CHAPTER 12
C’EST LA VIE, C’EST LA GUERRE
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: GUINEA FOWL WITH CALVADOS SAUCE, RABBIT LEGS SIMMERED IN WINE
Returning to Paris, my grades from Basic bring me back to reality. I scored high on my midterm and two other tests, above average on my daily work, and passed the final, but barely.
“You must let it go,” L.P. advises, as we change in the locker room. “You have much work to do until you get your diploma. If you cannot let go of the past, then you cannot focus on the present.” Somehow, everything she says sounds like Chinese philosophy or, as Mike says, a bit like the pronouncements of Yoda.
When the Gray Chef enters the demonstration room for our first lesson, he looks expressionlessly at me. L.P. whispers in my ear, “Remember, you are just as tough as him.” Young Jedi, I mentally add.
Chef breaks his gaze and begins.
With just thirty-four students, Intermediate Cuisine is roughly half the size of Basic. Culinary Darwinism at work, Basic tends to weed out the recreational cooks and those who want something else in a culinary program. Intermediate’s curriculum differs from the rest of the Le Cordon Bleu training in focusing on regional cuisines. We begin our culinary tour in Normandy.
“Quel dommage, les gens pensent seulement à la guerre,” Chef begins. I agree: it’s a shame that most people associate Normandy only with World War II. Its lush pastures provide grazing for vaches d’or, or “golden cows.” Their milk churns into wonderful cream, remarkable butter, and prized soft cheeses such as Camembert. Nine million acres of orchards produce tons of crisp apples each year, some of them turned into cider or Calvados, a stiff apple brandy.
“Le Calvados est le champagne de la Normandie,” Chef says, adding a bit to deglaze the pan in our principal recipe of the day, guinea fowl with apples in a Calvados cream sauce. As the pan simmers, the sharp, sweet aroma of the brandy drifts over the room. L.P. looks at me and frowns. To her sensitive palate, the taste of alcohol in cooking is too strong.
Afterward, we walk upstairs and bid each other good-bye as we head into different kitchens. I’ve been assigned to Intermediate Group 1, which lacks all my friends. My effort to change groups musters no sympathy from the administrators.
This first day, I take the only open space, a corner among four Koreans. I’m on time, but already the two communal ingredient baskets at this end have been ransacked, leaving me nothing except a withered apple. I gather onions, garlic, and all the ingredients from bowls on the other end of the table. I feel like a beggar going through trash cans. No one is speaking French or even English here—it’s all Spanish and Korean. I feel utterly isolated. Just when I think it can’t get any worse, the Gray Chef swaggers into the kitchen.
“Bonjour, mes petits amis!” he bellows to the room. He pats one guy on the back. He chats quickly with a woman with blond curls. He ignores me. I take out my frustration on the guinea fowl.
The large semiwild hens are known to partner for life. Newly engaged, I try not to think of this one’s mate as I take the bent handle of a soup ladle, tuck it behind the bird’s tendons above its ankles, and rip them out with one swift tug. With no one to talk to, I work efficiently, alone with my thoughts for two hours, turning my apples, tending my sauce. I carefully check all the flavors before I plate my dish for Chef.
Be confident, I think to myself. This is a great plate. Yet my hands shake as I take it to where he stands, arms crossed, at the end of the table.
Chef cuts into the guinea fowl, then tastes an apple and some sauce. He chews thoughtfully. “Ça marche,” he says, and pushes my plate back to me. I’m disappointed. All that work, and I get the equivalent of “It’s OK, it works.”
Deflated, I bag my food and silently clean up. On the way out of the kitchen, I run into Lely in the hallway at the top of the stairs. She looks like a lot of us do after a practical: smiling, sweaty, her hat askew as if she’d run a quick half mile.
“What happened to you?” she asks.
“I had the Gray Chef for my practical today,” I begin. “I don’t know anyone in my group, and some Koreans raided my basket at the beginning of class. There’s no one to talk to. I’m stuck in the corner. It’s . . . just . . . very lonely.” I begin, preparing for a cliff dive into self-pity. She puts up her hand like a traffic cop.
“No, no, missy, I don’t want to hear any of that,” she says. She gets behind me, puts her hands on my back, and directs me forward, down the stairs. “You go home, drink some wine with your man, and come back here with a better attitude.”
As we continue down the stairs, she tells me to work by the woman with the blond curls in my class, Jovina.
“She’s from Colombia, I think,” Lely says. “She’s nice.” Lely has heard her fiancé is an American soldier in Iraq. “You’ll have plenty to talk about.” We pass by a photo of Julia Child on the stairwell wall. “And, hey, you think that Julia would let a chef get to her? I don’t think so, no, ma’am, I don’t.”
You can’t argue with Lely.
Mike and I eat the guinea fowl in one of our last dinners at the apartment on Richelieu. Mike chuckles at Lely’s domineering advice. With shared intensity, we talk about wedding plans and the Allied invasion of Normandy. For the ceremony, we agree to invade the beach on Anna Maria Island in Florida, close to the “castle” where we broke the bed.
The next morning, I’m the first one in the practical kitchen. I stake out a spot next to where Jovina worked the previous day. By luck, she arrives next. With creamy blond hair in tight ringlets, stormy blue eyes, and skin like a porcelain doll’s, she doesn’t look Colombian.
“My parents are American,” she says in a midwestern accent. I’ve never heard her speak English, only Spanish or French. We start to unpack our knives and set up. “Lely says you’ve just gotten engaged,” she says. “Congratulations.”
I start to say the same, but “congratulations” seems like the wrong word from someone with a fiancé at war. Just then, the Korean students file in. One of them insists, in Korean, that I move from the space he had the day before.
I put my hand on the table. “C’est ma place.” My place.
We stand staring at each other, in a game of kitchen chicken. A slight Korean woman starts talking to him, apparently taking my side. He takes the place at which I worked yesterday. She smiles at me. “Merci bien,” I tell her.
Shifting three feet down the worktable changes everything. Across from me now is Benita, a round Spanish woman who wore thick bandages through most of Basic Cuisine. She sliced her palm open the first week of school. Just as it healed, she burned both hands by grabbing the lid of a hot braising pan just out of the oven.
On the other side of Jovina is twenty-two-year-old Brian, who used to work as a line cook at a California yoga retreat. He saved for two years to afford the tuition here. Across from him is Elena, a shy beauty from Madrid. The banter changes from Spanish to English.
We’re making lapin mijoté aux carottes fondantes, a stew made with rabbit legs braised in wine with carrots. Halfway through class, I look at Jovina. She is going on like everyone else, boning rabbit legs, preparing sauce, turning vegetables. I cannot think how I would cope, knowing Mike was far away, walking daily in body armor in one of the most dangerous places in the world.
The Iraq war has never felt personal to me, partly because I never understood it. Living abroad, I was not in the United States when the arguments for war unfolded. I was in London, where a million people—including many people I knew—took to the streets to protest it. News in the UK routinely covered the French military’s efforts in Afghanistan. So I never grasped the antagonism so many Americans developed for the French, epitomized by the likes of “Freedom Fries.” (Another misunderstanding: “French fries” are Belgian.) One American acquaintance was horrified that Mike and I were going to live in France. “Those frog bastards,” he said. “We should bomb them along with Saddam.”
Now in France, I’m working next to someone deeply affected by the war.
“How long has your fiancé been in Iraq?”
“Forever,” she says, looking down, chopping onions. “It’s been eleven days since we talked.” He was on his way to Karbala. “In the beginning, my parents thought it was a good thing when he went into the army because they worried we were too young to get married. But then the war in Afghanistan happened, and now there’s Iraq. I thought he’d be home by now. I thought—” she stops abruptly and looks over at me. Her eyes are wet. “It’s just the onions,” she says, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand.
Just then, the Gray Chef walks into the room. If Jovina can survive having her fiancé at war, I can achieve détente with the Gray Chef. I make a point to say loudly, “Bonjour Chef, est-ce que vous êtes notre chef aujourd’hui?” Are you our chef today? It’s a dumb question, with an obvious answer.
Chef stops, looks at me. He smirks a little. Chef means “chief” in French. He knows his place. “Oui, je suis votre chef,” he says to me directly, and adds in French, “today—and tomorrow.”
At the end of class, I present my plate. His critique is tough: my rabbit’s overcooked, my vegetables don’t look good enough, and my potato flan lacks salt. Overall, my plate is “sans rien de spécial,” nothing special.
I am undeterred. “Merci, Chef,” I say.
On the way home, a musician on the Métro plays “Imagine” by John Lennon on his violin. The words drift through my head:
Imagine there’s no countries . . .
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.
I read somewhere that any war remains an abstract concept until it has a face associated with it. For me, it’s Jovina, stifling tears over her onions.
Her knife is sharp, but her heart is elsewhere.
Things have gone wrong with the apartment on rue Étienne Marcel. The Italian manager, Arturo, speaks little English and marginal French. He interprets an innocent email the wrong way. We are baffled how “we are looking forward to moving into the flat” and “you should receive our wire transfer on Thursday” could incite such hostility.
“You are a bad man,” he begins an email to Mike in response. The email tosses a slew of insults against us and Americans in general, ending with “I could keep your money, and not let you move in.”
That’s when we freak out.
We’ve wired several thousand dollars to cover the three-month security deposit and the first month’s rent. We develop startling scenarios. What would be our recourse if he took off with our cash? Perhaps he’s an Italian shyster who has signed up several hapless couples as “tenants”? Or, now convinced that we are “bad” people, could he find a legal loophole to keep our money?
Mike crafts a careful response, in French and English. This prompts more emails in return, each increasingly venomous—all directed toward Mike.
For those who believe in such things, Mike has what astrologers consider a typical Cancer male personality. He’s loyal, trusting, and honest to a fault. The worst thing anyone can do is to question his integrity. Arturo’s messages do just that. So by Thursday night at 7:00 p.m., when we are to move in, the typically sanguine Mike is ready for fisticuffs. An irate Arturo answers the door.
“Do you want a Nescafé?” he asks us through gritted teeth as he leads us to the kitchen. We shake our heads. He paces. He makes himself some instant coffee. A friend of his shows up, in case we untrustworthy people try anything. His friend sits limp in the chair, saying little, a long, mauve-colored scarf wrapped closely around his throat. Arturo offers him Nescafé. He doesn’t want any either.
Finally, Arturo sits down. “In the kitchen here, you seem all right. But I am upset,” he begins. “I don’t know how I feel about you living here. But if you do, I will be like a French landlord: I will not help you with anything.”
Mike, who has been sitting in his chair like a coiled snake, springs to life. “Well, I am upset, too!” I’ve never seen him angry. “You said TERRIBLE things to me in email! Why would you want to rent to someone who is as bad as you say that I am? Why would we want to live here?” They stare at each other, the anger palpable. Across the table, Arturo’s friend raises his eyebrows.
Arturo is a college student in his late twenties. He had been living in this amazing apartment, a place he could never afford, until his uncle told him to rent it. Maybe we are not the ones with whom he’s angry.
“Arturo, why did you agree to rent to us in the first place?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You seemed like a nice couple.”
“Do you think that your uncle would approve of us as tenants?” He nods. “So why do you now think that we are bad?” He shakes his head. “We have done everything you requested. We got insurance. We sent our money as fast as we could. We have shown faith.”
Arturo gets up and paces the kitchen again like a caged panther. “Are you sure you don’t want a Nescafé?” he asks. He opens cupboards, looks in them, and closes them. He sits back down. “Maybe my English not so good,” he begins. “But you also made me mad,” he says, nodding toward Mike.
“That’s OK. We are sorry about that,” I say quickly before Mike can respond. “Let’s agree that it was a misunderstanding, and no one’s at fault.”
He grabs at this. “Yes, I misunderstand you, but that wasn’t my fault. You see that?” He gets up again and puts the kettle on. “You do not want Nescafé?” he asks me. Mike doesn’t drink coffee; I loathe instant.
“I’d love one,” we say in unison. Twenty minutes later, we’ve signed the rest of the rental papers. Arturo has calmed. His friend still hasn’t uttered a word. We think we’re done, but then there’s the état à louer, the “state of the rental.”
For this, the landlords have supplied Arturo with an exhaustive inventory of everything in the apartment, complete with hand drawings: every fork, each dish, the hand towels, every one of 414 books, some 87 figurines, 22 framed photos, 11 decorative bowls, 7 plants, and a one-eyed gargoyle inlaid in plaster over the door. A missing teaspoon prompts a panicked call to Rome. Even with Arturo’s friend helping, it takes more than two hours.
When we shut the door behind them, we breathe a sigh of relief. Then, we both blurt out that we could use a drink.
We head to the closest bar, a safe, quiet, elegant one with an American name: Joe Allen. As we sit down, we meet two shoe salesmen from Brittany.
“Is no one in Paris French?” one of them asks, smiling, when they hear our American accents. They insist on buying us drinks and then lead us to Le Tambour, an all-night hangout nearby.
Le Tambour is the opposite of Joe Allen. It’s a smoke-filled dive packed with locals, decorated with old Métro paraphernalia. Pierced guys with Mohawks sit shoulder to shoulder with men in business suits. The shoe salesmen squeeze us in at a crowded table and introduce us as their new friends. Mike heads to the bar to get a couple bottles of wine for the table. He does not return.
Mike thinks he’s done a good job ordering the Côtes du Rhône. But his request is greeted with a stern “Non” as the bartender crosses his arms in defiance. The scene attracts the interest of patrons around the bar.
The bartender reaches high atop a stack of wine crates. He brings down a dusty old munitions box covered in drab olive burlap. On the side are stenciled the words “No Service for English or Americans.”
“Well, then, what are you having?” Mike says.
After a short pause, and with the crowd quiet and attentive, the bartender produces a shot glass and a bottle of clear liquid that curiously contains a full-sized pear. Without a word, he pours a shot for himself.
He looks Mike in the eye and produces another glass, pours, and slides it Old West-style across the bar to Mike. “C’est très fort,” he says, following in English, “It’s from Normandy, do you like it?”
Mike, feeling he is defending the fortitude of all Americans, drinks it down.
“C’est bon . . . . it’s great,” he says. The crowd applauds.
The bartender reaches for another bottle, this time Calvados. As he pours another round, the bartender explains that the sign is from World War II. After the Allied forces liberated Paris, the French women flocked to the American soldiers.
“This was one of the few bars where Frenchmen had a chance to meet a French woman,” he says. They then talk and drink for hours. The bartender refuses to let Mike pay for anything.
La Poêlé de Normandie
PAN-ROASTED HENS IN CALVADOS SAUCE
Serves two to four
This recipe employs extra chicken wings to extend the sauce’s flavor, a common practice at Le Cordon Bleu. Use a heavy ovenproof pan large enough to hold both birds. Each hen can be a single serving for a healthy appetite, or you can use half if serving it as part of a larger meal. The Calvados butter may be made a day ahead. Craft it with simple brandy if you don’t have Calvados.
2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
1 tablespoon Calvados or brandy
½ teaspoon + 1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 Rock Cornish hens
Coarse salt, ground black pepper
1 teaspoon granted lemon zest
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 or 5 chicken wings, chopped into pieces
1 medium carrot, chopped (about ¼ cup)
1 medium onion, chopped (about ½ cup)
1 rib celery, chopped (about ¼ cup)
4 shallots, chopped
3 sprigs thyme
1 bay leaf
½ cup (125 ml) white wine
1 tablespoon Calvados
1 Golden Delicious apple, cored, chopped
1/3 cup (75 ml) chicken stock
1 tablespoon butter
4 ounces (125 g) mushrooms, sliced
½ cup (125 ml) cream, heated (optional)
Preheat the oven to 350°F/200°C. Make the Calvados butter by blending the warmish butter with the alcohol and ½ teaspoon thyme. Refrigerate the Calvados butter for at least a half hour after mixing; if warm, it will be slippery and difficult to work with. Rinse hens with cold water and pat dry with a paper towel. Carefully work your fingers under the skin and rub the cold Calvados butter directly on the meat. Season the interior of each bird with salt, pepper, lemon zest, and the rest of the thyme. Truss or tie with string to keep their shape. Season the outside with salt and pepper. Set aside.
In a large Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over high heat. Add the wings and sear until well browned. Reduce heat to medium, add the carrots, onions, celery, half the shallots, thyme, and bay leaf, and sauté until the vegetables are softened. Add the white wine and Calvados and reduce by half. Add half the chopped apple and place hens on top. Add the chicken stock, cover, and cook in the oven for about one hour, basting every twenty minutes. The hens are cooked when their internal heat registers 170°F/ 76°C.
Meanwhile, melt butter in a sauté pan. Add the rest of the shallots and stir until softened. Add the mushrooms and cook until lightly browned. Add the rest of the apple and cook until softened. Remove from pan and set aside.
Untruss cooked birds and cover with foil to keep warm. Strain the cooking liquid from the pan through a mesh sieve into a saucepan. Simmer over medium heat to thicken, skimming if needed. Add the sautéed apples and mushrooms and, if desired, whisk in the warmed cream.