Booze and Sharp Objects

“I can’t even boil water.”
This was the first day of my life as a Cordon Bleu student: orientation. It was one of those days you just tried to stifle your sheepish grin but it would keep coming out. I was out of the US, I was on the first steps of a new adventure, and the opportunities were open. It was exciting.

Of course, I wasn’t the only to leave America: about 40% of the student body were American I found. It was international in spite of having 1 French person out of 200 students in a French school. This would still be a great place to meet people from around the world in a concentration. Then again, there was her.

The admission process to Le Cordon Bleu involves applying, writing a letter of motivation, and working out the numerous visa issues and housing issues with some help from the Cordon Bleu staff. It gives you a lot of time to think out any questions. That whole process took roughly 5 months. This was orientation. This was day one, and she asked.

The American accent was so heavy that even her English sounded marred. “Will this be okay? I mean, I can’t even cook to save my life.” As a note, she couldn’t. Actually when she tried to cook, the only way she could save a life is if she stabbed a classmate in something not so vital, like a leg, thereby effectively stopping the knife from going into something more vital.

Another note to understand the school, I and every Asian appeared to be the only ones not told that there were translators at the school for English speakers. 80% of the school spoke not a word of French, and of the 20% who spoke French, only 3% were bilingual in both French and English. The chefs spoke very little English at all so this put us bilinguals at an interesting spot translating for both teachers and students. It was my first taste of the worlds opened by the power of language. I became an addict and began my dark, downward path toward becoming an admitted linguist.

This woman had a command of about thirty French words. Twenty of them all seemed to be the word “merde” however. When leaving America, I was happy to be in a new country and away from Americans. Unfortunately, my plans were foiled. I was followed.
And as would be befitting, she ended up in my practicum class of nine students: One Brazilian, two Singaporeans, one Filipino, one French speaking Korean, two other Americans, me, and her, Larenda.

They understand Americans at Le Cordon Bleu. It is a strange, scary new land and they understand how we naturally cope with such sensations and how we would be able to feel more comfortable: they arm us. They give us knives. Big ones.

My ex-girlfriend (but at this point, it would be another 5 months before I would meet her) used to keep her knives in her purse. The 17 inch chef knife wouldn’t quite fit and it would hang out, at the ready, as she took the metro late at night. It made her feel safe.
I’m not sure how well it worked, but she had the archetypical aura of “Pick-pocket me. I’m a victim,” about her. While living in Paris, no one ever bothered her.

Larenda on the other hand was the kamikaze cuisinier. She wasn’t sure where she was, or what she was holding, but it didn’t matter: it was big, pointy, sharp, and pointed at your lower back as you work diligently at your mire poix.

“Larenda! Watch what you do with that thing!”

She was a sight: a blood stain trickled down her apron, two fingers were tenuously held on one hand by band-aids and latex finger slips (finger-condoms as they are dubbed), and the other hand was heavily bandaged from a burn. I understand conversion between Fahrenheit and Celsius can be difficult. If it’s 23˚C, do I wear a sweater or a short sleeve shirt? If my body is 37˚C, do I have hypothermia or a fever? As a fast, easy conversion tool, I have prepared a simple gauge: 325˚C = Don’t touch it with your bare hand. It converts to roughly 415˚F, or just shy of the clean cycle on a standard oven. Another simple safety tip: if you do happen to miscalculate a conversion on a large number in centigrade, like 325, and do pick the pan up out of the oven with your bare hand, let go of it when it starts to hurt. Holding on and looking confused is a bad idea.

After three weeks of her antics, I made sure to get as far away from her in the class as possible. In a classroom that fit 9 students, it was a difficult feat. If I got six feet away, I was lucky. I generally ended up right across from her. The three feet of marble between us gave me some consolation.

I was a great deal safer, but I was still close enough to be privy to her antics. The man working next to her often, one of the Americans, was one of the more patient and empathetic of the group. He was also one of the more bled-upon-by-another-student of our class. She would be in the middle of an interesting acrobatic feat like trying to hold a 175˚C chicken with three fingers of her left hand while the other two tried to keep a paper towel against her palm to stave the bleeding of a previous injury sustained moments earlier. He other hand gripped the 17 inch chef knife with white knuckles and jittered from her sheer concentration. In a moment like this he would turn to her and say dejectedly, “Larenda.” He would pause for a moment, like a disappointed parent and continue, “What are you doing?”

It was a good question, and one on which she had not previously contemplated. She would stop, reexamine her the knife, the bird, her hand, the bird (my hand is getting hot, isn’t it?), the knife, the bird and look up with no clear answers.

She would look up, her eyes rapidly blinking as if to clarify the situation, “This is how they did it in the demonstration. It’s just so difficult to carve the chicken- and they made it look so easy.”
I wasn’t the first to root out the source of her talent; the American who often was stuck to working next to her was the one to solve the mystery. Larenda was an alcoholic. She was either moderately inebriated during class or experiencing her continuous hangover.


Some of the students approached the director of the school, another American, about such an obvious safety hazard. She responded, “You know, some people have drinking problems... and these people - well, it really is out of their control. We can’t just remove them from the school or it could get worse. We just have to let them stay and hope they can improve on their own.”

It was only later that we realized the school director was talking about herself. This was after all the women who frequently would, before an English-speaking audience, ‘translate’ French into French. It truly is a daunting intellectual feat mind you, to reiterate the exact words, with the only change a heavy American accent. The chef she would be translating for would look up, shake his head, and make some gesture involving one or more bottles of wine while she looked toward the audience, not able to see the chef. It would take her a bit of time to realize the problem of her translation, or lack there of. This was followed by her own exaggerated silent laugh as if this didn’t happen every week. She seemed to hold her job by depending on the French system of fault: “All students are required to purchase cooking slip-on clogs. Oh, the paper says you need to buy steel-toed boots? The printer made an error again - must be low on ink.” The French blame any inanimate object or person absent for their mistakes out of a cultural habit, but they do it with a sense of irony. She used it as a crutch.

Larenda did garner a bit of sympathy; she truly led a depressing existence. She never loved her husband, who was about thirty years her elder- mind you, she’s in her late 40s- but latched on to him for financial support. She wanted to meet men and find a more reciprocal relationship but was often too messed up to figure out how. She didn’t want to learn how to cook. She was there because her husband wanted to open up a restaurant but would be hard pressed to figure out how to microwave a potato.

She did garner a bit of sympathy, but she was in Paris, at the Cordon Bleu on an all expense paid vacation, and she had dug her own hole that she was in.

We were making quenelles of fresh-water pike one day. It is an easy recipe involving 3 main parts: ground fish mixture, mounted egg whites, the sauce, and the white roux to thicken it. Roux is a mixture of equal parts flour and butter. It is a common ingredient in French sauces, and forms a fluid paste when prepared. The roux is cooked before hand while each student takes their turn making the ground fish mixture (cream, egg yolks, salt, pepper and pike) with the Robocoup (a Cuisinart on steroids, Major League Baseball steroids). The mounted eggs are mixed with the ground fish, and small quenelles of it are poached in a cooking liquid. When they are done, the roux is mixed with the liquid to thicken it.

Our special student was working at a frenzied pace, but not yet half done with her recipe when the rest of the class began forming the quenelles. She would have been a little closer to being finished if she didn’t “go to the bathroom” for a good 15 minutes in the middle of the class and return smelling of brandy.

We looked over to see where she was at, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Her tour-de-cou pointed straight out from the right side of her neck while her eyes darted about the counter-top as if the reality of the marble was collapsing before her eyes- and it probably was. Her mouth hung slightly agape, her right hand made nervous fidgets and she swayed slightly. Her hat was falling half-way down her forehead and loose hair frizzed out in a frightful mane.

It appears she mistook the roux for a pastry recipe. She made an innovative dough with the flour, butter, and egg: if there were no eggs in the pastry, I could at least make out the egg shells in it. She had enveloped her pike filet with the dough and was struggling with the saran wrap as she tried to finish wrapping it in that as well before dropping it into boiling water to poach it.

She reached for her knife to cut the saran wrap, and the chef stepped in finally. Chef Xavier Cotte, one of my favorite chefs at the school, was the only to ever kick her out of class and tell her to stop drinking. The chefs knew the school director too well and French are morally opposed to hypocritical policy.


 

A recipe poultry fans who love their wine:

Coq au Vin (rooster in wine) This is amore tame version of the recipe. The "better" recipe involves quite a different story.

-4 bottles of a deep flavored, but young red wine (Merlot, Côtes de Rhone, Cabernet Sauvignon, Loire)

-Mire Poix (vegetables for the sauce)

-One or two chickens.

Pour all the wine into a pot, reduce it down to 1/10th the original volume. While this is going on, sauté the chicken with the mire poix. Add the wine when all the vegetables and chicken are browned, and reduce the wine to a syrup. Add enough water to cover the chicken and braise it until done. Remove the chicken, strain the sauce, and then reduce the sauce until it thickens. Let the chicken rest in the sauce for at least 10 minutes before it is served or the chicken will be dry. At this point, the dish will improve if you leave it overnight, and reheat it the next day. If you a stickler for the traditional method, the chicken should be soaked overnight with the wine first before cooking it, but this makes the chicken taste alcoholic (as it will be). Marinating after cooking the chicken helps better flavors permeate through the chicken as does the gelatin-rich sauce, making the chicken more juicy and succulent. At the Cordon Bleu, we did the more traditional method.