The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (3 page)

To kick off the tour, Mike and I led a walking tour of our former neighborhood near Les Halles. Among a smattering of meals and sightseeing, the itinerary included a tour of the wholesale food market Rungis, followed by a lunch buffet of impeccably fresh fish delivered only hours earlier to the massive seafood hangar across from the restaurant. The next day, we headed north in minibuses to Rouen, best known as the place where Joan of Arc was imprisoned by the English, then burned at the stake. Our visit was for dinner at an equally important landmark, at least for me: La Couronne, the restaurant where Julia Child ate her first meal in France. Julia Child is my longtime hero. After earning her diploma, she threw herself into writing
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
an effort that turned into a decade-long project that defined the later part of her life. I met Julia at the edge of an earlier existential crisis when I was twenty-three years old, shortly after I first began longing to study at Le Cordon Bleu but kept my desire secret. She was among the first people to whom I revealed what seemed like an impossible dream then: to study cooking in Paris.

Each evening after dinner, the weeklong agenda descended into the “where will Mike and Kathleen take us drinking?” tour. If there's one bright spot in my French-speaking skills, it's my ability to navigate the delicate rigors of ordering a round of beverages. One evening Mike led an impromptu “Introduction to Calvados” lesson at the hotel bar. Another night, we familiarized our group with French beers and martini blancos at a place near the Palais Royal.

We enjoyed the group so much that we organized a dinner with them on the one free evening on the itinerary. As we dined on the patio of a small bistro on Rue Moufftard, we began to notice workers carrying fake hams and rubber lamb shanks passing by our table. Our waiter told us that scenes from the film version of
Julie & Julia
would be shot on the street the next day.

By the next morning, a small army of prop designers and carpenters finished transforming the corner into a street market from the 1950s. Workers installed brand-new signs designed to appear weathered above the doors. They brought in aging handcarts, dozens of barrels, antique cash registers, and even a 1940s-era delivery truck. A few extras walked around in 1950s garb, smoking and talking on their cell phones, careful to avoid the thick tangle of cables that led to a massive camera and lighting setup choking the small street's intersection.

Mike and I watched Meryl Streep, dressed as Julia, wandering the market during Julia's early days learning to cook in Paris as a student at Le Cordon Bleu. Even from a distance, we could see a radiant smile as “Julia” took it all in with delight.

By chance, the tour ended the next day with its advertised highlight: a private class at Le Cordon Bleu. As we entered the familiar glass doors, I felt pangs of stress, as if I were still a student, a living version of an anxiety dream from which I'll probably never awaken. Just as I began a brief tour, one of my toughest teachers, the Gray Chef, appeared from around the corner. He had once scolded me mercilessly for a too-sweet duck à l'orange sauce, prompting me to flee the kitchen in tears. I introduced him, first in stuttering English and then in clumsy French. Recognizing his name from the book, the group descended as a hungry pack on the man—who now seemed much shorter than I remembered—circling for a photo. I offered to take it. Suddenly, the once-imposing Gray Chef looked vulnerable and intimidated. I felt overwhelming tenderness for him.
“Êtes-vous célèbre maintenant?”
he asked gingerly. Are you famous now?

“Non, chef, vous êtes,”
I told him sweetly. No, you are. He smiled broadly and then spread his arms around the group, confident again. I clicked the photo.

After the rest of the group departed the next morning, one person remained for an extra day. Holly was an affable silver-haired flight attendant from Orlando in her early sixties. Holly had come to Paris with a secret mission. As we stood on the historic Pont Neuf bridge, she confessed that she had been discreetly leaving bits of her late sister's ashes on the trip.

“She wanted to visit Paris all her life, but she always found reasons not to do it,” Holly said. My mind went to Floyd. We'd invited Mike's dad to visit us when we lived in Paris and even offered to buy him a spot on the AAA tour. He always declined, although he promised he'd visit “someday.” Just then, as the Eiffel Tower erupted in a sparkling display of strobe lights, Holly reached into her pocket, pulled out a small bag, and emptied it into the Seine. “Now she finally got to come here, and stay,” Holly said. Just before her sister died, they watched the movie
Something's Gotta Give,
starring Diane Keaton, whose character visits Paris every year on her birthday to dine on roast chicken at a bistro called Le Grand Colbert. “She was going through chemo, and she kept saying, ‘I'm going to get through this because I want to eat at that restaurant in Paris.' The idea of that meal and coming to Paris got her through all of it, at least mentally. But finally, her body just gave up.”

That night, the three of us dined at Le Grand Colbert. As we bid farewell to the gilded decor, Holly deposited a bit of her sister in a potted fern near the bar.

 

Mike and I had arranged a week to ourselves in Paris after the tour group ended. We thought that we'd be relieved to have the time alone, but Mike and I missed the enthusiasm of the group. Spurred on by that dinner with Holly, to make up for their absence and to avoid thinking of Mike's dad, we ate.

We began by haunting our favorite bistros. Curiously, a disproportionate number of their names contain
cochon,
the French word for “pig.” At Au Pied de Cochon at Les Halles, we ordered steaming bowls of arguably the best French onion soup in Paris. We made a game of digging into the hot crust of Gruyère and pulling the oozing, salty cheese with our forks a foot off the table as the pungent-yet-sweet aroma of onion-scented beef stock wafted around the room like a heavy cloud. At Aux Trois Petits Cochons, we started dinner with thick slabs of foie gras, spreading it like the smoothest butter onto crisp toasts. Au Cochon de Lait in the 19th arrondissement, a nondescript yet welcoming place that once served the workers of the slaughtering trade that operated nearby, had the aroma of grilled steaks, campfire, and stale red wine. The only foreigners in a sea of regulars, we ordered their specialty, l'Onglet Villette, a wickedly tender hanger steak topped with a buttery heap of caramelized onions splashed with red wine and a side of knife-cut crisp fries. We both closed our eyes to chew, and opened them to find our waitress automatically refilling our
pichet
of red wine with a knowing smile.

“I wish that my dad had come to Paris, at least once. He would have loved this,” Mike said. Neither of us wanted to talk about the empty place in our hearts that would greet us when we left the distractions of Paris.

 

On our last night in the city, in lieu of a standard author reading at a bookstore, I presented a knife skills demonstration at WHSmith, a splendid English-language bookstore at Place de la Concorde, the intersection of the grand boulevards and the former site of the ghastly guillotines of the French Revolution. Being in a city most famous for its food, I worried that my demonstration on basic cuts would be too remedial, but the crowd stood transfixed.

“I've always thought that if I could hold a knife properly, it would change my whole life,” a South African woman in the crowd commented. “I feel like I just never really learned. I always assumed that I'm doing it wrong.”

I had four chef's knives with me. I gathered everyone into groups and taught the fundamentals of holding a knife and drilled them on the basics of dicing, slicing, and julienne. Simple stuff, but then I realized that I'd learned the same fundamentals only a couple of years earlier. As the crowd disbanded, the South African woman pumped my hand in thanks. “I know this sounds totally stupid, but I don't cook at all and you've just inspired me to learn. I thought this whole knife thing was so much more complicated. I feel like I've had a complete epiphany! Have you ever thought of teaching?”

CHAPTER 2

—Penny de los Santos, photographer

 

 

 

 

How quickly we shifted back into our regular lives in Seattle. Still, after that moment on the stage, what
was
my regular life? The notion weighed heavily on me. So did my weight. In France, we ate as if training for an Olympic eating event. Yet I returned weighing a few pounds less. So did Mike. Less than a month back in the United States I gained nearly ten pounds. How? Sure, we walked more in Paris. But what was it about being back in the States that led us to gain weight?

The French eat less in general and lean toward more fresh food and few snacks. As in other European cities, Parisians shop more often for groceries. Some of it is cultural, but most of it is practical. When I first moved to London in 1999, I had to completely shift my thinking about grocery shopping thanks to the dorm-room-sized fridge in my minuscule kitchen. I couldn't “stock up”; I had no physical space. My freezer was only slightly larger than the size of a paperback novel. Plus, I knew that I had to carry home with me whatever I bought. Since I shopped frequently, I chose mostly fresh food and prepared it that night. In Paris, we did the same thanks to the easily accessible street markets. Even so, I saw a lot of shoppers buying frozen quiche Lorraine in Parisian supermarkets, not to mention the customers who flocked to American-style fast-food outlets. While it might once have been true that French women don't get fat, more recent surveys show that as the French adopt more American-inspired habits of eating, notably consuming long-shelf-life products, their national weight steadily increases.

Contemplating all this not long after we returned from Paris, I wandered over to my local supermarket, a vast sixty-thousandsquare-foot store that's open twenty-four hours a day in the urban Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. When it comes to diversity and cart voyeurism, it's hard to beat the collection at my local grocery.

That was the day I met the woman and her daughter, the one with the cart full of boxed and frozen ultraprocessed food products. She was shopping in a store with a bakery, a full-service deli, a sushi bar, a large meat department with trained butchers, a seafood counter replete with water tanks featuring live crabs and lobsters, plus signs bragging that the store carried 129 different varieties of produce, a third of them organic. With all those options, why did she actively select mostly food in boxes and cans?

We started talking after the butcher demonstrated how to cut up a chicken. “When I make stuff from a box, it always turns out right,” she explained. “I never really learned to cook. Mom made dinner when we were young, but by the time I was in high school, she worked a lot, so my brother and I ate a lot of frozen dinners.”

She picked up one box of pasta, the kind that makes a side dish in a few minutes. “I know that Alfredo sauce is made with cream, but I would have no idea how to make it.”

I spent a year in culinary school learning endless variations on cream sauce. I explained a simple technique—boil cream until it reduces and then extend it with a bit of the cloudy water left over from cooking pasta. “That's it? Oh, wow, I thought it was a lot more complicated.”

She agreed that if I wrote down the recipe, she'd give it a try. Out went the nine boxes, and in went two packages of whole wheat pasta, a quart of cream, and a small wedge of Parmesan cheese—for roughly the same amount of money yet enough to make twice as many servings.

This result made her curious about what else we could replace from her cart. Boxes of Hamburger Helper were swapped for ingredients to make simple skillet dishes—onions, garlic, peppers, canned tomatoes, and a block of Cheddar cheese. We visited the bulk herbs and spices area and stocked up on several, including a Cajun blend, chili powder, mixed herbs, oregano, thyme, and red pepper flakes. Her daughter, initially bored by our conversation, took over filling and labeling the plastic bags of spices and herbs. “This is fun, Mama,” she said as she sealed one bag. “We should do this every time we shop.”

Real potatoes picked out by her daughter (along with a pink peeler) replaced the dehydrated variety. As we stood in the produce section, the woman looked around feebly. “I know that I don't make vegetables enough,” she said. “I'm not very good at figuring out what to do with them. I kind of avoid anything that requires a lot of cutting something up. I see those chefs on TV and it looks so easy. I guess I'm not very good at it, and it always feels like it takes a long time.” We bought a few bags of a precut broccoli and cauliflower mixture on sale that day, a bottle of olive oil, and some lemons. I wrote down instructions for how to steam and roast the vegetables, then top them with some lemon or a bit of her new herbs and spices.