The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry

Nestled on a nondescript residential street in southwest Paris, the four-story beige structure was formerly a medical clinic, the larger examination rooms now converted into kitchens. On orientation day, I walk right past the entrance before I spot the blue logos stenciled on the windows. Inside, I find a compact reception area stuffed with staffers and students.

“Vous tous, everyone, they’re starting, come with me,” she says, herding us around the corner to a vaulted room where some seventy students sit arranged toward a trio of women at the far end. I slide into an open seat directly in front of a graceful Asian woman clad in a black Chanel suit.

“Ohayou gozaimasu!” belts the woman in Chanel. My hands fly to cover my ears. I’ve inadvertently sat among two dozen Japanese students. For the next hour, she continues a strident, concurrent translation for their benefit, drowning out both the French presenter and the English translator.

Still, it’s impossible not to get the drift. They start with the vaguely draconian school rules: uniforms must be immaculate; no jewelry can be worn except wedding rings; no tardiness; and only four permitted absences—no exceptions. Well, there’s one. For a resident visa, the French government requires a medical exam. Impossible to reschedule, the school allows an absence should it cause a conflict. So students may be excused for the sake of French bureaucracy but not for contracting the Ebola virus.

Leading the presentation is a freckled fifty-something woman with a distinct American accent, the lead academic administrator for the school. She motions to a soft-faced girl to show off the uniform: an apron worn over a crisp white jacket, houndstooth trousers, and a white neckerchief. Under her cap, the girl’s nut-brown hair is held back by butterfly barrettes.

Madame introduces two chefs wearing tall toques. They nod politely, and one begins to talk in a quiet French monotone, his voice no competition with the staccato Japanese translation. I give up trying to hear and look around the room.

Known as the Jardin d’Hiver, or the Winter Garden, this airy loft provides the school’s sole communal gathering spot. A peaked glass ceiling offers ample light for a few live trees to grow in huge planters. For orientation, blue-and-white caned bistro chairs are arranged in rows, their matching tables pushed to the side. High on a wall, there’s an official-looking plaque commemorating the opening of this latest physical incarnation of the school in 1988. It feels like an institution: practical, yet furnished on a budget.

The audience skews young, with most students in their twenties. About three quarters are women, and one third or more appear Asian. It’s a cold January day, and many cradle Styrofoam cups of coffee gathered from a nearby table. They’re all paying rapt attention—except for a striking brunette in the back row, scanning the crowd. She reminds me of someone famous for being beautiful. Catching my gaze, she flashes a radiant, practiced smile. I smile back. The crowd shifts as the chefs organize everyone into groups to tour the school.

She appears as unpretentious about being confused with an internationally famous beautiful person as possible. “But my friends call me Kat,” she says, as she shifts a black coat trimmed with plush, silky fur from one arm to the other.

On hearing my nickname is also Kat, she assures me that I can call her Liz. “To avoid confusion, you know.” Before we can settle this Liz vs. Kat situation, an imposing-looking chef shushes us. He and a female translator corral our group together, and we follow like children behind a pair of pipers.

In her biography of Julia Child, An Appetite for Life, Noël Riley Fitch notes that during the 1940s and 1950s Le Cordon Bleu “had only one sink, and did not have electrical equipment other than stoves (and some of them did not work).” This was in one of the school’s former facilities, a warren of seven rooms on rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré in central Paris. In the 1980s, André Cointreau, heir to his family’s orange liqueur and Rémy Martin cognac fortune, bought the school and moved it here. By comparison, the modern Le Cordon Bleu brims with technology, even if there are only a handful of food processors on the premises.

As we descend the winding beige tile stairs to the basement, known as the sous-sol in French, the sharp smell of simmering meat stock hits me. We turn the corner into a cramped preparation area dominated by a massive built-in cauldron gurgling with gallons of silky brown liquid. Cutting boards and boxes of produce are everywhere. A corkboard holds the week’s lessons for all levels of cuisine and pâtisserie, listing required ingredients, delivery schedules, and so on.

Chef shows off the two large walk-in coolers as he explains that each of us will need to take turns acting as assistant for our hands-on class at least one week per semester. Class assistants fetch the ingredients assembled by the sous-sol crew for the practical sessions, transporting them upstairs via an electric dumbwaiter system. The dumbwaiters work only if the two safety doors are closed at both destination and departure. Already, LizKat and I can tell this is an imperfect system as we hear an urgent plea to close the basement dumbwaiter door over the intercom. “Fermez la porte, s’il vous plaît!” bleats a thin female voice. “S’il vous plaît, fermez la porte!”

Nevertheless, the dumbwaiters are a smart move. With an average of two hundred students cooking daily, Le Cordon Bleu receives enormous shipments of ingredients from morning to night. One chef, a lean, mustached gentleman referred to as Le Maestro, controls the inventory. Scraps from each practical are sent down to the sous-sol for reuse, typically in the preparation of stocks. Butter, cream, and eggs are among other unused items returned. As little as possible is wasted, we’re told, because that’s how real kitchens should work.

Next, we’re led to the main demonstration room on the ground floor, just off the Winter Garden. Plastic chairs with collapsible white writing desks are arranged in tiered rows, auditorium style, to assure everyone a view of the workstation where the chefs teach. A massive mirror tilted at an angle above allows students to watch the chef’s handiwork. One floor up, there’s a second demonstration area with a similarly organized workstation. Although smaller, this room is flanked by French windows. “Basic Cuisine rarely meets here,” the translator says dismissively.

Next, we hit the kitchens. Four in total, they’re all the same and surprisingly small. The largest, the grand salon, accommodates just fourteen students, the others just ten. On the top floor, there’s a large, bright, and airy kitchen that smells warmly of freshly baked apples. For pâtisserie only, the chef says. A pity—I’ve signed up only for Cuisine.

They are there for two reasons. Le Cordon Bleu’s first classes in 1895 were taught on electric stoves, then a radical invention. Also, electric stoves are safer—less worry of gas leaks and hapless students catching fire.

We’re told that although a dishwasher will wash our cookware, students are responsible for keeping knives, personal cooking utensils, and the work areas spotless. On this note, Chef warns us “Ce n’est pas un détail.” A student who leaves a work area less than immaculate receives no credit for the day.

For a nonoptional 450, all students purchase a set of gear along with their education, whether they need it or not. My set includes Mundial-brand knives with blue handles, a sharpening steel, and a whole load of utensils that slide cozily into the pockets of a dark blue canvas holder that wraps and folds into a lean, heavy meter-long purse. Added to this are a piece of cake-sized Tupperware, a digital scale, aprons, side towels, and other accoutrements. Last, we receive three-inch-thick blue binders, our text for the course, neatly organized with all information provided in both English and French. Arms full, we teeter down to the main women’s locker room in the basement.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” LizKat says as we arrive. About ninety lockers are crammed into a space the size of my mother’s living room. At least LizKat gets a top locker; mine is on the bottom near the door. Already, our gear almost fills the locker. We leave the chaos and head to the Winter Garden.

Just twenty-two, LizKat comes from a different social echelon than I. She just spent three months in Barcelona, “To work on my Spanish,” she says. Before that, she spent six months in Rome, to work on her Italian. She speaks fluent French. She came to Paris because her mother thought it might be good for her to learn the basics of French cooking.

Just then, the well-dressed woman in the pashmina corrals us into a small room where racks of chef’s jackets and piles of houndstooth trousers await. It feels like trying on clothes at a basement clearance sale. A thrill runs up my spine as I slip on a white chef’s jacket emblazoned with the Le Cordon Bleu logo—that is, until I see how it fits. The “small” chef’s jacket fit too snugly at my hips and tents high on my shoulders. The sleeves droop over my hands by a good half inch. “Man-tailored,” I’m told. “It’s tradition.” I look for an extra-small and push up the sleeves.

“Those look bad on you,” says a monotone voice behind me as I slip on a pair of trousers. I turn to face an expressionless Asian woman. “You should get a size larger. It will help hide your stomach.”

“It’s the buttons,” she explains. “Get the larger size. You’ll be more comfortable, and the buttons will lie flatter.” Oh, all right. We begin chatting, and when she says nothing further that I find offensive, we decide to head out to a late lunch at a brasserie. Her Chinese name is complicated, she says. “Just call me L.P.” Does it date me that I think of her name as a record?

L.P. is not a big talker. She says only what’s needed, to the point, and offers sometimes harsh opinions. Hers is not a ready smile, her face as mute as a poker player’s. I learn she’s in her thirties, from China by way of England, an intellectual property lawyer, though she stopped enjoying it a few years ago. An avid cook, she took time off to investigate whether she might want to swap the law trade for life in a kitchen. She left two dogs and her husband in the UK. She doesn’t say, but they may rank in that order.

By the time we finish lunch around four o’clock, it’s almost dark. An icy wind kicks up. She lives close to the school, so we say good-bye, and I head to the Vaugirard Métro around the corner.

Our apartment on rue de Richelieu is so close to the Louvre that when I take the wrong exit, I end up in the entryway of the museum, where tourists are buying their tickets. I find my way out, cross rue de Rivoli, and navigate past the Comédie Française to our street. As I turn the corner, I bump into a pair of American tourists intently studying a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code, presumably trying to follow in the steps of the book’s main character. This has the feel of a side street, even though it’s busy with traffic hoping to avoid the often congested avenue de l’Opéra nearby.

Passing a flower store, a sushi-on-conveyor-belt restaurant, and the mysterious dark entrance to what’s rumored to be a wife-swapping bar, I stop at an alimentation. That’s the name for the small convenience stores selling overpriced wares found in most Parisian neighborhoods. I’ve not yet located a nearby supermarket, so I stop in to purchase some coffee, milk, soft cheese, and a bottle of white wine. Behind the counter, the cashier hums along to the remake of “La Vie en Rose” by Tony Bennett. A French classic sung by an American man hummed by a genial Moroccan, all in my little corner store.

Balancing the heavy binder and a shopping bag in one hand, I enter the security code and lean with a shoulder to push open the ornate blue entry door. From there, it’s huff and puff up the six flights of stairs, pausing outside the door on the fourth floor to catch my breath. I overhear a couple arguing in French inside. Does it count as eavesdropping if you can’t understand what they’re saying?

Breathless, I open the door to the apartment. You would never know this used to be the servants’ quarters. The seven-hundred-square-foot loft is utterly modern, resembling an art gallery with stark white walls, modern skylights, and polished wooden floors. Almost medieval exposed beams lend contrast, making it feel both aged and industrial. The open kitchen—an unusual fixture in France—crafted from burlwood and featuring metal drawers without handles, is a sleek design. Lean dangerously out the front-room window and you can see the Sacré Coeur to the north. The building dates from the mid-1700s, its major claim to fame being that Napoléon’s hatmaker once operated here.

Paris is rich with short-term rental flats, and online sites and agencies manage them at widely varying rates. Mike and I had settled on a starkly furnished one-bedroom near the Luxembourg Gardens, but three days before my arrival in Paris the agency called with an urgent message: that apartment’s owner changed her mind about renting it. To make amends, they offered us this apartment for three months at a steep discount. We take it, despite one major concern: we’ll have to find another apartment in just three months.

Arriving “home,” I call Mike. As I had to do in London, I check my math. If it’s 5:00 p.m. in Paris, it’s 8:00 a.m. in Seattle. I text his mobile phone, and wait for him to return my call using a cheap international calling card from his home.

“Good evening, handsome,” I say, and with that we talk for two hours. I tell him about my first day at school, about meeting LizKat and L.P., about the Métro, about everything. His days are busy, too, preparing to join me.

To come to Paris, Mike has to leave his new consulting business, find someone to rent his house and manage his tenants in his rental property, finish his studies to become a private pilot, and generally put his entire life on hold for the rest of the year. If all goes well, he will join me in two or three weeks, to make what we both know will be the largest leap of faith he’s ever made for love.

After I hang up, I pour a glass of wine. I sit by the window, contemplating the French rooftops, reflecting on the whirlwind day. For the first time in weeks, I feel as if I can breathe. I am alone in Paris, the eve of my first full day at Le Cordon Bleu. I flip open my binder, reading the rules, the chef bios, the explanation of cuts of meat and conversion charts, and finally the ingredient lists for the recipes. As I close the cover, I marvel at what’s printed there: “Kathleen Flinn, Cuisine de Base, Hiver 2004.”