CHAPTER 7
NO BONES ABOUT IT
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: INTRODUCTION TO LES FARCES, CAUL FAT, MEAT-STUFFED MEAT, AND DINNER AT LE FOUQUET’S
Two nights after Mike arrives, Basic students go to our “class dinner” at Le Fouquet’s, an institution on the Champs-Élysées heavy with Old World decor and well-coiffed patrons who drip with diamonds.
Upstairs, in a private room, we’re a tough crowd. Students pick apart everything, from the seasoning of the grilled lamb to a muted red-wine sauce deemed too thin to the turn of the carrots served on the side. Only a light lemon-artichoke mousse passes inspection. We’re seated at round buffet tables of ten and at ours is a woman whom I’ve seen around school but not yet met. Lely hails from Jakarta, her face graced by large dark eyes, dark straight hair, a flat nose, and a beatific smile. I’ve never met someone from Indonesia; I could see her wide frame cascaded in leis.
At dinner, Mike meets everyone for the first time. Known for his quick wit and well-timed puns, he is an immediate hit when he starts a long string about the waiters, who seem to be on a mission to provide our table an endless supply of bread and butter.
“I don’t know why they keep coming over here,” muses Lely. I look at LizKat, tonight clad in a fetching low-cut black top, and then around the rest of the table loaded with beautiful women. Personally, I think it’s obvious.
“Maybe they are trying to butter you up?” Mike says to Lely. (Groans, laughter from the crowd.)
“Hey, you’re really on a roll,” I say. (More groans and laughter.)
“You could say that I’ve risen to the occasion,” Mike says.
Lely’s first language is not English. She looks confused. “I don’t get it,” she says. Butter, roll, rising dough, I explain, thinking this will kill the humor. Instead, as if a light goes off, she begins a shriek of delayed laughter.
After dinner, we all walk in a bitter wind along the Champs-Élysées in search of a drink. We lose part of our large crowd to the lure of warm taxis, and others to clubs throbbing with Euro dance music. Oddly, we end up at an Australian pub.
Beers in hand, our crowd of global nomads raises its pints to make a toast: “Here’s to caul fat!” says Lely. I clink my glass to it. After all, who knows what mysterious substance ties people together?
Caul fat soaked in a large bowl of water spectacularly resembles brain matter. Also known as crépine, caul fat is the spiderlike veil of white fat that surrounds the internal organs of animals. This week, Chef Bertrand has been demonstrating how to use it. The day after our dinner, for example, he unwinds a thin, lacelike layer of the membrane and then gently wraps it around small, stuffed veal parcels known as paupiettes.
We’ve moved onto les farces, the French term for absurd comedies and “stuffing.” Although anything can be made into a farce, there’s a whole repertoire of classic dishes (such as the paupiettes) that involve stuffing meat with more meat.
Paupiettes sound simple, but they’re typical of the laborious recipes we undertake here. First, Chef bones a hefty piece of veal shoulder, then grinds it with a chunk of marbled pork and sheer white pork fat. He combines the ground bits with sautéed shallots and mushrooms, seasonings, and a panade (a blend of fresh bread crumbs and cream). This gets wrapped in a veal escalope—a slice of meat made flat by pounding the hell out of it with the bottom of a small saucepan until it’s as “thin as cigarette paper,” says Chef Bertrand. He wraps the crépine around the veal-stuffed-veal to form the parcels into little balls before they’re braised in veal stock.
To use caul fat, we each rip off a large piece. It tears like thick crêpe paper, and in hand it feels like rubbery, delicate wet lace. Anna-Clare takes a photo. “You don’t see a bowl of wet brains every day,” she says, and who can argue—until we use it for almost a week.
The next day in class, we flatten chicken breasts into escalopes with sauté pans. These are stuffed by piping in a mixture of ground chicken and cream, then topped with a mushroom-cream sauce.
I carry the mushroom-stuffed chicken home in a Hefty OneZip plastic bag, a favorite of my sister, who calls them “zipbags.” As a surprise, Mike brought me a cache of them in two sizes from Seattle, a thoughtful gift inspired by my daily complaints about the cake-sized Tupperware. I reheat the chicken. When Mike cuts into it, the filling oozes everywhere. He loves it.
“So when are they going to teach how to make chicken cordon bleu?” he asks. Huh. I have not seen that dish listed in my binder. I ask the next day. Turns out it’s not in the curriculum. According to Madame Madeleine Bisset, the woman with the purple pashmina the first day, despite its name the dish has nothing to do with the school. “It is a very old recipe that might have come from Austria,” she says. “Or it could be German. Either way, it’s not ours.”
My stepfather is worried. “Let me tell you something about men,” he says one day after wrestling the phone away from my mother. “You don’t want more than one hound in the henhouse; it messes up the whole system.”
I have no idea what he’s saying, but I know what he’s getting at.
This week, our first houseguests arrive. One of them just happens to be a friend of mine. Well, maybe that isn’t exactly the extent of it. Bill, an NPR host back home, is someone I dated a couple of times years ago.
His visit does not sit well with my mother. After observing my love life as a spectator sport for two decades, she believes that Mike is serious marriage material. She begins to counsel me on strategies to ensnare him. They sound suspiciously like tips from 1950s home-economics classes, ranging from “always make the bed every day” to “invest in some really nice lingerie—men love that.”
She’s so concerned that Bill’s visit will offend Mike that she offers to pay for a hotel for Bill. They don’t accept my protests or assurances that we’re just friends.
Mike arrived only last Wednesday, but by the following Monday he has already enrolled himself in a grueling thirty-six-hour-per-week intensive French class at Langue Onze, a school in the République area. Slowly, details of his classmates drift out that are a bit worrying.
Jacqueline or “Jackie” is the worldly nineteen-year-old daughter of an Australian embassy official. A.J. is a young, scarlet-haired Danish woman who speaks four languages. Tia sounds stunning—a South African who also happens to be a professional hula hoop dancer. (I didn’t know that this was a profession. It turns out that she gets paid to wear skimpy clothes and hula-hoop in nightclubs.)
But this Wednesday night, we wait for Bill. And we wait. I verify the time of his train from London. Two hours later than we expect, we hear the buzzer. Again, the wait is long. “It is six flights,” I remind Mike.
“Maybe he needs help with his bags,” Mike says. He goes downstairs to investigate. There’s a muffled conversation on the steps. Suddenly, Bill hurtles into the flat. His six-foot-two frame is hunched, his face a stark, ghastly white.
“Hi Kat, uhm, where’s your bathroom?” he asks, and then flings himself in its direction, slamming the door behind him.
Mike appears in the doorway, arms loaded with Bill’s coat and cases. “Food poisoning in London,” he says, nodding toward the bathroom. So, for his first twenty-four hours in Paris, the man that worried my mother remains wrapped, miserable, in the fetal position on a foldout couch in the postage-stamp-sized den.
The next night, Bill is feeling better. We end up waiting on my good friend Marietta, who is a couple hours late arriving from London, too. “I hope she didn’t eat what I ate,” adds Bill. We had planned to meet Mike and “the girls” from his class at a bar/restaurant in République called the Chat Noir. As soon as Marietta arrives, she, Bill, and I bundle into a cab, but by now we are hours late.
The real Chat Noir was a celebrated cabaret. This bar is a popular brasserie, with solid tables and Stella Artois signs scattered around to perk up the decor. The group started drinking red wine at 4:00 p.m. while waiting for us to arrive. Apparently, some of them never stopped.
Rail-thin Jackie is the first to greet me, wearing a black T-shirt that says:
Sorry I Missed Church
I Was Busy Practicing Witchcraft
And Becoming a Lesbian
She moves over to shake my hand and promptly loses her footing, taking a couple of chairs with her. For some reason, I had imagined her as very proper and embassylike, sort of an Anne Hathaway after she’s cleaned up in The Princess Diaries. Instead, here she is, splayed on the floor, the result of having consumed no food and half her body weight in vin rouge.
“I’m all right!” she slurs mightily, as Mike and A.J. raise her up. “It’s so nice to meet you. Mike talks about you all the time. He loves you sooooo much.” Then her lids droop, and her body follows.
Mike says, “Okay, let’s get you home.” He puts her in a cab back to the embassy. “I told her to go, but she wanted to stay and meet you,” he says to me.
The other two aren’t what I expected either. Tia is very pretty, to be sure, but a bit goofy, dressed in a sort of wanna-be-a-gypsy getup. She keeps wandering off to flirt with men at the bar.
I’d pictured A.J. as a severe Nordic Bond Girl, but she turns out to be a soft-figured beauty with an engaging smile. With her four languages, she’s taken a job at a currency exchange to pay the rent, allowing her to attend language classes full-time. She thought it would be undemanding, but it sounds horrific.
“People yell at me constantly. They say horrible, mean things. Today, some guy from Alabama called me a whoring bitch,” she says, her blue eyes starting to water. This genuinely pains her. “We post how much commission we take and all the exchange rates, but people can’t do math anymore. All they know is that they get back less than they expected, so they yell at me. It’s awful.”
Mike tactfully interrupts. “Hey, there’s a DJ downstairs. Allons-y!” Indeed, a jumble of decks are set up in an underground chamber with ancient brick arches, the space just large enough for us and a handful of Parisians. We dance until midnight. Mike chats with a friend of the DJ, and it turns out they both play jazz trombone. His new friend insists on taking us to another club, so we’re off en masse through the backstreets of République to an unmarked dance club. Then, his friend produces a whole round of drinks, this time gin and tonics and bottles of Stella Artois.
The rest of the night is a blur. French techno music blares on the speakers, melding into what I’m convinced must be one endless song. We dance ensemble, sometimes infiltrated by men hitting on the girls. By 4:00 a.m., I’m wiped out. I look for Bill, who, undeterred by his food poisoning, has escaped to get a kebab from a street vendor outside the club.
Sometimes it is tough to know what’s good for you.
The next afternoon, Bill, Marietta, Mike, and I walk over the bridges to the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame. We stop in our tracks at the sight.
Scaffolding with snaking hoses, cranes, and massive fans accompany a full cadre of cameras and lights and a film crew in front of the church. We wait. An American voice yells “Action!” and suddenly it rains. It’s puzzling, though: it’s been raining here on and off for weeks. Leave it to Hollywood to wait for the first beautiful sunny day to create fake rain in Paris. With nearby British tourists, we amiably debate if we’re watching a scene for The Da Vinci Code, rumored to be shooting early scenes here. After watching a couple of takes, we walk on toward our planned destination, the Marais.
This neighborhood in central Paris near the Hôtel de Ville is not what you think of when you hear the word “swamp,” which is what marais means in French. Nor do you look and think, “That’s what I imagine a Jewish ghetto would look like.” It was once that, too.
The Marais was never demolished to make way for the grand boulevards under Baron Haussmann in the 1800s, and so it’s one of the few places in Paris that feels almost ancient, not just old. One of the oldest houses in the city is found here—a half-timbered number built in 1407 by a French writer and alchemist. The rest of the area is rife with sagging, gray, eclectic architecture laid out amid twisty, narrow streets, a few still made of cobblestone. Its old infrastructure is a major contrast to the updated store-fronts that are part of the area’s rebirth in the past couple decades as a trendy shopping and eating area and the epicenter of the city’s gay community.
As we walk, I learn that my mother had nothing to worry about with Bill. He’s madly in love with a woman in Seattle named Sara, and they plan to get married. Not that anything could distract me from Mike.
My mother always says, “Eighty percent of what you worry about never happens anyway.” She worried about Bill; I fretted about the “girls.” But it turns out neither of us had anything to be concerned about. So much of life is a farce, in both meanings of the word. Much of our life is made up of situations one might find in a traditional comedy—misunderstandings, wrong expectations, and odd situations that, in retrospect, seem quite amusing. How much of what happens is just stuff?
Of course, there is always that other 20 percent.
Poulet Cordon Bleu
CHICKEN CORDON BLEU
Serves four
Let’s set the record straight: The Paris-based cooking school has nothing to do with this dish. The specific origins remain a bit of a mystery, but the original (with veal) is likely a cousin in Germany’s schnitzel family and may have originated in Austria. Taste the ham and cheese before you start; overly salty or smoky versions of either can overwhelm this dish. Secure the chicken parcels by threading a trussing needle with string and sewing up the sides, or wrap them in caul fat; in a pinch, toothpicks work. My sister adds shredded cheese to her sauce as it finishes. Serve with a crisp white, such as a Sauvignon Blanc or Fumé Blanc.
4 chicken breasts, about 6 ounces (170 g) each
Coarse salt, ground black pepper
4 teaspoons Dijon mustard
4 slices (2-3 ounces) Swiss cheese, preferably Gruyère
4 slices (about 2 ounces) very thinly sliced prosciutto or ham
1 cup (about 100 g) flour
2 eggs, beaten slightly
1 cup (about 100 g) seasoned bread crumbs
½ cup (125 ml) dry white wine
1 cup (250 ml) chicken stock
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup (250 ml) cold milk or cream
Salt, pepper to taste
1 tablespoon grated Gruyère cheese (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F/175°C. Butterfly each chicken breast, using a sharp knife to carefully cut into one side until it opens like a book. Season the interior with salt and pepper and coat with 1 teaspoon mustard. Top with a slice of cheese, then a slice of prosciutto or ham. Close and secure with string or toothpicks, or wrap them in caul fat. Dredge this chicken preparation in flour, then dip it in the beaten egg, and then roll it in bread crumbs. Repeat for the other breasts. Bake in a dish lined with parchment paper or foil for thirty-five to forty-five minutes, or until the parcels are firm to the touch and juices running from the chicken are clear and no longer pink, and a meat thermometer reaches 180°F/80°C.
Heat the wine in a saucepan over high heat and reduce by half. Add the stock, bring to a boil, and reduce to a simmer. Keep warm until ready to add to the sauce below. (Don’t skip this step; your sauce will break.)
In another saucepan, make a roux by melting the butter over medium heat until bubbly. Whisk in the flour and continue to whisk for eight to ten minutes, until it smells like popcorn. Add the cold milk and whisk in completely. Whisk in the wine-stock mixture, and season with salt and pepper. Adjust consistency by adding more stock if sauce is too thick. If desired, add in the grated cheese. Remove the string from the chicken. Top with the sauce.