Autrement...

After that long post about Cordon Bleu the other day, I found the schedule of classes pasted in the back of my notebook. The mushroom soup lecture was the first class I went to; no wonder I was confused, so rattled that I forgot to write down the highpoint of that day's demonstration.

The recipe for beef stock which appeared so strangely in the middle of my mushroom soup notes had a wonderful coda. After we had sat appalled listening to the complications of making beef stock -- burning a sliced onion half over an open flame, such a problem for those of us with electric stoves -- Chef Narcesse, putting on his twinkly grandfather face, reached into his apron pocket and pulled out a silver-foil-wrapped object.

"Autrement," he said, drawing out the drama, "il y'a le cube."

We all whooped with relief!

A note about the kitchen apprentices who had made the stock; Chef, of course, did not lower himself to such basics. In the 1970's the French educational system did a big sorting out of the kids at the age of 14. Those with academic talent or aspirations went into the higher grades and the kids who had different talents went into the apprentice system. Chef Narcesse had three or four youngsters of different ages who were learning la cuisine.

Many of us were put off by the way these kids were treated. Chef roared at them and cuffed them. There were days when none of them could do anything correctly, starting from dirty fingernails at morning inspection. Several times parents were summoned by the horrible Mme Brassard for a family dressing down, the apprentice in the middle of a finger-jabbing mob of his elders. The Americans at the school were very sympathetic and tried to catch the boys' eyes to cheer them up. But the boys didn't want to be seen crying.

The pepper grinder episode was classic. One of the younger apprentices was standing by to help Chef as he went through the morning demonstration. He handed a pepper mill to Narcesse, who was in mid-sentence. Chef cranked, cranked again, and then swung the mill straight-armed toward the kid. It was empty. The kid raced into the kitchen and brought back another pepper grinder which Chef cranked, still growling. That mill was empty too.

"If I had done that when I was your age," Narcesse screamed, "I would have been fired and quite properly. Get out, get out, get out." The boy fled in tears. Some of us protested but Chef stopped us: "No. This is his work. He is training for the rest of his life. How can he leave here and embarrass L'Ecole Cordon Bleu?"

Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Porcelain

My grandmother, via my uninterested mother, gave me a set of 12 of everything in this rose porcelain. It dates from the period post-1911, the end of the Ching Dynasty, when a policy of improving exports suggested to the Chinese that honest labeling might be a good idea.

The cups and saucers are so thin they glow with backlighting. The painting is nicely executed, so I can guess the dishes were not real tourist trash.

At the old China Trade Museum we called this kind of pattern "bbfi" or "birds, butterflies, flowers and insects" The shorthand made filling out collection records much easier.

Sense and Taste Memory

The sight of a forgotten box of mushrooms in the fridge made me think mushroom soup. After a quick sniff to ensure that Doc and wouldn't be soon dead of food poisoning, I rummaged around for an old friend, my notebook from classes 38 years ago at L'Ecole Cordon Bleu. I was in Paris for a long year with husband one and baby Matthew and, in the interests of good eating in the future, I signed up for the six-week amateur's course. I bought a notebook at Gilbert Jeaunes, the one in the photograph, and appeared on the Rue de Champs de Mars.

I watched and listened and wrote in a whirl of rapid French (the course was not translated as it is now) and I struggled to keep up. My culinary skills to date included boiling eggs and horrid little meals from the “I Hate to Cook Book,” so the learning curve was fairly steep. On every page of these spattered notes, there are helpful drawings – a gutted fish, the layout of a rabbit terrine, a splayed chicken. The writing is a rich mixture of English and French, all tumbled together.

Revisiting the recipes in the notes has been puzzling at times. On many pages there are arrows to indicate that the flow of the recipe was interrupted (probably because I was taking too long to come up with a translation of what chef was saying).

Chef was Chef Narcesse. I once found a photograph of him in Gourmet looking very jolly. He was not always so as he watched us prep and cook the meal that would be his lunch. We could always tell when something on the menu was a favorite of his; he hovered, grumbled and sometimes said with great pain “Madame...”

Out in the foyer of L'Ecole CB was Mme Brassard, famous for her run-ins with a determined Julia Child. She hadn't mellowed since then.

The page above is indeed a rule for mushroom soup. I was diverted today by the list of ingredients on the middle left of the page – a turnip and blackened onions in mushroom soup? -- until I realized that my famous notes had made a detour to provide the method for making beef stock.