CHAPTER 6
LA VIE EN ROSE
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: ROASTED SIRLOIN FILLET, BEEF BOURGUIGNON, A TOUR OF A PARISIAN MARKET, AND MIKE’S ARRIVAL
“Mmmmm,” says LizKat groggily, as she fishes around inside her Louis Vuitton shoulder bag and pulls out a big pair of sunglasses. “I need some coffee.” She looks like a movie star trying to hide from her fans.
We all could use some coffee. It’s 8:00 a.m. and we’re wandering through the Saxe-Breteuil market in the Seventh arrondissement, one of the city’s largest outdoor markets. The Eiffel Tower looms at the end of the stalls, presiding over the market like a guardian.
This Marché de Paris, or market visit with a chef, is a staple of the Basic Cuisine curriculum. Our entire class, shivering in the brisk January air, is led by Chef Alexandre Colville, whom we’ve never met before. Younger than the other chefs, somewhere in his thirties, he’s a handsome guy with mischievous blue eyes and slick black hair. He’s the only chef at the school who has trained as both a chef de cuisine and a chef de pâtisserie, and therefore is the only one who teaches both disciplines. I know little about him, other than that he worked at one of Paris’s most famous restaurants before joining Le Cordon Bleu. Also along for the tour is a new translator, Janine, an affable, down-to-earth Australian in her late thirties, with boy-short blond hair.
As at all French markets, the purveyors began assembling around 5:00 a.m. Within two hours, everything is in place, the fruits and vegetables arranged attractively, priced with handmade signs. Portable meat counters are hoisted down from trucks. The fishmongers, or poissonniers, build their displays as if by erector set to create tiered levels, topped with tarps and dozens of bags of ice, before the fish and seafood are brought in from chilled trucks.
Chef Colville wanders through the market, stopping among the stalls to give us insight, buying a bit here and there, distributing the plastic bags of his purchases among the students. Our lesson is to understand how to recognize good produce and to start learning how to select meat, fish, and cheese. As we walk, we’re bombarded by the aromas: nose-searing stinky cheeses, sweet simmering pots of choucroute (sauerkraut, ham, and sausage), and pungent mounds of dried spices.
Our first stop is the butcher, where a woman skewers trussed chickens on a large swordlike device to put into an upright portable rotisserie. The main display case is standard brutal French fare: a rabbit with head and fur intact, a variety of chickens with their head feathers, a generous selection of small, tender birds. The fur and feathers are left on so buyers are assured of what they’re purchasing, Chef explains. How do you know it’s really a certain kind of chicken if you don’t see its feathers? He gives us a lesson on quizzing stall managers. Vital questions to ask include: Where did it come from? What did it eat? What does the seller know about the people who raised it? How long has it been hung to dry or waiting to be purchased? A good chef is not shy about asking such questions, Janine says, translating it all.
We continue this way until we come to a charcuterie stand. Much of charcuterie centers on transforming every part of a pig—snout to hooves—into an edible something. The result is a vast spectrum of ham, sausages, pâtés, terrines, and pressed meats, some of which we’re looking at right now. Chef points out various types, starting with a saucisson à la cendre, a tough white pork sausage rolled in ash so that as it air-dries it takes on a smoky flavor. Then, he points to a string of andouillette. There’s a collective groan. Not to be confused with American andouille, the fat, spicy pork sausage from Louisiana cooking, French andouille and andouillette are made mostly out of tripe, the muscular linings of an animal’s stomach. The whole process for making tripe sounds unpleasant. Let’s just say there’s a lot of soaking and washing involved to rid the stomach of the animal’s last meal.
Amused by our chagrin, Chef Colville asks the butcher to prepare slices for us all.
“Chef says that you cannot be a chef without knowing how things taste, even if you don’t like them, because often what you are asked to prepare is out of your control,” says Janine. “And come on, guys, it’s not really that bad.”
L.P., LizKat, Anna-Clare, and I all gather together, eyeing the white, paper-thin piece of the sausage. The cut shows the cross-section of the sausage and the pinkish-white swirls of tripe. L.P. goes first. Her expression is unchanged. “It is not very good, but it is not that bad,” she says.
LizKat pushes her sunglasses atop her head and nibbles thoughtfully. Her eyes widen. “I’ve never fancied tripe, and that hasn’t changed.”
Anna-Clare is the least inclined. She screws up her nose and shakes her head as L.P. hands her a piece. “I just know I won’t like it.”
“You are not serious about cooking,” says L.P.
“Because I won’t eat pig’s stomach?” balks Anna-Clare. L.P. nods. Anna-Clare takes a bite, and her face contorts. It’s my turn. The cold sausage has a chalky yet fatty feel on the tongue. The flavor is almost sour, with a metallic aftertaste. L.P. had it right. Tripe is an acquired taste. To the untrained palate, it’s not very good, but it’s not especially bad, either. It’s just foreign.
We finish with fruits and vegetables. Chef picks out some tender endives, crisp radishes, white turnips, a head of fennel, and a pair of cabernet-colored beets—vegetables common in France but likely to be unfamiliar to many students. We head back to school, crammed on a city bus.
Chef and an assistant spread out our cache buffet-style on a table in the window-lined demonstration room on the second floor. There’s a raft of cheeses, olives, fruits, and vegetables, and a variety of sausages and breads. We cradle plastic tumblers filled with Chablis. It feels elegant but a bit odd to be sipping wine at 11:00 a.m.
In Paris, music haunts the Métro. Some musicians are not content to sit still at a station and instead spend their days moving from train to train. A few even tote portable amplifiers and audio players strapped to luggage carts to provide accompaniment. On my train today, a saxophonist plays a soulful rendition of “La Vie en Rose.” When you’re in love, every love song gets your attention. I hum along, Louis Armstrong singing the words in my head.
Give your heart and soul to me and life will always be la vie en rose.
The song finishes just as I alight at Saint-Placide, the Métro stop for the Alliance Française language school. While I can order in a café, hire a cab, navigate the Métro, and buy shoes, my French needs bolstering for the rigors of culinary school. An unsmiling woman hands me a placement test. Among the grammar questions, there’s a writing test. It directs: “Write a letter to a friend about Paris.” Huh. I have much to say, but how to write it in French? I agonize and chew my pen for nearly an hour. The unsmiling woman’s face changes as she grades it. She starts to chuckle, but it’s a laughing-at-you-not-with-you sort of chuckle. She draws an “X” across my paper with a red pen. “You are what we call a false beginner,” she says dismissively. “You have to start all over.”
Ugh. Well, I thought I knew how to cook, too. I take the school’s brochures home without signing up.
I read that Julia and Paul Child tacked a large map of Paris on their wall and then crossed off each area as they visited it, to be sure not to miss a speck of the city. I vaguely recall a shop in the Gallerie Vivienne that sells posters and maps. There, sure enough, I find an inexpensive reproduction of a 1925 map of Paris. Holding it up to a new one, I see that it appears central Paris is largely unchanged. I want the map to feel like a blank canvas, not just to show how much of Paris Mike and I have to explore together, but how much of everything.
“C’est un cadeau?” asks the efficient proprietress.
I stare at her blankly. “Cadeau” . . . Is it a hat? No, that’s a chapeau, you idiot. Cadeau . . . is a . . . gift. Of course! I nod yes. She reaches under the counter and pulls out a heavy piece of white paper and a long, shiny red ribbon. In seemingly one movement, the map is wrapped with an expert bow. She hands it to me with a cheery “Bonne journée,” the French version of “Have a nice day.”
I walk to busy avenue de l’Opéra and step into a wine store to buy a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne. At home, I put it in the refrigerator but then catch myself before closing the door. I stare at it hard. When I open it tomorrow, Mike will be here. My heart pounds at the thought. I am nervous, excited, and about a dozen other emotions all at once. How can you miss someone so much, in only a matter of weeks? How can you fall in love so quickly with someone you’ve known for years? I pace the flat. I can’t be here alone with all this nervous energy. I run down the six flights of stairs and out onto the street. I walk fast past the Louvre and don’t stop until I reach the Seine. I pull my coat around me, the cold wind stinging my face, and stare at the city, the sky dim with twilight.
“Mike Klozar.”
Three unrelated people—a friend in Oregon, a former colleague in Germany, and my downstairs neighbor in Seattle—all mentioned the same name when I asked if they knew anyone working in the London office. I emailed him, and our exchanges turned chatty. When we agreed to meet on his next business trip to Seattle, I was intrigued. Was this a job interview or a blind date?
It was around the fourth of July 1999. I watched him walk into the restaurant I selected, one of my favorites. Mike searched the room for a woman matching a description I had sent him. (He swears now that I had said I’d be wearing leather boots, a short black skirt, and a white top. Boots? Surely not in July. The miniskirt? Well . . .) His pale blue eyes locked on mine, and then he smiled a dimpled, impish grin. The attraction was intense, immediate, and mutual, something neither of us expected. I had been arranging a portfolio of my work on the table in front of me. This forced a split-second decision on his part: sit in the chair across from me as expected, or slide in beside me on the bench. As he slid beside me, with only incidental contact, the electricity felt powerful.
He asked why I wanted to go to London. “Adventure, to try something different,” I replied. As we talked, Mike casually mentioned that he had booked a flight to Spain that left in just three hours and that he’d recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He sailed, he hiked, and he loved to cook Thai food. So he was a funny, smart Renaissance man and he had an amazing sense of adventure. Exactly what I was looking for in my life—except that we both were in long-term relationships.
So when I moved to London we became friends. But as we got to know each other, something always lingered below the surface. One night years later, in my London flat, we began to kiss. For the first time, neither of us was in a relationship. After a moment, I pulled away and, from out of nowhere, I heard myself say: “If you stay . . . it will be forever.” He didn’t. We found reasons to avoid each other for weeks. “Forever,” it seems, was a scary word for each of us.
A year later, Mike left the company. He took off traveling, enjoying his newfound freedom from corporate life. On his way through Europe, he and I arranged to meet in Milan, where I was going to be on a business trip. After dinner the first night, we strolled along the Piazza del Duomo, gently lit by a hazy moon. He asked softly, “Are you OK with forever now?” With a kiss in the middle of the shadowy piazza, we crossed the thin line between platonic and passionate. It took three years for us to get to that kiss.
I’ve got to hear his voice. I dial directly to Seattle on my cellphone, even though I know it will cost two dollars a minute. “Good morning, sexy,” he says groggily, tugged from sleep.
“Good evening, handsome.” I try to make my voice light. Across the Seine, I see the Eiffel Tower explode with strobes, as it does on the hour every evening.
“I was just dreaming about you,” he says.
At school today, I can barely concentrate, even though we’ve moved on to red meat. We’ll prepare the meat and marinade for boeuf bourguignon. We’ll cut palm-sized pieces of meat from a jagged hunk of shoulder and steep them overnight in a crimson marinade of red wine, garlic, onions, and herbs. Tomorrow, we’ll retrieve our marinade, add veal stock and a bit of sifted flour to the top of the meat, and let it braise leisurely as we prepare the dish’s garniture, or signature vegetables, separately. Once cooked, the meat will be “decanted,” removed piece by piece from the now hot stewing liquid. After straining the vegetables from the sauce, we’ll reduce it, and then add the beef and separately prepared onions, mushrooms, and bacon, along with a dash of chopped parsley.
Chef moves on to the mashed potatoes that will accompany the grilled sirloin we’ll prepare in the rest of our practical. “You should add roughly half as much butter as potatoes,” Anne translates as the chef churns soft just-boiled potatoes through a food mill. “Un petit peu de beurre,” Chef says—“a little bit of butter”—tossing three sticks of butter in. He beats them in with a wide plastic spoon and pours in a generous dose of cream. Mike will love them, but my thighs will not.
Our practical class cannot end quickly enough. I prepare my bourguignon marinade in record time. I poke repeatedly at my sirloin on the grill, urging it to cook, and take it off at the first hint of doneness. “Bien,” Chef says of my jus. My meat earns a “très bien.” Cooked bleu, it’s so rare that it’s almost still mooing, the way many French people prefer it. I’ve worked so quickly, I finish with Amit. Anna-Clare waves me to leave. “I’ll clean up your station, don’t worry,” she says. Everyone knows that Mike arrives today.
“Have a great time!” calls out LizKat. “Tell him we can’t wait to meet him.”
L.P. is typically pragmatic. “Don’t forget, we have an early class tomorrow.”
At home, huffing onto the sixth floor, I see Mike’s bags dropped just inside the door. I put the food in the fridge and then creep over to the bedroom. He’s wearing the deep blue sweater that I bought him for Christmas. Kissing his neck, I coax awake my jet-lagged boyfriend and murmur, “Welcome to Paris.”
Later, I lead him on a tour of the apartment. He marvels at the view across the rooftops, delighted that we can see the flag flying above the Palais Royal. His interest in architecture is piqued by the clever uses of small space, by the whole wall that slides over to reveal the master bedroom.
Mike leans out far to see the Sacré Coeur as I sauté the sirloin until it’s closer to medium-rare, reheat the potatoes, and make a salad. For the first of what will be many similar dinners, we feast on my day’s work, talking and laughing. I tell him about the beef bourguignon that’s marinating in the basement for tomorrow, and I show him the schedule of what’s to come. He lifts up a glass of champagne in a toast.
“We’re here,” Mike says, and we clink glasses. “Isn’t it odd we talked about this years ago? How do you feel about it now?”
I ponder the thoughts I had standing at my window in London. Sitting here, with my binder from school open, from the look on his face I know that my grandmother would agree: I’ve picked the right lane.
“Are you kidding? No regrets, none at all.”
He takes my hand and kisses each fingertip, one by one. “Good,” he says. “Because I feel the same way. I would give up anything to be with you.”
By 9:00 p.m., he’s wide awake, so we bundle up and go out with a vague plan to find somewhere to kiss in the cold, clear night air along the Seine, to mark off our first place on the map. We end up at the same spot I called him from just a day ago. A dinner boat passes by below, and a familiar song drifts up from it along the water:
Give your heart and soul to me and life will always be la vie en rose.
Boeuf à la Bourguignonne
BEEF BRAISED IN RED WINE
Serves eight to ten
Marinate the meat at least six hours, although overnight is better. Serve with hot buttered noodles or boiled potatoes. For entertaining, make a day ahead, reheat, and voilà. The ideal pairing here is to serve the same wine you used in the marinade.
MEAT AND MARINADE
2½ to 3 pounds (about 1.5 kg) lean beef stew meat, cubed
1 bottle (750 ml) red wine, preferably Syrah
2 medium carrots, chopped
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled, smashed
Parsley stems from one bunch, tied with string
½ teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
½ cup (125 ml) cognac or brandy
2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
2 teaspoons coarse salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
8 ounces (230 g) pancetta or unsmoked bacon, cubed
1 teaspoon thyme
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups (500 ml) brown beef stock
3 cloves garlic
½ sweet onion, sliced
8 ounces (250 g) mushrooms, sliced
1 medium carrot, chopped
2½ cups (20-ounce can) tomatoes, chopped
2 medium white potatoes, peeled, cut into ½-inch chunks
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar (optional)
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
Combine meat with marinade ingredients in a large, nonreactive bowl and stir to mix. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C. Separate the meat, vegetables, and red wine. Discard the parsley bundle and bay leaf. Bring the marinade liquid to a boil. Vigilantly skim foam off the top. Dry meat with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. Add oil to a large Dutch oven over high heat.
Brown the meat in batches and set aside. Lower heat, and add pancetta or bacon. Cook slowly until slightly browned. Remove half and set aside to add before serving.
Add the meat, the vegetables from the marinade, and the thyme and bay leaves to the pan with the pancetta. Sprinkle with flour and stir to coat. Add the boiled wine and stock (and water if needed) to cover meat. Bring to a simmer, cover, and bake in the oven for an hour.
Then add the garlic, sliced onions, mushrooms, carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes and cook until the meat and vegetables are tender, about forty-five minutes. Check seasonings, and add the reserved pancetta, balsamic vinegar (if using), and parsley.