doing my veg, prep my pastry and then put stuff on to cook while that’s resting, then finish the apple tart. That way, all the ‘dirty’ stuff – meat, veg prep – is out of the way before I use my work area for making pastry.

Then I look up and see that at least half the class has started out by making pastry. Hmm. The temptation here is to join them just because it’s what everyone appears to be doing, but I have confidence in my calculations and it works out fine. We all finish at about the same time, but I’ve spent less time cleaning my workstation and more time cooking.

In France, ‘Chicken curry’ is essentially a fricassée of chicken with some curry powder stirred in; they’re not big on authentic, Indian sub-continent cookery here and definitely not into hot-tasting foods so I moderate the amount of curry powder I put in.

The apple tart is a ‘tarte fine’, pronounced feene, which is a circle of blind-baked pastry, crème patissière and then the apples sliced thinly and arranged attractively on top. Everyone knows what these things look like because they see them every day in the patisseries in town.

We also have to do a Pilaf rice to go with the curry, and not everyone succeeds with this; several rices get burned when they forget the 17-minute cooking time, others go soggy when they get stirred immediately after being removed from the oven by those curious to see how they’ve turned out. I remember the 17 minute rule, the no-stir rule and it works out fine. The curry’s good too, and I serve my plated meal and my two side dishes with the remainders in good time.

Just as I’m returning to my workstation I notice my neighbour about to set off with his plates; “Julian, you’ve forgotten the diced-tomato garnish!” I warn him.

Stoner Julian, ever laid-back, replies simply, “Yeah, I was hungry, I ate the tomato.” I lend him some of mine, generous person that I am, but see him picking at it on his way to the examiner. So check any curries you eat in France carefully – if the diced tomato garnish is missing, your meal may well have been prepared by a hungry stoner.

When we’ve all finished we clean and scrub the kitchen – there’s a collective mark for the condition of the place at the end of the exam so it’s worth doing it properly.

And then we’re free for the next two weeks of school holidays, two weeks during which we can remember every mistake and error and fault in the dishes we prepared….

And, obviously, during which I will NOT be on holiday but working like a dog in the restaurant.

[Okanagancook]

Thanks for posting.  Interesting reading.  Birds Custard, brings back childhood memories.  I think I have a half a canister in the cupboard.

[Chris Ward]

On 9/13/2016 at 1:46 AM, Okanagancook said:

Thanks for posting.  Interesting reading.  Birds Custard, brings back childhood memories.  I think I have a half a canister in the cupboard.

Me too, dating to 1987 I reckon.

[Chris Ward]

17: Result: I'm officially ill

 

14.5 out of 20 for my exam at the end of last term, which I was very pleased with indeed, third in the class behind David, who’s a waiter-turned-cook working in a posh restaurant north-east of Avignon, and Beatrice, the Belgian owner of a very smart local chambre d’hôte bed-and-breakfast. And then Philippe our teacher let slip that he’s marked us down ‘very severely’ and that for our proper CAP exam we could expect to do a few marks better than the scores he’d given us. Result indeed, that’s gotta be a good 18 or 19 out of 20 for the real thing. I was let down by my ‘commercial presentation’ – talking about the dish I’d prepared. I misunderstood the question asked, and chatted about the ingredients and techniques I’d used as if I were talking about it to my chef de cuisine. In fact, I’d been asked to present it to a customer who would want only general details and to be told how delicious the dish is. Lesson learned.
But that’s the only good news today because I’m feeling very, very poorly indeed and got Delphine to drive me to school this morning because I was feeling so bad. It’s a flare-up of a condition I’ve been suffering from on and off since 1997, when we first started looking for a house in France. Then, we were staying in a B&B just west of Nimes and I was feeling fluey, which I put down to a long drive from London and just general tiredness. I woke up at about three in the morning dying of thirst and completely disorientated, and fell out of bed. I was trying to get up and go to the bathroom but was so badly disoriented and confused that I actually couldn’t work out which way was ‘down’ in order to push myself upright, and had to be physically dragged back into bed.
By the time the doctor came in the morning I wasn’t feeling too bad, and he took blood samples and sent them off for tests but couldn’t find anything. I was worried I’d been bitten by something – the day before we’d been to the Camargue and I was worried that a malaria-laden mosquito had bitten and infected me. Which is rubbish, of course, the Camarguais mosquitos live a few thousand kilometres north of their malarial cousins in Africa. Still. There are poisonous spiders in the vines, everyone said. And scorpions. And I was definitely suffering a bite, my leg had swollen up to three times its normal size and hurt like mad.
So this morning at school I can feel the symptoms recurring, as they have done just about every year since 1997: flu-like feelings, leg swelling and soon I’ll get the shivers and shakes so violent that I can’t stand up, so I excuse myself at 10 am and go home for a lie down.
Before I leave Chef gives me the recipes for today, black forest gateau and paupiettes of merlan (whiting) which I promise to do later this week.
And then I go home and spend 24 hours in bed, shivering and shaking, before the doctor comes to see me. She does lots of tests which, I tell her, will be useless; I’ve seen lots of doctors and specialists over the past nine years and none has ever found a solution.
But French medicine, supporting as it does the Best Health Service in the World, diagnoses my problem. I have, it turns out, an ‘erisipel’, a blood infection. I have – have always had, since my early childhood – athlete’s foot which comes and goes and I control with topical creams to kill the ‘champignons’, the ‘mushrooms’ as the French so delightfully call the fungi. Every now and then they get into my bloodstream via a cut or break in the skin on my foot and infect my whole body – my leg swells up as it’s nearest the site of infection.
My doctor says I need to go to hospital immediately since this is a very serious problem and I could die if I don’t get it sorted out. Ha! Has she never heard of the Cook’s Code of Conduct? Rule 1: Always Go To Work, No Matter What. Rule 2: See rule 1.
My restaurant is officially closed at the moment, but I’m working with the Chef on a few passing groups and our resident group of Gendarmes (groups of CRS Gendarmes, the French riot police, are regularly stationed away from home all over the country and we have a permanent group staying in the hotel). So as it’s just me and him there’s no question of me leaving him to work alone so I tell her to find another solution.
Hmm. Well, says the doctor, you could take this, and this, and this and use this cream and this special soap and lie in bed at home and a nurse will come round and give you twice-daily injections in the stomach to try to stem the infection. Eight prescriptions? I must be poorly. In France, others judge your real level of illness by how many items you’re prescribed – one or two and you’re clearly faking it. Three or four and yes, well, OK, you might be a bit sick but it’s not serious. Five or six items and you’re definitely poorly, take the day off. Eight items, plus a nurse coming round morning and evening to give you an injection? Now you’re definitely sick, lie down straight away.
So I go with this option, except the only nurse I can find in the yellow pages who will take me on doesn’t do home visits so far away from home (she’s a five minute walk from my flat) so I have to schlepp round there twice a day. Me, who’s supposedly so ill I should be on a drip in hospital.
Anyway. So I do that and continue going in to work too, collapsing in bed as soon as I get home. Delphine is working at the moment but, sterling trooper that she is, manages to drive me to and from work most days and I get the bus the rest of the time rather than taking my bike – I’m really not up to cycling the five kilometres to the restaurant.

[Chris Ward]

18: 'Murican style

 

Delphine drives me to school this morning. I’m still not up to cycling, so she drops me off on her way to work and I’ll get the bus home this evening.

I apologise to Chef for missing last week and he checks to make sure I’ve been given the recipes they worked on while I was away. I’ve already copied them from Mr Whippy – Pascal, the guy who shares my workstation and who can whip anything into a better froth than I can. Including, obviously, the genoise they made last week. Chef moves on. I can’t tell if he’s mad at me for not coming last week or disinterested – he doesn’t seem impressed at my tales of the doctor wanting to cart me off to hospital. Clearly, unless you’ve lost entire limbs, preferably more than one at once, you should come to work. Not being able to work out which way is ‘up’ is no excuse at all.

So today we’re doing ‘Poulet à l’americaine’ and, like so many things given foreign names by the French, it bears little resemblance to anything Americans might do to a chicken. Well, that’s not true – essentially American-style chicken in this case means quartered and grilled with a tomato sauce, but Americans aren’t the only ones to treat poultry thusly. Mind you, Americans get away lightly – just about the only foods the French have named after the English are ‘légumes a l’anglais’, vegetables boiled in salted water, and crème anglaise which is really nothing like custard at all (no powdered eggs, for example). Everything else à l’anglaise is really quite rude – try checking out ‘J’ai les anglais qui arrivent’ or ‘Filer à l’anglais’ if you have a strong stomach. NSFW.

American chicken starts, as do all good French recipes, with some good stock; chicken, in this case, or ‘fond brun de poulet’, chicken stock made with roasted bones. At the restaurant we make our own but, since we don’t have enough time at school today, we use the powdered stuff. Add in a little tomato concentrate, carrots and onion and we’re good to go.

Well, good to start going. You take this sauce, reduce it down and then ‘diablé’ it, devil it by adding chopped shallots, white wine, white wine vinegar and ‘poivre mignonette’ which, literally translated, means ‘cute little pepper’ but in practise means cracked black pepper. ‘Diablé’ because anything vaguely hot in French gets a wicked name – the French simply cannot cope with hot, spicy food and need to give it a name that says ‘Warning! Warning! Danger of Death!’

Wimps.

So then we actually get down to grilling the chicken, first scrubbing the hot grills (cast iron plates that sit over a couple of gas burners) and then, well, grilling the chicken on them after seasoning and oiling the meat. This makes pleasingly large flames to frighten the girls, which is always fun.

We grill a few tomatoes and mushrooms too, and finish the whole lot off in the oven. Which sounds like a simple idea but is something that had simply never occurred to me to do before I started cooking professionally. Grilling things on hot pans gives them a nicely coloured exterior (Maillard reactions! Look it up!) but then goes on to burn the meat if you leave them on the hot gas. You can turn down the gas and keep turning the meat repeatedly, but it’s simpler to whack the whole thing into the oven and let it finish off there at a lower temperature, cooking the inside through without burning the outside. Good tip there, food lovers, which only seems obvious once you know about it.

Midday today and I eat a quick lunch to give me time to copy up notes from last week’s classes – the people involved in the justice system (judges, lawyers, bailiffs and so on), plus ‘La fiche de stock’, stock sheets which is how you’re supposed to keep track of what’s in the pantry by checking stuff in and out. I’ve never worked in a big enough kitchen to warrant using such a thing – they’re all small enough to stand in the pantry or cold room and say, ‘Hmm, I see that we need more flour and aubergines.’ Much less complicated than the enormous sheets Chef has handed out where you need a minor degree in accounting just to work out how much olive oil you have and whether you should order some more. Yet another thing that, if you need to have it, would be easier to do on a computer but all the French restaurants I’ve seen bar one have used exactly no computers at all. And that one used wireless handsets to take orders which were then printed out and passed around the kitchen.

Then on into a Hygiene class where we learn more about bacteria, including the fact that it takes just two hours for them to multiply in whatever food you leave lying around to reach critical mass, the point where they gain sentience, rise up from your work surface and suffocate you in a glooping mass of grey goo. Well, I exaggerate slightly for effect but that’s the general idea. It seems obvious to me that some things will go off more quickly than that, while other things can be left out for a lot longer than two hours, but again for the purposes of passing this exam the limit is two hours. We also learn about ‘sporification’, whereby the spores of bacteria can survive even boiling and that the only way to kill them so they can’t hatch into new, killer baby bacteria and fill your life with grey goo is to sterilise them at temperatures over 140 degrees Centigrade.

And then you can re-contaminate stuff by, say, letting beetles crawl over it when you leave it uncovered sitting on a windowsill. Good grief. All fine stuff but it doesn’t take an hour for a grown adult to understand it.

2818566224_3c58e2625f_bThis picture shows what I do for the next 50 minutes after I’ve grasped the meaning of this week’s lesson (which, don’t forget, is being given in French so I have to translate it first before I can understand it. The text at the top is my notes on bacteria. ‘Aglandau’ and ‘abeulau’ refer to two different types of olives from which olive oil is made – David and I were having a discussion about the merits of each instead of paying attention to teacher. ‘Beur-ger King’ is the name of a new, Arabic chain of burger bars recently launched in Paris, ‘Beur’ being an Arab word. The sums are me working out my wages and tax owed thereupon. The drawing bit is me doodling.).

I love the practical cooking parts of this course, and the classes on cooking techniques. And while I understand the necessity of teaching hygiene, nutrition and legal stuff to future restaurant chefs I do think it could be done more by way of handing out a small pamphlet at the end of the year, rather than making a group of grown-ups with better things to do than sit in a hot room and have a nap.

We do Quiche Lorraine this afternoon. The quiche is fine, any fule can fill a pastry case with flan, vegetables and bits of bacon. Bacon, of course, is counted as a vegetable in France so Quiche Lorraine is a vegetarian dish over here. I jest not; I’ve since worked for a couple of weeks in a restaurant where the ‘vegetable of the day’ was regularly ‘flan aux lardons’, flan with bacon bits in it. When I explain that, of all the ingredients – milk, eggs, bacon – none come from the food group known to the rest of the world as ‘vegetables’, I’m told ‘There’s salt in it!’. Well, salt isn’t a vegetable either. But flans are, apparently, so Shut Up.

Back home on the bus. Bus routes are the same all over the world – this is my first trip on a bus in Avignon and its route planners have followed the rules used by bus route planners everywhere: check departure point, check arrival point, draw straight line between two, then visit every other place you can think of within three kilometres of that line so the journey takes an hour instead of 10 minutes. And above all when you’re within 500 metres of the arrival point make sure you take an extra detour so as to frustrate passengers to the maximum.

And then back to bed. Standing up all day from 8 am to 6 pm has done me in.

[Chris Ward]

19: Big promotion, one of the proudest professional moments of my life

 

If you have to take time off sick from a restaurant in the South of France, you’re supposed to do it in the winter when it’s closed anyway. Luckily for me it’s January and the restaurant is - mostly - closed for the whole month, only due to officially re-open on St Valentine’s Day. There are a few groups coming in though, tourists passing through and a few local societies having their annual dinner so we’re opening the restaurant for them.

And, being a proper French restaurant, obviously we’re not hiring in anyone to do any work so all these groups are catered for by just Chef and me. This means I get to do lots of prep work before service and then work in the kitchen during service, as well as doing all the plonge, the washing up. It’s making for long days doing exactly what the doctor ordered me not to do - standing up. In fact, the doctor wanted me to go to hospital, this infection is so serious. Being a professional cook I, of course, refused, and visit a local nurse every morning to get injected in the stomach with antibiotics.

And the effort is worth it because the great news is that, after Easter, Chef has promised to hire someone else as the full-time plongeur and he’s going to promote me to Chef de Partie des Entrées, the Starters cook. I feel very, very flattered indeed. He had been speaking over Christmas with my school chef and told me how impressed they both were with my progress at school and in the restaurant. Just before I became ill he sidled up to me - literally - and started talking about how I was doing at school, and wondered what I was thinking of doing when I passed my exam.

“I suppose you’ll be looking around for a job as a Commis?” he asked. In fact, at this point my heart started to sink because I’d been hoping to stay on with him, even if it was just as plongeur. He has very high standards and I knew I was lucky to be allowed to work with him. So imagine how I was surprised when he said, “How would you like to work here - as Chef de Partie des Entrées?”

This would be a big step-up for me, jumping right over the Commis level to become responsible for all the starters in the restaurant. Menu planning, designing dishes, the lot. Even more hard work and none of it easy. Of course I said “Yes”. But of course that’s a few months away and I can still eff up badly enough to get fired, let alone be promoted. So, knuckle down.

School this week begins with cleaning and filleting rougets which we will be cooking this afternoon, and then on to making scrambled eggs the hard way and cute puff-pastry baskets. The hard way means cooking them over a bain-marie, same as doing a sauce hollandaise; in fact, Restaurant Chef has already taught me a much better method of doing things like this which need a bain marie according to the cook book – do them on the fourneau, that part of the cooker which I believe may be known as the ‘flat top’ in the US.

Anyway. RC’s patented method for cooking stuff which mustn’t get too hot is to put it on the edge of the fourneau and keep a hand on one side of the pan; when you smell burning flesh, the pan’s too hot so move it away from the heat a little until the sizzling noise dies down (NB: This is a joke, don’t try this one at home. Probably.)

It works, too, for hollandaise and scrambled eggs, although the breakfast staff who actually cook the scrambled eggs at the hotel aren’t too keen on the idea of singeing their flesh. Wimps.

At school, of course, we have to do this Properly with a capital ‘P’, so bains-marie are mounted all over the kitchen as we set to. A Bain-Marie is a bowl set over a pan of barely-simmering hot water, so everything in the bowl is cooked at a maximum of 100 degrees C, and so it takes absolutely ages and ages to prepare eggs this way, I can’t imagine breakfast clients waiting this long, I think to myself as I stir and stir and stir, thinking of the faff if we had to do 48 covers this way. Still, as I’m learning today we have to do things the way they’re shown in our text book, not how you might think it’s better to do them in real life.

The scrambled eggs go into the puff-pastry baskets we made with the pate feuilleté we produced first thing this morning – détrempe (mix flour and water in appropriate proportions) then refrigeration, then battering flat the butter so it’s one third the size of the pastry, and the first two folds; one third into the middle from the left, another third into the middle from the right, turn 90 degrees, refrigeration, rolling, two more folds, more refrigeration, more rolling, two more folds, yet more refrigeration, always in the same order. And then rolling it out to about a third of a centimetre thick and cutting out the baskets and folding over the corners…it’s harder to do than it is to describe and it’s impossible to describe. But my baskets rise nicely, thanks to the practice I’ve had back in the restaurant making puff pastry – although the marble counter top there does make it easier to keep the pastry cool, I have to say.

We make a little fondu de tomates - tomatoes mondés, peeled and de-seeded, chopped up and reduced with a little onion and herbs over a low heat - to put on top of the scrambled eggs, giving us Paniers aux Oeufs Portuguese, which we send out to the self-service cafeteria for staff and students next door as a lunch entrée. We can eat in the cafeteria too, for €5 a week (four courses, usually, a starter, main course, cheese and pudding) but the quality is variable, depending on which class has been cooking which course; if we get the youngsters who are just starting out, it tends to be simple fare prepared…well, prepared below the standard you might like to find even for €5; if it’s our class, you’d be happy paying up to €6.

In fact, as I discovered recently, those of us doing the ‘continuing education’ course one day per week spend as much time in the kitchen in our one year as those doing the same course over two years (normally the 15-17-year-olds). They get one ‘TP’ – ‘Travail Pratique’ or ‘Practical work session’ per week, which lasts for the equivalent of one service or half a day – four hours. They’re also limited by law to working a 35-hour week – Restaurant Chef tells me that, when he did his training, they worked a 53 hour week (and, probably, also lived in a cardboard box in middle of t’ road) and did four or five TPs in their school’s restaurants and loved it, too. This story was easily topped earlier this summer (we heard it more than once from Chef over staff meals when he was telling the latest crop of stagiaires just how lucky they are) by our Second de Cuisine, Christian – he’s in his mid-50s, and when he started out on his apprenticeship at the age of 14 his first duty every morning was to fill the stoves with coal – yes, coal-fired stoves as used by Carème and Escoffier! So, obviously: Young people today, blah blah blah…

Then it’s our ‘Droit’ class, Business Administration (Droit strictly translated means ‘Law’, but since French has the smallest vocabulary of any European language some words have to double up on meanings). As usual, we get 10 minutes worth of information spread out over an hour – teacher is more used to teaching recalcitrant 16-year-olds than attentive adults, and it shows. The hardest part of this class is staying awake – that and working out its relevance to cookery half the time: yes, it’s useful to know about the different types of limited companies one can form, but as I say, it’s 10 minutes worth of information. Then we discuss ‘Partenaires de l’Entreprise’ – clients, suppliers, banks, the State, accountants…There is, I’m almost sure, a reason why we are being told this stuff and each week I keep waiting for the penny to drop as its relevance to cookery becomes apparent - only to realise, after an hour, that the penny has rolled away under a table in the corner, never to be found again.

Still.

We learn how to make fumet de poisson this afternoon – how to make fish stock, which we do with the remnants of the rougets, the red mullets we trimmed, scaled, gutted and filleted this morning. Again, this is something I’ve done at work – dégorger the bits (leave them in a bowl under running water to remove the blood), sweat the GA (Garniture Aromatique of onions, shallots, leeks, carrots and mushroom peelings), raidir the fish bones – sweat them a bit over a hot flame – moisten with just enough white wine and water to cover the whole lot and simmer for just 20 minutes. I thought stocks took longer, but this is where we learn that yes, veal and beef stock take hours, days even. Fumets take tens of minutes. We filter, re-boil and then put the fumet into the rapid chiller to bring its temperature down to under 10 degrees centigrade within two hours as required under the health and safety HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Control of Critical Point) regulations.

This fumet is the basis of the court mouillement we’re going to use to cook our filets of rouget; it turns out that the English for ‘court mouillement’ is ‘court bouillon’, which seems strange – replacing one French word with another. Court bouillons, according to both Chefs, are spicier than court mouillements, and mouillements may also contain poshly-cut GA since it may be eventually served to clients.

We also turn more carrots and turnips and cook them slowly in a little water, butter, salt and pepper – ‘Glacé à  blanc’, unlike last week when they were cooked à l’anglais - boiled in salted water, in other words. Every French person thinks that everything is just boiled in England. The idea of glacé à blanc is not to colour the vegetables at all but to leave them with a nice, glossy finish. We achieve the same effect in the restaurant by blanching them as normal, then reheating and finishing them in hot water laced with a little olive oil, a process that is much easier as far as I’m concerned. Still, the text book says…

We’re also supposed to tourner, decoratively cut, our mushroom caps, giving them a sort of spiral finish. Hmm, is the conclusion here: no one, not even Chef, manages to do this one convincingly. Another one to practise at home.

The rougets are decorated (one in two filets anyway) with courgette ‘scales’, courgettes sliced and placed on the fish to resemble giant, green fish scales. Not only do the scales have to stay in place while cooking on top of the filets of rougets swimming in the fumet but they also have to be cut just thick enough to be cooked in the seven minutes it takes to cook the filets - but not be so thick that they’re not slightly translucent, allowing you to see through them to the red of the fish skin. And you have to keep the filets warm while reducing the sauce, but only warm - put them somewhere too hot and they continue cooking and dry out.

We cook the rouget filets and reserve them - keep them warm enough to serve but not so warm that they continue cooking - then reduce down the cooking juices to make a very nice sauce; the whole lot gets wrapped and chilled for lunch for tomorrow’s students, lucky devils, as Filets de Rouget Sauce Bonne Femme.

And even though we seem to have done lots today we have half an hour left to discuss ‘progressions’, those sheets we need to fill out at the start of our exams showing what we plan on doing for the four and a half hours of the event in 15 minute sections. It’s quite hard to get your head around this idea to start with, but it is blindingly, obviously important – you need to have worked out at the start if something is going to take three hours to cook, rather than realising this 15 minutes before you’re due to serve it. Chef gives us some blank forms and tells us to pick a few recipes out of our text books to practise on for homework.

[Anna N]

Re-heating vegetables in hot water laced with oil is an interesting technique.  Is it a common technique in French restaurants?

[Chris Ward]

3 hours ago, Anna N said:

Re-heating vegetables in hot water laced with oil is an interesting technique.  Is it a common technique in French restaurants?

I've done it in every restaurant where I worked, yes. 

[Chris Ward]

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.

[Smithy]

You lost me at the peas, but I agree that the blanquette as prescribed sounds like a snowy winter's nightmare.  (Is there any chance the word 'blanquette' refers to whiteness, or is 'blanc' a false cognate?) This is good reading, and I enjoy the laughs as well as the insights.  'Poor workmen blame their tools in French as well as English', indeed! 

[Chris Ward]

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.

[Chris Ward]

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.

[Chris Ward]

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

[pastrygirl]

19 hours ago, Chris Ward said:

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).

 

 

Or cook your pineapple to neutralize the enzyme, but you probably know that by now.  Canned pineapple is just fine in Jell-o, it's only raw that's a problem.  (And raw kiwis, papayas, and maybe a few more, I don't recall.)

[Chris Ward]

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.

[Chris Ward]

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…

[Chris Ward]

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.

[chromedome]

Ah, yes...I remember "those" weeks perfectly. 

 

"But wait, there's more! Order now and you'll also receive one dumbass mistake ABSOLUTELY FREE with every meal!"

[Chris Ward]

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.

 

[chromedome]

Okay, I don't think I've done anything that egregious in foodservice. 

 

There was a time though when I was a computer salesman, I got so busy explaining how to install the $800 hard drive (yeah, it was a lot even back then...it was a very specific drive) that I forgot to actually collect the money for it. Fortunately he was a regular, and came back the next day to settle up, but it made for a very tense few minutes with my hot-tempered manager at closing time.