This month starts a new series of articles on French cooking, planned with a different approach to the subject. The title gives you a clue to its aim. You will be the apprentis and I the chef, reversing the role I played many, many years ago when I was serving my apprenticeship under those great French chefs to whom I owe such a very-great debt. At the same time I will be following another role, the one I played when, as chef des cuisines of the old New York Ritz. I trained so many young chefs. As I plan the series I begin to wonder if I will be able to make you feel, as you read the printed words, that you are actually watching me work and hearing me explain how our fine French cuisine is achieved. Well, my heart is in it and I most certainly hope to succeed.
At the outset I must make it clear that the French consider cooking an art. And an artist, as we all know, is one who strives for perfection. Perfection, in turn, revolves around an ideal, a grand effect or perhaps exquisite workmanship. And that, mes apprentis, is the mood for you to establish in these classes in cuisine classique.
I suppose that trying to teach others always tends to make you relive some of your own experiences. Right now there persists in my memory a flashback of those weeks when my parents were deciding if I should be permitted to go into training to be a chef. My farmer grand-père, I recall, kept extolling the advantages of following in his footsteps. But I knew what I wanted. The kitchen was my lure, although it was not until years later that I realized this wasn't purely accidental, but was shaped almost unconsciously by the concern of a parent.
The reason behind my career, at least in part, was the fact that I was born left handed. An unfortunate occurrence in those days when schoolmasters could never think of letting a child write or work with the left hand. The sharp edge of a ruler on your knuckles made that very plain. It was a painful reminder you obeyed—and didn't run home and tattle about, either. But this can do strange things to children. I, for instance, started walking in my sleep, rubbing my knuckles in a sad kind of way as I wandered. This always roused my mother, so my older brother told me years later, and she would lead me back to the bed I shared with him, saying gently,“Vas durmir, mon petit” (“Now go to sleep, my little one”). But my waking hours were even more difficult; I was turning into such a nervous and belligerent small boy that I was always getting into fights, acting like un petit gamin and not a bit like the rest of our family.
Our town boasted no child psychologist. Mais non! Parents had to make up for this lack by having a kind of sixth sense, or perhaps our simple French realism carried us over trying situations. At any rate, the problem of petit Louis was resolved very sensibly. Mon père went to the schoolmaster and asked him not to chastise me for something I really couldn't help, and offered to work with me in encouraging me to use my right hand. For her part, ma mère coaxed me into helping her in the kitchen, which actually gave me things to do with both my hands. And to quiet my nervousness she talked to me about the cooking, about the different dishes grand-mère had taught her, about Emile Malley, the son of her best friend, who had gone to Paris to be a great chef. (The same chef Malley, incidentally, who would one day get me starred in Paris too.) It proved to be a practical solution, and one that worked. And I learned much more than how to use my right hand. I learned to count as I got out the eggs or potatoes or onions for the cooking, and how to spell the words, too—and how to cook, naturel-lement.
By the time I was eight I was quite expert at making our morning meal of leek and potato soup, that being our breakfast dish, corresponding to the oat-meal porridge that was eaten by our cousins across the English Channel. And then one memorable Sunday, the great surprise: While my mother was at church I prepared a dish of pommes au lard to go with our Sunday dinner. A chef, this chef, was in the making.
There weren't many short cuts in the cooking I learned. There aren't too many in any really fine cooking The more you cook, of course, the more you learn about working quickly and avoiding the clumsy, roundabout ways of doing things. But you never sacrifice results to save minutes, not if you want to be a fine cuisinier. And as you progress you will find yourself less and less dependent upon recipes, for you will have at your finger tips the techniques of French cooking acquired by putting into practice what you read in these articles. To know the hows and whys, and to have the “feel” of this famed art of the French, is to become its master.
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