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be too large and require trimming, cut away the meaty parts. Real French chefs never waste pork fat.
Our salmon cutlets wrapped in the fattiest possible smoked bacon are to be served with broccoli butter, which causes some of my veggy-loving classmates to sigh with happiness. They have no idea. Should you wish to prepare broccoli butter, here is the recipe: Blanch a little broccoli. Place in a blender with lemon, salt, and pepper. Jam in a massive amount of butter, as though you were stuffing a sausage casing. Blend.
What comes out looks like green cookie dough but is far, far richer. To turn this faux cookie dough into a delicious vegetable sauce for the salmon, merely add a little cream.
Chef Antoine then shows us how to make jus, which is a light sauce of natural juices. He places a tomato peel in the jus, explaining that the acidity in the peel will clarify the jus. I studied chemistry once, and I find this fascinating.
“Why is that?” I ask.
“Because,” he replies.
Chef Antoine already seems to be tiring of me, and it is only our first day.
At lunchtime I chat with Patrick Huriet, the directeur général of the school. He tells me that many French students who secure cooking internships in the United States hope to return there to work after graduation because they are treated so well in American kitchens. “In France everybody is yelling. It is our way of showing strong authority,” he explains. “Part of our culture is to bully.” Actually, I already knew this.
I am hoping that Chef Antoine will teach me to curse like a real French chef.
Our lunch each day consists of what we prepare each day with our own French Food Lovers’ hands. Today it’s those two salmon-and-pork preparations, which settle on my stomach like a combo platter at a barbecue joint. Students not in our course are enjoying the school lunch of the day: brochettes of sausage and smoked pork fried in oil accompanied by stuffed baked potatoes. Their dessert is floating island—
meringue in a custard sauce.
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Also savoring the school lunch, even though it is much lighter than what they normally have at home, is a contingent of German students.
They have all won a day at the school as prizes in a recipe contest.
I ask one of the Germans for her winning recipe, for it is not often that the French find virtue in German cooking. She says she merely had to answer a question on a postcard, and while she doesn’t recall the question, she clearly remembers her prizewinning answer: “Putten a turkey from France.”
I am no linguist, so I want to make certain I have not misunder-stood.
“Putten a turkey from France?” I repeat.
“Yes,” she says, flapping her arms like a turkey. “Turkey, turkey.”
“Nein,” I say. “What means ‘putten’?”
“ ‘Putten’ means ‘putten,’ ” she says.
I ask Chef Antoine if he will be teaching us this prizewinning recipe.
He just rolls his eyes. As you might have guessed, Chef Antoine is a pretty patient guy for a French chef.
A highlight of our stay at the school is a personal appearance by Bocuse himself, who drives up in his Mercedes and parks it in an unau-thorized spot, the only person who dares to take such liberties. Bocuse is a combination of Julia Child, Charles de Gaulle, and Ronald McDonald—celebrity chef, Gallic symbol, promotional figure. He is the president of the school, as well as the proprietor of a three-star restaurant on the outskirts of Lyons.
Bocuse shows us how to make coq au vin, the first and only dish we are taught that I might possibly attempt at home. The catch is that his recipe calls for fresh chicken blood, which is pretty difficult to get in America unless you’re a Santeria priest. Blood aside, Bocuse’s coq au vin isn’t much different from what you find in French cookbooks, but the first step is a standout: cut off the chicken’s feet and blanch them.
We have one other memorable cooking session, a demonstration of how to assemble fillet of lamb in a pastry crust. Actually, that’s an oversimplification. It’s lamb encased in lamb mousse, wrapped in cabbage, and enrobed in a filigreed pastry crust. Three Big Hat chefs work 5 0
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for nearly three hours constructing the monumental work of meat, and they are able to finish that quickly only because the pastry dough was prepared in advance. I calculate that it would take me, working alone and starting from scratch, twenty-four hours straight to duplicate their efforts. Remember when you were a child and your mother said to you, as mothers always do, “Don’t eat so fast, that took me all day to make!” You never believed her, but now you know the dish she was talking about.
The week concludes with two days of pastry and dessert classes taught by Chef Alain Berne, who wears the red-white-and-blue collar of a Meilleur Ouvrier de France, which means he is about as good as it gets.
Chef Alain can chop a half of a canned peach into perfect one-eighth-inch-thick slices in four seconds, make a trout out of sugar, and a violin out of ice. I can make Toll House cookies using the recipe on the back of the bag. Chef Alain’s classes are a little over my head.
The world of the pastry chef is alien to me. It is a place where French meringue and Italian meringue and Swiss meringue are all different, where a biscuit is not a biscuit, and where ice-cold cream poured into caramelized sugar will explode. Every preparation requires enormous amounts of time, effort, and meringue. And yet the pastry chef suffers like no other man. His delicacies are either thoughtlessly popped in the mouth, as though they were
