CHAPTER 27
AN AMERICAN HOSPITAL IN PARIS
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: PREPARING FOR THE FINAL EXAM, VEAL, PIGEONS, AND TROUBLESOME KIDNEYS
The pain is blinding. It feels like someone stabbed me in my right side.
I let out a gasp. I lose my balance and grab the edge of the worktable during our afternoon practical, right in the middle of pigeon rôtis sur crème de céleri. Despite the heat in the kitchen, a chill runs through me.
From across the table, Jenny’s maternal instincts kick in. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. . . . It’s nothing,” I say, trying to stand upright in a sudden wave of exhaustion.
“Bullshit,” she says. “You’re hunched over like an old lady, and your face is as white as a sheet.”
I can sense that I’m beginning to sweat, and a lot—Nixon-in-his-second-term kind of sweat. I’ve had a nagging pain in my side for the last few days, but now it has shifted around to my back. I had hoped it would just go away. Now, it feels as if something is attacking me inside with daggers and a vengeance.
Please don’t let me be sick, I pray silently.
The sharp pain eases into a dull, throbbing ache. I try to pretend nothing is wrong, even smiling and humming as I finish my chestnut-and-truffle garnish. Chef Bouveret gives my plate a thumbs-up. Margo, Jenny, and Isabella give me worried looks as I walk out the kitchen door. “I’m fine,” I assure them.
Two hours later, I am in the emergency room at the American Hospital in Paris.
It’s a quiet evening at the hospital, housed behind a handsome brick façade nestled on a leafy, broad side street in the plush Neuilly-sur-Seine neighborhood on the western edge of Paris. Founded in 1906 as a nonprofit endeavor to serve the burgeoning American expat community, it’s now recognized as one of the top private hospitals in Europe.
Mike insisted I go. And now he steadies me as we walk through the main lobby toward the emergency room. I notice black-and-white photos lining the wall. Several show old Red Cross vehicles, from the hospital’s days serving Allied troops during the world wars. In French, I give my name and address; but I can’t remember the French word for “pain” when asked for my symptoms.
“It’s douleur,” prompts the receptionist, a pretty young French woman. “You’re American? You are not well. We will speak your language. You have enough trouble being sick.” She leads us into a massive exam room, big enough for perhaps four beds but holding just one on the right side of the room and a large desk to the left.
Mike and I appear to be the only visitors to the ER tonight. In walks the nurse, looking at my chart. She’s got a wide smile and a mess of curly black hair.
“Yes, Mrs. Klozar?” she asks. Why are people in hospitals always confusing me with Mike’s mother? Oh, right, that’s me now, according to my passport.
“Sit up here,” she says, slapping the bed. I crawl on top. “You’ll need to get into a gown. You want this handsome guy to leave?” She winks at Mike.
“I think I’ve seen everything she’s got to hide,” he says. Without asking, he comes to the bed, unzips my boots, and gingerly removes the first one.
Perhaps fresh from his own injury, he’s figured that it’s hard for me to bend down to do it myself. The nurse watches.
“So nice, maybe I would like one of those,” she says, nodding toward Mike.
“These boots?” Mike asks.
“No, a husband,” she adds, as she pulls up the cart of blood-sample needles. “You are married long, yes?” I start to explain how we were friends, and then we started dating. She interrupts with a rehearsed singsong phrase, “I don’t know what you’re saying, my English is not so good! I know only a little!”
Then the doctor enters the examining room in a whirlwind.
“Hello, hello, hello!” he says, smiling broadly as he offers us each his hand to shake. “Please, please, sit down over here.” He skirts the desk and looks over the nurse’s notes. He runs a hand through his salt-and-pepper mound of hair. Then, he settles his gaze on me. “Tell me about your symptoms,” he says. I give him the list: chronic abdominal pain, sweating, fever, chills, and overall lethargy. “When did this start?” A few days ago, I say.
“Any back pain?” Maybe a little, I tell him. He gets up and walks around the desk. Without comment, he pokes me in the back, near the waist. I screech and nearly jump out of the chair in pain. Mike lurches back in his seat at my reaction.
“I thought so,” the doctor says. “We’ll do some tests.”
Within an hour, they draw my blood, take a sample of my urine, and put me through both a CAT scan and an X ray. This is all too familiar. Three months ago, I was the one holding Mike’s hand while he was tied up to an IV and stuck with needles. Now, he’s holding mine. I know the vow says “in sickness and in health,” but is it necessary to test this so early into our marriage?
Results in hand, the doctor sits down with me and patiently goes through every one of my results, something a doctor has never done with me before.
“You have a kidney infection, and a fairly serious one,” the doctor explains. He’ll give me a shot of antibiotics tonight. I can go home, but I’ll need to return for two more shots and take some other medications. I’m to stay off my feet for a week. But it will take another six weeks to recover, and it will be possibly six months before my kidneys return to normal.
“But Mrs. Klozar, if you don’t respond to the antibiotics within three days or you get any worse, we will have to admit you,” he says. “A kidney infection is nothing to fool around with. Why did you wait so long to come in?”
They give us the CAT-scan negatives (“You paid for them,” the doctor says) and a bill for six hundred euros for everything. We never cease to be amazed by the economics of medicine outside the United States. Mike’s CAT scans had cost around two thousand dollars each.
On the taxi ride home, the shot of antibiotics takes effect. The scenery whizzing by melts into a haze. I don’t remember how I get there, but I wake up in bed the next day. As I awake, reality hits me.
I’m allowed four absences, and I’ve had two. I have four more classes plus the final exam one week from now. Then there’s the written test, being held this afternoon. To miss that would be an absence, too. I decide I can manage sitting at a desk. Over Mike’s protests, I get dressed for school. “It’s ten percent of my grade,” I keep telling him. Tomorrow is the five-hour practice, working in a kitchen for the final exam. It’s been years since a student missed it. If I miss that, how will I be able to graduate?
After years of resisting, the Paris school begrudgingly agreed to provide a written test. We’ve been advised there’s “no way to prepare for it.” Rumor has it that it’s the same written test as in the London school. However, our curriculum isn’t identical. As I ease into a chair, I’m presented questions in both English and French.
Immediately, I know I’m going to fail.
“Where does Sarawak pepper come from?” Have we ever used it?
“What is vergeoise?” I learn later from a Google search that it’s a type of brown sugar. It was used once in an early Intermediate demonstration.
So it continues. Some are fair, such as, “When should you salt vegetables?” Others are debatable, such as, “What is the proper temperature for roasting beef?”
For the next hour, most students squirm around in their seats. My side nags with pain. Afterward, I gingerly make it down the stairs. Every step hurts.
A Canadian student named Margaret finished well ahead of everyone else. I ask how she knew everything. “I realized I didn’t know any of it,” she says. “It made me so angry that I just guessed at random and went down for a smoke.”
The ever-competitive Margo was apoplectic. She’d tried to study, reviewing tomes by Escoffier and our French/English cooking definitions. “Wasn’t that test a little slice of heaven?” she asks sarcastically. I don’t answer. “Are you worried about the final?” Margo asks.
“All I want to do is go home and lie down,” I say.
That night, we go back to the hospital for my second shot of antibiotics. “At least we can cross this part of town off the map,” Mike says.
After another hazy drive home, I’m back in bed. I sleep for eleven hours.
The next day is the five-hour practice for the exam. I am as shaky as a newborn calf. Just getting ready to go to school exhausts me. “I can’t do it,” I tell Mike.
He’s relieved. “You’re not supposed to be on your feet, remember? Why don’t you go back to bed?” I fall into a troubled sleep punctuated by a series of anxiety dreams.
In the first dream, my planned celery and salsify flan melts into a creamy heap of mush. Next, my en croûte pastry burns, turning black. In the last, I keep plating my food but somehow never get done, like the famous Lucille Ball scene in which she tries to keep up with the chocolates in the factory.
I wake up in a cold sweat, hearing my phone ringing.
“Darling, it’s Isabella, I’m here with Chef DuPont. I told him you were sick. He wants to know how you’re doing. Here, he wants to talk to you.”
Oh, shit. “Bonjour, Chef,” I say.
“Bonjour, ma petite amie,” he starts and goes on in rapid French. I don’t understand.
“Pardon, répétez, Chef?” I ask.
More rapid-fire French, then “Au revoir, ma chérie.”
Isabella comes back on.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He was saying it’s a disadvantage that you couldn’t be at the practice, so he will look over your recipes and plans and advise you personally,” she says. “He said to bring them to school, and he’ll talk to you about them after class.” I’m amazed—that’s so nice of him to offer.
“Oh, dahrling, it’s so sweet. He’s genuinely concerned about you.”
That evening, before heading to the hospital for my shot, we decide to get some dinner in the Seventeenth. Mike’s found a beautiful little bistro. We toast to my health—the doctor said that I can drink some wine even on antibiotics—and then share a slab of chateaubriand. After our final visit to the emergency room, I take a last hazy ride home.
Another round of anxiety dreams haunts me all night. The one I remember the most: a call from the school, saying that I failed my exam. “I’m sorry, Meeze Fleen,” I imagine the chief administrator, Madame Sofia Rousseau, saying in her charming accent. “But theeze eeze going to be a very difficult conversation. . . .”
A few days later, I am back at school. I meet with Chef DuPont and give him my menu and sketches of my planned final plate. His advice is concise. I’d planned a flan; he advises against it. I had two white or beige side dishes; he says to avoid that, too. Color, think of how the colors interact on the plate, he says. He told us not to do puff pastry, but I’m pretty good at it now.
“C’est tentant,” he says. It’s tempting, but don’t do puff pastry.
Then he asks about my health. I’m all right, I say. After a few more minutes, he gives me a quick hug around the shoulder. “You’re gre-at,” he says in his exaggerated American accent, usually reserved for class. It’s funny, but it hurts to laugh.
Antibiotics are remarkable. Only a couple of days after that, I’m in our kitchen. It’s filled with produce from a shopping trip with Isabella on rue Montorgueil. Mike lugged it all upstairs. I’ve bought enough stuff to practice my exam menu at least twice.
I decide on a Normandy-style approach. My final menu:
Fillet of veal in pastry, stuffed with apples, celery, and mousse de fois gras with Calvados sauce
Endive flowers with marinara sauce
Whipped cauliflower with salsify and roasted garlic
Chanterelle mushrooms sautéed with parsley
For a special garnish, I’ll finish the plates off with tomato roses to lend each more color. Heeding the chef’s words, I decide on a mock brioche for the pastry, the light puffy number that requires only five minutes of hard kneading and an hour to rise.
But making anything en croûte is tricky. The ovens have been acting up in some kitchens and won’t be serviced until after the break. It could be problematic to rely on them. The dish will take longer to cook in pastry, and once it’s cut, that’s it. There’s no going back into the oven. I know some students will likely cut the veal into medallions and sauté. I stick with my plan anyway.
To stuff the veal, I make a fine dice of the golden apples, celery, and onions and sauté gently, deglazing with the Calvados. Once cooled, this mixes with the required mousse de foie gras.
“Hmmm, I like it better without the foie gras,” Mike says, tasting it.
“Sorry, it’s required,” I tell him.
This mixture gets smeared onto the trimmed veal fillet, now sliced open for easy stuffing. I tie it off with kitchen string into a squat roll and then sear it to get it browned. Once cooled, this gets wrapped in a rolled-out rectangle of mock brioche, brushed with egg wash, and baked.
The salsify and cauliflower will be cooked in milk and then put through a food mill with roasted garlic. The chanterelles get a quick sauté in butter and are then tossed with parsley.
The endive flowers take me a while to figure out. Braised endive has been a household favorite since it was first demonstrated back in Intermediate. After simmering endive in butter, lemon, and chicken stock, I make a cup of the leaves with a marinara sauce to offset their slightly bitter flavor, nestled into a carved carrot stem.
The plan is for my plate to show off several techniques: pan-braising, sautéing, pureeing, making pastry, searing, and roasting. It’s not the most original plate, but I think I can get it done in four hours without seriously screwing anything up, and that’s what counts.
On round one, it takes me six hours. Mike, Isabella, and a few gathered friends happily eat up the results.
Round two, the next day, takes me five. Mike eats it, but with less enthusiasm. I notice that he loads up on the endives.
I set a plate from round three in front of him. He just eyes it. “Just how offended would you be if I went out and got a slice of pizza?” he asks, then eats it anyway.
Chef DuPont leads us through the final demonstration. But we are weary now. Some of us don’t even takes notes. All we’re waiting for is the exam.
I realize that I am sitting in exactly the same spot where I sat during the first demonstration in Basic, the one that L.P. saved for me next to LizKat.
What a different person sits here now. I’m following the chef in French. What I learned those first few days at school now seems like second nature. He takes an onion, cuts it in half, and starts to dice it the way we’ve been taught.
A Venezuelan TV crew bursts into the room unannounced. A woman producer leads them, her head a solid helmet of glossy hair. She asks Chef DuPont if he speaks English.
“Very good,” he says and then laughs. The class laughs, in on his joke.
“Great!” she says. “What are you making?”
“Yes,” he says. The class roars its approval. After a few minutes, the crew leaves. “Bah-bye,” the chef says, waving.
After a show of pan-cooked Saint Pierre and pasta made of vegetables, we’re done. In addition to our usual taste, the assistant hands out plastic tumblers filled with champagne. There are some hugs and a few photos. I have mine taken with Chef DuPont.
The night before the exam, stressed out and worried, I decide to do yet another four-hour practice. I time myself on how long each step takes. Using my training in project management, I stay up until 1:00 a.m. writing out a full time line:
9:00 Arrive, unpack, set up. Boil two pans of water and milk
9:10 Cut up cauliflower and salsify for puree, put in water/milk
9:15 Trim the veal
9:25 Brown the veal trimmings for sauce, cut mirepoix for sauce
9:40 Brunoise apple, celery, and onion for stuffing
And so on. Four hours of this. I even set myself a couple of key “mile-stones.” For instance, I know that I have to start my brioche dough by 11:15 a.m., or I won’t finish on time. The veal has to go into the oven no later than 12:15 to give it enough time to cook and, crucially, enough time to rest before I slice it.
Mike goes to sleep before I get done, thereby escaping a late-night plate of stuffed veal. I finally sit down to write out all the recipes—in French—finishing at 2:00 a.m.
“That’s all I can do,” I say, putting everything by the door. Tomorrow, I’ll take the exam, and with that pass or fail Le Cordon Bleu.
If I don’t pass, have I truly failed? I had thought I wanted my obituary to note that I had graduated from Le Cordon Bleu. Maybe I sold Gladys Smith short, like her obituary. Maybe she lived a very rich life, one that couldn’t easily be measured or graded. I’ve learned a great deal and met so many people here. But as Julia Child told me, I’ll never know everything about anything, especially cooking, which is something I love. Mike says the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.
I have so much more to learn about everything.
Chicorées Frisées Classique
CLASSIC BELGIAN ENDIVES
About six servings as a side dish
In France, endives are a common yet cherished commodity, and this is a classic, simple preparation. Don’t skimp on the butter, and be sure you serve extra bread to sop up the sauce. For my final exam, I wrapped the endives around a sort of marinara sauce to form small packets. I’ve since used the same combination on slices of toasted French bread as an appetizer. You can use the tomato sauce from the grilled-pizza recipe on pages 156-157.
8 Belgian endives, sliced in half lengthwise
3 tablespoons butter
1½ cups (125 ml) chicken stock
1 tablespoon brown sugar
¼ cup lemon juice (juice of ½ lemon)
Salt, pepper to taste
Slice off discolored portion of the hard root end of each endive. With a paring knife, remove the tough triangular core.
Melt butter in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the endives, cut-side down, and cook for two minutes or until endives are very browned but not burned, then turn over carefully. Cook a further four or five minutes, until butter gets very brown but not burned. Adjust heat if necessary. Add stock, brown sugar, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Bring to a simmer, lower heat, and cover. Cook about twenty minutes, until tender and browned.