[Plongeur]

There are, it turns out, rather a lot of soups. Going back to the days of Escoffier and earlier, rather than calling soup with carrots in it, 'Carrot Soup', the French call it 'Potage Crécy', named after either Crécy-la-Chapelle in Seine-et-Marne, or after Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Somme. Both claim they grow the best carrots and the best soups, both claim Potage Crécy (and anything else containing carrots) as their own whilst declaiming the others as lesser, impostering, worthless, tasteless, rank rubbish-vendors. Or something like that.

I mean, just look at the tables we got given today; there are potages where you start with carefully sized vegetables, puréed vegetables, puréed dried vegetables, with creams and cream-liasions, consommés (aka clear potages), bisques, cold potages, regional specialities..."You need to know all the families plus one or two examples of specific soups within them," says school Chef. So yes, we have to know that split-pea soup is really Potage Saint Germain and not just split-pea soup, that a Consommé Madrilène (served with straw-cut red peppers) is chicken consommé with chopped fresh tomato pulp in it, and that if you really want to start an argument in a room full of Provençal cooks you start telling them what to put into a Soupe au Pistou - man, the guys and gals in class went over that one for a good quarter of an hour. It's a good job our knives were across the other side of the building in the kitchen, otherwise blood would have flowed. Not least mine for suggesting that, like bouillabaisse (fish stew), it's really made up of whatever vegetables and herbs you have lying around. Blimey, you'd have thought I'd asked for a well-done steak.

So, over in the atelier we do a Potage St Germain aux Croutons - split-pea soup with croutons, as I think you say in English (I'm remembering fewer and fewer words of your language with each day that goes by. Pardon.) It has the washed and blanched split peas, blanched and fried lardons of bacon, leeks, white veal stock.
Then we do a Velouté Dubarry, which is a velouté of veal with cauliflower, cream and egg yolks. With both I learned something I'd never thought of before - after mixing them with the giraffe (the large, hand-held mixer you plunge into the saucepan and which, in our indistrial-sized case, is about the size of a decent pneumatic drill) and then passing the mix through a chinois, you should re-boil it again since you can't guarantee the cleanliness of the giraffe and chinois.
This afternoon - after a singularly unappetising lunch in the school canteen of very wishy-washy cod mornay (we've discovered that the stuff we cook is usually served on Tuesdays when the school director makes a big deal of eating in the canteen with the plebs instead of in the private staff dining room or the gastronomic restaurant next door where the final-year kids get to cook) - it's Entremets Singapour. What's an entremet? Well, the fact that the Larousse Gastronomique feels it necessary to devote nearly half a page to the subject should clue you in to the potential problem here. Basically, it's anything served after the meat course. Generally it means puddings, but in big restaurants the entremettier will do soufflés and savoury pancakes and pastries plus sweet entrements like sweet omelettes, rice puddings and ice creams. But then Taillevent reckoned to also include things like oyster stew and almond milk with figs and "swan with all its feathers" in the list, although this latter item is apparently not something we'd be expected to produce for our final exam.
Instead, Singaporean Entremets are a Genoise sponge (this is a very international dish) cut into three horizontal layers with crème patisserie between the layers. Again, I have trouble getting my Genoise frothy enough because of my RSI-ed wrists. I must think about having an operation again when the restaurant is closed in January.
Next week: Pancakes, Law and cutting up pork ribs (there are similarities).