Sometimes it seems to me that I have been teaching people to cook all my life. Of course, that isn't so. There was a time when I myself had to be taught. But it is a fact that when a chef reaches the top of the ladder that he has climbed with such painstaking care, he must take on the responsibility of overseeing the apprentis who are always being trained in kitchens of any importance. At least that is the system long followed in fine French establishments. How else do you suppose the traditions of this great cuisine could have been kept alive? How else could the necessary special skills be passed along?
We French chefs take great pride in our cuisine française. We don't want it lost to posterity. Most certainly we don't want the great restaurants of the world ever to lack well-trained artisans. So passing along the gros bonnet has become a prideful duty and responsibility, and I confess to a sentimental pleasure in it.
Some of us, myself for example, have gone one step further and attempted to teach others than prospective chefs the ways of fine French cooking, and with some success. However, I do find that no matter how well received our books and articles are, we hear always one criticism: that we take it for granted that all readers know as much about this type of cooking as dedicated, experienced gourmet cooks. And such cooks, our critics point out, are actually very few. Newlyweds eager to establish a bon ménage insist that we can't make our instructions too simple for them. And this is particularly true of young men and women who have never done any cooking before.
So in this new series of articles on French cooking, my sights are set on those who want to start from the very beginning. Or even before that, if such were possible. The “whys” as well as the “hows” will be explained. If fear and lack of confidence have been holding you back, your uncertainty will disappear, petit à petit, until yon are able to say, “This is the way I have always warned to be able to cook.”
We must start by conceding that the only way to become an expert is by endless practice. Cooking is no different from playing the piano, driving a car, swimming, painting, or any other skill. You learn by doing, mais oui. But more important, you become skillful by doing again and again until each step is automatic and perfect. Nothing can take the place of learning by constant repetition. So whatever each lesson is concerned with, whether with chopping an onion or making pastry, I shall expect you to be as persistent in perfecting it by constant practice as if your livelihood depended on it.
At the same time, each article will be planned to teach you to make dishes that go together and to give you combinations that you can serve and enjoy, attractive little meals at first, then important courses in longer meals, and eventually, I hope, les grands diners.
Although this may sound tiresome, I should not be doing my job if I didn't remind you that a good cook is a clean, tidy, well-organized worker. He arranges the equipment he is using—cutting board, knives, bowls, beaters, casseroles, kettles, and so forth—in an orderly fashion and stores them where he can put his hands on anything he may need at a minute's notice. Young apprentice chefs are taught to clean and scour all the things they use and keep the places where they work scrupulously clean. They learn to respect their tools, and in later years when someone else is delegated to clean up after them, they know from experience what that person can be expected to do and how he should do it.
A good cook, like any other good worker, knows what he is going to do before he begins. Ingredients and utensils needed are checked to make sure that all are on hand. Recipes are read—and reread if necessary—to make certain that every step is understood. Finally the time required for preparation and cooking—and chilling, if that is needed—must be estimated so that the dish will appear on the table at its peak of excellence, exactly on time.
It isn't difficult for a Frenchman to decide what dish in French cuisine is the first that you should learn to make. It is, naturellement, soup. Every French home serves soup regularly, no French restaurant would dream of leaving soup off the menu, and in many French entrées, soup stock is one of the ingredients. Alors!
We begin with soup, a very simple one and its variations. Even a child can make this soup. And when I say that, I mean it, because I could make this simple soup when I was only eight years old. Of course, I had already been watching ma mère for a good two years, fetching this, stirring that, asking endless questions. She had not actually been teaching me to cook at this early age, but I was left-handed, and she was trying to train me to use my right hand. In those days schools would not permit a child to write or work with his left hand. There were no books on child psychology to guide my puzzled father and mother. Their typically French commonsense approach was to develop my facility with the right hand by interesting me in tasks at home where I could be watched and supervised. Since my mother spent so much of her time in the kitchen, cooking turned out to be the easiest approach. The sharp raps on the knuckles from the schoolmaster's hard ruler that had made me so nervous were replaced, when I slipped into my left-handed ways, by my mother's gentle, “la main droite, mon petit.” Meanwhile the kitchen activities became so fascinating that I was absorbing more than anyone realized. It came as a pleasant surprise therefore when my first steaming kettle of leek and potato soup awaited my mother one Sunday when she returned from church.
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