So, this is how school went. Dawn comes, and with it jet lag. Or, another way to see this is that jet lag comes and then drags dawn in behind it like a cheap U-Haul. Nobody wants dawn to have scraps of grass sticking to it and bleary eyes, but there you are, right? Dawn is just like that. It gets up early. In France, it gets up BLOODY early.
Out my window, dawn rose over a small pond ringed with wildflowers. Horses called to each other just after dawn; barn swallows and house martens complained as they began to work their territories in the dry yard (to the British, the “front garden.”) When I gave up and admitted dawn had me by the nape, I got out of bed and showered, then went downstairs where I was handed a plate or croissants (eat what you like) with special jams and butter.
Write that down: “Butter.” You will hear a LOT about butter, fella.
At the table, I sat with binoculars. I heard and saw the blackbird (recognized it from the White Album, “singing in the dead of,” well, breakfast). I had fresh orange juice and blessed, HOT, STRONG COFFEE. Café crème. There was coffee in the cup, and then there was the cream.
Write that down: “Cream.” You will be hearing a LOT more about cream.
About 10, the chef would call us in. It was me and one other student. She and I would sit down on stools and basically get a picture of what the morning was going to look like, and when we were going to eat what we were doing. The kitchen was mercifully, perfectly, informal. It was a bunch of tables pulled together with raw wood table tops and a bunch of cutting boards that cycled around constantly. There were two cooktops and some ovens here and there and a small fridge and a sink and bowls and bowls of fresh ingredients, lemons that had been zested already and fresh vegetables.
What Chef Ash taught me, I think, was courage. (Also, practice.) He uses, of course, the sharpest knives. And so that’s one thing right there – when you’re boning a guinea hen, and he says “Watch your finger there!” with real urgency, you are reminded that this man cooks for keeps. The guinea hen is real flesh and real bone (and one of Ash’s partners is vegetarian – now THERE is commitment, because I am here to tell you a raw hen looks like MEAT that scurried left when it should have scurried right) and you have a real knife that is made of real steel and it is REAL SHARP and yet you are expected to get all the meat off the bone properly. PROPERLY. It’s not that Chef Ash will scold you – the man did not scold, although he did say that in a restaurant kitchen sometimes things can get a bit hollery – it’s that you want to get it right.
I did OK. The hen did not look ill-used. And when we were done taking off its flesh, setting it in a place where we would cook it shortly, Ash took a dish filled with vegetables, a roasting pan really, and heaved the bony remainder of the hen on it. Next day, he said, we would roast it. And then boil it. And then simmer it. And turn it off overnight, let it sit, this increasingly vile pottage which is, as it turns out, thr foundation of all right-thinking chef’s assaults of modern cuisine.
In fact, as it turns out, the modern chef makes the primeval person – famous for eating every possible piece of whatever prey for which he had lain in wait two weeks, missing several brand new episodes of LOST – look like a piker. Because the modern day chef takes all of it, heads, bones, chunks of meat that your mother didn’t know what to do with, contents of the meat’s wallet, maybe a T-Shirt it wore the day before but hadn’t washed yet – and it dumps it into the stock. As Chef Ash puts it, “You can make a good stock with that,” and when he said that of the used motor oil and the discarded auto parts from the 2CV upended in the pond (it’s a JOKE I am KIDDING HERE) we made him stop.
In general, as I say, this is an issue of courage here. When one (that would be me) looks at the stock recipes in soup cookbooks, one is lost. Much is called for; little is simple. You look at the stock recipe, and it’s like, the longest recipe in the dang cookbook. It’s HUGE. There are vegetables in the stock recipe that were last grown immediately prior to William the Bastard’s little boat trip. Grown women weep. Farmers plunge into the potato bin and emerge shaking their heads.
Robert said, and this is why God made London accents: “Wehw [see that ‘w’ instead of an ‘l’? that’s London for ya] , you throw in pretty much whatever you’ve got.” And right you are. There were leeks, and carrots (OH PRAISE GOD NOBODY HAD TO PEEL THEM) and there was celery root and I think also some other vegetables I didn’t peel. (I think there was an onion.)
The stock sat there. It looked AWFUL. Aliens would have thought it was a compost bin – or maybe a vileness tub where humans threw the things that displeased them. And we haven’t even TALKED about the FISH STOCK. (OH MY GOD THAT’S A HEAD. OVER THERE BY THE HEAD-LOOKING THING? IS THAT, LIKE, A MONKEY? CALL 911.)
I think if there was any absolute lesson I took away from days that included roasting sea bass, making salmon just sit quietly until it’s tasty, cooking other pieces of salmon in a bag, shouting at the veal until it admits it’s done, and generally treating vegetables and fruit with the respect that is due them, it’s this: Try It.
Chef Ash basically did this: He tasted with his finger. The man had a pottery 45-degree pipe called a “salt pig.” He was forever chopping in butter and gushing in a bit of cream. (You're not going to eat like this every day," he said, and yet, one wondered why NOT.) When in doubt, he introduced some stock. Adding pepper and salt to something at the end was called “correcting,” as if the treated object had failed in its mission by being uncorrected. (DISCIPLINE was clearly called for. Retured headmasters found themselves facing registered letters. Salt pigs were rife. And don’t even START ME about pepper.)
He also forgot to use the timer. “Ow, I’ve forgotten the timer. Check it.” The man checks doneness by comparing the meat to points on the skin of the ball of his thumb. Somewhere, epidemiologists were weeping. “This,” he would say, “is well done. This is medium. This is rare.”
So: Fear the chef. I am coming, and I bring amuses bouches. And I think we all know what THAT means.