Vignette: Power cut

Last night was fun; six tables reserved, about 25 covers and we’re halfway through serving the starters at 2030. I’ve just finished cleaning up the batterie of saucepans and whatnot from the prep and have half-drained my pots ‘n’ pans sink when the power goes off. I re-plug the sink and wander into the kitchen, where Chef is checking the fuses. I check my fuse box in the Plonge and it’s not us, so I go up the drive and look up and down the street. The traffic lights aren’t working, so it isn’t just us. In fact, it later turned out that about a million people throughout Provence had their electricity cut off because of a forest fire.

I collect my bike lamp and back in the kitchen we’re working by emergency exit lamps, torches, cigarette lighters and candles, and continue to do so until 2200. At about 2130 Chef comes to tell me that the emergency puit, the well-water supply has failed so that quarter sink of muddy brown water I’ve been using for the past hour is all there is. I use a sieve to strain out the big bits every now and then, and the Plonge gradually fills up with plates and saucepans.

But the service goes well and quite a lot of extra customers arrive when they work out that (a) they can’t cook themselves because they’re on all-electric deals, and (b) the restaurant down the road (us) cooks with gas so will have hot food. We light the restaurant with lots of candles and it’s very romantic for the customers. The Patissiers even find an old silver candelabra to light their workspace. I work by the light of my bike lamp.

Then at 10pm the ‘leccy comes back on, and I push everything I’ve stacked up through the dishwasher. I’d just been discussing with Chef whether to come back in the morning or afternoon tomorrow, assuming the power ever comes back on again and this isn’t just the end of the world – not a prospect I was relishing (coming back tomorrow, my half-day off, not the end of the world).

Chef sends me a stagaire to carry stuff back out into the kitchen, a very needed helper considering I have three hours worth of washing up to do in one hour. This particular stagaire is stupid even by stagaire standards; finding nothing to do during the power cut, he literally stood in a corner of the room next to the plonge, wedged between the wine fridges, for 45 minutes without moving. Weird.

He also thinks that the best way to clear the trays that hold the plates I put into the machine is bit by bit, picking things out of the two or three cleaned trays and leaving stuff in each one; I fiercely tell him to clear one tray at a time and then give it back to me so I can put more stuff into the machine, and he takes this advice badly – as he always does. I’ve tried telling him before that now he’s in the kitchen he has to work by kitchen rules, but he doesn’t believe me; he assumes he’s due the same respect and so on that he got in his former life (he’s 38 and a former accountant for the Epargne, the big French savings bank). He refuses to believe that, in the kitchen, as a stagiaire he’s less than nothing and even I, the Plongeur, out-rank him. The other night he refused to believe this so much that he shouted at me in my own Plonge that I had no right to tell him to take stuff out with him and put it back on the shelves if he didn’t feel like it, he didn’t see why he had to do things like that if he didn’t want to. This allowed me to shout back at him and wag my finger in his face, as well as using lots of French and English swear words. He didn’t speak to me for two days after this, which was a blessed relief – he only knows how to talk crap.

Anyway. Then the Patissier came along to help, too, having finished the puddings (and bringing me a plate of strawberries and almond ice-cream too, which was nice of him) so things really sped along.

In the end we were out of the building by 2330, about the same time we’d have finished normally. I just hope the finance director doesn’t hear that we managed to do most of a service without water or electricity – he’ll want us to do it like that every night.

Chapter 30: Result!

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

Those results in detail:

WARD Chris né(e) le 23/10/1960

APPROVISIONNEMENT ET ORGANISATION	15.00 /20
VIE SOCIALE ET PROFESSIONNELLE	16.00 /20
COMMERCIALISATION&D.P.CULINAIR	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.

Chapter 29: The Exam

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.

Chapter 28: Week 26: 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.

Chapter 6: Overworked

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

Chapter 5: Week 1: First day at School

After weeks of preparation, months of planning and a couple of years of thinking about it, my first day at cookery school finally came and, just like in the restaurant, went in a fast-moving blur of put your stuff here, cut that, boil the other and find yourself a saucepan.

The biggest disappointment of the first day was that we weren’t allowed to eat what we cook – it goes to the school staff canteen or college brasserie the next day. And not much technique was taught either – “slice those apples,” Chef said, as we made a tarte fine aux pommes this afternoon; I knew how to slice them nice and fine, but the chap sharing my workstation was basically just quartering them to fan out on top of his apple tart. “It’s quicker that way,” he said. Erm… peel, core and halve your apple, turn it flat side down, convert to slices using your biggest (or smallest, depending on what you have to prove…) knife.

So Day One, Lesson One is exactly what you’d hope from a French catering college – we started the morning making fond de veau, veal stock, a real mainstay of traditional French cuisine. Take five or ten kilos of washed veal bones (some even boil them, but that’s exaggerating in a kitchen where you have far too many commis), cut into 4-5 centimetre lengths (butchers with bandsaws are handy here), add some roughly chopped carrots, onions and any other bits of vegetables you have lying around, some parsley stalks and a bouquet garni of herbs (thyme, rosemary, a bayleaf all wrapped up in a bit of green leek leaf and tied around with string), cover with water and set to simmer very gently on the back of the flat-top of the stove for 5 − 8 hours. Don’t let it boil fiercely, you’ll emulsify all the scum and fat together and end up with grey stock. Skim off the grey scum and fat that collects on the surface from time to time. When you’re fed up waiting for it to finish, or you just have to go home, let it cool down (it helps at this point if you have a blast chiller), filter it and use it at will. You can reduce it down which helps with finding room to store it all. It makes a great base for soups and sauces – its gelatinous qualities will add a superb unctuousness to everything and really improve what we’re now supposed to call ‘mouth feel’, I understand.

We had our first classroom lessons today, too; an hour on cookery theory with School Chef, and an hour of, today, ‘hygiene’, which is apparently more than just ‘wash your hands.’ Microbes, in fact, are really, really tiny organisms which can breed very, very quickly. I know we have to make allowances for the fact that this content is normally aimed at bored 16-year-olds, but still…Next week we have ‘Droit’, Law. Let’s hope it’s more interesting.

We make tartes fines de pommes this afternoon, complete with that non-lesson on how to slice apples in a manner which could be called ‘fine’. My pastry, as usual, is just ‘meh’; I’ve never been good with pastry, my hands are too hot, but I can do the compote de pommes and the apple slicing and peeling with panache (which, it turns out, is French for ‘shandy’). The compote and nicely sliced and arranged apples cover up the horror that is my pastry, and we’re done.

We clean down the kitchen together, hosing the floor with the special hosepipe like in the restaurant – it adds cleaning solution automatically, then we scrub and squeegee clean after washing down all the work surfaces. Another group of us wash up the pots and pans – I try not to do this one since it’s what I do all day at work normally.

Chef catches up with me as I leave the administration building. A lean, worn-down sort of guy (lots of good chefs have this pared-down appearance) with a shock of once-gingerish hair, he seems nice enough but he tells me off for turning up in my cycling clothes – trainers, jogging bottoms, anorak – and said I should be arriving in a suit and tie after cycling 5 kms from the centre of town. “But it’s only 50 metres from the gates at the entry of the school to the changing room and we stay in our kitchen clothes all day,” I say. “Of course I’m gonna put on a suit and tie for that distance!” I joke.

“Well, I do,” he says – and it turns out, he does! He tells me that he lives not far from me in the middle of town and cycles down on his boneshaker, loaded with kit and books, in a suit and tie. And there he is standing in front of me in a jacket and tie, heading for his bike.

“It’s the school rules – when on campus you should at all times be either in ‘tenue de cuisine’, cook’s whites, or ‘Smart apparel’. My cycling gear, he informs me with a superior air, is not ‘Smart’.

“Yes, Chef,” I lie because you never say ‘No, Chef’. I’m not really going to do that. The only suit I own now is of the monkey variety, i.e. A dinner jacket and I’m not planning to wear that on my bicycle even for a bet. No one says anything else to me for the whole year, but Chef cycles past me in a stately fashion every week in his tweed jacket and tie, me in my scruffy track suit and trainers.

Perhaps I lack the dedication needed to be a really good cook, let alone chef; if I were better at this I wouldn’t hesitate to slip into a little something from Saville Row and cycle five kilometres in it, before donning my immaculate whites. Then again, most of the chefs I see on the telly are scruffy, bearded monsters wearing watches, of all things, in the kitchen (watches catch on saucepan handles and bring your precious ingredients crashing to the floor).

Both my chefs in Avignon are old-school; neither of them has hardly ever had the time to watch the cooking Channel, let alone be aware of celebrity chefs. And it’s an attitude I’m not against.

I just don’t want to cycle to school in a suit.

Chapter 2: Errors and learning

Only young people have the luxury of knowing everything, simply because they know so little. As you get older the day finally comes when you realise that not only will you never know everything, the amount of stuff you will never know is increasing exponentially.

Worse, there are things you didn’t know you didn’t know but thought you knew all along because they’re so obvious. Like, for example, how to wash a lettuce. Until I started working in a professional kitchen I’d never really given much thought to washing lettuces – rinse it under the tap, perhaps, pull off leaves, cut them up a bit without any method to the process.

And then one evening when I arrived at La Grange, Franck asked me to wash half a dozen lettuces ready for the evening service. Greg, the sous-chef, seeing me eyeing them suspiciously, offered me some advice: Fill the sink with water, rip the leaves up, rinse them well and bring them over to my workstation he said.

So I did.

Except when he said ‘rip them up’ he didn’t mean ‘into the small pieces I put onto plates for the starters’, he just meant ‘remove the whole leaves from the stalk, don’t bother using a knife’. So I shredded half a dozen lettuces and was in the process of stirring them in a sink brimming with cold water when Franck just happened to pass by.

‘Why have you ripped up all the lettuces?’

Erm, well, Greg said….

It turns out that ripping them up like that bruises and discolours them and now they’re no longer fit to be served. Ah.

Now, on one level this doesn’t matter – half a dozen lettuces, total value about three euros, not many dead. Take it out of my wages. On the other hand it’s 19h 30, the shops are shut and this is all the lettuce we have. Ah.

See? Even washing lettuce isn’t easy.

There are plenty of other errors to be made: Washing up, for example – that’s not how you wash up. You scrape off the big bits and then put it in the machine. Sweeping the floor – you can’t use a broom because it raises dust and that’s now illegal in kitchens, you have to use a hoover and/or a wet mop which, in turn, is now illegal. You have to hose down, scrub with a stiff broom and squeegee; Beating eggs – where should I start? I can’t even crack open an egg properly, it turns out. For starters, you don’t crack them on the edge of a bowl because that can and will force small fragments of shell into the interior. And when you’re whisking yolks and sugar together your whisk should make a figure-of-eight pattern in the bowl, not round and round. And when you’re beating egg whites by hand the whisk shouldn’t go round and round the edge of the bowl in circles. Or in a figure of eight. It should lift up from the bottom, not vertically but sort of horizontally. Look, let me show you… When the waitress says No Chantilly she means No Chantilly on the profiteroles and not No Chantilly on the crème caramels as you thought, so now have to try to save an order of profiteroles with the unwelcome addition of whipped cream.

And then I opened another new door onto a whole arena of errors I’d never even known existed before when I bought a book on the waitering side of this business, because I thought I knew a lot about the kitchen and wanted to learn a few of the basics out on the other side of the swinging doors.

The book covered the CAP and BEP exams, roughly GCSE level, with a suitably spotty youth in an ill-fitting DJ on the cover holding a covered tray, wearing slicked-back hair and a shirt two sizes too large. That sort of thing.

The very first question in this book is, “In the ninth century the culinary arts changed in five principal areas, describe them.” What? There’s more. “Name the eight cheese families and give an example of each.” Yes, I know – cheese has families? My favourite question is the one that gets you to replace negative expressions with something more positive – so, ‘Je ne sais pas’ becomes ‘Je vais me renseigner’ and ‘Impossible’ becomes ‘C’est difficilement réalisable’. The best, though, is that ‘Non’ becomes ‘Oui mais…’

What it also tells me is that, in fact, I know sod all about cooking and kitchens. Sure, I know, now, where the ladles are kept in this particular kitchen and, yes, I can robot my way through producing a couple of dozen tiramisus. And to start with I was quite proud of my Tiramisu-producing abilities: In fact, I was now make two dozen tiramisus every Thursday morning in an hour, down from an hour and a half back in May. I now also only use a dozen eggs, instead of the two dozen it used to take me – you have to separate the egg yolks and whites, something I didn’t always manage successfully. If you have any yolk in the whites they won’t rise properly. The only time my whites didn’t rise properly was when Greg transferred them out of the mixer bowl into an ice cream glass while he used the mixer. I suspect the glass wasn’t clean but luckily Chef had some spare egg whites about his person so I didn’t have to crack another dozen. It’s a sign of a good chef, don’t you think, to always have a dozen spare egg whites about your person?

But this is not really cooking, as I’m starting to realise. What about Menu planning? Meat preparation? Portioning? No idea. How do you calculate prices? Filet a whole Cod? Negotiate with the baker to get them to give you, for free, all their day-old speciality loaves to serve toasted with the foie gras? Should I do my own accounts or hire an accountant? ‘Give up’ is the only realistic answer I could come up with.

So, I decided, I should do a proper apprenticeship and called whatever the acronym is for the French organisation which looks after apprenticeships. “You’re too old,” they said. “You need to be under 26”. Ah, I said. So who looks after continuing adult education? This is, I think, the first time I’ve ever heard a shrug down a telephone line. Not their problem.

Bah.

 

Prologue: Asking to be a plongeur

Prologue
It all starts, as do so many lunatic ideas, with lunch. Because I had so much free time on my hands as a journalist I’d started a book club for local ex-pats and we met in my favourite local restaurant, La Grange de Labahou, in Anduze, Gateway to the Cevennes mountains.
We were discussing Toast – The Story of a Boy’s Hunger by Nigel Slater, and a right disappointing read it was too. And, interesting though the book club is, and good though lunch is (foie gras maison – well please, it was on the menu, what could I do? – fricassée de pintade au cidre, poire au vin) the best portion of the event came when I chatted with Isabelle about my upcoming inscription at Vatel, the big hotel and restaurant school in Nimes to further my dream of becoming a professional Chef.
Which, I told her, was going to cost a fortune – five grand a year and how am I supposed to earn a living at the same time? Well, erm, I added, I was wondering would it be possible to come here and work as a plongeur? Isabelle, who runs the front of house while her husband Franck cooks, laughs. I say I’m serious, I’d love to work as a washer-up in their kitchen if they’d have me, I very firmly believe in starting at the bottom and, come the glorious day when I get to run the People’s Kitchens at the palace formerly known as Buckingham, I don’t want to be ordering some former toff to scrape dirty saucepans if I’m not able and prepared to do the same myself. It turns out that they don’t actually need a washer-up, they already have one and he only comes in on Saturdays when they’re really busy, she says – the rest of the time Franck and Greg, his sous chef, wash up as they go along. But, suggests Franck, come along for a day a week and work here anyway, to see how you like it. Get a feel for the business and see if you like it before splashing out on the Vatel course.
Some short discussions later and it’s arranged: I’m to be given a foundation course in doing things in the kitchen Franck’s way in return for teaching them some basic English. Neat! So, says Franck, see you next Thursday, wear sensible, enclosed shoes, trousers that don’t matter (this doesn’t narrow down my wardrobe much) and I can borrow one of his sous chef Greg’s chef’s coats. Cool. What could possibly go wrong?