Les Stagiaires
Life as an Intern in a Paris Cooking School
In May, 1982 I took a job at Complete Cuisine in Ann Arbor. I just graduated from Michigan, had no other prospects and still had 4 months on my lease. It was not a long walk from where I lived on the north side of town.
I did not intend to cook professionally at that time. I cooked at a yacht club in Detroit during high school and a couple of college summers, but found restaurant work in Ann Arbor a bad option. With so many students available, restaurant owners, from The Gandy Dancer to the original Cottage Inn, were exploitative, to say the least. I gladly left both businesses after a few months, and decided against further restaurant work.
But here I was, with the country in severe recession, working at a cookware store with a little lunch café business. Seemed like an easy enough gig, and I needed rent money. On my second day, the French ‘chef’ who wrote the daily menu, and did as little work as possible, ran off, literally, with one of the waitresses, and I was left in charge. I had no idea what a quiche was, or fettucine with pesto, or pate de campagne, or vinaigrette. The owner rolled out the crusts for quiche, I roasted a leg of lamb and cut hot, boiled potatoes into red wine vinegar, olive oil and grainy French mustard; filled the quiche shells with cheese and bacon, and eggs whisked with cream; ground basil leaves with pine nuts, olive oil and grated, hard cheese. As noon approached there was a line of professor’s wives waiting for a table and the ‘opportunity’ to have a sophisticated French lunch. Sandy, the owner, and I together fed the 30 ‘ladies who lunch’ , and I caught a bad bug that would last 11 years.
Over the next six months I learned to make chocolate mousse, bake flourless cakes, make soups of pureed vegetables and fresh herbs, make stocks and cream sauces. But doubtless the most important thing I learned was through a pure accident. I overheard a random conversation about working in France, at a cooking school. I always dreamed to follow Hemingway’s footsteps to Paris, and this was my shot. I didn’t know the name of the school, or how they employed Americans, so as final recourse I called the French Consulate in Detroit and explained my interest. A nice lady with a heavy accent said she would be happy to send me a list of cooking schools and let me decide.
A week later the list came, and two of the schools mentioned that they translated classes from French to English. Translate French? I still remembered enough of my French. I wrote a short letter to both schools, in French, asking for more information. One of them replied. I interviewed with the school’s founder, and saved money while cooking at several restaurants; eventually I left for France. It was January, 1985.
I emptied the bank account, and still was pretty poor when I landed in Paris after a 48 hour trip that took me through New York and London, a train to the coast, a ferry across the channel, and another train ride from Calais to Paris’s Gare du Nord station. I had two US Army duffle bags stuffed with almost everything I owned, and all I lived on for the next 16 months.
The tourist office at the train station helped me to find a local hotel on the ‘least expensive’ list. It was 12 francs a night, and included breakfast. The girl traced lines on a little mimeographed map and I made my way through the Algerian grifters on the sidewalk - they wanted to ‘help me’ find a place, and after a few blocks came to a little doorway on Rue La Fayette with a smaller sign, Hotel Gare du Nord. Inside an elderly woman explained that breakfast was done so I mustn’t under any circumstances expect ‘un petit dejeuner’. I was happy that between her, the border guards on the coast the previous evening and the tourist office lady, I understood enough of the French to make sense of what was happening and why. I assured the hotel clerk, or owner, that I would not harass them for breakfast. She gave me a heavy brass key and after a few flights of stairs I found myself in a 2nd floor room, like an old dormitory room, 10 x 12, with a twin bed, an armoire and a sink. After two full days of travel I smelled myself as I undid the layers and let them fall. I found towels and soap in the duffle and took a full bath standing in front of the sink, just happy that there was actually hot water. I read the signage across the street through the sheer curtains so doubtless I had some unwitting spectators.
I laid down on the bed and was happy that the linens looked clean. I had little sleep for two days but the adrenaline flowed and my eyes were open. I dressed quickly with a pair of jeans, a hooded gray sweatshirt and a lined blue jacket that I purchased just for the trip. The desk clerk told me that travel around Paris required a “le guide, monsieur, le guide.” She happily exchanged a $20 traveler’s cheque at 8 francs to the dollar, 2 francs below the going rate, as I soon learned. I also learned how the French act when they are lying or cheating; pursing their lips forward, avoiding eye contact, vibrating their head and repeating non, non, mais, non, as they try to persuade themselves that they are not cheating you. The churches are empty in France, even on Easter Sunday, but you can’t take the Catholic entirely out of the French.
I purchased the requisite book across the street, and with my new ‘guide’ in hand I was able to find the school La Varenne, 34 Rue St. Dominique on a map and locate a Metro entrance and stop. I soon had the Paris Metro figured out. The Metro stop was Place des Invalides. I came up the steps to a huge group of people, and also some animals, not pets but farm animals, sheep and goats and I believe geese. Odd. I carried just my passport and my traveler’s cheques around my neck in a ‘hidden’ wallet, and a homemade leather bag over my shoulder with my guide and my letter of acceptance to the school.
I had just one city block to walk, according to the ‘guide’, to find the school, so I strode through the crowd, across the open ‘Esplanade’ and as I turned to make my way up Rue St. Dominique I felt a hand on my shoulder, not a friendly hand. A man in a beret and army fatigues looked me over, a gun on his hip: “Qu'est ce que tu foutre?” I didn’t understand question, yet. My astonishment confused the soldier, but he recognized quickly that I was a foreigner, though dressed, I suppose, like a trouble maker, and an inadvertent participant in the ensuing protest. He brought me back around the corner I just turned; I was now under other watchful eyes. Soon I heard the approaching marchers, “CRSS, CRSS” they chanted, loudly and in unison. At the same time there was a ruckus out in the open space of the Esplanade when the protesters attempted without success to set a few animals on fire. Objects were tossed, by whom and at whom I knew not. The soldier who grabbed me was gone in the chaos. 700 to a 1000 marchers made their way into the Esplanade from Rue St. Dominique, still chanting “CRSS.” The men in fatigues arrested a few protesters, police cars wailed in their unusual French 3 note siren. It was a mad spectacle. I poked my nose around the gray concrete of the corner building and saw Rue St. Dominique was now rather peaceful. I jumped out and was surprised and relieved to find the school was only a few paces from the corner. I slid in behind the glass door to find a large kitchen in full swing, students cooking away, the chef shouting at everyone. I came back down to earth and heard “May I help you, monsieur?”
Rue St. Dominique turned out to be a flash point, there were several ministries of the government located there including the Ministry of Defense. Protests were not rare, some larger than others, none were ever really violent, but none were ever completely peaceful either. The labor unions in France were quite vehement and still leaned communist, and they often found sympathy among the farmers, although the countryside never appeared overly enthusiastic for urban politics. What they protested on my first day in Paris I never found out, though a dishwasher at the school explained it to me in great detail. I did not understand political French at that point. I eventually understood that “Qu'est ce que tu foutre?” means ‘what the fuck are you doing’? - the harshest French expression. ‘CRSS’, the chant, referred to the ‘Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité’ the CRS, a Republican Guard if you will, a division of the National Police used for riot control. You can imagine why the protesters added the additional S in their chant! The French do like their drama.
In response to her polite question I produced my letter of acceptance from my leather bag. The young lady behind the reception desk read the letter with great interest. One of the chefs slipped in beside me, also interested in the letter. He was Claude Vauguet, she was Anne. “Un nouveau stagiaire?” Claude asked her. “Oui, Chef.” He shook my hand lightly, “bienvenue, jeune homme,” and dashed off. Anne escorted me up a winding staircase to the second floor where another class was just ending, a tall woman stood beside a young chef, Patrick, and explained the history and value of the recipes the students made in the class. We stood aside and listened to the whole spiel. Afterwards Anne introduced me to the speaker, Suzy Davidson, an American, who ran the school. We spoke briefly at her desk and I was introduced around. It was Thursday and my start was the following Monday, but they needed a hand for the afternoon demo so I volunteered to wash pots and pans. For this I received lunch, the output of the morning’s class, which included several dishes, all fine, quality basic French cooking, perfect for a cooking school. The afternoon demo was also good. I’d come to the right place.
Afterwards, I walked the three miles back to my room at Hotel Gare du Nord, and collected food on the way, bread, fruit and pate. I fell asleep at 7:00, and woke the next morning to the breakfast announcement, “petit dejeuner, monsieur.” Two croissants and coffee with hot milk. France was ok.
I settled into the work at La Varenne pretty quickly. My job was to get to school early, load bins of ingredients for the classes and walk them from the basement cooler and storage to the classrooms. Then I translated the chef’s instructions to the students, and translated the questions back to the chefs. We ran up and down the steps to the basement storage all day; it was a physical job, but interesting in every respect. There were guest chefs each week, and special classes interspersed with the normal basic French cooking, like charcuterie for the production of sausages, pates and other delicacies of the pig. Each class lasted 6 weeks and covered the full range from soup, salad and main courses to desserts and pastry; students came and went fairly quickly. I eventually became the lead stagiaire, drew up the weekly schedule, kept things running as smoothly as a kitchen can, leaned on new stagiaires to pick up the pace. Most of them did not come to the work with previous kitchen experience, the main thing being their language skills, so it was always an uphill climb to get them into the rhythm of the school and the physicality of the work. There was a dearth of French cooking schools available to the English speaking world at that time, so we had students from Australia to California, and even a few from Latin America and Asia who had English skills.
Each class did 5 - 6 recipes a day, each with several steps to help the student understand how to build a recipe, step by step, ‘pas a pas’ as the French say. The chefs added in their own ideas; sometimes they took ingredients for one recipe and split them into two recipes to challenge the students’ skills. The most difficult idea for a new student was the discipline of French cooking. Nothing is haphazard, there is a specific method they must follow to attain the best result. The first two weeks at the school were difficult for all the students but they soon got the message and started to take a more professional attitude to cooking. The chefs settled down as classes became less chaotic. Some students, the Irish in particular, had a difficult time with the discipline. They preferred doing it wrong to listening and learning how to do it correctly. There were also a few Americans like this, who, for whatever reason, paid a lot of money to come to France and tell the chefs how to cook. This did not go over well. The chefs eventually ignored these students. They simply hated the attitude and the mess, and students with the wrong attitude always made the biggest mess. Frustrated, they told me to translate to the student “Why do you never do anything correctly and your work is always a pile of shit?” Some students never heard criticism like this before and it really stopped them in their tracks. Most responded well, but a few just bore down in the wrong direction. However, the chefs never faltered in their practice of teaching, they always helped and prodded those who wanted to learn. I tried my best to help some of the students, especially the women, understand that it was not personal; the chef criticized them because he saw they had talent and wanted them to work harder at honing their skills (true at least some of the time, and it was the best I could come up with). When they responded in kind to the criticism and raised their game, it amazed to see how well they started to learn and practice their skills. Other students noticed as well, and by week 6 the classes started to make real progress. For the student who stayed on for 12 or 18 weeks, or the 36 week master class, the classes became really interesting. Multi step dishes that took real skill at every step were common, and students who absorbed the discipline executed them very well. And with success came confidence.
For the stagiaires there were two evening classes a week, with one of the chefs, when we worked on our own cooking skills. Like the students we were expected to follow certain basic recipes to learn the methods of French cookery. Croquettes de poisson, for example, required you to clean a fresh fish and pass the flesh through a fine sieve to obtain a puree. To this we added heavy cream spoon by spoon as we whisked it above a bowl of ice to make a mousseline. We piped the mousseline into 3 inch cylinders on a parchment lined baking sheet and put it cool. Then we breaded them ‘a l’anglaise’, milk, flour, beaten egg and finally breadcrumbs. Finally we deep fried in hot but not too hot oil. Sounds like a fishstick from our childhood, but the preparation conveyed the importance of following a method. New students and stagiaires worked hard to master this simple recipe and do it correctly and without making a huge mess. None ever found it as easy as the recipe sounds.
The chef always found the bones of the fish and while the student waited for their mousseline to setup in the refrigerator they learned how to make fish stock. Again, another step by step process that yielded a very useful method and a fine result. Sometimes the chef used the stock to prepare a simple fish soup, other times we saved it for class the next day. We used everything to the limit, another really important idea that all students learned.
Over time I grew to respect French cookery in a way I didn’t understand on the train ride from Calais to Paris a year earlier. It was not just the results of French cookery that I respected, but the culture that elevated the human skills required to produce French food. It required precision to a degree that I was unprepared for when I began my internship, and the only way to acquire consistency in precision is through discipline. French cookery is a craft that you have to practice with maximum conscientiousness. For some students and stagiaires the lure of French cookery was a romantic fantasy that started at a great restaurant perhaps, and the classes with a chef who demanded discipline were too difficult, physically, mentally and especially emotionally. They struggled to concentrate for three hours straight to bring a recipe from start to finish. Quite often the chef would have to take over at the end to finish their work. Strangely some students never complained when we asserted ourselves to finish their work. At the end of the 3rd hour they were overwhelmed, and stepped aside without protest. We presented the day’s work, of the entire class, to the Director of the school before we sat down to lunch and we would all take a lump if some dishes appeared poorly done.
One other aspect of French cookery which amazed me was that it was not really the province of professionals only. French cookery really starts with the farm, the market stalls and the home. The professional chef refines the concepts and practices, but the best of French food comes from methods and recipes that go back centuries to the homes of farm families. The logic of their cookery, embedded in their methods, was practiced in homes first before the advent of the professional chef. Ingredients that highlighted the best of the farm are highly prized and are the bedrock of French cookery. The average French person understands the difference between a roast and a braise and a stew. In fact calling the myriad of recipes that use the stewing method stew seems a little disrespectful. They are perfect examples of dishes that started on the farm and were elevated, not forgotten, by the professional chef, and there are dozens of them.
France was and is an insular culture. Outside of their cookery, there is not a lot of French culture apparent in the rest of the world these days. French film was a thing for a time, but that seems to have slowed down now. The French themselves seem to have little interest in the rest of the world. Millions of tourists visit France every year, but it’s rare to run into French tourists, even in Europe. During my time in France, there were a couple of things that provided some insight into the current French thinking about the world and their place in it. The wounds of two world wars, in which the French took a beating, especially WWI where they lost huge numbers of their young men, persist. Germans who visited the school from time to time were not especially welcomed, and often ignored completely. The French also feel the rub of Americans like sandpaper. Obviously there’s some residual respect for our aid to France in both world wars, but it does not flow easily and you’ll more often hear complaints about everything from buying oil with US Dollars to the impoliteness of American tourists who sometimes, it’s true, gape at France and the French like they have wandered into a Disney production. Chef Claude had a joke about how the US lost its best chefs when they all went to work for NASA. There’s a grudging recognition that whatever place France once occupied in the world, the most populated and powerful country in Europe, it was usurped by a richer, more technologically advanced United States. Every country, every culture needs an identity, and France, having failed at more modern economic pursuits, settled on wine, cheese and cookery. From this perspective French culture, indeed the French economy and the country itself, stagnated in the early 20th century. Losing 1,400,000 young men killed in WWI, with another 4,200,000 wounded, does that to a country. France lost so many young men to death and disability that the population has still not corrected - the population of females is still 3 points higher than males.
Travel outside of Paris and you’ll notice the economic stagnation immediately. French villages with 20,000 people still have market days, where you can go to purchase a new pair of overhalls, shoes and pots and pans. There are also artisans selling goods of all kinds, intricate high quality, hand made, much like French cookery. France is still a country that appreciates artisans over mass production. French regard for the past may appeal to those of us from a country that heralds economic growth at almost any cost, where the past has little value and we look forward, always and without fail. But embracing the past also has its downsides. The current fires burning across France are one of them.
When I lived in France North Africans, Algerians or Moroccans, owned all of the food boutiques in my neighborhood. I ate at the school on most days, but Sunday was a day off, so I shopped at their stores when I needed bread, butter, jam, wine, beer, cheese. That was my typical Sunday buffet! As in the US, small business is a natural fit for immigrants with less education and a desire to lift themselves up through hard work. And like the US, the children of these immigrants, seeing the 24/7/365 routine of their parents in the shop, are less inclined than any other group in society to open a small business. In the US they often take the college route to professional careers.
One of the hit movies during my summer in France was a banal film called “Le Thé au harem d'Archimède,”(the tea in Archimede’s harem) a play on ‘The Theorem of Archimedes’. The movie features an Algerian youth and his white buddy who become petty criminals while living in a housing project outside of Paris. Another movie was “Sans Toit Ni Loi” (literally with neither roof or law, called Vagabond in its US release) a play on the French idiom "sans foi ni loi", meaning "with neither faith nor law.” This was about a young women who falls through the cracks of post-faith France and end up on drugs, in prostitution, in pornography. These are not hopeful movies and it’s been awhile but I don’t recall that they offered any remedies for the ills they depicted. This was 38 years ago, and the problems the French saw then have accumulated. What’s the answer?
The US goes overboard for new technology and the economic growth that it offers, but France faces the opposite problem. They have lots of youth, many but not all immigrant youth, without prospects for growth, and with little interest to continue to work at small businesses, or as artisans who have a difficult time making a living in a modern global economy where you have to buy oil with US dollars. France now exports cooks all over the world, young men with skills who have to seek opportunities elsewhere. That’s not a feature, but a bug of a system that’s not working.
One of the chefs at the school was Fernand Chambrette, a short robust man who is still the best cook I’ve ever met. He was into his sixties and no longer working full time during my tenure at the school but we became good colleagues still. His personal story was interesting. His father died when he was quite young, and after another fight at school a nun dragged him by his ear to a local restaurant where they put him to work as an apprentice, age 12. Maybe this is how France operated in the past? But I heard the same story from a Frenchman my age a few years later in New York. The truth is that many of the workers in the trades in France are boys who the authorities deem a little too spirited for further schooling so they are sent to work apprenticeships, some in cookery, others in baking, charcuterie (all things pork), butchery. This is another area of French culture, adjacent to cooking, that was remarkable to me. As an American so used to personal freedom, to hear that people in authority at a school or a government office made life choices for others seemed unbelievable, but it happens everyday. It’s just another example of how the French view their economy and their citizen’s lives. Agree or disagree with their approach, but does it scale? and is it agile? Can a growing country in a dynamic world economy work when bureaucrats, the French call them ‘functionaires’, design individual people’s lives? Do bureaucracies have a vision of the world that the rest of us lack?
There are parts of the US economy and society that deserve criticism, but my experience in France taught me that all human choices, and human choices in aggregate are human societies, are less than what we desire, less than perfect, because we do not finally have the capacity to make optimal choices; all of our choices are constrained, limited by a less than optimal reality at every turn.
Some societies are simply not to be tolerated - on that we can all agree - we had enough examples in the 20th century. But societies run for the betterment of their citizens may differ on their foundational ideas about human life and how it should be lived. With its long intellectual history of Descartes -”I think therefore I am”-, Voltaire, the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church and its Jesuit priests, France expects, nay demands, that life, and cookery, follow a logical method, a purposeful laid out plan to maximize the results. For several centuries this plan worked wonders; France sat atop the world and its language was the language of the great courts of Europe. A super power in its day. And who knows, perhaps future generations pick up this thread and make France great again. In the meantime, they need to figure out what to do with a huge stock of youth, many of them immigrants, who do not have work and may not have the same worldview.
One last memory of my time in France. Anne, who worked as receptionist and secretary at the school, was a fine young French girl, quite pretty, about my age I think. We never had more than a few words but she did invite me one Saturday, a day off, to meet her family, which I did. They seemed nice. On my last day at the school she invited me out for a coffee and in the spirit of friendship I accepted, of course. In a small cafe just a block from school she explained that if she came to live in the United States as my wife, we must agree to live in San Francisco, only San Francisco for some reason. I had never held this girl’s hand, or taken her on a date, but she offhandedly made an offer of marriage to me. I have no idea what my face looked like while she spoke and I slowly realized what she meant, but she seemed quite pleasant and cheerful as we walked back towards the school. I said good-bye there on the Esplanade of the Place des Invalides - the memorial to the dead of French wars, with a handshake. She skipped back to the school and I took the stairs to the Metro. I guess when boys are scarce in a society, especially boys with prospects, a girl must take the initiative. I really hope she eventually found some young fellow and they made a good life together. (Hopefully not in San Francisco.)