CHAPTER 10
AS THE VEGETABLES TURN
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: CONSOMMÉ, ROASTED DUCK, MARDI GRAS, AND THE SEARCH FOR A PARIS APARTMENT
“We could call it our underground lair,” Mike says. “Wouldn’t it be “great for parties?” That’s his optimistic take on a warren of rooms in a basement apartment in République. The place could be a set for a Stanley Kubrick film: red and black inflatable furniture set against stark white walls and floor. A hole in the floor offers a sharp descent via a staircase to the bedroom below. In the end we agree this is a place of broken necks and bad dreams.
Finding a good yet affordable apartment in a major city is never an easy task; Paris is no different. We’ve been renting our place on rue de Richelieu from Nigel, an affable Brit who came to Paris about fourteen years ago and just never left. He helps run an online rental agency along with his friend Theo, a good-looking blond Frenchman with deep dimples. Mike’s been lending them some free technical consulting on their website and helping to repair a couple of wildly infected laptops. Nigel apologizes regularly about making us move out, but months earlier he’d agreed to rent our apartment to a wealthy Jordanian woman who can pay one thousand euros more per month for it.
“Really, if I could keep renting it at this rate, I would,” he tells us more than once. We don’t debate. We like the apartment, but it’s so modern, it could be anywhere. Mike and I agree that our next place should feel like we’re truly in Paris.
So in our search, we crisscross the city, looking at a dozen places. We inspect an intriguing apartment with exposed, decaying beams and a view of the Panthéon just outside. Everything feels ancient, including the rudimentary bathroom surely built by the Romans. Access to a mattress in what’s euphemistically referred to as “the bedroom” is limited to a rickety wooden ladder. The agent proudly discloses the price. A bargain, she assures us. The rent is three times the price of the Richelieu apartment, plus there’s a monthly commission equal to our current rent—and that apartment has modern plumbing. We pass.
A well-dressed French woman from a different agency leads us up six flights to a loft in a building on rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine in the Bastille neighborhood. It’s great, even if it does have a bizarre, blood-red tile shower. We look out a window and realize it’s across from Barrio Latino, a notorious late-night four-story dance mecca.
“Oh, no, it’s not noisy at all,” she assures us. We thank her and head downstairs to meet Nigel for a drink at the Barrio. Nigel laughs at her response.
“This whole street rocks with bass until about six a.m.,” he says.
The next day, we meet Chef Henri Gaillard, who will introduce the classic method of clarifying a stock to make consommé.
A stout, handsome man, Chef Gaillard’s reputation precedes him.
“He’s the one who made a girl cry last term,” says L.P. as we watch him prepare for the demonstration. Born in Cognac, he began his restaurant training at the age of thirteen. He arose each morning at 5:00 a.m. to receive the deliveries of vegetables, meat, and seafood. Then, he broke down the crates to start the fires in the ovens. The rest of his early days were spent doing whatever the chefs requested. At the end of the dinner service, he cleaned up the kitchens, only to get up a few hours later to do it all again. His tenacity over the years was rewarded. He moved up the ranks to hold prestigious positions in kitchens throughout France, eventually heading up one of the most prominent kitchens in Paris, in a restaurant made famous by Hemingway.
“Est-ce que vous désirez une petite histoire?” he asks. Do we want a little story?
“Oui, Chef,” we reply.
Chef sets a massive stockpot on one burner, heats up a cloudy veal stock, and adds ground beef, egg white, and tomatoes. For the next hour, he lovingly tends to the consommé, pulling the ingredients as they cook into a floating ring known as a “raft.” The stock gurgles at a languid pace. The beef adds flavor, while the egg whites and tomatoes draw out the impurities in the stock, he explains. The result should be a bright-flavored, clear bouillon. As he does all this, he occasionally takes a small taste with a fresh spoon and tells us his theory that soups similar to consommé led to the creation of restaurants.
“Everyone says that the Revolution brought about restaurants,” he says via Anne the translator. “What really happened was that the monarchy made people tired and sick.” So, street vendors began to peddle inexpensive thick bouillons or thin soups—said to restaurer, or “restore,” one’s vigor—to hungry peasants, weary travelers, or tired city workers. More places offering this “restorative” nourishment began to appear in the sixteenth century, until the first establishment known as a “restaurant” opened in France in 1765. Even then, it was operated by a French soup seller, the chef says.
Shortly afterward, elite heads rolled throughout France, and chefs for the upper classes had to find some new customers. That’s when the idea of a “restaurant” expanded well beyond soups, Chef says.
Chef carefully removes the clarifying ingredients and pours the consommé through a passoire. He tastes again with his spoon. Satisfied, he adds perfectly diced vegetables.
“Goutez, goutez, goutez,” Chef begins. “C’est très important . . .”
Anne translates. “Always taste, taste, taste, as you cook. Chef Gaillard believes this is very important. If you wait until a dish is done, then it is too late to fix the seasonings. You must taste everything as you go along, every ingredient.”
As I taste his consommé after class, the clean flavor does indeed feel as if it could restaurer my body, now growing weary of looking at substandard apartments.
That afternoon, I nurse my consommé and finish yet another round of disappointing puff pastry. As I do, I consider how wonderful it would be to toss some hamburger, egg whites, and tomatoes into the soup of life. Suddenly, everything would be clear and the purpose of it all would be revealed.
Chef Dufour oversees the practical. My consommé is fine, but my puff pastry raises an eyebrow. Without a word, he picks it up off my plate and drops it to the marble work counter. It hits with a clunk.
“Maybe you should practice—at home,” he says.
Some people believe that Julia Child dropped a whole chicken on the floor while filming The French Chef. In truth, she dropped only some potatoes she was trying to flip in a pan. But how I wish it were true. Then, I wouldn’t feel so bad about the duck.
Everything is going well with canette rôtie aux navets, roast duckling with turnips. Aiming below the knee joint, with a whack I take the webbed feet off in one swift blow. Chef Bouveret whistles as he walks around the room and collects the feet in a large stainless-steel bowl; the sight looks as if a host of Daffy Ducks were bumped off and stored, feet-side up. I pick off the excess feathers, cut out the wishbone, and truss what remains into a neat package. Then, I follow Le Cordon Bleu’s precise roasting instructions.
La canette goes on its side in a hot oven for ten minutes. Then, the duckling is turned to the other side for ten minutes. After I add mirepoix, it is turned on its back for fifteen minutes to finish. I’m dubious about the short cooking time until I see the duckling, brown and tender, its skin just ever so taut. I rest the pan on the open oven door as I insert my roasting fork into the cavity to turn it over for the last minutes of cooking.
Then, my wrist hits the edge of the hot pan.
My duck flies from the roasting fork into the air and drops onto the floor. It keeps rolling, like a succulent little football, to the edge of Anna-Clare’s stove.
Now, there is one thing that’s true about Julia Child. She said that you should never confess to mistakes that were not witnessed by others.
“Remember, you’re alone in the kitchen,” she would say. “You must stand by your convictions and just pretend that was the way it was supposed to turn out.”
Of course, here I am not alone. There are nine other students, plus the nosy Algerian dishwasher in the kitchen, restocking pans. Mercifully, Chef Bouveret is out of the room. Anna-Clare eyes the duck with a look of horror—for a good reason. The sous-sol sent up only five ducks today. We’re sharing this one.
I put a finger to my lips to Anna-Clare and the dishwasher. Without a word, I scoop up the hot duck with my side towel and toss it into the pan, shove it in the oven, and slam the door. I stand up and bump into L.P., standing in front of me. Her face says it all. She doesn’t approve, and I sense a lecture coming. But then, Chef Bouveret returns to the room, whistling and triumphant, having found the turnips that had been missing from the class basket.
“Look, look,” he says, holding up the bowl.
I proceed with my recipe and plate as usual.
By now, whispered word has spread in the kitchen of the dropped duck. The dishwasher peeks around the corner. Will I let the chef taste the contaminated duck?
Chef tries the sauce. Good consistency, he says, but it needs more salt. My vegetable cuts earn a “bien.” He tastes a tender turnip. His hand, clutching a small plastic spoon, hovers above the duck-breast meat, sliced thin and fanned out on the plate. Instead of taking a bite, he directs my attention to the coloring of the meat.
“Look, look, ici. Pas assez cuit,” Chef says. It needed two more minutes of cooking on one side, he says. But otherwise, it’s “bon travail,” nice work, “Meeze Fleen.”
In the locker room, Anna-Clare and I debate the duck. Didn’t some researcher find that the “five-second” rule wasn’t a myth? That you could reclaim food as long as it had been dropped on a clean floor? Surely, our duck wasn’t on the floor that long.
Still, when I take my half home, I tell Mike, “Just don’t eat the skin.” He asks why. “I’ll tell you later.”
Such intrigue over a duck is nothing. We are learning that it’s best to keep the chefs happy, even if it requires the occasional bit of clandestine work. The following day, we are to sauté three pieces of beef to specific doneness. We are instructed to make one bleu (bloody), one rare (a little less bloody), and one what the French call à point (sort of medium-rare). The chefs have taught us a trick to determining the doneness of meat using our hands. It goes like this: relaxing the hand, hold thumb to forefinger, as if making the OK symbol, and touch the soft pad under the thumb with your other forefinger. That’s bleu. Touch the thumb to the middle finger, the bump gets a bit taut. That’s the way that rare meat feels. The thumb to ring finger equals medium-rare.
The thumb to pinky? That’s well-done, or “Américain,” as one chef says.
At the other end of the table, there’s some shuffling when Chef Bertrand leaves the room. Ramona has overcooked all her steaks and utterly destroyed her béarnaise sauce. Students quickly converge to assemble an adequate plate, chipping in a piece of meat, some sauce, and some warm potatoes Pont Neuf, which are essentially large French fries. Chef returns, looks her plate over, deems the sauce too salty, and leaves. A minute later, he returns, tastes the same sauce presented by L.P., and declares it perfect. C’est la vie.
Such teamwork is common, but we realize in a week’s time that we will not be able to help one another on the final exam. In Basic and Intermediate Cuisine, it’s always the same. The chefs provide a list of ten of the thirty or so recipes that we have prepared during practical. Of those, two will be used in the exam. In B4, half of us will receive one recipe, and the other five will complete something else. Typically, the dishes include one fish and one meat dish.
Students also must perform a technique. This we learn in advance. Our technique will be to fillet two whiting, or merlan.
In class, we present a single plate. In the exam, we must plate all our work—every piece of food, every ounce of sauce. A trio of Parisian chefs will be brought in to judge the work. We will have exactly two and a half hours to complete our dish, aided by only the ingredient list. The steps, the taste, the technique, and the procedures for everything must be from memory.
This list includes the dreaded hake with hollandaise, a fragrant chicken fricassée, and the veal paupiettes. There’s immediate and heavy speculation about which dishes will be part of our test.
“The tarragon chicken is the most common test dish, so everyone should study it carefully,” says L.P. seriously as the women from B4 gather after class in the Winter Garden. L.P. has questioned Superior students about what dishes typically turn up at the Basic Cuisine exam. She’s been able to find out the test dishes for the past five semesters. She’s charted them roughly on a piece of paper and developed a simple statistical model for what we’re most likely to get. We all hunch around the list. “Now, the duck is also common, probably because it requires precise cooking. The hake has been used twice, so review the hollandaise sauce. . . .”
Chef Bertrand returns early from a trip to Costa Rica and spends a day just observing classes. He’s not happy.
“You do not taste as you cook, so you ended up with bland or over-seasoned consommés. Your puff pastry was nothing special,” he lambastes us via Anne the translator. We were not careful enough with the meat, and some of us did not follow instructions for cooking the duck. “Some of you are taking too much liberty. You are to reproduce what you see in the demonstrations, consistently and faithfully.”
Later that day, chefs conduct our first uniform checks. Diego makes up a complicated lie about why he hasn’t yet purchased professional chef shoes. He’s given forty-eight hours to comply. Kim’s attire is usually spotless, but she’s gotten lazy with houseguests and today wore a dirty apron. Chef Savard expels her from the kitchen. She clandestinely purchases a new one from the front desk so that she can continue class.
Everyone seems to struggle to “turn” vegetables. Starting out with large potatoes, I keep turning, trying to get the right shape, whittling it down to a half-inch clumsy cylinder. Chef Savard is unimpressed when I present mine along with some pork medallions soaked in a mustard sauce.
“Everything is OK, but these vegetables are not acceptable, although I can see you know that, Meess Fleen.”
So on my way home, I stop by Monoprix and buy four pounds of carrots and five pounds of potatoes. I buy flour, fresh yeast, and butter. Mike comes downstairs to help me lug them up the six flights. I start puff pastry, making two turns and letting it rest overnight. Then, I sit for four hours practicing turning until my hands are almost too sore to move. Mike practices a few, too. Irritatingly, his are almost perfect.
Everyone seems to be under fire from the chefs. We can do nothing to please them. They have been easy on us for weeks. But the mood has changed among them and among us. It’s their time to find out who is serious.
When the going gets tough, the tough, well, throw a party. We decide to invite over all of B4 and the twenty-somethings from Mike’s language class for one last fête at our apartment. The culinary students bring food; the language students bring alcohol. I spend two days concocting great vats of gumbo and jambalaya. Amit brings bags of artisan bread at the bakery where he’s working. Anna-Clare offers to make a round confection known in New Orleans as a “King Cake.” By tradition, a plastic baby representing Jesus gets tucked inside before it’s glazed with yellow, gold, and green icing. Whoever gets the slice with the baby is “king” for the day.
“I got very strange looks when I asked store owners whether they had a plastic baby Jesus, and for once it’s not my French,” Anna-Clare reports. She settles, and uses a plastic coin instead.
There’s too much of everything, and some feel compelled to stay and consume it all. Our final visitors stumble out at 5:00 a.m., so we claim the party a success.
The day after the party, we answer an ad in FUSAC, France USA Contacts, a biweekly magazine consisting mostly of classifieds and ads for British-style pubs and French-language schools. The apartment manager, a young Italian named Arturo, shows us a place on rue Étienne Marcel, not far from Les Halles.
As we walk inside, we know that it’s different. Elegantly furnished, it feels like someone’s home, not a rental. The built-in bookcases sag with books in Italian and French. Aged Persian rugs lie on the floor. The apartment is in the corner of a traditional old French building; the nearly circular living room is lined with windows. Then, we walk into the kitchen.
Much as in New York City or London, many Paris apartments have only cramped kitchens, some without even an oven. Yet this is a large room with every appliance, even a dishwasher and a separate fridge and freezer. The countertops and walls are covered in a warm, soothing rustic tile. But it’s the window that sells us. A modern remodeling changed the wall into a light-flooded ten-by-twelve-foot bay window overlooking the lively five-way intersection of rue de Turbigo, rue Étienne Marcel, and rue Pierre Lescot, the last of which is a pedestrian street leading into Les Halles. Classic French buildings sit on each corner. It truly feels like Paris.
Thoroughly transfixed, without taking our eyes off the activity of the street scene below, we say in unison: “We’ll take it.”
It is too good to be true.
Gombo de Paris avec Saucisse, les Crevettes et le Poulet
GUMBO FROM PARIS, WITH SAUSAGE, SHRIMP, AND CHICKEN
Serves eight
Gumbo is a post-Thanksgiving staple in my family, as it’s a great way to use up leftover meat for the turkey carcass for stock. True gumbo uses a dark roux that smells of lightly roasted coffee. Roux can be made ahead and refrigerated for up to a week, but take care with its preparation: if it has many black specks, it’s ruined, and you need to start over. Also, hot roux is known as ‘Cajun napalm‘ for the nasty burns it can cause, so be careful.
Always use gloves when handling hot chilies; they can burn and irritate eyes and skin. Gumbo requires good stock; see the recipe on pages 44-45.
ROUX
1 cup (250 ml) olive oil
1½ cups (375 ml) all-purpose flour
¾ pound (375 g) raw shrimp, shells reserved
3 quarts (3 l) brown chicken or turkey stock
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
2 bay leaves
4 ribs celery, chopped
1 green bell pepper, seeds removed, chopped
1 pound (450 g) cooked chicken or turkey, cut into bite-sized pieces
1½ pounds (750 g) cooked andouille sausage, sliced
1 (28-ounce) can (about 800 g) peeled, seeded tomatoes
2 habanero peppers, minced
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme, or 1 teaspoon dried
¾ pound (375 g) okra, thawed if frozen
2 cups chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon filé powder (optional)
1 to 2 lemons, juiced
coarse salt, ground pepper
Cayenne pepper or hot sauce, to taste
Cooked white rice
Preheat oven to 315°F/160°C. For the roux, combine olive oil and flour in an ovenproof sauté pan over medium heat. Stir constantly until the roux is light brown, with a nutty smell. Put into the oven and let cook undisturbed for the first hour. Then carefully stir every half hour afterward until it’s a dark, almost chocolate brown. This will take from three to five hours. Set aside and let cool.
To start the gumbo, combine the shrimp shells with the stock and simmer while you prep everything. Heat the olive oil in an eight- to twelve-quart pot. Cook the onions with the bay leaves over medium heat until translucent; then add the celery, carrots, and green bell pepper. When the vegetables soften, add the chicken, sausage, tomatoes, habanero peppers, garlic, and thyme. Strain the stock and add to pot with vegetables. Bring to a simmer and then stir in one third of the roux until it’s absorbed in the liquid. Keep adding roux a tablespoon at a time until the gumbo reaches the desired consistency. Bring to a simmer and add the okra, parsley, shrimp, and filé powder, if using. Cook until the shrimp are bright pink and the gumbo thickens. Finally, stir in the lemon juice, add cayenne or hot sauce, and serve over hot rice.