Everyone had arrived and it was a room full of men and three women: me, a Turkish girl, and another American woman, whom I would later know as Sage, who entered casually. She had lots of hair and a pointy nose. Sage asked around to see what cooking station was left and I could tell from her accent she was from the Midwest. She informed me that in the Basic Cuisine class most of this group had previously been in, they’d had a certain agreed-upon setup. Since this group had fourteen people, the extreme capacity of the practical room, I had to move down and work on the stove next to the other sink. I looked at the station I was going to be relegated to and was about to move when I said, “No. I’m not moving. I want this work station.” She stared at me with wide eyes, as if unable to believe I wasn’t automatically doing as she’d instructed.
Stuttering, she explained further that the group already had their groove. I explained to her that since there were two new students and I’d gotten there early, things were going to be different. Her expression shifted from disbelief to anger, and I thought we were going to have it out right there, but then Yoshi said he would move to the stove next to the sink; he didn’t care.
I finished the first practical in Intermediate and was exhausted, regretting having signed up for the basic wine class. I ate my guinea fowl and studied the next recipes on my tour of France. The African custodian finished cleaning up the small reception room on the second floor and then he brought in bottles of water and platters of cheeses. I followed him in and sat at the very front. I liked getting to my classes early because as a journalist I was always late. A story would happen and by the time I arrived on the scene it was all about catching up and getting neighbors and witnesses to tell me what they’d seen.
The introduction to wine students arrived at their leisure and this time I made an effort to say hi to people. Yves, the instructor the registration woman has raved about, arrived a minute before class started. He was a middle-aged man with charm and presence. A representative of Le Coq Rouge gave him a glowing introduction that made us feel grateful we were in his presence. I was lucky to be so close to him that I could smell his subtle yet expensive cologne. I sat in the front and my inquisitive mind kept wondering, if a sommelier became an alcoholic, would he have to change professions or would he just qualify for disability in France?
“Bonjour,” Yves boomed, the Le Coq Rouge representative translating for him, “I love to teach this class. On one end I can teach you that wine is a gastronomic Kodak of a day in the life of the earth, the land. With one taste we experience la terre; wine is the blood of the earth. At the other end, at its simplest, wine is just fermented grape juice. For me wine is science and poetry coming together and exploding in my mouth.” As Yves’s spicy scent filled my nose and his silky voice filled my ears, I wondered what it would be like for me to explode in his mouth.
“Homard à l’Américaine, lobster American style, comes from Marseilles and is one of the dishes of Provence. It was created on a cruise ship going from Marseilles to the U.S.; hence the name,” translated Henry for Chef Chocon. To avoid causing the lobsters too much pain, Chef Chocon would work faster.
“The best method to kill lobsters without causing them too much pain is to stick their heads in the boiling water,” translated Henry. The chef grabbed the lobster and forced the head down. The lobster kicked up its tail and, even after the lobster was technically dead, the muscles still stretched and moved as the tail and legs were cut off. Most of the women around me flinched. “C’est ça la cuisine,” Chef Chocon explained via Henry. Cuisine is this way. “I watch television shows about doctors performing surgery and cutting up people in all sorts of places and there is blood and guts everywhere… you suffer just watching it. Well, in cuisine there is a little bit of suffering and blood, but at the end you get great sauce,” translated Henry.
Who knew the guts of a lobster would make great sauce? But they do. The chef fried the aromatic vegetables and threw in the lobster’s shell. After the pieces of shell were red, he added cognac and struck his lighter. In a split second the casserole was on fire and he looked like a magician instead of a chef. The whole class gasped, “Wow.” He then confessed that you do that cooking trick only for the cameras, because the alcohol in the cognac would evaporate on its own as it proceeded to get cooked; but this was the thing audiences wanted to see celebrity chefs do. He went on, complaining about celebrity chefs preparing designer dishes that were more chemistry than cuisine. He criticized the very famous Chef Bocuse and called him “Chef Beaucoup” for the beaucoup—lots of—money he made off his frozen meals and his private cooking school.
The lobster ended up finger-licking good. I hated seeing that poor lobster die before my eyes but, damn, did it taste delicious. I was always one of the last students in the demonstration room because I waited until the food paparazzi finished taking their pictures of the food and then I took mine. I also made sure to get my demonstration dégustation, and then seconds and thirds if possible. There is a word that describes someone like me: gourmand.
In practical I looked at my knives and then at the lobster. I am a hypocrite. I will not kill my lobster, but I will gladly eat it. I felt bad about the time I’d sat in the courtyard during lunchtime next to a woman from California studying here who proudly claimed to be a vegetarian; I’d made her think twice about her choices.
“You know plants scream when you cut them,” I informed her with a serious tone in my voice.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Ask any psychic and they will tell you they can hear the trees crying after they have been chopped down.”
“I don’t believe in psychics,” she said, dismissively.
“They’ve conducted scientific experiments where they had someone cut up part of a plant and abuse it. A week later the same person came back and this time they were measuring the electrical responses of the plant and found that when that person came close to the plant the plant remembered that person and was scared.” I delivered the line as a matter of fact.
“Really?” she said, finally believing me.
“Yeah, I think if you really want to be sensitive you shouldn’t eat plants either… but then you would have to starve and die… I know, it’s a difficult decision… That’s why I accept that I am a hypocrite and I really enjoy my food.” I confessed all this to her and then left, like the Lone Ranger. She probably looked at her food and wondered, Who was that bitch who ruined my appetite?
Chef Lucas stared at me, wondering why I hadn’t killed my lobster yet. I handed it to him and asked him if he could kill it for me. He looked at me and smirked.
“You women want equality in the kitchen, but you don’t want to do the dirty work or have the strength to get the job done,” Chef Lucas said, shaking his head.
“The day you can pop out a bun from your oven I will bow to you,” I responded in my horrible French. He wiped the smirk off his face and tore the lobster in half. I was so shocked I had to turn away. He handed the still-moving lobster back to me, but I just pointed for him to put the pieces on the counter. He had no patience for a girl like me. I said, “Merci” and he continued inspecting everyone’s work without turning back.
I poured the cognac on my lobster shells and aromatic vegetables and stuck in my long fancy lighter and boom, it was a beautiful fire. Sage asked Benino, her friend working at the station next to hers, to lend her his lighter but he’d forgotten it in his locker.
“Do you need a lighter?” I asked Sage. She turned to me and paused for a bit before uttering, “Yes” and snatching the lighter from my hand. Sage poured the cognac and flicked the lighter, but the casserole did not catch on fire. She tried a couple more times before she gave up and handed me the lighter back. She took too long and the cognac had probably evaporated.
“I need a beer,” she announced.
“Do you want to get one after class?” I offered. I hated beer, but I wanted to buy her one and somehow make it up to her for not being so nice on our first d
ay of Intermediate.
She paused again to consider my offer. Eventually the doubt left her eyes. “Sure. I don’t have much time, but we can get a quick one.”
After class we ended up going to C’est Ma Vie. As usual, there were not that many customers during the day.
“I’m sorry about the other day—” I began to apologize.
“No sweat,” she cut me off. “You’re funny thinking you did something bad. I’ve been in New York City kitchens and the kind of shit men do to you…” She drank her wine. “I’m used to getting shoved and mistreated. It comes with the territory. I know, I could be doing something else with my life, but it’s hard getting chosen as a female firefighter, so this is the closest thing,” she admitted, almost laughing.
“You want to be a firefighter?” I asked, not sure if she was joking.
“When I was younger and liked playing with matches,” she replied, mellowing down and letting the wine soothe her nerves.
“So you want to be a chef?” I inquired, trying to see where that would take the conversation.
“Of course, don’t you?”
“I just want to own a restaurant. Manage it, let someone else do the cooking in my kitchen,” I lied. Then I felt bad about it and figured that over Bordeaux you should tell the truth. “Actually, I’m just killing time. Maybe I’ll be a food critic, since I can’t go back to being a real journalist.” I stuffed myself with cheese so I wouldn’t reveal more.
“It’s a pretty expensive way of killing time. Why don’t you just hang out at cafés pretending to be a writer like all the rich kids I know?”
“Because this way I get my papers to stay in the country and at the end I get a diploma, so I won’t feel like I wasted my time.”
Sage got real close to me and whispered, “Hey, that guy behind you is a famous author. He has a book on the best-seller list at W. H. Smith. He wrote a novel about stepping on dog shit for a whole year in Paris, or something like that.” I turned carefully and studied his face.
Sage whispered, “You would think the first few days after stepping on dog shit he would have looked down.”
I was not about to add blood as a thickener to my rooster sauce. I didn’t mind eating cooked blood if I found out afterward, but the mere thought of blood in the sauce brought back many memories. Like the red mole we had that included my pet rooster back when I was eleven. My friends hated it when I admitted to growing up with chickens and roosters in my backyard in East L.A., but some stereotypes are true. Of course not everyone had chickens, or a sweet rooster like Ricky, in their backyard, but we did and the day Ricky went from pet to plate I sobbed. I might have to make rooster again now, but I draw the line at adding blood.
Chef Fournier, the first female chef I had ever encountered, came up to me and inquired why I wasn’t working. I liked her very much and from the rumors I had heard about the last female chef at Le Coq Rouge, I truly admired her for whatever bullshit she had to put up with to be there, so I didn’t want to give her a hard time. She was about to tell me something when the fire alarm went off and she commanded all her students to take everything off the burners and leave the practical room immediately. We all marched down to the street level and walked across the street and watched students pour out of the building. Some of the pastry students had flour on them and were annoyed at having to wait outside, knowing that their soufflés were disasters by now. Two American girls from Intermediate, Cynthia and Persia, were happy about leaving the building so they could take a cigarette break. I caught bits and pieces of their conversation.
“She is so stupid, I don’t know why they put her in our group. She’s only studying cuisine and isn’t pursuing a grand supérieur diplôme like us.”
“I think it’s because Trevor left.”
“What a loser. I can’t believe he left because he couldn’t handle a chef calling him a fag,” the tall girl said to the Indian-American girl.
They enjoyed their cigarettes more than food. These were the two students in demonstration who never ate the samples afterward. They would instantly leave and talked about how they were determined to lose weight; they were going to win this fight. After Chef Sauber complained to the students that they were required to taste the demonstration as part of their training, Persia was forced to eat, and during the break she was so disgusted she vomited. Once I was waiting by the bathroom door when she did it. When she came out of the bathroom she avoided looking at me. I thought it was a one-time thing, but I soon discovered it was a regular ritual. I made it a point not to go to the restroom after her because the smell of acid was overpowering. How could you be bulimic and in cooking school? I tried to picture myself as a bulimic or anorexic, and I’m sure there is a Mexican-American woman out there who is, but I couldn’t imagine being Mexican and having an eating disorder. Just like I couldn’t conceive of being Mexican and on a diet. I was used to fighting with my nine siblings so I could get my share of food to eat. I would eat as fast as I could so I would get seconds and feel satisfied. The thought of wasting food in that manner made me want to vomit.
Their cigarette smoke in my face also made me nauseous, and I was about to tell them to point their poisonous smoke elsewhere when Chef Sauber escorted Bassie out of the building, giving her a lecture, in front of Sélange and Françoise, about cuisine being a very serious business. I walked closer to them to listen in as Bassie tried to explain how she was not an arsonist who’d intended to burn up the trash can. It was an accident. She had poured too much cognac into the lobster and when she stuck in the lighter it practically exploded in her face and she stepped back. She probably ignited the paper towels in the garbage can next to her by accident. Poor Bassie looked like a little girl surrounded by upset family members telling her to stop playing with matches. Bassie lowered her head and nodded every time they told her that she was going to be on probation and no more special treatment for whatever disorder or disease she had.
The students were allowed back in and the grades for that day were nullified. I was at my locker when I saw Bassie come in. I tried not to laugh at the image of her setting the garbage can on fire. Poor Bassie; I knew she was trying her best. I’m so glad I had her as a friend because we could both commiserate. I asked her if she wanted to get a drink and, much like her lobster, Bassie’s face lit up.
We went to C’est Ma Vie and no one was there except for Jérôme, reading up on his wines. He welcomed us and we ordered two glasses of red. Jérôme recommended the house wine and read off from a book the region it came from. He showed us a map and located the winery.
“They want me to quit,” admitted Bassie, holding back tears. “They are willing to give me back my money, but I am going to finish,” she said with the determination of an ant.
“Don’t they understand what you have?” I asked compassionately.
“I’ve explained to them that I have ADD and all my allergies, but their answer is that I just shouldn’t do it. People like me shouldn’t be in the kitchen.” Bassie went on to describe all the mistakes she had made and I started recognizing myself in her. Maybe I have whatever she has, just not as bad, I thought to myself.
“The other students are all doing both cuisine and pastry and they think that makes them special. They resent the fact that I am merely a cuisine student and they have to share their kitchen with me. They want me to quit so they can have the extra space and not have to censor themselves with their stupid jokes about the cuisine students in front of me.” The more wine Bassie poured into her mouth, the more her frustrations poured out of it.
“I heard Persia and her friend mention you,” I revealed.
“Those bitches are mean. They threw a party for our cooking group and didn’t invite me.” Bassie sulked.
“Can you ask to be moved?” I suggested.
“Yeah, I already tried, but I think this is the administration’s way of showing me how incompetent I am by putting me in a class with competitive students who all want to be the next celebrity chef.�
� We both laughed at them, but I secretly imagined myself with my own cooking show. My show would be for single women: how to make a meal in fifteen minutes or less with enough leftovers for the cat.
Jérôme came by and poured more wine into our glasses.
“Merci,” we both said. We took a sip of the wine and let out a deep sigh.
“I’m so lonely. Paris is the worst city to be in when you’re lonely… I actually broke down and called my ex-boyfriend,” confessed Bassie.
“I thought you said he was a jerk?” I asked carefully.
“He’s gotten better,” she replied in between swallows. I thought about Armando and wondered how he was doing. On occasion I thought about calling him. When you’re dating you think it’s so wonderful that your boyfriend is also your best friend. When you break up it sucks double. I knew loneliness very well. Now that Luna was gone and Armando was becoming a distant memory, I only had me; but I wanted to run away from me.
The next day I woke up hungover, again, and quickly threw on some clothes. I couldn’t miss the chartered bus to the Loire Valley for my wine tour.
“In my family the first sons always inherited the wine business, but because I was born female it went to my younger brother,” Marie-Anne, a translator from Australia who’d joined us on the wine excursion, translated for the winery owner, Véronique. “So I decided to go to school to study winemaking; that’s where I met my husband and we decided to start our own winery. We focused on sweet white wines and we are very happy that our business is in continual growth.” Véronique then explained how they made their wines and escorted us into their caves. I was not prepared for the cold and crossed my arms and massaged them to generate more heat. Yves handed me his scarf. I looked up at him and was touched by his chivalry.
Hungry Woman in Paris Page 12
