CHAPTER 21
BACK IN BLEU
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: FISH WITH INDIAN SPICES, THE DANGERS OF A BROKEN HEART, MOVING TO BELLEVILLE
As promised, I’m back in Paris. But I’m alone.
Mike and I planned to return to France together, move into the apartment on rue Étienne Marcel, and pick up where we left off. But of course, life doesn’t always follow the recipe.
Not content with his other dangerous pastimes of driving motorcycles and flying small planes, Mike decided to take up paragliding, a sport where you fly off mountains with a high-tech parachute wing. A good friend of Mike’s who has great passion for the sport took him on as one of his first students.
Two weeks before I am to leave for France, I get a call from Mike.
“How did the flying go today?” I ask.
“Well, I had a good flight, but the landing wasn’t so great,” he says. “Hakan is taking me to the hospital to get checked out. I’ll see you tonight.”
My heart dropped a bit, but the problem sounded minor.
I had no idea.
It had been a perfect day for flying, the blue sky dotted with paragliding wings resembling bright-colored jellyfish floating high above Tiger Mountain, outside Seattle. Although many beginning paragliders learn there, it’s a technically challenging place to fly.
“You’re going to do fine,” his instructor reassures Mike as he prepares for only his second flight off the launch. “Just do exactly what I say, and you’ll soar.”
Mike hooks into his red, white, and blue wing, checks his harness, then inflates the giant kite above him, his wing gently lifting him into the sky. In the air, it’s quiet, with the mountain behind him and a forest of dense old-growth cedars below.
“Fly back toward the mountain,” Mike hears on his radio, so he obediently makes a 180-degree turn. As he turns he sees he is perilously close to the mountain and struggles to turn away. But he finds himself caught up in what paragliders refer to as a “downwind demon,” a ferocious tailwind that has caught his wing, hurling him toward the mountainside and a patch of dense 150-foot-high trees.
His wing catches the treetops, and he plummets through the tall cedars, grasping at branches as the sharp limbs rip his cloth wing to shreds. He lands hard on his back. Checking his legs and arms, he’s amazed that nothing seems broken. As he lies stunned and breathless, his radio crackles.
“So are you on the ground?” he hears his instructor say. “Was the landing a thing of beauty?”
Mike answers, “Yeah, I’m on the ground, and it was something. . . .”
“Where are you?” asks his instructor.
Mike doesn’t know. The sun is setting quickly, and he is deep under a canopy of dense forest in a state park with no roads or trails, just steep, treacherous hills. He stuffs the pieces of the wing into its bag and hikes down, keeping an eye out for bears, cougars, and other animals that lurk in the woods there, fully aware that it will soon be too dark for him to navigate, and he’ll be left hopelessly lost with no way for anyone to find him. After two hours, he hears a dog bark and goes toward it, emerging in someone’s back-yard. As he waits for his friends to retrieve him, the surge of endorphins and adrenaline wears off, and Mike realizes something is wrong.
Soon, he’s admitted to the cardiac care unit. I rush to the hospital.
“Mrs. Klozar?” the doctor asks. I almost don’t respond—no one has ever called me that. “Your husband is lucky to be alive.” He explains that the fall broke Mike’s sternum, but, worse, he has a traumatic aortic injury caused by a contusion to the aorta wall. They need to keep him in the CCU for observation.
“His aorta is scraped, and if it ruptures he could bleed to death internally in minutes,” the doctor says. “So we’ll keep him here for seventy-two hours.”
Just then, a counselor approaches me and touches my arm. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Klozar, does your husband have a living will? We need that.” She hands me brochures about do-not-resuscitate orders and medical directives. I hide them in my purse.
I walk into the room in a daze, not knowing what to expect. I see his friend Hakan standing next to Mike’s instructor, their faces white with worry. But Mike looks like himself, except he’s accessorized by an IV and a host of monitoring machines.
“I guess my landings need a little work,” he says to me, joking. It’s so Mike. I sit on the bed and hold his hand. I’m trying to hold back tears again. “I’m sorry about this, Kat.”
“Well, I did say I would stick around for better or for worse,” I tell him.
But this is worse. It is the longest weekend of my life. When I go home that night, I don’t have to search for his living will. The envelope from the lawyer with our updated man-and-wife documents arrived just a couple days earlier. I open it and look at his living will, signed with his neat signature. This is not supposed to happen to newlyweds.
When he finally arrives home, I don’t want to go to Paris. He’s in agony sitting up or lying down. But he insists that I go.
“I’ll be there in three weeks,” he assures me.
It’s a sweltering day in late August when I return to Paris. Heat rises from the sidewalks in great waves of steam. Everywhere, the hot air presses my skin like in a sauna. I pull a mighty suitcase up the escalator at Les Halles train station and head down the familiar side street toward rue Étienne Marcel.
The Italians who own the apartment took up residence over the summer and plan to stay until the end of September, so it will not be ours again until then.
An elegant, thin man wearing a beautiful sage-green silk shirt and a well-kept goatee answers the door. “Buon giorno, bonjour, Kath-a-leen-uh!” he says. “I’m Niccolò,” he adds, pronouncing it in a way that only Italian can. Then he looks around.
“Where is-a Mike?” he asks.
My throat still clenches at the question. I had second thoughts all the way up to the departure gate at the airport and beyond. When I landed at Charles de Gaulle, I debated getting on another plane and heading straight back to Seattle.
“Um, he had an accident,” I say. “But he’ll be all right. I know he will.”
Niccolò looks genuinely concerned. He offers to tug my luggage up to the fourth floor.
Unlike horrible Arturo, the owners Alberto and Niccolò turn out be charming, thoughtful hosts who can’t do enough for me. They ply me with fresh espresso and melon slices, and there’s not a single mention of Nescafé. They smile constantly, almost beaming. Alberto has huge, expressive brown eyes and a propensity to talk with his hands. Yet everything about him is graceful, from his chic, fawn-colored silk shirt with brown linen trousers to the way he crosses his legs when he sits.
For the month of September, they’ve offered us rental of another apartment they’ve just acquired as an investment, a pied-à-terre in Belleville, on the eastern edge of Paris. It’s about an hour-long commute to Le Cordon Bleu, one requiring three separate Métro lines. But if it means that eventually we’ll be back on Étienne-Marcel, it’s worth it.
The Italians help me pack my bags into a taxi and head to Belleville. I’ve never been to this part of town. As the taxi navigates onto its main drag, my impression is that this is an area that feels like it’s willfully resisted gentrification.
The edges of the Nineteenth, Twentieth, Tenth, and Eleventh arrondissements come together at a point here. It’s a notable metaphor, as Belleville is a mixed neighborhood, serving as home to mostly poor denizens of former French colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Their presence and poverty strike me as the unforeseen residue of France’s flings with imperialism. When they were busy taking on colonies, they didn’t consider the implications. Today the government struggles to cope with the offspring of the people they conquered, not in some faraway land but as a marginalized populace in their own country.
For now, all I can take in are the Chinese, Arabic, and Vietnamese signs hovering above a variety of shops, often next to boarded-up store-fronts and in scruffy buildings, some of which have been hit with fits of graffiti. Once in Belleville, we turn down rue Rambuteau and get out of the taxi. The apartment is in a building that houses the local police station, now closed for renovation. The street itself is notable for ending at the butte of Parc de Belleville, the second-highest point in Paris, after Montmartre.
“You knowuh, Edith Piaf was a leetle girluh arounduh the corner from here-uh,” Niccolò says as he tugs my suitcase up the five flights of stairs, the stairwell a patchwork of plaster in various states of repair. Then, he and Alberto open the door.
Like Étienne Marcel, this apartment carries their elegant stamp. Although small, no part of the 350 square feet has been wasted. Gilded paintings of the last emperor and empress of China flank a smart, slip-covered sofa. There’s a gleaming antique desk, a deep-hued oriental rug, built-in bookcases, closets, and cabinets with exquisite molding. The bed is built into the wall under a shelf, making it appear more daybed than bed; it pulls out at night to reveal a full mattress. Four traditional French windows flank either side of the apartment, bathing it in light.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, and we exchange hugs before they leave.
There’s no phone in the apartment. But I have my French mobile phone from our last trip and call Mike.
“Hi, handsome,” I say. It is hard to keep my voice light.
“So there is one good thing about the accident,” Mike says. “Now I’ll be here to go to James and Amy’s wedding.” The friends who had gotten into that dreadful fight on Valentine’s Day had made up and set their wedding date for two weeks after the beginning of Superior Cuisine. I’ll miss it, but Mike and his broken heart will be there.
Diego is the only one of my classmates still in Paris. He’s working two nights a week at a Michelin-starred restaurant, finding odd catering jobs, and asking his parents for occasional doses of cash. It’s his birthday, so he comes over to pick me up and go out for a drink. We debate options and head to the Marais.
“This is sort of a tough neighborhood,” he says as we walk toward the Belleville Métro. We pass the skeleton of a bike, obviously once set on fire. It’s still chained to a metal signpost. “Are you sure you want to live here?”
As I turn onto rue Léon Delhomme, I feel a stab of nostalgia. I look at the stoop where the world’s smartest homeless man used to sit and wonder about him. I enter the familiar doors and start to walk past the front desk. Then, I hear a voice.
“Kathleen! Well, hello!” Anne the translator smiles broadly and comes around the desk. “Back for Superior Cuisine? Did you get married?” I nod affirmatively to both questions. “Excellent,” she says, “You’re going to enjoy this part.”
“Being married or Superior Cuisine?” I ask.
She laughs. “Both, I’d expect.”
I think about those horrific seventy-two hours at the hospital but say nothing.
Since I’ve taken a break from school, Le Cordon Bleu requests that I attend orientation again. This time, the group is smaller, about sixty-five students packed into the upstairs demonstration room, the one with the windows. There’s no Japanese translator. It feels less formal.
In such a short time, many things have changed. The previous administrator retired, soon to be replaced by the director of the Ottawa school. They’ve added a written test. Uniforms and equipment shifted, too. In my Basic class, the school distributed heavy-gauge Mundial brand blue-handled knives. Now, they use Le Cordon Bleu brand Wüsthof knives. Another assistant, this time a fragile-boned Taiwanese woman, is brought in to model the uniform. As with every Star Trek movie, the uniform has been updated. It now sports an attractive blue piping on the jackets, and the more traditional bib-style apron has been replaced with one that starts at the waist. I’ll look out of place in my old gear, I think.
Halfway through, they ask everyone to introduce themselves, in either French or English, and state what they’re studying. As I watch the introductions, I notice a thin woman with a bob of shoulder-length dyed-red hair leaning against the door, dressed in a simple yet expensive-looking blue linen dress. She says that her name is Margo and that’s she’s American and returning to study Superior Cuisine. Then, it’s my turn.
“Je suis Kathleen, et j’habite à Seattle aux États-Unis,” I say. If everything’s going to be in French, I might as well start now. “Je retourne pour étudier la cuisine supérieure.”
Anne smiles at me, nodding, and then translates into English for the class.
“Kathleen lives in Seattle in the United States, and she’s returned to study Superior Cuisine.” Oh, how ironic to have my French translated into English. As she does, I feel something curious. I can feel someone staring. I turn to see Margo’s narrowed eyes on me.
We head downstairs to pick up our various course binders. After I grab mine, I head to République to a small Alsatian place, Chez Jenny, not far from the Métro. There is no point in going to the empty apartment. But as everywhere, there’s a discomfort to dining alone. All around me, couples or groups laugh together. I’ve forgotten what this is like. When a single woman dines out by herself, she must have props. Thankfully, I have my binder from school. As I study, sipping a light Riesling and waiting for my parchment-wrapped trout with mushrooms, I marvel at the recipes in between interruptions from the solicitous waiter. Odd fusion dishes mingle with almost painfully correct French cuisine. Deep-fried grapes, shrimp with coconut and lemongrass, and terrines made from foie gras. Is this really the curriculum? When I don’t find even one recipe with meat-stuffed meat, I can’t wait to get started.
My first day begins in the dark, with a wake-up call from Mike.
“Time to wake up, sweetheart,” he says gently. I ask about his recovery. He assures me that he’s getting better every day. “Only a couple of weeks, and I’ll be there.”
My commute to Le Cordon Bleu from here is a different experience; coming in from the working-class neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts this early in the morning offers a more intimate glimpse of Parisian humanity. Not all the women are thin, the men are not all well dressed, and they share a universal expression of fatigue. As we dip farther into the city, toward the more fashionable neighborhoods, the clothes improve; the women get thinner, with more stylish haircuts and impressive shoes.
By the time I get to the Vaugirard Métro, it’s light outside. I stop at a small market for a crêpe. Lonely for Mike, I order his favorite, banana and Nutella.
Lesson one of Superior Cuisine meets on the second floor. My class comprises just twenty-eight students. Most of them are young and form a tight-knit clique - like les femmes du Cordon Bleu once were comrades, bonded in the trenches of culinary school. Now, I’m an outsider.
Four of us are wearing the last year’s uniforms. Birds of a feather, we find one another. One is Margo, who has already commandeered the middle seat in the front row. Next, there’s Jenny, another American, whose husband has been dispatched to Paris for two years with his company. The last is Isabella, a beautiful girl with soft brown eyes and long hair. Her accent sounds South American.
“Come sit with us,” Margo says. She immediately starts a gentle interrogation, smiling and nodding at my answers. Had I worked as a professional cook? When did I study? Did I remember my class ranking?
Then, Chef Dominic DuPont begins. “La cuisine, c’est la sensibilité,” he says. Cuisine is sensitivity, as opposed to pâtisserie, which is more about science.
No translator. Just me, my brain, and whatever I can muster in French. I have dreaded this moment. I’m surprised to find that it’s not as difficult as I had feared.
Cooking has its own language, one that I’ve learned by osmosis via the recipes we’ve studied so far. Chefs require quick words to describe complex processes in the kitchen. When the chef says he’ll concassé the tomatoes, that one word describes the entire process of peeling, seeding, and roughly chopping the tomatoes. “Nappé” means that I should reduce a sauce and cook it, thickening if necessary, until it can coat the back of a spoon. “Mise en place” means all the ingredients are prepared and ready to combine up to the point of cooking. Every culinary student understands mirepoix as the combination of diced carrots, onions, and celery. Most Americans grow up thinking “gratiné” means “topped with cheese,” but it actually means “lightly browned.” I’ve internalized common verbs, such as “couper,” to cut, “bouillir,” to boil and “cuire,” to cook.
As he pats red spices on the back of a fillet of fish, Chef holds up his spice-colored fingers. “Le garagiste, il travaille avec ses mains; le boulanger, il travaille avec ses mains,” he says. “La cuisine c’est un métier manuel: on travaille avec ses mains.”
It’s OK to use your hands in the kitchen. A mechanic works with his hands; the baker works with his hands. In the kitchen, it’s a manual trade, so it’s all right to use your hands, as long as they’re clean. I’m so pleased and proud that I follow him—until I lose him minutes later, when he wanders off on a tangent about fish markets.
I glance at my digital recorder and make a note of the time. Technically, we’re not allowed to make audio- or videotapes of the class. (Fear that perhaps we’ll sell copies on the black market?) But I notice that I am not alone; several students have some kind of audio recorder. If I miss some French, I can go back tonight, download it on my laptop, and listen to it over and over until I understand.
The list of ingredients seems long for effeuillée de Saint-Pierre aux épices rouges, or a fish known as John Dory with tandoori spices. Forget the simple chicken and cream sauce from Basic. This calls for filleting a fish and making a sauce, two side dishes, and three complicated garnishes.
I head up to our kitchen, the grand salon, on the second floor. I’ve worked in this kitchen, the largest of the cuisine kitchens at Le Cordon Bleu, only twice. With ten students in a kitchen meant for fourteen, it feels luxurious compared to the cramped kitchens I was used to earlier. I take one corner near the dishwashing station, graced by a small window. I can see people walking on rue Léon Delhomme below. I set out my gear, now bolstered by gifts from friends: a heavy eight-inch Wüsthof chef’s knife, a fillet knife, and a quart-sized tub to hold a dozen spoons for tasting. Jenny sets up in the space across from me and Margo beside her. Isabella stands to my left. “Dahrling,” she purrs. “Do you mind if I work next to you?”
Then, in walks Chef Gaillard. His face lights with recognition.
“Ça va, mon amie?” he asks, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. I’m genuinely pleased to see him, too.
“Bien, Chef, et vous?”
“Comme ci, comme ça,” he says. Not bad.
To start, we must fillet the John Dory, which the French refer to as a Saint Pierre, or St. Peter. The name derives from the dark blotches on either side of the fish, supposedly the imprint of St. Peter’s thumb as he took a piece of money from its mouth. To me, the fish looks like a mean, grumpy old man. Not that I’m rebuking the biblical account, but I’m not clear just how St. Peter got around this thing’s spiky fins. At the top, they look like a crazy man’s hair, except they’re razor sharp; on the bottom, the fins look like a ragged goatee, except far more lethal.
Chef Gaillard tells us that we’re to split each fish between two people. I offer to fillet the fish. “Be my guest,” says Jenny. “I don’t want to go near that thing.”
I cover my cutting board with parchment and set the fish on top. Carefully, I cut behind the gills with my new, ultra-sharp knife and then guide it along the backbone. It’s a small battle, as I try to artfully tug and release the dense meat from the bones.
Chef Gaillard, prowling the kitchen, stops at my station. He peers over my shoulder, hands behind his back.
“Bien,” he says, and moves on to another student. “Non, non. Vous perdez trop de poisson,” he says, exasperated. You’re wasting too much fish.
On to the sauce. I whack the hell out of the fish carcass with a cleaver. I’ve heated a fish fumet sent upstairs from the basement. The hot fumet smells slightly sour. “Yuck,” I think before dropping my fish bones into the pot. When I taste the liquid, it is very fishy and . . . what is that? Salt. I dilute it with water, then add sliced mango and papaya. After a while, I taste again. The salt has diminished, and the fumet is now soft with the flavor of fruit.
Then, I remember the rice.
I opened my eyes wide in disbelief when I first saw the famous orange box of Uncle Ben’s brand wild rice. I added water and slid the rice into the oven and forgot all about it. Now I rush to the oven and confirm I’ve cooked the hell out of it. Merde.
I’m a Superior student vying for a diploma from Le Cordon Bleu, and I can’t cook rice? What will Chef say? I add a brick of butter and some water and set it aside, hoping it will soften.
I season the fish and sear it in hot oil. As it cooks, I finish the sauce, adding fresh cilantro. We’ve also had to sauté spinach, an odd addition, and candy limes by cooking them in water with sugar. I’m not crazy about the limes. They’re fussy work, and in the end they still taste bitter to me.
Finally, I’m done. I contemplate the presentation. I know Chef Gaillard likes a simple plate. I know he also doesn’t like too large a portion. On the other end of the table, I hear him say of Margo’s plate: “Joli, mais c’est trop de poisson.” It’s pretty, but too much fish. I carefully taste everything again as I heat my plate. I take my rice—still hard and overcooked—and mold a small amount into a ring in the center. I ladle some sauce in two crescents on either side. As I start to top the rice with the spinach, I realize the spinach is too oily. I grab a sieve, throw the spinach into it, and press hard with a paper towel. Then, I assemble it on the plate atop the sauce and then gently add a piece of the reddened fish. I top it with minced cilantro and place the limes slices around the edge.
I present it to Chef Gaillard. “Bien,” he says of the presentation. Good. He takes a small plastic spoon and tastes everything, digging under the fish to taste the rice. He hands me the small spoon. “Goûtez,” he says, his face unchanged. Taste.
I taste it. “Trop sec, Chef,” I say. It’s too dry, and I know it. We banter for a couple of minutes. The sauce has good flavor, while other students’ were too salty. The salty fumet, I think; in a week, the new basement team will know better. The spinach is good.
What’s the most difficult part of the recipe, he asks? The fish, I say. He nods.
He deems my fish cooked perfectly. “Bien, bon travail,” he says, and shakes my hand. “Re-bienvenue, ma petite amie.” Welcome back, my little friend.
Something remarkable happened—I understood everything he said.
But no matter the critique, there’s still a missing ingredient. I can’t take my day’s work home to Mike, to share with a bottle of wine. I never realized that for me, sharing with him has been an integral part of my education.
Filet de Bar au Lait de Coco et Épices Douces
SEA BASS WITH COCONUT MILK AND ORIENTAL SPICE SAUCE
Serves four
My Brazilian friend, Isabella, developed this using Colombo, a type of curry popular in the stews of West Indian islands such as Martinique. Instead of sea bass, you can also use another firm, sweet whitefish such as halibut, ocean perch, or grouper. Serve with basmati or jasmine rice. I’m partial to beer with Thai flavors, but a sharp, dry white, such as a Gewürtztraminer, would work, too.
SPICE PASTE
2 cloves garlic, minced
¾ teaspoon curry powder
¼ teaspoon saffron (6 to 8 strands)
⅛ teaspoon cardamom (ground or seeds)
⅛ teaspoon cumin (ground or seeds)
SAUCE
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon minced shallot
1 tablespoon minced ginger root or ½ teaspoon ground ginger
1 cup seeded and chopped tomatoes
½ finely sliced fresh red chili (or 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes)
2 teaspoons water
1 cup (250 ml) coconut milk
FISH
Coarse sea salt, ground pepper
1 lemon, juiced
4 sea-bass fillets (about 6 ounces each), skin intact
1 teaspoon butter
2 teaspoons olive oil
½ cup (125 ml) pineapple, diced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
¼ cup roasted peanuts, coarsely chopped
Grind ingredients for the paste with the back of a spoon in a small bowl and set aside.
Heat the oil in a small saucepan over medium-high heat and add the shallots and ginger. Stir and cook for one minute; then add the tomatoes, chili, and spice paste. Cook and stir for a couple minutes until very fragrant. Add the water and coconut milk, stirring well. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a low simmer and allow sauce to thicken.
Rub the salt, pepper, and lemon juice into the fleshy side of the fish. Over medium-high heat, heat the butter and oil in a skillet until butter foams. Add the fish, flesh-side down, and fry for a few minutes, then carefully flip. Allow fish to cook for a couple minutes, then add coconut sauce and simmer, covered, until the fish is done. Uncover the pan and allow sauce to thicken. Add the pineapple and heat through. Using a spatula, remove fish to serving plate, leaving skin in the pan. Spoon the sauce over the fish, and garnish with cilantro and peanuts.