“Debuts” - Beginnings
I’ve eaten more butter in the last three weeks than I had in the previous six months. I’m also down a belt loop. Go figure.
With a solid two weeks in at Le Cordon Bleu, I’m starting to get into a rhythm. It’s harder than I thought it was going to be, and I figured it would be tough. It also feels like one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done. I take notes like a madman, scrawls all across the pages of my Moleskine and arrows pointing here and there, mismatched numbers down the line that I swear make sense, clarifications in the margins that are longer than the directions on the main page.
Inside LCB, every student is expected to wear a uniform. For demos and lectures, we have to wear our jacket, pants, safety shoes, and a tour de cou (a “neck tie”) which is just a white bandana tied in a four-in-hand style knot. Inside the kitchen for practicals, we add to it: a white apron that wraps almost all the way around us and hangs down to the ankles, a torchon (“tea towel,” not used for wiping or cleaning but for grabbing hot things), a calot (which is our cook’s cap) and pour moi and the other longhairs, a hair net. The uniform is expected to be clean and pressed and we are graded on it.
If you’re curious, here’s (mostly) how it works. Classes are about three hours long, and they are divided into both demonstrations and practicals. The demo consists of a chef enseigneur and one or two assistants standing at the front of a classroom. The chef cooks between one and three recipes, all from our “cookbook,” which is a binder of ingredient lists. The chef walks us through the process of making each dish—often concurrently (hence the aforementioned maniacal notes). Our responsibility is to take notes, step by step, and make them make sense. How fine to cut each ingredient, when to add each ingredient, how long to cook each ingredient, etcetera.
Practicals come sometime after. If we’re lucky, the next day. If we’re not, 30-45 minutes later. We’re each assigned a station in a long kitchen. Each station has a drawer in which we keep our knives and other tools, an open area beneath for other storage (think bowls, bins, and the like), and we share a small refrigerator (“low boy”) with our station mate. That’s where we keep our ingredients so they’re not just sitting on our station, and where we stage sauces once they’re prepared.
Across from the station is a cooktop (all induction at Le Cordon Bleu), with an oven beneath it. Throughout the kitchen there are other tools we may need—strainers, baking sheets, foils, etc. We have roughly 2 hours and 15 minutes to replicate one or two of the dishes, depending on what the rubric calls for. It’s frantic. A little chaotic. There’s already been some yelling at each other. I love it. My body, however, aches like mad after a practical. It’s good for me.
The difficulty is ramping up, and it already felt pretty damn hard. We’ve made a lot of seemingly basic things that never feel quite basic. In our first graded practical, I made a souffle (it fell), a French omelette (too brown—I’ve since embarked on a journey of omelette cookery that will lead me to perfection, by god), and a poached egg (“c’est bon”). A few other things we’ve made since, all of which have come out more-or-less ok: a Basque-style poached egg, poached hake with leeks, Quiche Lorraine, poached chicken with pilaf rice and sauce supreme. What’s nice is every recipe offers a different technique that’s considered a must-know in the kitchen. And obviously we’re poaching a lot. But the oven is coming—poulet roti is on the docket soon and the French take their roast chicken very, very seriously.
Katy’s mom joined us for the last week and a half. Before Katy had to sign on for work every morning, they and Auggie got out and about in Paris and went—well, frankly, everywhere. Listed in no particular order: Notre Dame, Saint Chapelle, Petit Palais, Montmartre and Sacre Cœur, and up into the Eiffel Tower at night (I got to join for the last two). She helped Katy figure out who will be babysitting Auggie every day while we’re here. After Katy and Di sorted through roughly hundreds of responses to the listing, they narrowed it down to three. And after a quick interview with each one, we agreed on someone: a nice kid (“kid,” he’s 30) from Norway. Auggie likes him, and we think he’ll have fun with him. And here, that’s the most important thing. Auggie gets to hang out with him from 10am-2pm every day.
While Di was here, Katy and I got to go on a date. We had dinner at a really interesting spot near us in the 15th, La Véraison. They offered both a la carte and a menu formule (essentially a set menu) and given that we weren’t trying to quickly eat while also entertaining a toddler who would probably have no interest in sitting at the table as long as we did, we got the set menu. It went something like:
Amuse Bouche - beet and pear salad
1st entree - raw scallop with broccoli and citrus salad
2nd entree - half-cooked (purposefully) salmon with leeks and mussels
Main - pork loin with carrot and Jerusalem artichoke
Dessert - (they sent two!) chocolate three ways and rice pudding with candied nuts, passionfruit, and pomegranate seeds
We will absolutely go back when people visit.
Meanwhile, Katy is settling into her routine. While she was originally working from about 1pm-9pm every day, she’s started to make some adjustments to her day that won’t have her burning the proverbial not-quite-midnight oil quite so much and gives her a little more freedom to have dinner with us and take evening strolls in our neighborhood.
Our list of places to go and things to do is, frankly, exhaustive. I keep reminding all of us that we’re here for nine months…but then again, January is two-thirds gone already. We visit different parts of the city via the Metro—which Auggie won’t shut up about: “Want ride train! Want ride train!”—grab a coffee and pastry, and wander around. The gardens and the monuments and the sheer history of the place leave us constantly awestruck.
So far, we’ve hit the Musee d’Orsay and all of its Van Gogh goodness, Les Halles in the 1st (which is absolutely a flop but there’s plenty to love around it, like Rue Montorgueil), Le Marais in the 4th which is trendy, beautiful, and fun. And we’ve hit—you know. More. We’ve already seen so much, but there’s still so much more. We walk a lot. It’s hard not to.
Speaking of. Walking Rue Montorgueil in the 2nd on Saturday, Katy was window shopping while Auggie and I stood back looking at the entire street. It was still the morning, the city just starting to stir. Above a shop, someone opened their giant windows to let the fresh air inside, the sound echoing down the rue in all the quiet, and the gesture felt just so romantic. I thought, “I could live here.” Then paused for a beat because I realized: I do.