CHAPTER 4
TAKING STOCK
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: FUNDAMENTALS OF STOCK, FILLETING FISH, POACHING POULTRY, BASIC WHITE SAUCE
In the 1954 film Sabrina, a lovesick Audrey Hepburn is sent by her chauffeur father to Paris to attend “the world’s most famous cooking school,” its name never mentioned but assumed to be Le Cordon Bleu. In a classroom kitchen with views of the Eiffel Tower, she learns to boil water the first day and how to crack an egg the next.
Our learning curve feels a bit steeper.
For each of the more than one hundred recipes in our binder, we are given only the ingredient list. That’s it. The rest of the recipe we learn from watching the chef. On days two and three, the chefs instruct us on how to prepare veal, chicken, and fish stocks, fillet fish, truss and poach whole chickens, and craft two types of white sauces. We’re introduced to “les liaisons courantes,” common thickening agents such as roux. It is not possible to see the Eiffel Tower from the kitchens on rue Léon Delhomme. The kitchen in which my group works has no windows at all.
“Chef hopes you enjoyed your first practical class,” says Anne on day two, back again as our translator. Chef Bertrand peers over his glasses at the crowd and smiles. “Today, we begin with the process to make stocks. In French, these are known as fonds de cuisine, or foundations of cuisine.”
Like mirepoix, stock is fundamental. Many sauces, most soups, and dishes as diverse as braised meat and risotto rely on it. “Life without stock is barely worth living,” writes Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential. I agree. Working in restaurants at an impressionable age taught me its value early. For my twenty-third birthday, I bought myself a twenty-quart industrial stockpot from a restaurant-supply store.
Chef explains that we must understand the basics, although for efficiency the sous-sol crew will craft the stock required for our classes, using the huge cauldron downstairs. Quality stocks take time, and by making fonds the basement crew can constantly recycle the scraps from our practical classes.
Fond de veau, or brown veal stock, starts life as knobby sawed-off bones roasted for nearly an hour. Peeled and quartered vegetables are added to roast with the bones for forty minutes. Then, into a pot of water they go with a bay leaf, some thyme, perhaps a few peppercorns. “Just remember the theory,” Anne translates for the chef. “Use a three-to-one ratio of bones to vegetables. Don’t add too many carrots, or your stock will be too sweet, or too many peppercorns or garlic, as it will be too spicy. You want a rich yet neutral flavor.”
Chef has other commands on stock:
• Keep it clear; don’t stir it, and never let it boil—it will cloud
• Avoid adding salt—it may become unpleasantly brackish
• If refrigerated or frozen, heat to a near boil to kill lurking bacteria.
“Always smell stock to see if it’s fresh, and taste it to check the flavor,” Anne translates. “If it is poor, anything made with it will suffer.”
After he puts his veal stock on to simmer, Chef turns his attention to a mess of fish.
“For round fish, the procedure is always the same,” Anne says.
With his left hand, Chef Bertrand gently cradles a fish. With his right, he scissor-clips the fins and tail, brutally grabs at the gills and rips them out, then offers us two options to remove the eyes: cut them out with a paring knife, or dig them out with a vegetable peeler. He puts the extracted fish eyes on the ends of his fingers and holds them up to the crowd like a puppet as he smiles and singsongs, “Allo, allo, Monsieur Poisson.”
He sharpens his fillet knife and slices through the soft belly. We can see this clearly in the mirror, yet he lifts the fish up and wiggles his fingers around inside to remove its guts, a glistening slippery mess that drops in gooey clumps from the stomach onto his cutting board. He picks them up and offers them to an Asian student in the first row. She shakes her head, covering her mouth as she emits a high-pitched giggle. “Non?” he asks, feigning surprise. “Mais, c’est très bien pour un sandwich.”
Chef rinses the fish, lays it down on the clean part of his cutting board, and gently persuades his fillet knife along its skeleton, removing one long piece of white flesh. He repeats the operation on the other side. Then, he wedges his knife between the skin and the flesh, rocking it back and forth, and the skin peels right off.
“Chef says that it’s important you learn to extract as much flesh as possible,” Anne says. “There’s already a lot of waste in fish, so an additional loss of even ten percent can be very expensive to a restaurant.”
An American woman raises her hand to ask a question. “But they have someone at the market that will do filleting, so why do we have to do it?”
The chef puts his knife down and stares at the woman who asked the question, obviously annoyed. After a long response of rapid-fire French, Anne consolidates his message. “Chef asks, Why are you at school? Why don’t you have the butcher roast your meat for you, too?” The student shrinks back in her jacket.
Today’s recipe, filets de merlan Bercy, or whiting in white-wine sauce, has several teaching points in addition to filleting. One is to make a fumet, or fish stock, which Chef begins by heating the bones in the bottom of the pot until they get hot and begin to release their internal juices, or “sweat.” Then we add mirepoix and water. It needs to simmer only twenty minutes, Chef advises, lest it taste “too fishy.”
In a buttered sauté pan, he sprinkles thinly sliced shallots, then adds the fish and equal parts of white wine and the still hot fumet. After the fish poaches, Chef transforms the liquid into sauce by reducing it and then whisking in a half cup of butter.
“Hot food always goes on a hot plate, and cold food goes on a cold plate,” Anne says as Chef takes a blue-rimmed dinner plate out of the oven and sets the fish on top with some sauce and perfectly chopped parsley. With that, he bows, the class applauds, and students crowd around the chef’s plate to take copious photos.
We taste. The sweet fish couples nicely with the sting of the shallots, muted by the softness of the butter sauce. This is more like it, I think.
He makes it all look easy, but then chefs are like that. They’re magicians in white, accomplished at sleight of hand.
Without discussion, in a curious nod to human habit, the members of B4 assemble in exactly the same spots at the communal marble table in the kitchen, where we will work for the rest of Basic Cuisine.
This week’s class assistants, Kim and Tai Xing, empty out the dumbwaiters, heavy with fish. Kim, whose husband works at the American embassy, is an attractive, wholesome brunette from Maryland with two kids, a trim figure, and shoes that always match her handbag. Her vague ambitions focus on catering.
By contrast, Tai Xing from Taiwan seems stuck in her awkward teenage phase. Tai Xing’s look is a study in practicality: industrial barrettes hold back her otherwise tousled black hair; she wears a thick man’s watch on her slim left wrist. “Cruise ships or fancy hotels, that’s where I want to work,” she says, when I ask her later why she’s at school.
Kim artfully arranges the vegetables for our practical in bowls while Tai Xing slaps two lukewarm fish onto our cutting boards. Amit goes right to work, filleting the luckless fish in a few minutes.
I sharpen my knives and review my notes. At thirty-six, I’ve managed never to fillet a fish.
Although my father often took us fishing on weekends when I was a kid, this messy duty fell to my older brothers. They went outside with fish, newspapers, and my dad’s sinister-looking knives and returned with fillets.
I never asked questions. Now I stand, knife in hand, staring at the eyes that I must gouge right out of a poor fish’s head.
I take my vegetable peeler, sink it into the edge, and twist. It doesn’t budge. I twist harder, tunneling around the cavity of the crunchy eye and through the firm, gooey tendons holding it in. I tug and whack! it flies across the marble table and sticks to Kim’s forearm. “Ew! Ew! Ew!” she cries, jumping up and down. “Get it off! Get it off!” I pick it off with my snowy-white side towel. She washes her arm a dozen times before she returns to her own fish, poking at it tentatively, as if it might reanimate and attack.
Back at my cutting board, I get on with it, production-line style. Two tails, clipped. Fins, clipped. I cut into the stomach of the first and, using a paper towel, remove the guts. Ugh. Even through the paper towel, I can feel them, squishy and slimy. On the second fish, something goes wrong. I cut into its tender belly, and blood gushes out onto my pristine apron. The scales, scraped off with my paring knife, fly everywhere, not unlike iridescent confetti. I somehow manage four awkward fillets, chunks of white flesh still glistening on the skeleton. The skin, which came off so easily for Chef Bertrand, seems adhered by Super Glue, and my fillets fall apart under my clumsy attempts to remove it.
Happy to be done, I throw the bones into a bowl of water to draw out some of the blood, turn over my cutting board, and move on to the vegetables.
“Hmmm, a bit messy,” I hear behind me. I turn to see the raised eyebrow of Chef Gaston Dufour. He’s one of the few chefs who can speak English, although curiously he has a slight German accent. A veteran of Michelin restaurants, Chef Dufour’s most noteworthy job was head chef to the royal family of an Arabic principality the size of New Jersey. Chef Dufour’s dominating physical characteristic is a long, black handlebar mustache. He habitually strokes the ends, turning them upward into tight points, reminding me of a shady turn-of-the-century circus barker.
“I’ve never filleted a fish before—” I start to explain.
“I can tell. You should practice—at home,” he says flatly. Still stroking his mustache, he walks over to Kim, who has just finished her first fillet.
“No, no, that is wrong,” he chides, exasperated. Taking the fillet knife from her hand, he snaps, “Didn’t you watch the chef at all today? A child could do better than this. You are also too slow.”
Amit presents his plate and leaves. I aim to follow the chef’s instruction exactly for the rest of the recipe, constantly looking at my notes, now soggy and stained with fish guts and blood. After another hour I’m done. I take my plate to Chef Dufour, standing at the end of the counter.
With a plastic spoon, he scoops up some sauce for a taste, then cuts into my fish. “The fillet is not even, your fish is overcooked, your sauce is too thin, it needs more salt, and your parsley isn’t chopped finely enough. Thank you,” he looks at my name tag, “Miss Flinn.” With a bored tone, he calls, “Next?”
That’s it. After three hours, two fish, some three thousand calories in wine and butter, and ruined notes, I clean up, put my tiny fillets in my enormous Tupperware, and wearily head downstairs with Kim, L.P., LizKat, and Anna-Clare, the woman who works across from me.
The Winter Garden is back to its usual setup, with bistro tables and chairs in clusters around the room, now buzzing with activity. Most students have finished for the day. The sweet smell of Basic Pastry’s babas au rhum competes with a lamb dish prepared in the Intermediate Cuisine. We’re tired and sweaty, and we smell of fish.
Kim drops her knives on the floor. “This isn’t cooking, it’s like learning some complicated sport,” she says wearily, tugging off her necktie.
“Why am I so flustered in the kitchen?” Anna-Clare wonders aloud. Like me, she had long dreamed of coming to Le Cordon Bleu and finally convinced her advertising agency to give her a three-month sabbatical so that she could. “It’s just bizarre. In my job, I have to make presentations to marketing directors and corporate chiefs all the time, and I can do that without being nervous. I mean, I knew this would be kind of stressful, but I’m surprised at how the scrutiny of the chefs completely unsettles me.”
“But you’re probably not as emotionally tied to those presentations,” I tell her.
“Well, that’s true,” she says. “I like my job, don’t get me wrong, but cooking is my passion.”
I know how they both feel, especially Anna-Clare. In my own kitchen, I’m usually sipping a glass of wine while I cook. Now I’m exhausted, and it’s only the second day. I look at my bloodstained apron, gray bits still clinging to parts of it. This isn’t like Sabrina at all.
Audrey Hepburn would never have ended up covered in fish guts.
On Thursday, a chicken becomes Chef Bertrand’s comedic prop. Chef uses his fingers to animate the wings of the plump roaster with feet intact and wiggles it around in a dance. “Aujourd’hui, mesdames et messieurs, vous apprendrez tout du poulet.”
Today, our translator is John, a dry-witted Brit with a boyish face. He takes each opportunity to translate as a chance to work on an ongoing stand-up routine.
“Today, the chef will teach you all about chickens, specifically how to hold them up and pretend to make them dance,” John says. “It’s a wonderful skill that you’ll find endlessly useful in the kitchen.”
Chef slides his eyes toward John. He doesn’t speak English, but he knows that’s far too many words for his simple sentence. He moves on.
He begins with a small slit in each ankle and then, with a curved end of a soup ladle, tugs hard. Voilà, the tough white tendons, which resemble thick white strands of silk, come out in one swift tug.
“Chef says that he can guarantee that the chicken didn’t feel a thing,” says John. “This technique is also useful on turkeys and guinea fowl and people whom you really don’t like.” A male Asian student has fallen asleep in the front row. John gives him a gentle punch to wake him up. “Hey, now pay attention, the information you’re about to learn must be used every time you prepare a whole chicken. It’s riveting stuff.”
Chef extracts hard, yellowish glands found within the flabby button leading to the chicken’s former tail. The wishbone and the excess fat and skin around the neck go next. Then he trusses, skewering the chicken with a long needle threaded with kitchen string, passing it diagonally through the cavity of the chicken, back and forth until it becomes a tight, dense package.
“You can also use this in place of a football,” observes John.
The chicken is destined for poaching as part of poularde pochée sauce suprème avec riz au gras, a classic Le Cordon Bleu teaching recipe. The whole chicken gets poached in stock, and we cover the pan not with a lid but with a clean towel to keep in moisture. The rice sounds undemanding, baked for twenty minutes with some stock and finished with a few knobs of butter. The simple white sauce begins with a roux, made from melted butter and flour whisked together and set aside to cool.
“Roux must be cold and your liquid hot—or vice versa,” John translates. To the cooled roux, we add a ladle of hot chicken stock and boiled cream, then whisk quickly. It’s finished by whisking in about a half cup of butter. My thighs are getting bigger just hearing this.
“This should be easy,” whispers L.P. to me.
Of course, it isn’t.
Half our class turns out inedible, dry rice; the other half seems to have cooked it not enough. I boil over my cream—twice—and once strained, it’s too thick. I add more stock, and it’s too thin. While trying to fix my sauce, my small poached chicken goes stone-cold. When Chef Dufour isn’t paying attention, I dump the chicken into the bubbling, hot sauce. I look up, and he’s staring right at me. Busted.
Today we are to plate not a portion but the entire chicken on a platter, atop all of our rice, the sauce spooned over the top. The result: a dull beige chicken, topped by a dull beige sauce, sitting on a bed of dull white rice. It’s not a feast for the eyes. I add a bit of parsley, for color.
Chef Dufour cuts into my chicken in three places. “Your chicken is cooked all right, and it’s hot.” He tastes the sauce and the rice. “Your sauce has too much liquid, it’s too thin, and it needs more salt.” I explained it was too thick, and I overcorrected. “I know, I saw you,” he says dismissively. “And your rice is good, but it needs salt. Thank you,” he looks at my name tag, “Miss Flinn.”
From class, I rush to Gare du Nord with my chicken to catch the 7:40 p.m. Eurostar to London; on the train ride, I devour half of it. I could not arrange movers before Christmas, so I have returned to finish packing up my flat and put my life as I know it into boxes—indefinitely.
I walk up the three floors on Litchfield Street, in central London. It’s a cold, dark state of chaos, with a bookshelf half emptied, clothes in piles, and the rest of my life in various stages of being sorted and packed. I sit down on my red velvet couch in the darkness. I’ve lived in this apartment for four years, longer than I have lived anywhere in my adult life. I have no idea where I will eventually unpack the things that I look at now. It’s as if I am getting on another train, this one to a destination unknown.
I’ve been in Paris for only a week; it feels like I’ve been away for months.
Did I act too quickly that night when I signed up for Le Cordon Bleu? Almost on a whim, I decided to empty my savings account and move to another country with my new boyfriend, a place where he doesn’t speak the language and I barely can communicate. Why didn’t I leave my job earlier and find something else? By fouling up my career, I’ve also lost the chance to live in London, an opportunity few Americans ever get to experience. I move through my flat slowly, picking up things here and there, taking a mental inventory. There’s much power to a place that you know you’re about to abandon.
Surveying my closet, I realize I have no use in my present life for all those skirted suits, that corporate attire. Will I ever have a need for them again? I wander into the dining room and sit at the table, contemplating the ghosts of dinner parties past. On a high shelf in the kitchen sits the stockpot that I bought more than a decade ago, now worn by regular use.
Finally, I walk to the window overlooking the street below. London feels so busy and loud to me now, compared to the reserved hush of central Paris. Below my flat, the music from the French wine bar shakes the floor.
“Living is like driving,” my grandmother used to say. “You have to pick a lane.” Have I chosen the right lane? It feels like this place, this moment in time, lies exactly halfway between my past and my future.
It’s too late to change back. When I return to Paris on Monday, I must really start living there. So far, I’ve barely ventured outside my apartment, except to go to school.
I find a bottle of white wine in my tiny fridge, pour a glass, and eat the rest of the chicken. Then, I start to pack.
Fond de Cuisine de Mon Ami Ted
MY FRIEND TED’S STOCK RECIPE
Makes four quarts
My chef friend Ted developed a two-thousand-word missive on the perfect stock. This simplified version captures key points of his méthode. A good stockpot is critical. Get a sturdy pan with a thick bottom, preferably stainless steel, which is nonreactive and easy to clean. Pure, clean water is essential, as the long simmering process concentrates all flavors, the good and the bad. This recipe is for a ten- to twelve-quart stockpot. Adjust the recipe as needed to fit your stockpot.
1 pound (1 or 2 large) onions
½ pound (about 3 ribs) celery
½ pound (about 2 large) carrots (for brown stock only)
Parsley stems from one bunch
About 8 pounds (3.5 kg) chicken or beef and veal bones
8 quarts (8 l) pure, clean, cold water
Rinse vegetables and chop coarsely. If bones are frozen, remove from freezer with plenty of time to thaw in fridge; this could take twenty-four hours. Place thawed and/or fresh bones in stockpot or bowl and cover with water. Let stand for fifteen minutes and then drain, discarding the water. This helps to remove salt, freezer frost, blood, and other undesirables. If making a white chicken stock, skip the browning step and put the bones into the pot with fresh water.
To make a brown beef or chicken stock, roast the bones in a 375°F/190°C oven for 40 minutes, then add the vegetables. Continue to roast until the bones have a rich brown color, for a total of about sixty to ninety minutes. Transfer the browned bones and vegetables to the stockpot and then cover with water. Pour the fat out of the roasting pan, add water, and gently loosen the pan drippings. Pour this into the stockpot.
In either case, the water level should be at least three inches above the bones. Apply high heat until the stock comes to a slow simmer. Then reduce the heat as necessary to maintain a gentle simmer. For the next couple of hours, use a ladle to regularly skim the foam and fat from the surface of the stock. Don’t let the stock boil; it will become cloudy. Simmer the uncovered stock for a minimum of four hours for chicken and at least eight hours for beef, skimming every ninety minutes. Add water as needed to keep the bones submerged.
Straining the stock: first, use a long pair of tongs to remove most of the bones and discard. Ladle or pour the remaining stock and vegetables through a colander into a clean bowl or bowls. Take care to avoid burning yourself.
Strain it again, this time through a colander lined with cheesecloth or a coffee filter. Either use the stock immediately or cool the stock as quickly as possible. To cool, pour the stock into several bowls. Place these bowls over others filled with ice, or, after the stock has cooled to below 175°F/ 80°C, plop freezer bags filled with ice into bowls. Ladle into freezer-proof containers and freeze.