How I Became a Professional Cook in France

[Chris Ward]

26: Big cookout

 

Normally we do a couple of recipes a week at school. Today, we do five, just to keep ourselves busy: Gnocci à la Parisienne, Millefeuilles, beignets de pommes, omelettes and pintadeau rôti sur canapé.

Lots of interesting stuff there. Parisian gnocci are potatoes mashed, mixed with choux pastry batter and then deep-fried in churro-length portions. Millefeuilles are, well, millefeuilles, sheets of puff pastry interspersed with crème patissière. Beignets de pommes are apple circles deep fried in batter. Omelettes are omelets, this time with mushrooms. And pintadeau rôti sur canapé is guinea fowl roasted and served on toast. Canapé, it turns out, is not what you eat with your evening cocktails but the small slice of toasted bread on which you serve it. Who knew? Apart from every French person to whom I point out this remarkable fact, that is. Duh, they say, You Eenglish peeple, you steal all our words.

French people are like that because they’re used to all their words having several meanings. The French language has the smallest vocabulary of any European language, a fact which they will vehemently deny – even when you prove it to them. They get around this first, as I say, by using each word several times over, and then nicking lots of words from English (as we nicked many of our words from the French back in the Norman invasion days). Even when they’ve already got a perfectly good French word for whatever they’re talking about – instead of using ‘grignoter’ to describe snacking between meals they now talk about ‘le snacking’.

Chef’s idea today is to get us to do an entire meal from hors d’oeuvre (‘outside the [main] work’) to pudding, which sounds cool although his choice of menu wouldn’t necessarily be mine.

The Parisian gnocci are popular, but then what’s not to like about any form of fried potato? And not really difficult to make either, just equal quantities of mashed spuds and choux pastry batter, piped into hot oil from a plastic piping bag, cutting appropriate lengths with scissors. Actually it turns out to be easier to do this in pairs, one squeezing the piping bag and the other working the scissors.

The crème patissière for the millefeuilles is one of those recipes that looks simple – it has only five ingredients, flour, eggs, milk, vanilla and sugar after all – but which can go horribly wrong if you don’t pay attention and do it properly. It’s all too easy to end up with tile cement or yellow water with lumps in it, so keep stirring! And I discover that it’s much, much easier to cut puff pastry into interesting shapes before you cook it, rather than afterwards. And that no matter how sharp your sharp knife may be, a serrated knife is what you need for cutting cooked pastry.

Beignets de pomme are also very simple. I’ve done them at home using cider instead of water in the batter, and very good they are too. Just core and slice your apples, dip in flour, dip in batter, fry, coat in sugar. We churn out a few hundred and send them on over to the school canteen so we can eat them for lunch ourselves – not that we have enormous appetites since we’ve been stuffing ourselves on Parisian gnocci, millefeuilles and apple fritters all morning. And then omelets, the last thing we do before our own lunch break, and everyone has their own way of doing these things. Meh. I like to just mix three eggs, salt and pepper, oil in the pan, nice and hot, pour in the eggs and drag mix from the outside to the centre with the back of the fork I used to mix the eggs up. When it’s setting, pop on the fried mushrooms and fold over and then fold out of the frying pan onto the plate.

Being French, Chef tells me that the omelet I’ve produced it too coloured – they should be yellow not browned, he says, nul points. Huh.

Our after-dinner nap is a very complicated version of the Fiche de Stock - the piece of paper we’re supposed, as good chefs, to keep showing us what we’ve got in our pantry. Apparently we can use the ‘Méthode PEP, Premier Entré Premier Sorti’, first in first out, or ‘Méthode de court moyen ponderé’ which I don’t even pretend to understand. It’s something to do with working out the average cost of stock because it all costs different amounts depending on when you buy it. Apparently. Anyway, first-in, first-out sounds much more sensible so that’s the one I’ll be sticking with. Or, more likely, just wander in, see what’s left and ordering replacements. You need this sort of documentation when you have a very large kitchen but if you’re doing 50 covers per service you just don’t need one.

This afternoon we finish off jointing our pintadeau, browning and then roasting them and serving them up on slices of toast. Personally I think a smear of Marmite or marmalade is more manageable on toast than a quarter of guinea fowl, but what do I know? The toast works to mop up the juices dripping out of the fowl, apparently, and it’s a very old-fashioned way to serve up such delicacies which we have to know because all good French cooking is Very Old. Well, a century old anyway.

Stood the test of time though, hasn’t it?

[Chris Ward]

27: A white exam.

 

More omelets this morning, followed by an ‘examen blanc’ this afternoon. ‘Blanc’ as in ‘pretend’ – so a ‘mariage blanc’ is a fake marriage undertaken for the purposes of gaining French citizenship, a ‘nuit blanc’ is a sleepless night and so on.

The omelets are interesting because we get to use poitrine salée, salted pork belly or streaky bacon, as we say in English. The French have a cut of cured pork called ‘bacon’ which isn’t bacon at all; it’s more like dried ham, similar to but drier than prosciutto or Parma. Bacon as in sandwiches can be bought but is usually sliced so thinly and so filled with water that if you try to fry it you end up with shoe lace-sized strips of tastelessness.

In the restaurant, and at school today, we’re provided with 30 cm square chunks of salted pork belly. At the restaurant we cut it up to make lardons, bacon bits, so I’ve done this lesson already – as so often now, my restaurant chef prepares me at work the week before school by putting items on the weekly menu or staff meal list so I can practise beforehand. So I’ve already skinned and chopped up my fair share of poitrines this week, and have learned how to remove the skin pretty efficiently with my new désosseur, my deboning knife.

I now own several knives, in fact; the désosseur, a 25 cm chef’s knife – both Spanish Arcos brand knives with which I’m very pleased indeed. There’s a good Coutellerie, a knife shop in Avignon just round the corner from Les Halles indoor market and the coutellier gives sensible advice and doesn’t simply recommend that you buy the most expensive knives he sells. I explained that I was starting at cookery school and wanted something durable, decent and above all cheap and he showed me the Arcos range. Spanish steel is, he says, very good quality, plenty of carbon to make sharpening easier but not so much that the blades rust. So Arcos it is.

I’m less pleased with the Sabatier filet de sole knife I picked up in Metro while shopping with Chef one day. Sabatier has a good reputation, in the UK anyway, but in fact there are different grades of knife made by different branches of the Sabatier family. The filleting knife I bought simply won’t keep an edge, even with enthusiastic use of a good steel (‘fusil’ in French, the same word for rifle – it comes from the name for the ramrod used in the past to ram gunpowder and bullets into muzzle-loading guns) so I’m going to buy a new one one of these days.

All of which is academic because, even though I knew I’d be skinning pork belly this morning and doing an exam this afternoon, I’ve left all my knives at home. Duh. I realised quite early on during the day – when I started setting up on my workstation, in fact – and initially resolved to catch the bus home to pick them up. But then I’d miss the morning, so borrowed knives here and there and ended up with enough blunt objects to keep me going. Why don’t people sharpen their knives? I have friends in the UK who bought a hugely expensive set of foreign knives – German, Swiss, Japanese, whatever – that have never been sharpened. I scared them by sawing at my wrist with the unsharp edge once, wondering how on earth I was going to kill myself with something so blunt.

Anyway. Omelets and lunch out of the way it’s exam time. Chicken chasseur, tarte fine aux pommes – chicken in mushroom sauce and posh apple tart. Which calls for a decent-sized knife to cut the chicken into portions before frying it off, a sharp knife to slice mushrooms and the same sharp knife to peel and then thinly slice the apples. Oops.

But I get through on borrowed knives and turn in my dishes. The format of the afternoon is similar to how our proper exam will run later this year: we’re given the recipes and a box of ingredients and told to get on with it, and are judged on lots of criteria. ‘Travail propre’ – work clean – is a big credo instilled in me by both my current chefs, and it’s something for which you can easily lose marks in the exam itself so I spend a fair amount of time just making sure my work surfaces are clean and tidy.

We also get judged on our planning and the order in which we do things – so don’t start cutting up the meat, then do the apples, then back to the meat, then the veg. Do it all in a sensible order. But what is the correct order? We all spend the first few minutes of the exam pretending to write out a menu plan of what order things need to be done, but in reality we’re all furtively looking around wondering what everyone else will do.

I start by cutting up my chicken and frying it off, and cutting up my veg while that’s happening. But when I look around about half the class are making their pastry first for their apple tart. Erk! Should I have done that first? Me and the others who’ve commenced with the chicken are obviously having doubts – as are those doing the pastry first.

I plunge on with my plan, getting my chicken and veg fried off and into a casserole dish ready for the oven, then make my pastry and, while it’s blind baking, cut up my apples. Which I now see could be the wrong order – pastry, apples, veg, meat would be a more intelligent use of my cutting board. But then I wouldn’t be able to fry off my chicken while cutting up my veg.

All this, I have come to realise, is a large part of what working in a professional kitchen is all about: planning, planning, planning. Checking through your ingredients box while reading the recipe to make sure you have everything you need, working out the most sensible order in which to cook things, making sure the cooking order gets everything onto the plate at the same time without keeping the vegetables cooked and waiting for the meat to arrive. I want it to be intuitive, but it’s not, certainly not at the start anyway.

I have most trouble with the tarte fine – the apples should be sliced millimetre-thin and laid in pleasing circles on the surface of the tart, but slicing millimetre thin isn’t easy at the best of times. It’s less easy with a blunt, borrowed knife. Talk about failure of planning! Argh! But then I look around and see that some of my classmates aren’t even trying to slice their apples thinly, they’re just cutting their apples into eights. Man, does that look ugly, by comparison my tart is a work of art.

After four hours of cooking we have 30 minutes to present a plate for each course, with points awarded for similarity to the photograph of the plate in our official text book. Which, of course, we’re not allowed to consult.

So I get the sauce wrong by putting it both on and around the meat, my carrots are turned wrong – I’ve tried to be a smart arse and done the cut we use in the restaurant rather than the official one – and am reduced a further point by putting a sprig of parsley on top. Pretty? Not sanctioned.

I end up with 13 – out of 20. For incomprehensible reasons the French almost always mark out of 20 rather than giving a percentage. Recently a stagiaire at the restaurant asked me what sort of mark Chef would give him at the end of his stage with us. “Four or five,” I replied. “Ah,”, he said, “here in France we mark out of 20, not 10.” “Oh,” I said, “I was marking out of 100.” Poor lamb, he believed me too. Stagiaires are so gullible.

So. 65%. Not very good, I think, and only third-best in class. Then Chef spoils it all by saying that he’s marked us more severely than we would be marked in a proper exam. And then telling me that he’s marked me even more severely than the others because ‘I expect more from those like you who are capable of doing the best work’. Right. So that’d be, what, a 19 or 20 out of 20 in my real exam then? Neat. This may not be the effect he was trying to achieve.

As for the correct order in which to do things, he’s cool with starting with either the pastry or the meat. The idea is to make us think about doing things logically and to have reasoned our way through why we’re doing them like that, not to say that there is a right and wrong order. Although he himself would have started with the pastry, he says.

Harumph.

[Duvel]

Chris, I really enjoy your readings. Please keep it up !

[chromedome]

I got off the bus in a near-coma once, when I was going to school (full-time school and full-time work will do that to you) and left my entire knife set on the bus. It didn't show up at the lost and found, so I was really in tough at class for a couple of days. 

 

An acquaintance who was a corporate chef and seldom cooked any more stepped up and loaned me his spare roll as a stopgap, and fortunately I qualified for a special program administered by the school (call it the "Oh Crap! Fellowship") which paid for my replacement set. Here in Canada, at least at the schools I attended, it's mandatory to purchase a ridiculously complete kit before classes start. 

Edited October 3, 2016 by chromedome
Edited to correct a typo. (log)

[Chris Ward]

5 hours ago, chromedome said:

I got off the bus in a near-coma once, when I was going to school (full-time school and full-time work will do that to you) and left my entire knife set on the bus. It didn't show up at the lost and found, so I was really in tough at class for a couple of days. 

 

An acquaintance who was a corporate chef and seldom cooked any more stepped up and loaned me his spare roll as a stopgap, and fortunately I qualified for a special program administered by the school (call it the "Oh Crap! Fellowship") which paid for my replacement set. Here in Canada, at least at the schools I attended, it's mandatory to purchase a ridiculously complete kit before classes start. 

 

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

[Chris Ward]

28: A little cheffy common sense

 

If you’ve never started your day by sticking your hand up a chicken’s bottom I heartily recommend it as a way of waking yourself up, clearing a muzzy head and getting yourself to the head of the queue for the loo.
Well, it’s not that bad really. Today we’re doing ‘Habiller une volaille affilée’, dressing a drawn piece of poultry – in this case, a chicken. Volaille almost always means chicken, but can mean turkey, guinea fowl, even rabbit – which is very handy for serving rabbit to those who think they won’t like it but who will, once they’ve tried it. As in ‘volaille surprise’ – which looks like breasts of chicken wrapped in bacon and served with a tomato sauce. The surprise, of course, is that it’s rabbit not chicken.
We learn how to ‘vider’, empty the chicken – most of the guts are gone, it’s just the heart, lungs and delicious liver left. I do like a good chicken liver salad, sautéed until they’re just pink inside and deglazed with some raspberry vinegar.
Tasty.
And we also get to learn how to tie up a chicken with the giant darning needles we all bought at the start of the year because they were on the list of ‘must have’ kit. Actually I didn’t buy mine, my Restaurant Chef gave me one of his since he had several spares. He’s kind like that. We learn how to do this even though it’s now been taken off the list of required things to know for our CAP exam – nowadays all chickens are tied up with elastic string which is cheaper and quicker. You can also slip off the elastic to poke around inside an allegedly PAC, Prêt à  Cuire (ready to cook) chicken to make sure it’s been properly emptied before seasoning the inside and then slipping the elastic back on to hold it all tightly together. The idea is to hold the legs and wings tightly together so that you have as compact an item as possible which will cook evenly – if you leave extraneous wing tips and feet sticking out they’ll cook more quickly and even burn before the rest of the bird is done. Perhaps not too important at home, but in a restaurant where you serve every bit of the chicken, it counts.
It’s just a detail and one I hadn’t really thought about before; I’ve bought hundreds, even thousands of chickens in the past all tied up like this and never really known what to do with their bondage gear – leave them tied up, set them free, what’s the difference? It never says anything on the label about the string so I’ve always considered it optional. But a little cheffy common sense points to the right answer, so leave it on it is.
We roast these chickens – and thanks to my Restaurant Chef I already have this one down pat; 15 minutes on one thigh, 15 minutes on the other, 15 minutes on its tummy and finish off with 15 minutes on its back to crisp up the skin over the breast. This avoids cooking the breast too much, exposing the thighs to more heat – when we do a dish with a chicken cut up into portions we cook the breast for 12 minutes and the thighs for 15, since they need it more.
To go with the roasts we do Pommes Dauphine, a mix of pâte à choux and mashed potato, both of which we’re now expected to be able to produce without any further information from our School Chef. He wants us to add 400 grammes of mash to a choux pastry based on a quarter of a litre of liquid, which ends up as a roughly tant pour tant mix – equal amounts of each. My Restaurant Chef thinks this is wrong, we should be putting a quarter choux to three quarters spud. Last year’s Seconde de Cuisine had it the other way round. Oh, how the French do love to argue about recipes. All agree though that these are piped into attractive shapes on a baking sheet and baked, unlike last week’s recipe in which we piped a different pastry/potato mix into a vat of oil.
Lunch, and the fried fish in the school canteen at lunchtime has gone through all four levels of the Kitchen Kids ‘Make it inedible’ regime, and they’ve succeeded once again. France’s future cooks – I’m bringing sandwiches. Luckily, most of these individuals won’t be let loose on my lunch without the supervision of a proper chef.
We start this afternoon with a nap. Sorry, with our Hygiène class, talking all about Water and its various roles. Its first role is Plastique, one of those Faux Amis French words – it doesn’t mean plastic. Indeed, I’ve never really got any sort of handle as to what it means. In this case it means that water aids in the construction of our billions of cells and in repairing wounds, so I guess it means something to do with building. Water also has, it turns out, a role to play in blood. Yes, it’s the water in blood that makes it so liquid. Well, you learn something every day. If you’re 16 and stupid, that is. For a classroom full of adults it’s not the best way to start an afternoon in a sunny classroom after lunch which may have included a glass or two of red wine. Well, unless you like to start your afternoons with a siesta, that is, which it seems most of us do.

[Chris Ward]

29: Last day at school

 

Last day at school today. We cook poulet chasseur, chicken in mushroom, tomato and wine sauce, pommes au four (roast potatoes) this morning and do it without having to be told much. This afternoon we spend going over a few basic techniques, ideas and problems to revise for our exam next week. Chef says he’s pleased with us and doesn’t think anyone will fail. I’m nervous, not because I think I’ll fail but because I don’t think I’ll succeed well, which I want to do both for him and for Jean-Remi my restaurant chef.

I have mixed feelings about the year; I’m very glad I went, but the whole process has literally worn me down to a state of permanent and total exhaustion. I’d originally intended to go on and do a second year straight away in Patisserie or Traiteur, but (a) I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to be a patissier and (b) sod that for a way to kill yourself, Armagnac is much more fun.

Really, 10 months of having just one day of rest a week is not recommended, don’t try this at home. Tonight I’ve just got back from school half an hour early and, unlike last week, don’t have to go to work. Last week I got only Thursday off and spent all that writing two ‘dossiers’ – reports for my exams. And not cooking exams either, I have to do French, Maths, Physics, Geography and, best of all, English. My first exam, in fact, next Monday – a 20 minute English oral exam. I shall be complaining if I don’t get 20/20.

So, what next?

Well, Les Agassins (not the Chef, the management) are buggering me about this year over contracts and it looks like I simply won’t be able to work there after September for financial reasons (i.e. they won’t pay me). Much as I’d love to stay, it’s really time to move on. I don’t want to let Chef down now so I think I’m going to do my very, very best to finish the season unless something super-startling turns up.

Then my plan is to find something, anything to do until the winter and then go and work in the Alps for the season there. Dunno if I want to do a restaurant or be a Chalet cook-and-maid. The latter attracts me more but I would probably learn more doing the former. We’ll see.

Still, back in the restaurant I’m now a proper cook. Chef de partie des entrées, it says on the newest line of my CV. I’ve even managed to persuade Chef to put something on the menu – smoked quail eggs. OK, it’s only one item in a dish with a number of other ingredients, but hey, you have to start somewhere. We smoke the eggs ourselves and serve two (one cut into quarters, the other plopped inside the star-shape created) in a nest of alfalfa sprouts surrounded by ‘waves’ of smoked salmon. Looks very pretty, the nest presentation was my idea, too.

Yesterday we did 70 covers for lunch, me, Fabien - the new Second de Cuisine - and Carole, the stagiaire patissier who, for once, is within simmering distance of competent. It was Chef’s half-day off (he chooses carefully) and I’m proud to have gotten through it without forgetting or f-ing up anything. The waiters, on the other hand, were all over the place – especially when the group of 13 from Radio France (who should have sat down to eat at 12h30 but who arrived at 13h30) announced that they were going to be eating outside, necessitating 20 minutes of table and cutlery moving. A-holes, I didn’t even send out their starters until gone 2 o’clock.

Tonight was even worse. Everyone turned up at half past seven, when they normally arrive between 8 and 9 in discrete lumps. I was in the middle of farting about with my Trilogies (dried tomato, goat cheese and aubergine caviar in layers) and hadn’t even put my amuse bouches in place.

Luckily Chef was there to jump in and do my orders for me and he managed to do just about everything while I was just cutting up tuna for six tartares. Embarrassing and an indication of just how much I have to learn still, notably Get Your Arse In Gear.

If it had been the plonge I wouldn’t have had a problem, partly because the mise en place is easy (Squeezy bottle full of washing up liquid? I’m good to go!) and partly because, having done it for 18 months, I know how to do it quickly. I’ve been in the kitchen doing services less than 18 days, so that’s a good excuse. Reason. Whatever.

Still, it felt shitty not keeping up. I later learn that 45 covers last night didn’t leave until 4 am in the morning, inconsiderate a-holes. It was a wedding party, so in France 4 am is a pretty early finish. This is why I’m glad I’m not a waiter. Still, I’ve learned the very hard way that getting my mise en place in place BEFORE service starts works well, along with putting all the amuse bouches onto dishes before service starts. That way I can keep up with the flow of orders, I think.

Lunch is easier as the menu has only two starters – evenings there are up to six starters, depending on what kinds of guests we have in the hotel, which can go out as Menu items (miserly portions) or à  la carte (splendiferously generous portions).

Then again, I managed to embed a box containing litre of cream inside €180′s worth of foie gras tonight (although it was Chef’s fault), so perhaps I should shut up.

School is only the beginning; I’ve had a great opportunity and feel in turns over-confident and full of self-doubt. I see what I can do compared to some of my classmates and I’m clearly better than them; then my chef takes over my station and does in five minutes what I’ve failed to do in half an hour. And he does it better. That level of competence can only come with experience and I’d like to gain it here but know I won’t.

[Smithy]

Quote

Then again, I managed to embed a box containing litre of cream inside €180′s worth of foie gras tonight (although it was Chef’s fault), so perhaps I should shut up

 

I'm trying to visualize this.  You mean the box got dropped into the foie gras?  Buried in it?  How was it done, and how was it discovered?

 

Quote

 I see what I can do compared to some of my classmates and I’m clearly better than them; then my chef takes over my station and does in five minutes what I’ve failed to do in half an hour. And he does it better.

 

Nothing I can add here, except to say about this attitude, "right on!" I think that, all too often, people reach a certain point and figure "Hey, I'm the best, baby!" and become insufferable. 

 

 

I'm curious about retention of the material you folks learned in school. On this last day you say the class needed little guidance to cook the dishes described.  Would you say that the specifics of recipes (ingredients, proportions) would be well retained from this course, due to repetition and study, or that it would be more the techniques (knifework, searing, etc) that would stick around?  Does it depend on the individual?  As a home cook I find that once I learn a particular technique I can apply it and make a favorite dish more or less repeatably, but if it's something I don't do often I need to refer to a recipe for guidance. I'd guess a professional cook doesn't need that.  Does the transition happen during the course of the school year for most people?

 

[Chris Ward]

When you cook a terrine de foie gras, you let it cool and then remove the half centimetre or so of fat which has congealed on top, keeping it in a safe place for later use. Then you put a weight on top to 'tasser' it, to compact it. Being careful, of course, to put a cover the size of the top of the foie gras on top of the foie gras so that the litre or two of cream you use as a weight doesn't sink into it, since it's narrower than the width of the terrine dish. I forgot the cover the size of the top of the terrine so my litre of cream slowly sank into the foie gras.

As for not having to be told what to do, I guess that comes with experience; I've written something I'll try to dig up about how, one day, I suddenly realised I was slicing some gravlax salmon into perfect, thin slices without really thinking about it, and realised that I'd developed new talents along the way.

I almost always consult recipes still these days though. There is a great book, Le Repertoire de la Cuisine, which is all of Escoffier's recipes from Le Guide Culinaire distilled down to its ingredients which I saw in every kitchen I worked in. It literally just lists the ingredients, not quantities or techniques, as a sort of aide memoire for cooks - just to remind you what goes into such and such a soup or sauce because, obviously, you know the techniques and quantities. In fact my personal recipe book normally only has ingredients and quantities for each recipe, I usually always remember the technique. 

And when I was working in kitchens the recipes for, say, madeleines or Potage du Barry were familiar enough to not have to look them up at all. I was cooking six or more days a week, making the recipes all the time so they became muscle memory. Even now some are like that - the famous Trilogies for example. I've made thousands of them and no longer need to read a recipe. In fact, I don't think I've eve got it written down now.

I also find that I can gauge to within a ten grammes or so most things I weigh, and time things to within a few seconds - I often arrive in front of the oven or whatever as the timer clicks down from 5 seconds to zero. It all comes from having done it so many times over so many years. 

Edited October 10, 2016 by Chris Ward
Corrected bad link to Trilogies (log)

[Anna N]

Your link to Trilogies is broken so I am still in the dark.

[liuzhou]

On 03/10/2016 at 11:56 AM, Chris Ward said:

Sabatier has a good reputation, in the UK anyway, but in fact there are different grades of knife made by different branches of the Sabatier family.

 

It is a long time since Sabatier knives were made by the two unrelated Sabatier families. The name "Sabatier" is unprotected and even I could legally make "Sabatier" knives here in China and sell them in France or anywhere else.

 

A knife labelled "Sabatier" means nothing.

I seldom refer to Wikipedia, but their article on Sabatier gives a good account.

[liuzhou]

2 hours ago, Anna N said:

Your link to Trilogies is broken so I am still in the dark.

 

Link

[Anna N]

39 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

 

Link

Thank you. Now I know. Interesting....but for the eggplant

[Chris Ward]

10 hours ago, Anna N said:

Your link to Trilogies is broken so I am still in the dark.

Sorry, it's https://eatsleepcookschool.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/trilogies/

[Chris Ward]

30: The exam

 

It’s been around 20 years since I had that Exam Morning feeling - nervous, trying to read notes at the last minute, a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach because you’re sure the one thing that’s definitely going to come up is the one that you didn’t revise.

I have a week - well, three days - of exams starting on Monday, when I’m normally at school. So up at 5 am this morning to leave at 6 for a 0745 exam start all the way over in Cavaillon, about 30 kilometres away. The plan was to meet Pascal at the bus station and take a bus there, but when we arrive there appear to be No Buses Today. I don’t have a car any more since I sold it to pay my school fees, so we end up taking a €40 taxi to our exam to make sure we get there in time.

And then the exam doesn’t get underway until 0830 because they were waiting for one of the examiners and two of the students. What? If you’re not there on time for your exam, everyone else will wait? What nonsense.

And I then end up waiting all morning to do my English oral exam because of that missing examiner. At midday there are three of us who haven’t been examined yet and the two examiners who did bother turning up have gone, so I wander round and find the secretary’s office. Ah, he says, kindly interrupting his chat with the missing examiners, sorry, your examiner didn’t turn up so come back next time.

Next time I say? Tomorrow?

No, he says. Next year.

Next year? I repeat, a little loudly it must be said, and then launch into a big rant. He has the good sense to look a little uncomfortable and, reluctantly, agrees with me about the injustice of the situation which, unlike him, I do not think can be resolved with a shrug of the shoulders.

I appeal to the two examiners still there and ask them to examine us. There’s only three left, I explain, it won’t take long.

Ah, says the woman reluctantly, but you have to have 20 minutes to study the text and then 20 minutes each to talk about it so that will take me an hour.

Right, I say, I’ll go first without any warm-up which means it’ll only take 40 minutes. Deal?

Reluctant deal.

So into the exam room and she gives me a text to read out loud about mountaineers leaving rubbish on Mount Everest, which I read through pretty quickly.

OK, she says a bit nervously - I'm starting to think that my French is better than her English and she may not understand everything I say in English.. Do you think people leaving rubbish lying around is much of a problem here in Provence?

I give her both barrels about litterbugs, whom I hate, and gabble on for five minutes. 

Right, she says, a little dazed. That seems to be fine. You can go now.

Total time elapsed: 8 minutes. I’d better get a good mark for this.

Tuesday’s the same story. It’s the presentations of our history or geography projects. I’ve done the influence of geography on food (a subject which I now teach for a living), and the importance of the press in promoting the restaurant industry for my history project.

The order in which we’re to be examined is posted outside the exam room, and several students haven’t turned up when it’s their go - we were all supposed to be in place by 9. My turn comes up three times, only for me to be invited to wait as those who’ve turned up late can now have their turn. Same as yesterday - I think frankly, as far as I’m concerned, if you ain’t there on time for your exam then 0/20 and tough shit, organise yourself idiot. It’s a big part of cooking, you know, organisation. If you can’t organise yourself out of bed I don’t want to have you mucking about with my millefeuille d’asperge, thankyouveryymuch.

After lunch we do our written French exam and then maths. For the latter I pull out my mobile phone to use as a calculator, as we’ve been told we can. Except this examiner thinks I’m going to be using it to ask someone else the answers and tells me to put it away, so I have to do all the calculations by hand. Luckily they’re not too difficult, but still. I haven’t done a formal maths class in….hmmm…30 years now.

Wednesday and we have our practical cookery exam this morning, then the written paper this afternoon.

The practical exam is a Big Deal: Fail it, you fail the entire exam. Fail any other exam, you can make up the points exam. It's 'Eliminatoire', as they say here.

We have four hours to make fricassée d’agneau hongroise (i.e. Lamb stew with paprika in it) with riz créole (rice with a few bits of pepper in it) and choux chantilly (cream buns).

I had a really panicky moment at the start when I thought I wasn’t going to have enough time. I tore, almost literally, through my lamb shoulder (thank you, Chef, for making me practise on so many at work), turned all my veg for the stock and the service, got it all squared away and the stock on the boil and then turned around to see the other students in the kitchen with me all busy deboning their lamb shoulders. Eh? I thought, what have I forgotten to do first? how come they’re only doing their lamb shoulders now when I finished mine half an hour ago? What should I have done first that they’ve all done instead?

The observing Chef is a friend of my restaurant Chef. I casually asked, when he passed to observe the state of cleanliness of my workstation, in a jokey voice ‘What are they doing that I’ve forgotten? Ha ha ha….’ It turns out that they were taking nearly an hour each to debone a single shoulder, and hadn’t even thought about veg yet. Which was a relief. ‘Don’t worry,’ said friendly Chef, ‘you’re doing fine.’

I had also thought to check my ingredients – we get given a box of what we need at the start - and I was missing an onion and the paprika so called for them, then asked for a couple of rondeaux (large, shallow saucepans with lids) for my fricassée and the rice. Two hours later Nassima from my class comes along and tries to snaffle one, on the grounds that she needs it. In fact she just picked it up from under my counter and started to walk off with it. Get yer own, I growled, think ahead. She wasn’t happy and said she’d complain to ‘someone’. Well tough shit. Get yourself together at the start of service, it’s all there in the year-long course we’ve been doing. Try paying attention, miss, and think of this as payback for all the grief you’ve cause me this year…Yes, this was the one who kept swapping name labels on dishes in the chilling room to take my dish as her own. Well, now it counts karma's a bitch, miss.

The cooking went well, too well almost. I had lots of time to turn my vegetables nicely as required by the photos in our text books, to make some decent stock, to carefully time everything so that it came off the heat at the same time.

But in the end I had to send my stuff out first when I’d been anticipating sending it 15 minutes and three people later. Again, Someone Else wasn’t ready so Friendly Chef asked me to step up and keep the examiners happy.

So I sent it all too quickly, forgot to add the final salt to my rice and didn’t put enough sauce on the plate. And my choux buns weren’t dry enough so I should have cooked them longer. Huh. Luckily as I was carrying the choux out to table, Friendly Chef stopped me and asked, almost casually, ‘Are you planning on serving them without a dusting of icing sugar? That's very brave of you...’ Icing sugar was listed on the recipe and, hence, a vital ingredient. Thanks again, Chef.

Still. Eh?

And then I got Christian Etienne as my Marketing Presentation chef. He knows and dislikes my restaurant chef - they’re rivals in Avignon - and when he learned where I’d been working all year immediately wrote down my mark even before I’d started my Marketing spiel. It was my lowest score in the entire exam, 12/20 - my average was 16.5.

We had lunch in the school canteen in Cavaillon and then did the written paper this afternoon. It was harder than I thought, demanding a greater knowledge of traditional Escoffier-type dishes than I have. I said that the mystery missing ingredient in the Sole Dieppoise recipe was fumet de poisson (it’s cream), but did remember that it takes 20 minutes to cook a fumet (not 2 hours as everyone else told me afterwards).

I think I’ve passed, and I’m certainly not going to do it again if I haven’t. I’ll just lie instead and say I passed, it’s easier and cheaper and I’ve never been asked to produce an exam certificate in my life.

Restaurant and School chefs both tell me later that they’re sure I’ve passed, based on what they’ve ‘heard’ from the examiners (Avignon is a small town when it comes to chefs), but more than that I don’t know.

Three weeks until the results.

[blue_dolphin]

10 minutes ago, Chris Ward said:

Three weeks until the results.

I do hope you won't make us wait that long to hear the results !

[gfweb]

Is this blog in real time?

[Chris Ward]

No, I did the exam a fair while ago now...so I do know the result already.

 

Did I pass....?

[Smithy]

I expect you did.  How nice to see that Nassima got a come-uppance! Do you know if it reflected in her grade?

[Chris Ward]

13 minutes ago, Smithy said:

I expect you did.  How nice to see that Nassima got a come-uppance! Do you know if it reflected in her grade?

Yes! She passed but with a very low mark, just over the 10/20 you need to pass - 10.45 in fact.

[Chris Ward]

22 hours ago, liuzhou said:

 

It is a long time since Sabatier knives were made by the two unrelated Sabatier families. The name "Sabatier" is unprotected and even I could legally make "Sabatier" knives here in China and sell them in France or anywhere else.

 

A knife labelled "Sabatier" means nothing.

I seldom refer to Wikipedia, but their article on Sabatier gives a good account.

Interesting battle going on over Laguiole, its knives and so on: http://www.centrepresseaveyron.fr/2016/10/10/en-cassation-laguiole-se-refait-un-nom-et-reprend-espoir,1014199.php

[Chris Ward]

31: Result!

 

I now  have a CAP Cuisine. Yes, I’m a qualified chef. Believe it or not.

Those results in detail:

 

APPROVISIONNEMENT ET ORGANISATION    15.00 /20
VIE SOCIALE ET PROFESSIONNELLE    16.00 /20
COMMERCIALISATION & D.P. CULINAIRE    12.50 /20
FRANCAIS    09.50 /10
HISTOIRE-GEOGRAPHIE    09.00 /10
MATHEMATIQUES,SCIENCES    14.50 /20
LANGUE VIVANTE ETRANGERE : ANGLAIS    20.00 /20
PRODUCTIONS CULINAIRES    175.0 /200
TOTAL de points    394,50 ADMIS
      
      
ADMIS means I pass. The numbers don’t all add up because some subjects have a ‘coefficient’ multiplier which makes them worth more than others.

The important one, though, is ‘Productions Culinaires’, worth 200 points all on its own (out of 400). Fail that and you fail everything. Pass that and one other thing and you have your qualification. And effectively 175 out of 200 means I’m very, very proud of what I achieved. I note that my ‘Commercialisation’ note of 12.5 was the one given by Christian Etienne, he who doesn’t get on with my restaurant chef. Lowest mark of all. Huh.

20/20 for English. Ha!

Only 15/20 for ‘Approvisionnement et organization’, how I organised myself while cooking the food that scored 17.5/20. Bit of a surprise that, I’d expect it to be the other way round if anything. Still.

Ah. And then the secretary of the Ecole d’Hotellerie d’Avigon where I did my CAP called to tell me that I got the best mark of all my class in our exams. 57 students in all, our class, the other adult class and all the teenagers who took it at the same time. And that my 17.5/20 for the ‘culinary production’ is the highest mark they’ve ever had in the exam.

So yeah, I’m pleased with that. Proud, even. Good on me.

Cool.

[chromedome]

Yay, you! It's a good feeling.

[Chris Ward]

32: Epilogue - Afterwards

After passing my exam I carried on working at Les Agassins until the season ended in October, and then went on to become Chef de Cuisine (and plongeur, sous-chef, restaurant manager, sommelier and commis de rang) at Chalet Bertie for the winter season in Morzine. This was the year when there was almost no snow anywhere in the French Alps - apart from Morzine. So, it was a busy season both in the chalet and on the slopes.

I was responsible for everything to do with the kitchen, from menu writing, ordering and shopping to peeling the potatoes and serving the food. And taking the blame, although luckily there wasn’t much of that.

It was a nice step up from Les Agassins. I’d made the move into Personal Service, as we call it, on the advice of Steve and Caroline, two great friends and chefs from my days as a computer technologist at The Times as Dr Keyboard.

I had to do a number of trials and interviews, the first of which was very bizarre; when I got there it turned out there was already a chef in the job and the owner just wanted me to spy on him and work out if he was nicking stuff; the second one was for the job I accepted up in Morzine and was great – good people, unlimited food budget, I get to do what I want; the third trial was in a tiny flat near Chelsea Harbour for six, no seven, no make that 11 people. No we’re 10 now. Anyway, they loved the food and promised to get back in touch and let me know by the weekend. They never did, and nor did the agency which sent me up there – despite me sending them several e-mails. So don’t go looking at Alprecruit if you need a job.

I do recommend Natives. They found me this job and presented me for several which pay decent money – it seems that most people work up in the Alps because they want to go skiing, not because they want to cook. Well, a little skiing now and then will be very welcome, but cooking is what I went for.

After Morzine I worked in St Tropez in the Spring and then again in summer. For me, St Tropez is famous for traffic jams - one gigantic big one which just fills the town from end to end. I cooked for a private French family in their villa overlooking the town; mum, dad and a handful of kids, two other members of staff and a few visitors popping in here and there. Including the lady who’s now nanny to the children of Picasso’s grandson. Which was kinda cool. And Jean-Jacques Goldman, who is World Famous in France. He sings, apparently.

I cooked for an English family up in the hills near Grasse for a few weeks in between St Tropez stints but missed being at home in Avignon. I carried on in the same vein through the autumn and winter, including cooking other people’s Christmas, New Year and other festive meals in three different countries in 20 days.

Then the next Spring came what promised to be a life-changing event and turned out to be just that, albeit in a different way than I’d hoped. I went to Ireland to work for a member of a very famous beer-and-banking family - after a week cooking for an even more famous Irish dancer and his lunatic wife - on a trial, with the hope and expectation of it turning into a proper, full-time in-service job. I’d already done a weekend cooking for them after Christmas when they kindly flew not only me but Delphine, too, over to Dublin.

I worked for six weeks until the end of April when, on the 31st, Delphine announced that she was about to go into labour with our first child. I jumped on the next plane, arriving at home at six in the evening on the 31st, just in time to drive her to the clinic in Avignon at 2 am the next morning. Scarlett was born at 2 pm on the 1st. Good job I didn’t wait a day for a flight.

The next month was massive on many levels - new babies, it turns out, are pretty disruptive of your regular schedule. We were packing the house up to move back to Ireland, all three of us, when I found out that the old man’s staff weren’t actually planning on paying me any wages.

I’d got on fine with him but he employed at least one plain and simple evil witch. I managed to work out that because he was going to spend at least six months a year abroad for tax purposes, I’d be paid only for the six months when he was in residence. And that car that came with the job? Nope. Not yours. Oh, and no house either. So no wages, no car, no house and you’re living up a mountain in the middle of nowhere with a wife who speaks little English and a one month old baby. OK?

Erm, no. I had to sue them for the money they already owed me and travel back to Ireland for the hearing to get it. The lesson is, of course, Get It In Writing First, because other people simply don't care about you and yours.

So, not a great experience. But it did mean we got to go on living in Avignon, and I found a job without much difficulty as a Chef de Partie des Entrées in another restaurant in Avignon, albeit one not up to the level of Les Agassins. No jobs going there, unfortunately.

That autumn we decided to move a hundred kilometres back west to be nearer Delphine’s family and landed in Sommieres, a really beautiful medieval town 45 minutes from the seaside. Finding a job turned out to be less easy this time, mainly I think because of my age and because I knew too much. But I was eventually hired as Second de Cuisine in the restaurant of a chain hotel in nearby Lunel, and that was OK. Apart from the mad chef, obviously. But hey. Goes with the territory.

Then in 2010 my old carpal tunnel syndrome problems flared up really badly and I had to give up cooking all together. I was off sick for six months, completely unable to work, and the government Medecin de Travail, the Employment Doctor, declared me officially Unfit To Work in Restaurant Kitchens Ever Again. It would now be illegal for me to work professionally in a restaurant in France.

So, after a government-sponsored retraining and conversion process, I ended up teaching English. Now, I teach English and ‘Professional Culture’ to would-be hotel and restaurant managers at the world-class Vatel school in Nimes. It’s a great job and I love talking about the restaurant world to my students, who are studying for Bachelor and Masters Degrees in International Hotel and Business Management.

Delphine and I have a second daughter, Roxanne who’s now 6 - Scarlett’s 8 - and the French life with a papa who still loves cooking suits them very well.

Yes, I still cook. In fact I do all the cooking at home, and much of the washing up still. My favorite dish? One of the first I learned to make at Les Agassins all those years ago: a Trilogie - confit tomatoes, goat cheese and aubergines.

Plus ça change; my life is now, as it was then, all Eat, Sleep, Cook and, of course, School!

End.

[blue_dolphin]

Great story!  Thanks for sharing the saga with us.  

 

One note on the last installment:

5 hours ago, Chris Ward said:

I worked for six weeks until the end of April when, on the 31st, Delphine announced that she was about to go into labour with our first child.

There is no 31st of April