by Donia Bijan
My father stayed for a week, and I was grateful to Aunt Farah for having us over most nights and inviting his peers for conversation, indulging them with whiskey sodas and salted pistachios. The feeling of apprehension was still there when we returned to my room and while I made his tea and boiled him an egg in the morning before going to school. It was there when, later in the day, I debated whether I should walk home to see him or sit in the café with my friends. My father and I receded into the corners of the room, eyeing each other like strangers, unable to simply say, How about a walk by the river?
In an incredible gesture of parting, he gave me a cookbook by a treasured author, Rosa Montazami, considered the Irma Rombauer of Iran. On the inside cover, in his best handwriting, he had written: For my daughter. It meant that he was still capable of tenderness toward me. And this gift allowed me to consider his feelings; I was the daughter who ought to have been a son, following his father’s path—Dr. Bijan’s son, the doktor, not Dr. Bijan’s daughter, the cook. It was not an unreasonable wish for a father, a wish he had harbored before I was even born and one I had thwarted with my first cry. Yet he continued to set himself up for disappointment. When I was a child, he would frequently call me to assist when he tackled a broken screen door, changed a bulb, checked his engine oil. I was to hold the funnel, or pass him nails or a screwdriver laid parallel on a tray like surgical instruments. Bent over his task, he knew without looking if I was about to chuck a bent nail: Leave it. I’ll straighten it out. Come hold this while I screw it in place. It was like an arm-wrestling match I would never win. As simple as my part seemed, I managed to fumble, letting go of a latch just as he was reaching for his hammer, handing him a wrench when he’d asked for pliers. I tested his patience, hoping I would be dismissed, but he chose to overlook my ineptitude. His voice would gradually rise—Listen, LISTEN! I said PLIERS!—refusing to let me leave until the task was done. In Iran, I would never have dared to stray from his expectations and would have ended up a clod in a white coat. It was America’s fault, really, for giving me a taste of liberty, of choice.
IN MY FINAL months in Paris, I prepared for the final exam, which would be judged by Madame Brassart. The chefs had forewarned us not to be fooled by Madame’s age. Years might have softened her since the days when she mocked Americans and delayed Julia Child’s exam to postpone her graduation, but her judgment remained swift and brutal. From time to time, she would lurk in the back of our classroom, gray hair pulled back in a neat bun, the slightest tremor in her chin suggesting a perpetual non, non, non. No one dared look up to meet those glassy eyes that roamed the kitchen and didn’t miss a thing.
As the school prepared for its last days under her command—for she had sold the Cordon Bleu to the Cointreau empire—I saw my class as the end of an era. The new school would be moving to a different site with fancy modern equipment. The women would no longer be required to wear blue pin-striped frocks and tie their hair back with handkerchiefs, but they would have starched chef’s coats and paper toques, a far more uncomfortable uniform. I was glad I had been part of the old school, with its damp walls, banged-up copper pots, whisks with missing wires, and dented ladles that generations of cooks had handled. All that would be stored away, and a chapter of French cuisine under the old guard would close. Chef Simon was retiring to the Loire, and Chef Petroff, I later learned, took his life the following year.
My final exam consisted of two parts: the preparation of duck à l’orange in front of a panel of chefs and Brassart, and a surprise assigned on the morning of the exam. My mother had come to Paris for my graduation, which would take place after the exam, provided I passed it. The week before the exam, my aunt Farah bought a duck every day from her neighborhood butcher, and I would prepare duck à l’orange while she and my mother chatted, drank tea, and played cards. Sometimes my aunt would set up a chair in her bathroom, wrap a towel around my mother’s shoulders, and order her to sit down. Then she’d give her highlights, or put her hair up in a pretty chignon. I’d smile to myself, hearing their voices carry to the kitchen, their sudden shrieks of laughter like that of schoolgirls.
Every night, Aunt Farah would invite a few dinner guests, who would eat my duck dutifully. They’d ask polite questions about my future plans: What, after all, is Dr. Bijan’s daughter going to do now that she can cook duck? After they left, the three of us would make another pot of tea and take the dish apart, my mother and my aunt giving me feedback while I washed the dishes. They both came to my final demonstration. As if at a recital, they sat in the audience with open smiles and nodded bonjour to everyone. A glance at their faces put me at ease. I could make duck à l’orange blindfolded.
The morning of the surprise assignment, I woke up before dawn to pore over my index cards one last time. While I made us café au lait, my mother dashed to the bakery for croissants. She walked with me to school that lovely June morning and we admired the chestnut blossoms on the trees. Spring had come late that year, and we were seeing Paris in her prettiest dress.
Upon my arrival, I was given an envelope with my exam handwritten by Chef Simon on notebook paper. I had two hours to make pâte à choux and then use the dough to make éclairs au café, gougères au fromage, and cream puffs for a gâteau Saint-Honoré. I tied on my apron, which my mother had washed and ironed the night before, and found in the pocket a little note from her, wishing me good luck. I turned on the ovens and gathered the ingredients, reciting the recipe I had memorized. I piped the first batch of éclairs so big that, once baked, they looked like toddlers’ shoes. Started over. In the last forty-five minutes I was filling oval shells with coffee custard that was a little runny. When Chef Simon walked in promptly at eleven o’clock, I was more or less finished, quickly wiping up the little pools of custard that were oozing out of my éclairs. I was dismissed and the chefs gathered to taste and grade my efforts.
I learned that Madame Brassart had given my duck a 19 out of 20, remarking with a shaky voice that she was surprised I had not ruined the dish by making it too sweet, as Americans always tend to do with everything, mon dieu! I think it pained her to give that underhanded compliment, and Chef Petroff had a good time giving me the verdict, mimicking her quivering chin. The éclairs, despite the telltale puddles of custard beneath them, received a respectable 15, owing to the correct crispness and size of the shells (if they’d only known) and the flavor of the coffee custard, which was assez bon, good enough.
Before returning home, my mother took me to Printemps, a department store behind the Opéra, to buy a new dress. Spring itself paraded inside and bloomed on every rack. We each carried an armful of dresses to the fitting room and I tried on dozens before choosing one, a scoop-neck, belted jersey, pink with tiny white tulips. We shared a croque-monsieur and a lemon tart before going to Dehillerin, the quintessential cookware store, where I painstakingly selected five heavy copper saucepans, a boning knife, and assorted baking molds. We rode home on the metro, carrying my purchases wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. What pleasure to stroll together the next morning, me in my new dress, to be part of that Parisian splendor. I was seeing it all again as if for the first time: the patisserie windows with glistening rows of berry tarts, the delivery vans unloading crates of champagne, the elderly man in the café who winked at me over his coffee cup. Even the Eiffel Tower looked new when we turned a corner—there it was, magnificent and alone in the early light. We met Aunt Farah for one last coffee before catching the shuttle to Charles de Gaulle—this time an even quicker good-bye.
To celebrate graduation, a few of us planned a trip to the Loire Valley, shepherded by an American classmate who had been behind all of our occasional diversions: a side trip to sample ham at the charcuterie, pistachio macaroons at Trocadéro, leaving class early to go to a sandwich shop off the Champs-Élysées for all-you-can-eat raclette— that marvelous warm mountain cheese shaved onto your plate with pickled pearl onions, cornichons, and small boiled yellow potatoes. He never steered us wrong. He scou
ted these places while we were in afternoon classes and returned with persuasive arguments why we mustn’t waste our time in a stuffy old classroom, how we could learn everything beyond the walls of the Cordon Bleu. So when he suggested a trip to the Loire, we were in, packing ourselves into a Renault 5 rental car so we could share the expenses. We visited châteaux and picnicked on the banks of the Loire, drinking Sancerre and eating Crottin de Chavignol goat cheese on baguettes with radishes, apricots, and thick slices of saucisson. We had dinner on the patio of a family-run restaurant, where I had squab for the first time, with a warm chanterelle salad. I almost wept when they wheeled in a magnificent cheese cart, laden with delicate domes, furry pyramids and cylinders, tiny buttons and bells of goat cheese with soft names: Chabichou, Sainte-Maure, Selles-sur-Cher, Charolais, Clochette, Cœur du Berry. Alas, my mother’s foresight had been impeccable. I had caught a long-lasting fever.
Soon after graduation, I secured an apprenticeship at Fauchon, the tony patisserie on the place de la Madeleine. For weeks I waited for the pastry chef outside the employee entrance, offering my slim credentials until he finally let me into his kitchen. I was the only woman among nineteen boys, ranging in age from fifteen to eighteen, in a low-ceilinged basement kitchen under the supervision of a toothless head baker, Monsieur Jean. At five o’clock every morning, I ran downstairs to join the boys with tousled hair and bloodshot eyes on an assembly line where we folded croissants and pain au chocolat, or rolled brioche buns and secured their caps. For months, under the oppressive weight of flour that settled on my eyelids, in my ears, and on the bridge of my nose, I toiled in a Dickensian dwelling where hierarchy ranked me at the very bottom next to Abdul, a man from Senegal. In this kitchen I witnessed the horror of French racism, these unapologetic and entitled young men insulting a man who washed their pots and pans, cleaned and tended their ovens, and brought them fresh pitchers of hot coffee, offering sugar cubes from an old fluted bread mold. The cruel monkey jokes bounced off him as he stopped to give them a refill. Monsieur Jean hollered at him if the croissants were ever so slightly dark, ordering him to throw the entire tray away. I would shuffle across the flour-dusted floor to commiserate with him. Together we stared longingly at the pile of rejected croissants in the garbage bin. How I wanted to reach in to grab one and shove it in my mouth.
Subsisting on nothing but Abdul’s strong coffee all morning, I was ravenous and grateful for the homey stews, soups, and casseroles the cafeteria madams would serve us at lunch-time. Monsieur Jean would go home at noon, having been there since three in the morning making dough. He lived with his wife outside Paris, where they proudly tended their rabbits, ducks, and geese. Monsieur Jean often told us stories about chasing the rabbits for their supper.
I rarely saw the executive pastry chef. He came in at nine o’clock and spent the morning with his top aides in the laboratoire, the oval office of the kitchen, constructing the elaborate cakes that would line the windows of Fauchon. In the 1980s you could not walk down the narrow sidewalk in front of the shop without groups of tourists asking to have their picture taken with the cakes. When people found out where I was apprenticing, they imagined I was behind those cake monuments, but I told them no, I was perfecting the continental breakfast.
On Fauchon’s main floor, ladies in cream-colored frocks hurried behind the counter, taking orders from chic Parisians and indecisive tourists. They arranged the miniature fruit tarts and raspberry napoleons in signature pink boxes and trilled, Avec ça? Anything else? When they called on the intercom for backup pastries, the boys would parrot their high voices and hurl crude, tired jokes they had made up about the saleswomen. I gladly carried trays upstairs to get a peek at the shop and sniff the lovely perfumes of the customers with their Louis Vuitton handbags and Hermès scarves. The counter ladies were mostly kind to me, though they thought I was simple or crazy to stay in the basement with nineteen adolescent boys. But I approached my downstairs colleagues as an older sister would, and they left me alone, except for one skinny-hipped Pierre, who begged me for English lessons. He invited me to his parents’ apartment for dinner and I came prepared with notebooks, sharpened pencils, and a box of chocolates for his mother. She made us roast chicken, rice pilaf, and a salad with whole tender leaves of butter lettuce in the kind of lemony Dijon vinaigrette only a Frenchwoman can make. Pierre had no intention of learning English. Instead he taught me an important truc, a trick. Linking his arm through mine, he showed me how to fold my lettuce into small, neat packages so as not to bruise the leaves I had been severing with a knife. I ought to have used the knife to fend off Pierre’s roaming hand on my lap. I edged farther and farther away on my seat until he gave up and pouted. He had to find another English teacher. Given my unrequited devotion to the young man in California, I could not fathom romance with Pierre, and I had been naive in my judgment of both men. At least here, I could stand up and say thank you and good night to Pierre and his parents, but I had left a clumsy trace of long, passionate letters to the other that I could not retrieve: Good-bye, now may I please have my half-eaten heart back? I was thankful the next day when the boys largely ignored me, having pegged me as a prude.
The glimpse into the rough underbelly of a French kitchen did not deter me. It amused me that more than once I was asked if I planned to marry a baker to help him mind the shop. At twenty-four, I struck them as vieille fille, a spinsterish girl. For these young French cooks, this job, at Paris’s most esteemed patisserie, was the pinnacle of their career. Few of them would have the means or the opportunity to strike out on their own, whereas I was just getting started—and on my way back to America.
Ratatouille with Black Olives and Fried Bread
It’s impossible for me to make this dish without thinking of my father and how I almost went to jail preparing it for him. In the summer we can barely keep up with the abundance of zucchini from our garden, so I make big pots of ratatouille, browning each vegetable in batches before returning them all to the skillet and adding the tomatoes for a final quick toss. Whether served with croutons or as a side to grilled meats, or forgotten in the fridge for a few days, where the flavors just get better, it is a perfect summertime dish.
Serves 6
6 Japanese eggplants, chopped in ½-inch cubes, unpeeled
1 cup olive oil
1 large yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced, and 1 whole clove
2 red or yellow bell peppers, chopped in ½-inch pieces
6 zucchini or any yellow squash, chopped in ½-inch pieces
¼ teaspoon saffron
2 to 3 sprigs thyme
6 medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped
¼ cup black olives, niçoise or Kalamata,
pitted and chopped coarsely
Kosher salt and fresh-ground pepper
1 loaf chewy sourdough bâtard or ciabatta
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Toss the eggplant in a bowl with salt, pepper, and ¼ cup of olive oil. Transfer to a greased cookie sheet in an even layer. Bake approximately 15 to 20 minutes, until lightly browned and soft. Baking the eggplant allows you to use less oil.
3. In a large saucepan, heat about 3 tablespoons of olive oil and sauté the onions until they soften and glisten. Add the garlic and cook another 3 minutes. Add the peppers and season with salt and pepper, cooking over medium-high heat until they are tender and browned. Transfer to a baking sheet.
4. In the same saucepan, sauté the zucchini in 2 tablespoons of olive oil just until they begin to brown and soften. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Over medium heat, gently fold the peppers and onions and the eggplant into the zucchini. Add the saffron and thyme. Fold in the tomatoes and increase the heat to cook the vegetables together for another 5 to 10 minutes without stirring too much. The vegetables should not be immersed in a pool of their juices. Pour any excess liquid out and reduce it in another pot until thickened before pouring back over the ratatouille.
6.
Transfer the ratatouille to a bowl and cool. Remove the sprigs of thyme. Fold in the chopped olives, drizzle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and adjust the seasonings if needed.
7. Rub the crust on the loaf of bread with a halved clove of garlic. Cut into ½-inch-thick slices, brush with olive oil, and brown both sides on a griddle, or bake in a preheated 400°F oven until golden brown.
8. Serve the ratatouille cold or at room temperature with fried bread, or fold into eggs for a delicious frittata.
Duck à l’Orange
Graduation from the Cordon Bleu was twenty-five years ago, but I still remember the confidence that came with learning how to cook all the things that had until then mystified me. I knew how to fold butter into dough for puff pastry, I could cube vegetables uniformly and transform them into soup, I learned how to press goose livers through a sieve to make pâté. And when I walked past a butcher shop, I could buy a duck, take it home, and roast it. The weeks leading up to my final exam were like the movie Groundhog Day: every afternoon I’d be trussing a duck at four o’clock, and the doorbell would ring at seven o’clock—our dinner guests arriving to sample canard à l’orange.
Don’t let the fancy name stop you; it’s no different from roasting a chicken, but perhaps more festive. Use Seville oranges, if they’re available, for their exquisite tartness and aroma. I save the duck livers and sauté them separately with a teaspoon of shallots and a drizzle of red wine vinegar to mash up on croutons as an appetizer, or toss in a salad with radicchio, orange slices, and crispy strips of bacon for a quick, delicious dinner.
Serves 4
1 duck (3 to 4 pounds), trimmings (neck, wing tips) reserved
Kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper
3 oranges, scrubbed to remove the wax, 1 whole,