CHAPTER 14
RITES OF PASSAGE
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: COMPLICATED TROUT, JULIA CHILD, AND THE HISTORY OF LE CORDON BLEU
Laying out a measuring tape on the marble work table, Tai Xing warns everyone in her kitchen: “Fifty-five centimeters. I am entitled to five-five centimeters.” She will not be denied her fair share of space.
In Lely’s group, students hoard equipment rather than share. For some reason, the Koreans at my table get in the habit of pilfering ingredients at the start of class. All this signals a subtle but important shift: classes are becoming more competitive.
One day in week three, as we study the Alsace region, the competition comes to a head.
Alsace’s expanse of fertile land in northeastern France sits on the other shore of the Rhine River from Germany. Over a history of possessive squabbling, the land has shifted between French and German rule.
Chef takes a trout for truite farcie aux morilles and clips the fins. But this time, he doesn’t go after its innards through the fish’s tender belly as usual. Instead, Chef rips the red-and-gray guts out through its gills.
“Les alsaciens parlent avec un accent allemand,” says the Gray Chef, explaining that the French in Alsace speak with a German accent.
Removing the main skeletal structure by cutting along the spine, he tugs out the bones. He stuffs the fish with finely chopped morel mushrooms sautéed with shallots, then settles it on top of parchment paper in a roasting pan, sprinkling a bit of coarse sea salt over the fish. He ladles in some fish stock and finishes by splashing Riesling wine on top. The fish braises in the oven, and the smell of the sweet wine drifts through the room.
“Chef says that in France fish are served with their heads to the left,” translates John. “It’s tradition, and customers here expect that.”
Jovina and I arrive in the kitchen that afternoon, there are no more trout. Brian, the class assistant, is baffled. “The basement parceled out two fish per student,” he says. “I don’t know where they all went.”
Someone discovers that two students have taken extra fish in case they make a mistake. Trout are fragile, and it’s difficult to pull the guts through the gills without damaging the head. The chefs, like diners, expect a trout with an attractive head. The students want a good grade, and the recipe is among the most technically challenging in the curriculum.
The students refuse to give them up. It escalates. We argue, wasting precious time. Chef Savard arrives.
“Quel problème?” he asks. Brian explains the situation. Chef orders all fish on the cutting boards. The two students with extras hang their heads. Chef Savard takes the extra trout and evenly redistributes them, shaking his head. It feels like elementary school, when the teacher has to make children share their toys.
No one does well. It’s like a surgical technique to extract the bones while leaving the fish intact. Chef Savard finds bones in everyone’s fish. He extracts a huge one from mine. How did I miss that? As for my sauce, for the first time I’ve made something too salty.
“Just pray we don’t get that for an exam,” Jovina says, peeling off her uniform in the locker room. “That was awful.” On the way home, I give my hard-won bagged trout to the world’s smartest homeless man, perched at the end of the street. I don’t wait for his critique.
Instead, I rush up to Montmartre to join Mike’s language class on one of its regular walking tours. This one is led by a French historian with a long, gray silk scarf tossed around his neck. He delights in showing off the more unusual and odd elements of Paris.
He leads us south toward the Palais Royal via a series of passages built in the 1800s. Designed to allow Parisians to shortcut dense blocks, protected from the elements and away from streets dirty from horse manure, these passages, our guide theorizes, are the precursors to modern shopping malls. Passionately, he spins tales of love, murder, deceit, and the development of department stores as the sounds of our heels echo off the worn marble floors. A soft filtered light pours through the old skylights as we pass eclectic shops teeming with eccentricities. One store sells nothing but canes.
I’m thinking of the passages when I go to school the next day. There’s a sort of passage here, too.
On my way up to the kitchens each day, I pass a huge original poster of the film Sabrina. On another wall, a yellowed press clipping from a London newspaper heralds the international acclaim of Le Cordon Bleu as “a diploma that raises the standard of cooking.” It’s dated 1927. Across from it, a smiling Julia Child in her mid-eighties looks resplendent in a magenta blazer with matching lipstick.
Every time I see the photo of Julia, I think of the two times I met her. The first was in the mid-1990s during a food writers’ workshop at a swanky West Virginia resort. On the second day of the workshop, I arrived late. Just as I sat down, I heard a familiar warble ask, “Is this seat taken?”
Julia squeezed her giant frame into the seat next to me. It was as if God Almighty had saddled up on my left.
“That salmon at breakfast was so good, I had to finish it,” she whispered in a conspiratorial tone. She took copious notes of the morning’s session. As we broke for lunch, she closed her notebook with a satisfied smile. “I always love to come to this workshop. You learn so much,” she said.
This amazed me. After all, she was Julia freakin’ Child. I assumed she knew everything there was to know about food and cooking. I politely told her so.
She laughed. “Oh, no, you can never know everything about anything, especially something you love,” she said, patting me on the knee. “Besides, I started late.”
At an evening reception, I told her the story about the short obituary and the ad for Le Cordon Bleu at my desk and my plan one day to attend her alma mater. She listened with enthusiasm.
Our paths crossed again a couple years later, while I was working for the software company.
“When are you going to Le Cordon Bleu?” she asked. Shocked that my idol remembered me, I didn’t have an answer. Instead, I changed the subject, and we talked about why her Internet connection was so slow.
Now, as I pass her photo on the stairs, I think, I’m finally here, Julia, see? I told you I’d go. I have Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1 with me in Paris.
I always thought I’d send her a photo with a thank-you note when I graduated. She died before I could.
“To understand the history of Le Cordon Bleu,” says Madeleine Bisset, “you have to go all the way back to the sixteenth century.”
Madame Madeleine Bisset joined the school shortly after it was purchased by André Cointreau. She met the school’s former owner, Madame Brassart, and attended her funeral. Madame Bisset is known for her exceptional knowledge of the school’s history. One day, I ask her about the 1927 newspaper article.
In 1578, King Henry III crafted l’Ordre des Chevaliers du Saint Esprit, or the Order of the Holy Spirit. The group of knights reigned as the most exclusive inner circle of the privileged and royal class in France, until the Revolution in 1789 put an end to that sort of thing. To its esteemed members the king awarded special medallions made of silver. King Henry had the same medal encrusted with diamonds. Each hung from a thick blue ribbon—in French, a cordon bleu.
“The king did this for a reason,” Madame Bisset says. “It seemed like an honor, and it was, but it also required these nobles to be a part of the court and encouraged their loyalty to the king.” Membership had its privileges, and among them were legendary Cordon Bleu banquets. These sumptuous long-table feasts required dozens of cooks and assistants and grew increasingly extravagant and frequent. If nobles were expected to lavish cash on parties, clothes for court, and material displays of wealth, it lessened the likelihood they’d do something bothersome, like set up their own army or invade a neighboring noble’s land.
From the feasts, the term was first applied in the realm of cuisine. By the eighteenth century, the term “cordon bleu” had evolved into shorthand for a craftsman who hit the pinnacle of his or her profession or developed impeccable skill.
When a journalist named Marthe Distel started a publication on cooking and entertaining, she naturally called it La cuisinière Cordon-bleu, “The Cordon Bleu Cook.” To prompt readership, Distel offered subscribers cooking classes taught by professional chefs. The first class met on January 14, 1895, in kitchens of the Palais Royal.
Distel’s aim was to have top professional chefs teach the classes. One chef in particular, Henri-Paul Pellaprat, had a lasting impact on the school. Chef Pellaprat joined the staff after World War I and stayed for thirty-two years. A disciple and friend of Auguste Escoffier’s, Pellaprat took on the task of codifying the school’s classic French curriculum.
On her death in the late 1930s, Distel willed the school to an orphanage. By all accounts, this turned out to be generous but misguided. The school shut down temporarily during World War II, when matters more pressing than cooking lessons loomed large in German-occupied Paris. Madame Elisabeth Brassart gave the school a fresh start by buying it in 1945, and she used her significant contacts to attract top French chefs such as Chef Max Bugnard, who taught Julia Child.
Child attended in the late 1940s, when the school was located on rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. Julia adored Chef Bugnard but loathed Brassart, whom she called a “nasty, mean woman” and a poor administrator. Brassart didn’t care much for Julia, either, saying that although she worked hard, Julia had “no natural talent” for cooking.
Years later, enter André Cointreau. He and the aging Brassart both belonged to the Club des Cent, an exclusive, celebrated dining club. He persuaded her to sell him the school in 1984. Four years later, he relocated Le Cordon Bleu to its present site on rue Léon Delhomme. An astute businessman, Cointreau injected both significant funding and marketing savvy into the operation. He purchased Le Petit Cordon Bleu in London, a school started by a former student in 1933 that had no official affiliation.
He simultaneously launched Le Cordon Bleu schools in Ottawa and Tokyo.
Expanding the number of schools is Cointreau’s core focus. In 2006, Le Cordon Bleu had some twenty-seven schools in fifteen different countries, with more opening all the time. Most are set up through partnership deals, the largest being with the Career Education Corporation in the United States. Each year, some twenty-two thousand students graduate with a Le Cordon Bleu diploma. Only five hundred of them earn it in the kitchens at the flagship school in Paris. That’s because it’s now possible to become a “Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef” in Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, and Dover, N.H. Other deals have brought about schools in Korea, Mexico, Brazil, and Australia.
Madame Bisset says, “For [Cointreau], this is a spiritual mission. Food brings people together around one table. It’s a business, certainly, but it’s also very personal.”
All of this started with a twenty-page magazine in 1895. I wonder what journalist Distel would make of it all.
I find myself alone with Lely, chatting, drinking Chablis sitting on the sidewalk during lunch. It’s remarkably warm for an early April day. We sharpen our knives as we chat, and people cast worried glances in our direction. The combination of alcohol and knives makes people nervous.
“Did you ever see Sabrina?” I ask.
She just looks at me. “Are you kidding? I saw it as a little girl. That’s part of why I always wanted to come here.” But, like me, she took a complicated route.
Ironically, she started her career in the McDonald’s corporate offices. After a decade, she got bored and started her own business and then worked for another international company that sent her to Chantilly. That was the trigger.
“I turned forty in 2003, and I wanted to give myself a BIG present,” she says, sipping her wine. “So, I quit my job and flew to Paris a month later and started at Le Cordon Bleu the day after I arrived. It was cold and dark.” She planned to stay only for Basic but was having so much fun in Paris she couldn’t leave. For the first time in her life, she feels thoroughly free.
“In Paris, nobody knows Lely,” she says. “So there is no certain image that I need to maintain. Back in Jakarta, my friends and I, we go to the same restaurants, the children go to the same schools, shop at the same malls. Wherever I go, there is a certain set of behaviors that I feel I must maintain.
“For example, in Jakarta I will not walk alone to enjoy the view,” she says. “One, because there is no view, and second, it’s unseemly and probably is not safe.”
But in Paris, it’s different. Everywhere in Paris is beautiful, and she has walked alone over much of the city. It’s as if she wants to memorize not just what she sees but how she feels being open and free.
I tell her there’s an Ernest Hemingway quote that says if you’re lucky enough to live in Paris when you’re young, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for “Paris is a moveable feast.”
She smiles and raises her plastic tumbler. “Are we still young? Oh, forget it. Of course we are. Here’s to feasting on Paris wherever we go.”
That weekend, Anna-Clare and LizKat return for a visit. We head over to Lely’s for dinner in her cramped Seventh-arrondissement apartment. Two dozen students crowd the flat, and seemingly all of them have brought food. The table is heavy with a crazy buffet ranging from sushi to fondue to the roasted-pepper bruschetta that Mike and I contribute. The highlight, though, is a slow-cooked bolognaise by an Israeli student named Sharon. Mike eats two helpings of it.
“You have to give Kat this recipe,” he tells Sharon.
Anna-Clare is back at her corporate job. “When I got back, they moved me over to a big jeweler’s account,” she says. “A year ago, I would have been thrilled, and I like it. But now, I’m starting to think one day I’ll shift my career and do something with food.”
“Just quit,” Sharon says. “Why not? I did.”
It turns out that Sharon is a corporate refugee, too. “I wanted to cook for as long as I can remember, even as a small child,” she says. She got a degree in hotel management that she never used. She somehow landed in high tech, starting as a production manager and later shifting to overseeing Internet projects.
“I liked it, but I always felt like something was missing,” she says. “I would get bored really fast and change jobs all the time. Then I turned thirty. I found myself with no job, no real motivation to look for another one in high-tech.” Her fiancé, Amir, asked why she didn’t consider cooking as a career. “The idea had honestly never occurred to me,” Sharon says. She persuaded the owner of a well-known French restaurant in Tel Aviv to apprentice her in his kitchen for three months. That chef had graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in London, so after the apprenticeship she decided to follow his path. She speaks French, so she opted for Paris. “It was almost a spur-of-the-moment decision,” she says. “Suddenly, I was here.”
Sharon and Lely’s stories remind me of the passages. All of us have made the decision to enter into this experience with abandon, unsure of where we’ll come out on the other side. Sometimes, the places that life takes us can be so unexpected.
Spaghetti Bolognaise de Sharon
SHARON’S BOLOGNESE SAUCE FOR SPAGHETTI
Serves six to eight
My classmate Sharon learned this in an Italian class she took in Israel. Very lean hamburger works best for this. You can use cheap Chianti or other red table wine. This results in a mostly meat sauce that’s common in Europe yet may be unfamiliar to Americans used to a more tomato-heavy style. If so inclined, add in the tomato sauce from the grilled pizza on pages 156-157 near the end of cooking, in place of adding the cream, for a more traditional flavor.
2 large onions, chopped (about 2½ cups)
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 pounds (about 1 kg) lean ground beef
1 bottle (750 ml) dry red wine
4 tablespoons tomato paste
1 teaspoon Italian herbs
1 cup (250 ml) heavy cream
Salt and pepper to taste, at least ¼ teaspoon of each
3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley or basil (optional)
1 pound (500 g) spaghetti, cooked and drained
Parmesan, grated
In a heavy-bottomed Dutch oven or sauté pan, cook the onions in olive oil over medium heat until softened. Stir in the garlic, add the beef, and stir until the meat cooks through and separates into crumbly pieces. Add the wine and turn the heat up so that the wine bubbles continuously. Reduce by about half. Skim off any gray foam. Add the tomato paste and stir. Cover and turn the heat down to very low, and cook for a minimum of two hours and up to four hours. Stir from time to time, scraping the bottom to ensure nothing sticks to it or burns. Shortly before serving, stir in the cream and Italian herbs. Taste, and then add salt and pepper. Let simmer uncovered another ten minutes. Taste again, adjusting seasonings as necessary, and stir in the parsley. Serve with pasta, sprinkled with Parmesan.