CHAPTER 28
FINAL EXAM—SUPERIOR
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: KEEP IT SIMPLE
As usual in the mornings, a musician boards my Métro train at Châtelet, pulling a heavy amplifier on a luggage cart behind him.
As he plays, I sing along in my head:
Those were the days my friend,
We thought they’d never end.
We’d sing and dance forever and a day.
By the time I get off the Métro at Vaugirard, my heart is beating wildly. I get to school at 8:00 a.m., a full hour before my exam starts. The school is almost empty—all the exams are over except for that of Superior Group 3. In the deserted locker room, my hands shake as I put on my uniform one last time. I’ve heard we are graded on everything today, even our uniforms. I washed and ironed the one I’m wearing so thoroughly that it almost looks new. I head to the Winter Garden, carrying my gear and the thermos of hot tea Mike made me. Others begin to arrive. I spot Jenny; she looks tired.
“Did you sleep?” I ask. I hadn’t slept. My anxiety dreams plagued me again.
She shakes her head. “No, I was too wound up. I gave up at four.”
“And away we go,” I tell myself softly. I am to start ten minutes before her, so I head up to the kitchen on the first floor. Chef DuPont assigns me to the corner, the same spot where I spent most of Basic Cuisine.
For the final exam, we are assigned five to a kitchen. In mine are Isabella, Jenny, Marcus, and Demetrius, a student from another group whom I don’t know. The other half of Superior Group 3, including Margo and Suki, is in another kitchen.
On this spot, I first chopped mirepoix and filleted a fish. Here, Anna-Clare watched in horror as I dropped our shared duck. I almost expect L.P. or LizKat to walk in. Those days feel like yesterday and a hundred years ago all at once. I pull out my knives, and I start to hum.
When I asked L.P. about her own exam, she told me, “The final exam happens only once. I wanted to experience it, not rush through it.” As usual, she’s right. Like her, I do not want to hurry through this once-in-a-lifetime event.
I hear a voice behind me. “Meeze Fleen!” I turn to see Chef Gaillard at the door. Beside him stands one of the chefs on the jury for the exam, an older, gray-haired gentleman with thick glasses who is dressed for the occasion in a Cordon Bleu jacket over elegant gray trousers.
“Chef!” I walk over and shake Chef Gaillard’s hand. This final exam is a test not just of the students but also of the chefs and their ability to teach. “J’espère que je fais bien, pour vous,” I say to Chef Gaillard. I hope I do well, for you.
Chef Gaillard assures me that I’ll do fine. He wags a finger and says, “Goûtez, goûtez, goûtez,” taste, taste, taste, as if I need to be reminded to taste my food as I cook. “Bonne chance, mon amie,” and he waves good-bye. I can’t believe that I was once afraid of him.
I set out my recipes and my time line on the marble counter. I pull my filet de veau from the ingredient basket assembled by the sous-sol, trimming and shaping it until I end up with an eight-inch by four-inch oblong piece of tenderloin. As if by habit, I sear the trimmings in hot oil until they’re dark brown. To make the mirepoix once took me twenty minutes; it now takes me under five. I sauté the vegetables, taste the veal stock, and then add it to the saucepan. I taste again, and I know that this sauce will be fine.
I move on to the farce. As I chop the apples and celery, I toss the remnants into the sauce. I look across at Isabella. Like everyone else, she’s working intently, barely talking. The tension on the part of the other students is palpable, but I’m striving for Zen.
That is, until 11:00 a.m., when I panic.
Yeast, yeast, yeast . . . where’s the yeast? I search all the fridges, all the baskets.
No yeast.
I confer with Nicholas, a fellow student who has volunteered to work as assistant for our exam. A cousin of Demetrius’s, Nicholas is an affable Greek chap with a perpetual five-o’clock shadow and both ears pierced like a pirate. We both search again, with no luck. Merde, I think. I have to finish my pastry no later than 11:15 a.m. It needs at least forty-five minutes for the initial rise, then another fifteen minutes after I wrap it around the veal.
While he leaves the room to search, I measure everything else and dust the counter with flour. Minutes later, breathless, he returns with packets of the fresh yeast.
“Ah, merci bien, Nicholas!” I exclaim.
I crumble the yeast into lukewarm water to proof, taste my sauce, check the apples, and put the onions on to start my tomato sauce. I make the dough, then begin banging and slapping it against the counter. I finish it into a ball, lightly dust it with flour, and set it in a bowl above the stove to rise. It’s exactly 11:15.
I realize that, preoccupied with the brioche, I’ve burned my onions. Merde. But I planned ahead and chopped twice as many as I thought I’d need. I start them over.
At noon, I roll out the dough. All my vegetables are done or nearly finished cooking. All that’s left is to wrap my pastry carefully around the veal, now stuffed, seared, and cooled.
In one hour, my training at Le Cordon Bleu will be over.
I’ve gone through more than three hundred recipes, ninety lessons, my entire savings, and an incalculable number of calories from fat, cream, and butter. I look at my hands, scarred from a motley assortment of cuts and burns. I recall the woman from next-door-to-Cartier and think how appalled she would be at this sight. I notice my wedding ring, a simple platinum band with a nearly flawless diamond set flush in it. Mike designed it so that I would never have to take it off, especially in the kitchen. I scan the room, so familiar now yet soon to be a part of my life that I will forever refer to in the past tense. Everyone is working intently, the pulse quickening as the deadlines loom.
Soon, all of these people will go back to their lives or, more likely, go on to start new ones. I wonder how they will remember their times at Le Cordon Bleu. I start humming and then sing softly to myself.
Those were the days my friend,
We thought they’d never end.
Across the worktable from me, a drama unfolds.
Demetrius made the classic mistake, the one that Chef DuPont warned against. His menu is too complex to complete in four hours. Due to plate at 12:40 p.m. exactly, he starts rushing, making mistakes, dropping things, and even cutting himself. He’s burned a sauce for a side dish and must restart it. He starts to yell in Greek at Nicholas, who tries to calm him down.
Everything from my anxiety dreams happens to poor Demetrius. His puff pastry burns thoroughly, rendering the golden dough into a hard, black crust. When he turns over his chanterelle-mushroom flan, it collapses on the plate into an unrecognizable yellow glob. In this exam, as in any real kitchen, it’s all about timing. His is dangerously off. I wish there was something that I could do, but we’re not allowed to help each other in exams.
The drama does not end there.
Isabella pulls her veal wrapped in caul fat from the oven and slices into it. It’s almost raw. Chef DuPont snaps, “Ça n’est pas cuit!” It’s not cooked. It’s 12:42 p.m., eight minutes before she is due to present her plates.
It’s obvious what’s happened. Her oven isn’t working properly. Merde. I should have insisted she take the oven thermometer that I’d brought in. Panicked, Isabella throws the stuffed veal back into her oven and cranks the heat. She’s behind already anyway; she spent much of her exam on a complicated potato-and-mushroom galette derived from a dish by Charlie Trotter, a chef in Chicago—beautiful result, but her other vegetables suffer.
“My purée is too soft to pipe, dahrling,” she says, almost in tears as she starts to plate. She resorts to plopping a blob next to her semicooked veal.
Demeterius finishes at 12:52—twelve minutes late. Technically, after ten minutes he should have lost his chance. But Isabella is behind as well. Chef DuPont gives Demetrius an ultimatum: “Either give us your plates, or give up.”
Demetrius drops the last pieces of parsley as garnish, and Nicholas takes them away. Then Demetrius collapses, cradling his head in his arms on the worktable. He won’t let anyone near him.
The chef clucks at Isabella that she’s now five minutes late, as Nicholas takes her first plates into the jury. Then, he turns to me.
“Kathleen, cinq minutes,” and holds up five fingers.
Showtime.
I put my four plates in the oven to warm them. I hold my breath as I slice into my veal. The night before, I cut the veal wrongly, and the crust fell apart. I noticed that Marcus, the experienced chef from Canada, had cut the veal into medallions and pan-seared them instead. Why did I do meat in a crust? I knew it was risky.
The veal is reassuringly pink. I breathe again. My vegetables are fine. I pull the tomato roses from the fridge and gently place one on each plate. They’re close to perfect, but then I’d obsessively made at least thirty in the past ten days. The endives prove tricky, slipping around in my hand, which starts to shake as I spoon the bit of glistening marinara sauce into each one.
Finally, I add a last strand of chive to each of my quickly cooling plates. Nicholas takes the last one away. It is exactly one o’clock.
With that, it’s over. No more classes, no more uniforms to wash, no more Tupperware or zipbags filled with food from school. I turn to my fellow American, Jenny, raise my arms in victory over my head. “I’m finished!”
“Hold that thought for ten minutes,” she says, plotting little carrot balls around the edge of her plates. “I’ll be done, too. Right now, I’m so stressed I might pass out.”
I am happy but almost cry on the spot in a fit of stress relief and melancholy. Demetrius still has his head on his arms. I start to pack up my knives.
Students do fail final exams at Le Cordon Bleu, and they do not get diplomas. We’re reminded of this at the beginning of the test, when we verify our phone numbers. If we fail, the school promises to call within twenty-four hours to let us know. If you don’t hear anything, then you can assume you have passed.
So it is a surprise when Chef DuPont comes into the kitchen and gives me a quick hug around the shoulders. “Kathleen, c’est bien,” he says. So it was fine. It appears that I’ve passed. A few minutes later, he returns with a laminated tag. “Comme souvenir,” he says. “Souvenir” means “to remember” in French. From photos of past exams posted on the walls, I recognize it as the card that accompanies the official photo of my final-exam dish. It reads: “Kathleen Flinn, États-Unis, Août-Novembre 2005.” I put it in my bag and look up in time to see Isabella talking to the chef.
Visibly shaken, she asks whether he thinks she’s passed the exam.
“I hope so,” Chef replies curtly in French. This is too much for her. She cut her hand slicing potatoes, her veal wasn’t cooked, and she finished five minutes late. To fail puts in jeopardy not only her diploma but also an internship she’s set up at Le Doyen. Thinking of Anna-Clare, I tell her I’ll clean up her station so that she can leave quickly. I give her a hug. Steeped in depression, Isabella heads home to prepare for a houseguest from Finland.
“There’s nothing I can do about the exam now,” she says, on the brink of tears. “I’m in a bad mood, which is sad for my guest, but she’s going to have to deal with it.” I make her promise to call me. “Of course, darling, I will. Thank you.” She leaves, and I tend to both our stations. Chef DuPont returns to the kitchen as I prepare to leave. We are on our own.
“C’est bien, Kathleen. Merci pour votre travail aujourd’hui,” he says, a gentle smile on his face. You did well. Thank you for your work today. I put down my bags and knives and go to the chef.
I tell him in French, “Thank you for everything, Chef. And thank you for your kindness.” I give him a quick peck on the cheek.
“Vous êtes très gentille,” he says, smiling. You’re very kind. “Comment va votre santé?” I assure him my health is fine. “Bonne chance, ma petite,” he says, and gives me a chaste kiss on my forehead.
I go to the empty locker room and change out of my uniform for the last time. I turn out the light and gently shut the door.
Jenny, Margo, and I head to the Auvergne brasserie near school, joined by Samara. We split a bottle of champagne and two huge plates of frites and laugh and talk about the exam. Margo, the consummate competitor, finished five minutes late. Still, she was smiling and happy.
“I’ve been taking it all too seriously, I think,” she says. Yesterday, she practiced her wine-reduction sauce three times. She burned it twice. “I was so upset. I mean, I never burn my sauce. But something in me clicked. When I came in today, I decided to forget the burned sauces. I would just do my best because really, that’s all I can do.” She took a sip of champagne.
This was a shocking statement from the woman who once spent seventy euros on food-styling magazines to try to impress the chefs, and she knew it.
“Everyone learns something different at Le Cordon Bleu, and maybe this is my lesson,” she says. “Sometimes, I can’t be the best. Like today. My sauce was fine. It wasn’t the greatest sauce the judges saw, but it was what I could do today. I have to be happy with that.”
Everyone learns a different lesson. I mull it over. I wasn’t alone. The table went quiet. Then, soft-spoken Samara cleared her throat.
“You know, Le Cordon Bleu was hard for me,” she started. “I had never really done anything with my hands before. Always I studied philosophy and history, and that was my life. But it was only with my head. So here, I used my hands and my heart, because it is hard for me to separate my heart from cooking. It is so . . . .” she stops, trying to find the right word.
“Personal,” I offer, and she nods.
What is my lesson, I wonder?
Jenny and I stop by the school to pick up her stuff from the office. As we are about to leave, Madeleine Bisset, the woman I met the first day, asks me what I am going to do next.
“I might do an internship in the U.S. or London, but what I really need to do is get back to work and make some money,” I reply.
“Ah, doing your journalism writing?” she says brightly, her words flowing in her singsong accent. I nod. She pulls out a business card from her desk drawer. “Maybe you should write about going to school here, don’t you think? If you need anything, old documents, schedules, or interviews with anyone, just let me know. It’s an interesting story, Le Cordon Bleu, a lot of history here, many lessons.”
I might have to take her up on that. As I push open the door of 8 rue Léon Delhomme, I put on my Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, pull my sack of knives around my shoulders, and head out into the bright November day.
In the week between the exam and graduation, I seem to hear from everyone by phone or email. L.P. is back in England, starting a career as a chef-for-hire. Anna-Clare is moving back to Canada to be closer to her family; she’s still throwing ambitious dinner parties and happy with her corporate life yet not ruling out making a change. Sharon is married, cooking in a small restaurant in Israel. Lely sends me congrats, plus the business plan for ChezLely, her cooking school in Jakarta. LizKat is living a glamorous life in London, marketing doughnuts. I hear Amit is back at work in his father’s restaurant.
For the ceremony, we gather in the Eighth arrondissement at Cercle de l’Union Interalliée, a private club set in a massive mansion of more than twenty-one thousand square feet and formal gardens. It’s decorated in Old World decor, antiques everywhere, plush Persian rugs, walls covered with oil paintings or massive tapestries—even the ceilings are gilded with gold. In the ballroom, a motley collection of Louis-the-something chairs are set up to accommodate a temporary audience. Out of our kitchen whites now, this is our last step before heading back to the real world again.
Demetrius is there to get his diploma. Despite the ruinous exam, his daily work was strong enough to make the grade. Isabella is absent, traveling with her houseguest, but she passed, too; her excellent potato galette must have made up for the delay and the undercooked veal.
“Lobster, you look gorgeous,” I tell Suki when I see her shuffle into the room. Like several other Japanese women present, Suki is in a full ceremonial kimono, hers a lovely light blue. Her swept-up black hair looks lacquered, with an ornate spray of flowers cascading around her face. She looks like a geisha doll. She plans to return to Japan to start a cooking school for children, an oddly popular plan for the female Japanese graduates.
The main speaker is Jean Harzic, the former head of Alliance Française, an elegant man who speaks with a proper British accent. “You are entering a new life, and for many of you a life that will be greatly enriched by the fact that you are following your passions,” he begins.
“Every culture has it own approach and thought about food. The chefs hope you will take the discipline from French cuisine, the techniques and the ideas behind them, back to your own culture and country. I encourage you to mix what you’ve learned with the cuisine of your own region. Experiment, be bold, create.”
Afterward, each chef spoke, starting with Chef Gaillard.
“Voulez-vous une petite histoire?” he asks and the students roar with laughter and claps. He beams, proud of his joke.
Chef DuPont appears on the verge of tears. “You may have noticed that I am very sentimental,” he begins in French. “It will be very difficult for me to let go of you.”
Finally, it’s time for us to walk onstage to gather our diplomas from the chefs.
Janine the translator announces, “Kathleen Flinn is a journalist from the United States,” as I walk across and greet the chefs.
Chef DuPont smiles broadly and kisses me on both cheeks as he hands me the diploma, printed on an enormous piece of stiff white paper. Chef Savard places a tall, white paper toque on my head. “Bon travail,” Chef DuPont says.
I look out over the audience, the students, their families and friends. Then I spot Mike, who has slipped to the side of the stage to snap a picture of the moment.
I turn for the official cameraman and walk off the stage. Mike looks proud.
“Thank you for this,” I say, and kiss him softly. “I couldn’t . . . no, I wouldn’t have done this without you.”
After the ceremony, we retreat to a set of beautiful rooms for cocktails and flutes of champagne. For her determination, Margo ranked in the top ten of our graduating class. I congratulate her. She just laughs.
“I was surprised about that, since I finished late on my exam. But it doesn’t matter, does it?” She smiles and invites me and Mike to join her and her husband on their last night in Paris at the Café Trocadéro. “We’ll be sitting there, drinking wine, and watching the Eiffel Tower light up in strobes every hour,” she says. “We’d love you to join us.” We agree we will.
Afterward, I seek out Chef Gaillard. I thank him for being tough on me. It made me work that much harder, I tell him. He smiles, and we hug, but then he holds me back by my shoulders and looks me in the eye as he says, in French:
“Don’t forget, taste, taste, taste.”
Veau en Croûte avec Farce de Pommes et Céleri, Sauce Calvados
VEAL IN PASTRY STUFFED WITH APPLES AND CELERY,
CALVADOS SAUCE
Serves four
I prepared this for my final exam. Pork or turkey breast would work with the same flavorings; ask the butcher to butterfly the meat and give you the trimmings. The ‘mock brioche‘ recipe can be found in the ‘Extra Recipes‘ section at the end of the book (see pages 276-277), or use prepared pastry.
Prepared puff pastry or mock brioche
1 egg beaten with water (for egg wash)
1½ pounds (600 g) boneless veal, butterflied
Salt and pepper
Vegetable oil, for searing
SAUCE
Veal trimmings
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 carrot, peeled and chopped
1 celery rib, chopped
1 quart (1 l) beef or veal stock
1 tablespoon butter
Cognac or Calvados to taste
STUFFING
½ medium onion, finely chopped
1 celery rib, finely chopped
1 large apple, peeled, cored, and finely chopped
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons Calvados or cognac
¼ pound (115 g) ground pork, cooked
3 ounces (90 g) mousse of duck foie gras with truffles (optional)
Salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste
If making dough, start it first and allow it to rise. If using prepared dough, be sure to allow time for it to thaw. Trim the veal of any excess fat and season with salt and pepper. If not a uniform thickness, bang with the bottom of a pan to flatten thick areas. Set aside.
For the sauce, brown the meat trimmings in the oil. Add the onions, carrots, and celery and cook until softened, then add the stock. As you prepare the vegetables for the stuffing, toss in any trimmings, such as the apple peels. Simmer as you prepare the rest of the recipe, or until it is reduced by half.
For the stuffing, cook the onions, celery, and apples in butter over medium heat until soft. Add one tablespoon cognac or Calvados and let evaporate, scraping up the brown bits. Set aside and cool completely. Add the ground pork and the foie-gras mousse if using, the rest of the cognac or Calvados, and salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
Spread the stuffing in the center of the veal fillet and roll into a rectangular bundle. Tie with kitchen string. Sear the veal package in hot oil until brown on all sides. Remove and let cool. Pour three tablespoons of the sauce into the pan, scrape the browned bits off the bottom, and pour back into the sauce.
Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C. On a floured surface, roll out the dough into a thin circle, about ⅛ inch thick. Be sure to remove the string from the cooled meat. Wrap the veal in the dough like a present, seam sides on the bottom. Brush the pastry with egg wash. Bake for forty to fifty minutes, until a thermometer registers 150°F/65°C. (If substituting turkey for the veal, the internal temperature should read 160°F/74°C.) Let the veal rest for at least ten minutes before cutting into slices. Strain the sauce through a mesh sieve. Check seasonings. Stir in butter and cognac and whisk well. Serve the sauce alongside the meat.