I started joking a while ago that I've lived in France for so long that I sometimes have problems remembering English words, but it's now becoming true. Like when I wrote the title of this piece I was simply unable to remember the English word for 'fonds'. It's 'stocks', but it's taken me a good few moments to work that out.
Someone elsewhere on ChefTalk has been asking about doing a stage in France in 3* restaurants, and they've had some good replies (plus a couple from me). We've had foreign students in the kitchen, most of whom have spoken at least a little French, but one German student didn't speak any at all. So he and Chef had fun conversing in English all week - not as much fun as I had listening to the two of them, mind you. So it's not impossible to do a stage here if you have little or no French - provided you can find a willing chef.
But at school there's even less time to work out what stuff means than in the restaurant, and I have to concentrate hard to keep up with what the Chef there is saying. Classroom sessions are doubly hard - taking notes is a French dictation class as well as a cookery learning experience for me. If you want to go to cookery school in France, go to French classes first!
My school days start with an hour of that dictation, sitting in a classroom being taught about some technical aspect of the job - the different cuts of meat you get from a pig, for example, or how to store fish properly (my school Chef used to be the poissonnier - chef de partie in charge of fish - in a big restaurant, so he pretty much knows what he's talking about here).
Then we go collect our ingredients from the central Garde Manger - pantry - and watch Chef demo what we're supposed to do. This week, it's a 'Fricasée de Poulet à l'Ancienne', old-fashioned chicken fricasée (if there's an English word for 'fricasée I don't know it, I first heard this word when my mother made the dish at the school where she was head cook).
The idea is that, each week, we learn some new skills whilst actually making something edible for one of the three restaurants on campus; normally the stuff we make goes either to the posh, fine-dining restaurant or, more usually, the self-service restaurant mostly used by staff and students.
Today, we learn how to cut up a chicken before cooking it, not forgetting to remove the 'sots-y-laissent' - the oysters down there under the carcass; 'sots-y-laissent' means, literally, 'The stupid leave them there' as they're considered some of the finer parts of the chicken's anatomy, taste-wise. And if we don't remember to remove them (as part of the thigh portion) we lose marks. Indeed, the maitre d'hotel at the restaurant reckons that, back in his day, it was a guaranteed exam failure if you left them in.
Today's chickens are 'PAC', 'Prêt à cuire' or ready to cook; this means they arrive ready-eviscerated and without their heads; that sort of stuff we learn later this term, apparently; today it's about knife skills (fine cutting, following skeleton structure, chopping and not cutting ourselves).
The carcass and bits we use to make a 'fond blanc', a white stock; this means bringing the bones to the boil, discarding the water and then starting over with the bones and our GA, Garniture Aromatique (you can probably translate that one for yourselves) - small amount of carrot, onion, herbs from the garden for a bouquet garni and our mushroom peelings. Chef shows us a special way to carve the mushrooms which I will never master; it essentially turns your average Champignon de Paris (basic white mushroom) into a spinning top. Even he says he finds it hard, although his effort at least still resembles a mushroom when he finishes - mine, well mine looks like I trod on it, and that's being polite.
We also make pear tarts - pears poached in syrup then baked in a tart case filled with crème d'amandes, which gives us another chance to practise our pâte brisée. Which seems to translate as 'broken pastry', which can't be right; shortcrust, possibly? I find that, as well as forgetting some English words, I'm learning French words for which I have NEVER known the English words. Like 'sauteuse' and 'pochon' which are, respectively, a kind of saucepan with sides that slope outwards and a small ladle. I'm gonna be really stuck if I ever work in an English kitchen, I tell you.
Anyway, I get told off for slicing and fanning out my pears - the picture in the recipe book shows the pears whole, apparently, and that's what counts in the exam; it has to look like the picture or you lose marks (perhaps this is where the Chinese restaurants get this idea from?), even if your idea actually looks better.
We also have an hour of 'Hygiene' today, all about lipids (we get to do proteins and glucides, sugars, next). The human body, it seems, needs one gram of lipids per kilo of its weight per day. Three portion s of foie gras and I'm done, I guess. Apart from this fact, hygiene is BORING; our teacher is a former hospital dietician and, after communicating the 10 minutes worth of information she needs to impart each lesson, spends the rest of the hour lecturing us about how young people today eat too much fat/sugar/burgers, how they have no respect, how....I doze off at this point, as do others; one person even starts snoring.
This afternoon in the kitchen we also do a pilaf rice, including the complicated idea that the volume of water (or, in this case, stock) we add should be one and a half times the VOLUME of the rice; many get this wrong by weighing the rice, which doesn't work at all. I do get it right, and even get to test my new digital timer to make sure the rice only goes into the oven for 17 minutes; it comes out perfect, but Chef claims that there's not enough salt in the rice, even though it tastes fine to me.
Well, apparently the taste buds go when you get older, I tell him.
Next week: pâte feuilleté - puff pastry!
Someone elsewhere on ChefTalk has been asking about doing a stage in France in 3* restaurants, and they've had some good replies (plus a couple from me). We've had foreign students in the kitchen, most of whom have spoken at least a little French, but one German student didn't speak any at all. So he and Chef had fun conversing in English all week - not as much fun as I had listening to the two of them, mind you. So it's not impossible to do a stage here if you have little or no French - provided you can find a willing chef.
But at school there's even less time to work out what stuff means than in the restaurant, and I have to concentrate hard to keep up with what the Chef there is saying. Classroom sessions are doubly hard - taking notes is a French dictation class as well as a cookery learning experience for me. If you want to go to cookery school in France, go to French classes first!
My school days start with an hour of that dictation, sitting in a classroom being taught about some technical aspect of the job - the different cuts of meat you get from a pig, for example, or how to store fish properly (my school Chef used to be the poissonnier - chef de partie in charge of fish - in a big restaurant, so he pretty much knows what he's talking about here).
Then we go collect our ingredients from the central Garde Manger - pantry - and watch Chef demo what we're supposed to do. This week, it's a 'Fricasée de Poulet à l'Ancienne', old-fashioned chicken fricasée (if there's an English word for 'fricasée I don't know it, I first heard this word when my mother made the dish at the school where she was head cook).
The idea is that, each week, we learn some new skills whilst actually making something edible for one of the three restaurants on campus; normally the stuff we make goes either to the posh, fine-dining restaurant or, more usually, the self-service restaurant mostly used by staff and students.
Today, we learn how to cut up a chicken before cooking it, not forgetting to remove the 'sots-y-laissent' - the oysters down there under the carcass; 'sots-y-laissent' means, literally, 'The stupid leave them there' as they're considered some of the finer parts of the chicken's anatomy, taste-wise. And if we don't remember to remove them (as part of the thigh portion) we lose marks. Indeed, the maitre d'hotel at the restaurant reckons that, back in his day, it was a guaranteed exam failure if you left them in.
Today's chickens are 'PAC', 'Prêt à cuire' or ready to cook; this means they arrive ready-eviscerated and without their heads; that sort of stuff we learn later this term, apparently; today it's about knife skills (fine cutting, following skeleton structure, chopping and not cutting ourselves).
The carcass and bits we use to make a 'fond blanc', a white stock; this means bringing the bones to the boil, discarding the water and then starting over with the bones and our GA, Garniture Aromatique (you can probably translate that one for yourselves) - small amount of carrot, onion, herbs from the garden for a bouquet garni and our mushroom peelings. Chef shows us a special way to carve the mushrooms which I will never master; it essentially turns your average Champignon de Paris (basic white mushroom) into a spinning top. Even he says he finds it hard, although his effort at least still resembles a mushroom when he finishes - mine, well mine looks like I trod on it, and that's being polite.
We also make pear tarts - pears poached in syrup then baked in a tart case filled with crème d'amandes, which gives us another chance to practise our pâte brisée. Which seems to translate as 'broken pastry', which can't be right; shortcrust, possibly? I find that, as well as forgetting some English words, I'm learning French words for which I have NEVER known the English words. Like 'sauteuse' and 'pochon' which are, respectively, a kind of saucepan with sides that slope outwards and a small ladle. I'm gonna be really stuck if I ever work in an English kitchen, I tell you.
Anyway, I get told off for slicing and fanning out my pears - the picture in the recipe book shows the pears whole, apparently, and that's what counts in the exam; it has to look like the picture or you lose marks (perhaps this is where the Chinese restaurants get this idea from?), even if your idea actually looks better.
We also have an hour of 'Hygiene' today, all about lipids (we get to do proteins and glucides, sugars, next). The human body, it seems, needs one gram of lipids per kilo of its weight per day. Three portion s of foie gras and I'm done, I guess. Apart from this fact, hygiene is BORING; our teacher is a former hospital dietician and, after communicating the 10 minutes worth of information she needs to impart each lesson, spends the rest of the hour lecturing us about how young people today eat too much fat/sugar/burgers, how they have no respect, how....I doze off at this point, as do others; one person even starts snoring.
This afternoon in the kitchen we also do a pilaf rice, including the complicated idea that the volume of water (or, in this case, stock) we add should be one and a half times the VOLUME of the rice; many get this wrong by weighing the rice, which doesn't work at all. I do get it right, and even get to test my new digital timer to make sure the rice only goes into the oven for 17 minutes; it comes out perfect, but Chef claims that there's not enough salt in the rice, even though it tastes fine to me.
Well, apparently the taste buds go when you get older, I tell him.
Next week: pâte feuilleté - puff pastry!
