"Gout" - Taste
This newsletter brings two milestones: first, I’ve gone past the halfway point of Intermediate, and thereby, of culinary school. It’s unfathomable that it is already late May. We’ve been in Paris for nearly five months. I said in an earlier draft that ten months is a long time, and I’d like to amend that statement: it is not a long time at all.
May in France is basically one extra-long holiday. We’ve had a decent amount of time off which, with better planning, we might have been able to do more with. In fact we’re in a four day weekend right now. I intend to use that to explore just a few more areas in Paris that I haven’t yet. It’s strange to think that there are neighborhoods I haven’t seen. But Katy and I were saying yesterday while walking to Canal Saint Martin (she had yet to visit, compared to my three or four times) that, in a city like this, it’s just impossible to visit everything no matter the time you have.
Auggie, being the city kid that he is now, is obsessed with pigeons. He thinks they’re funny. At the park near our apartment recently, he chased them for no less than 20 minutes. They would scatter, reconvene, then scatter again as he barreled through them, flapping his arms and yelling “no pid-jum, no pid-jum!”
The next morning, I cooked a pigeon in class. They’re a red-meat bird like duck, taste not dissimilar, and as such can be cooked rare—they’re just less fatty. Overall it wouldn’t have been all that much different of a day, except Le Cordon Bleu insisted we plate the bird’s head. When chef critiqued my plate, he told me they normally remove all of the skin from the bird’s head after blanching it. I said, “Chef, I had no idea what to do with that thing.” Chef replied, “I know, I know” and still scored me just fine. It’s funny seeing how plating from the 50s, 60s, and 70s has changed so significantly to the plating we see today. These days, it’s pretty rare that anything goes on the plate which isn’t edible—a trend that I personally like—and there’s no one picking up the pigeon head and…well, you get it.
Want to know how to break down a pigeon? We dressed it the way we do a chicken, except they are much bloodier. Birds are packed up tightly, almost like they’re roosting, with legs tucked up and wings tucked in, so you stretch the bird by grabbing its feet and neck to “relax” it. Flambée the bird with a torch to burn off the little feathers that weren’t plucked during processing. Pluck the remainder with your fingers or tweezers. For this recipe, one breast is served as a sûpreme, which means the wing drum is left attached. For both breasts, we can remove the wing below the drum, but we reserve it to make a jus. This is a weird part (though I’m telling you how to clean a pigeon, so what doesn’t seem weird?): snip the toes of the bird off, leaving only the middle toe—consider it the pigeon flipping you proverbial bird, and now I’m wondering if that’s where that phrase comes from. Trim the claw from the remaining toe. Cut a slit in the neck to pull the skin clear, then chop the neck off as close to the breast as possible. Because we plate the head, we had to blanch it, which means cooking it very quickly in hot water. It helps get the remaining feathers off.
How ridiculous does all this sound?
Pull the skin of the legs up tight, toward the body of the bird. We need that skin to completely cover the breasts when they cook. Draw a line with your knife around the leg, tug it out so the bone dislocates, and make the cuts where appropriate to release it. Repeat on the other leg. Now, we make an incision at the base of the breastbone, following the curve of the ribs. This opens the chest cavity of the bird and suddenly I feel like I’m writing a veterinary textbook. There’s a surprising amount of blood inside a pigeon, as well as all of their organs. My station neighbor found two kernels of corn inside his bird. We clean them out, by hand. Reserve the liver and the heart, which go into a farce for a crudité. Otherwise, clean them all the way out, using paper towels or whatever you have to in order to get all the blood. Flip the bird around so you’re looking down its neck, and trim along the adorably tiny wishbone until you can remove it. Pull the skin all the way down to cover the breast meat as much as possible, and reserve in the fridge until we’re ready to cook.
Honestly, it’s not the weirdest thing I feel like I’ve done.
Even with the bird, Intermediate feels good, natural. My only real mishap so far is a créme caramel (think flan) that absolutely did not set. It cooked in a bain marie (water bath) for over an hour and just didn’t come together. I put it on the stove top and boiled the everloving water out of it and still it only just coagulated. I pored over the recipe and my notes several times and don’t know what I did wrong. Maybe, if I’m ambitious, I’ll try it again this weekend and see what happens.
The second milestone can be framed two ways, depending on who you ask. For me, it was our first trip as a family outside of France, taking the train to Amsterdam. If you ask Katy, it would be seeing Harry Styles in concert for the first time.
We had tickets to see HS on the first night of his new tour. He’s doing 10 nights in Amsterdam, and we saw him on night one. And despite admitting to some first-night jitters, he put on a hell of a show. I go to a lot of concerts, but rarely the big spectacles that come with being a pop star. He had loads of energy, the band was tight, his voice was great, and the only hiccup was a speaker in front of us that couldn’t handle the house-music bass that a lot of his new album has. Aside from that, he played a lot of what we hoped to hear, with a few surprises. Katy wanted to hear Satellite—it reminds her of Harrison—and he wove it into Carla’s Song. In Treat People With Kindness, he sang a couple bars of This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads—one of my favorite songs and which also makes me think of Wubs—while his keyboardist quoted the riff from You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon. We went for a pop show, and got to see the guy paying homage to his (and my) heroes.
He has a tune on his new album, Taste Back, which I mentioned in a previous newsletter. The lyrics go:
Must be lonely out in Paris if you talk like that /
It was tough with the time but you called back /
And you know you can tell me, I can take that /
Did you get your taste back, or do you just need a little love?
I’m not one to glomb onto pop lyrics and go, “OMG HE’S SINGING ABOUT MEEEEE.” But I’d be lying if I didn’t feel in tune with these. Being in Paris, feeling lonely with the loss of Harrison, getting my taste back because I’m in culinary school, and starting to feel like myself again. It’s maybe all a bit on the nose for a good metaphor, but what can I say? I like it, and it felt good to hear him sing it.
We danced and swayed and grooved. Katy may have hyperventilated once or twice. At one point, when a stagehand slung an electric guitar over Harry’s shoulder, she made noises I can only describe as animalistic.
Beyond the concert, we unfortunately didn’t spend a ton of time exploring. (I apologize to Paris for complaining about the rain in March and April. It rained almost nonstop while we were in Amsterdam, and thanks to poor planning, we had only one umbrella. C’est la vie.) We took a boat ride on the canals, which Auggie enjoyed for the first thirty minutes and after that required that I hang onto the back of his shirt to keep him from leaning too far over the side. We drank beer and ate bitterballen (breaded, deep-fried meat ragout balls) in the middle of a beautiful park. We ate an incredible meal of Indonesian food, which I’d never had and which I learned The Netherlands is quite well known for.
Amsterdam is funny. There’s obviously the whole “legal marijuana” thing and the Red Light District, which bring large crowds of tourists for bachelor parties. The Dutch, by and large, don’t really mess with either. As a result, it doesn’t dominate the city. Fun fact, which I learned from Katy after she got back from Amsterdam a few weeks ago: cafés are where you go to get coffee, coffee houses are where you go to get weed. Why? I asked our tour guide on the boat trip. His answer was basically that the Dutch believe in not sticking out too much, not drawing too much attention to oneself. It keeps everyone level-headed. So even their pot shops don’t believe in flashy, tie-dye, blacklight marketing tactics. They’re just…”coffee” shops. Wink wink.
We did manage to get into the Vincent Van Gogh Museum, which was great…until August decided that he’s just not much a fan of post-impressionism and we left after making it through only two of the four floors. We’ll go back in early October, when I have a ticket to another concert, and hopefully finish the museum then.
Starting this weekend, we have guests off and on for nearly four weeks straight. It’s fun, if a bit surreal, to see friends from home. It’s a stark reminder that, at least for right now, we live here. Katy’s taking selective days off, and I’ll be sharing my time here and there as class allows. We’re trying a few new things and some favorites. We hope, if you come, that you love Paris as much as we do. And if you want, I’ll cook for you. Just ask.
After that string of guests, we’re jetting (uh…er…railing?) down to Côte d’Azur, the south of France. We’ll be in Antibes as our home base and taking day trips to Nice, Cannes, Èze, perhaps Marseille—we’ll see where we land. We look forward to reintroducing Auggie to the sea, lounging on a few beaches, finding at least a semi-authentic Marseillean fish stew called bouillabaisse, otherwise eating our weights in fresh fish, and discovering a couple of medieval villages. We will also keep Auggie’s eyes away from sharp corners this time.
Speaking of, our little boy who is in no way little at all is becoming an entirely new version of himself. He’s begun to play and otherwise interact with other kids at parks, which is particularly remarkable because he has no idea what they’re saying to him. He smiles back at people on the metro rather than curling his head in and being shy. He likes having his long, blonde hair (longer than mine, by the way) pulled back into a little bun and being “Chef Auggie,” since he sees me with mine pulled back at school. He pretends he’s going to “class,” and has started making up songs about the things he sees as we’re walking around. He also just took a shower by himself for the first time, no longer afraid of it.
Recently, after I got home from said class and was making dinner in our kitchen while Katy worked, he walked in and said something to me. “Oh, you want to cuddle?” I said, and dropped to my knees to give him a big hug and pick him up. “You’re so sweet, did you miss dad while he was at class?” He hugged me back and he bounced on me and smiled and laughed. But then he leaned back and said that thing again. “We are cuddling, buddy,” I replied. “No, Daddy.” And said it again. I stared at him, in the same way I stare at most Parisians when they say something to me in French: a little blank, eyes a bit squinted, trying to decipher exactly what it is they said and translate it to English so I can respond in kind. I put him down and he dragged me to the cupboard in our dining room, where he opened the door and pointed to his crayons. “Oh, color. You want to color. Not cuddle. You didn’t want to cuddle at all, did you?”
“No.” But then he grabbed my leg with both arms and squeezed. He’s incredibly sweet, unbelievably willful, and sometimes frustrating. He’s incredible.