by Bill Buford
The man himself looks surprisingly normal. He has a robust physique—broad shoulders, strong arms, maybe a little squat—and a familiar physiognomy, more Irish than French: a square head, bushy eyebrows, turned-up nose. He would have been bored in school, good at sports, played rugby. He was probably loved by his mother. But Cros isn’t normal. He is, in the words of one of the teaching assistants, “damaged by food.” He was on the far side of obsessiveness. Cros, chitchatting? Impossible to imagine. In the school hallways, he always had his head down, not wanting to waste a minute, running. I didn’t know anyone else who ran to class. He was a maniac.
* * *
—
We began by preparing five hundred sea bass. It was an exercise in mise-en-place, a kitchen expression, to have everything in place before you begin the service. For the sea bass, we needed a plastic garbage bag, a cutting board, two trays (one for skins and guts, the other for bones), a pair of scissors, a scaler, a knife, and pliers for plucking out the bones.
With the knife, you didn’t “cut” as such. You used the back to scale the fish and the tip for removing the eyes (“Never present a fish that is staring at the client”) and for poking into the anus and slicing (a delicate wiggle-wiggle) back up the belly, being careful not to pierce the intestines. To skin, you made an incision just before the tail, pressed down with the side of your blade, and yanked the skin off in one go. (I loved the skinning. It seemed so flash.)
Cros examined my work. I had completed fifteen fish, lined up on my cutting board, looking, I admit, a little beaten up. The guy next to me had done thirty. Cros picked up a fish.
“Yes,” he said, “this one is okay. We can serve it.” He picked up another. “But this one, no.” Ce n’est pas correct.
I looked at it. I couldn’t see the difference.
“You trimmed off some belly, didn’t you?” The bass’s belly (which, frankly, doesn’t have a lot of tissue) is covered by a nearly invisible fan of threadlike bones, and it’s true, rather than pluck out each one, I sliced off the whole flap.
“We can’t serve it,” Cros said, and threw the fish into the trash.
I was stunned. You threw away my fish?
He picked up several others—“These, too, pas corrects”—and tossed them. I followed their trajectory into the bin.
He lingered, arms crossed across his chest. “Why are you so slow?”
“I don’t know, Chef.”
He studied me from behind.
I picked up a fish, clipped off its fins, and scaled it. I snipped out the gills. I skinned and picked up another fish.
“Mon Dieu! You’re not still doing that with your knife? No one taught you?”
I thought: What exactly am I doing with my knife? And whatever it is, yes, I am obviously still doing that, whatever that might be, and, no, it is equally obvious that no one has ever taught me.
“No, no, no,” Cros said. “Once you start with the knife you finish with it. No one ever told you that?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t going to be apologetic. This was why I came to France.
“You never put your knife down and pick it up again.” Jamais.
I’ve since come to think of the practice as “Assembly Line Knife Technique.” What I should have done was set myself up as a single-person factory: Clip off all the fins and gills of all the fish at my first heavy-scissors station; scale them at the next station; and stack them up until every fish was completed: Then (and only then) I pick up my knife. I gut all of them; I cut off the heads of all; I skin all; I bone all. Then (and only then) I put my knife down. The technique’s efficiencies are self-evident to all of humanity, even if they weren’t to me, including the obvious one that, if you do the same thing thirty times, it’s going to go a lot faster after the third time than the first and can be done at a magician’s mindless blitz by the thirtieth.
Never pick up your knife until you know you won’t have to put it down. There was such simplicity in the instruction: Would this change my life forever?
I then had my first test.
* * *
—
The assignment: Poach a fish in vegetable broth, stew vegetable slivers in the poaching liquid, make a sauce from it, and steam potatoes in the English style (à l’anglaise).
It had been demonstrated. The fish was a colin. In the fish morphology, a colin is in the “round with two fillets” category. It is white and meaty and, according to my dictionary, called a “coalfish” in England, or a “pollack” in America. I had no memory of eating one, and had certainly never ébarbed, écailled, dépouilled, éviscéred, or boned one (fish has its own culinary vocabulary). For me, therefore, a colin is and will always be a colin (whatever that is). The sauce was a beurre Nantais—a butter-and-cream sauce in the style of the city of Nantes. I say that as if I knew both where Nantes is, and why anyone would name a sauce after it. The only thing I knew about the sauce Nantais was that it was different from the one from Bercy, which doesn’t have the cream.
I presented my dish. I hadn’t tasted it. I was two minutes late. I was in a fluster.
Cros began with the potatoes. I had made three. He had a bite of each.
“This one is correct,” he said. “The others are undercooked.”
He tasted the fish. “Overcooked.”
He picked up a selection of the stewed vegetables (a carrot, a leek, and a celery twig) and inspected them, resting on the tines of his fork.
“The size is okay, almost.”
He tasted.
“It needs to be seasoned.” (I had seasoned the broth; I hadn’t seasoned the vegetables.)
He bit the carrot.
“Hmm…crunchy. Oh, that’s right, Americans like crisp vegetables, don’t they?”
“Oui, Chef,” I said, thinking: Crunchy carrots, soft carrots—do you really believe that I am so in command of what I am doing that I have any inkling how my carrot twig is going to turn out?
He tasted the sauce. It confused him.
It was based on a beurre blanc. Many fish sauces are based on a beurre blanc, a white butter sauce: shallots, white vinegar (reduced), then white wine (reduced), plus butter. This one, being the one from Nantes, also had the cream plus some fish stock (reduced). The sauce is both acidic and lightly fatty, and a piece of lean seafood seems to taste better with some acid and a light fat.
“The butter, the montée,” Cros said, shaking his head, mystified by the wrongness in his mouth and searching for an explanation. “The consistency of it, yes, the montée—it’s not good enough.”
The verb for adding butter is monter. You “raise” the butter. You “mount” it. You first reduce and concentrate all those good liquids, then build them back up, whisking in the creamy fat, and the whole pot seems to swell, the liquid becoming rather wonderfully thick and full. It becomes a sauce.
Mine: not so wonderful.
“Pourquoi?” he asked.
I couldn’t say. I didn’t know. Now I know. I had rushed it. I was running late. I didn’t incorporate my butter one piece at a time. I dropped it in by the chunk, gobs of it, and then boiled the fucker, whisking wildly, a human blending machine on top speed, trying to make up for lost time. And Cros could taste that, could he?
He had another spoonful. “Actually, there isn’t enough butter, not for the amount of cream you’ve used.”
Nantes: I don’t know why a beurre blanc from there has cream. I still haven’t been to Nantes. Were there a lot of cows in Nantes—was that it? (A beurre Bercy, the one with no cream, is finished with beef bone marrow. Does Bercy have a lot of slaughterhouses?)
Cros had another spoonful. “It’s too thin, isn’t it?” N’est-ce pas?
“Oui, Chef.”
“And the acidity,” he said, tasting it again, “well, actually, it’s almost okay.”
“Merci, Ch
ef.”
He dipped in his spoon again. “But why doesn’t it have more taste? It should have more taste.” Plus de goût.
“Oui, Chef.” I made a note: “Next time more taste.”
What seems to produce a successful sauce is the balance between acidity and fat. That was my supposition, anyway, because I made three more sauces that day, and I never got the balance quite right.
For the sauce that went with a trout dish, there wasn’t enough fat. Cros said that I hadn’t added enough cream, until he realized that I had forgotten it entirely.
“Excusez-moi, Chef.”
I cooked raie—i.e., skate, the dish that I’d once prepared in its sous-vide form in Michel Richard’s kitchen. I then made the sauce, but the issue, this time, wasn’t the fat; it was the acidity. Cros said that it needed much more acidity, and then asked: Where is the lemon?
Oh, fuck, I said (blurting out in English). I’d forgotten the lemon. “Excusez-moi, Chef.”
The day ended with sole à la bonne femme (back in the day an affectionate name for your home cook), poached in white wine, a fish stock, and six mushrooms. The sauce is again made from the poaching liquid, reduced and finished with butter and cream plus a citrus kicker. This time, I remembered the kicker. I tasted it. I liked it. It definitely had kick.
Cros ate the fish (“overcooked, but so was everyone else’s”), spooned up the sauce, swallowed, and lurched sideways so suddenly, twisting his torso, seeming to double up, that I thought—well, I didn’t know what to think. Had he slipped?
He regained his balance and stared at me, astonished, eyes bulging slightly.
Damn, I really thought I’d nailed this one.
He had another taste. He looked like he might spit.
“Mon Dieu! Taste the sauce before you add the lemon. You don’t have to add it if there is enough acidity already. Oh là là. Taste it. Please!”
“Oui, Chef.”
He had another spoonful, and grimaced.
* * *
—
After lunch, I found Willy in the bar, having a coffee. I wanted him to explain Cros. “What’s up with the mini-exams?”
“He does them so that you will learn how much you have to learn,” Willy said. “You think you know these dishes. The exams prove you don’t know diddly-shit.”
* * *
—
Once, midmorning, I was absent briefly. I hadn’t paid my bill for Cros’s class, and slipped out. Cros had already taken me to task for an unscheduled pee break. (“In America, they don’t really take cooking seriously, do they?”) This, evidently, was more serious.
I apologized. I explained that I had to pay for the class.
Cros was irritated by having to suffer an explanation.
“When you were not here, I taught four recipes.”
I tried to look regretful and self-abasing.
“There are now four recipes that you don’t know.” His speech was clipped; it seemed to be the speech of a man who wanted to be swearing at me but whose pedagogical position prevented him from letting rip. He named what I’d missed: a fish clarification, a fish sauce, and two mussel dishes. “The class knows how to make a moules à la poulette. Do you know how to make a moules à la poulette?”
“No, Chef.”
“Do you know what a moules à la poulette is?”
“No, Chef.”
“You should learn how to make it.”
“Oui, Chef.”
“It could be on the exam.”
“Oui, Chef.”
“And if it is, you will fail.”
Panic. Was I the only person who had never heard of a moules à la poulette?
On the bus back that evening, I studied the moules à la poulette recipe. It had been among the day’s handouts. It didn’t give a lot away. Cros’s recipes weren’t really recipes; they were inventories of ingredients and (sometimes) quantities. The rest was up to the student.
What does it even mean—a moules à la poulette? A poulette is small chicken. Can the word be used as an adjective? Chickeny? Chickeny mussels? The dish involves cooking the shellfish in white wine and draining the liquid afterward. The liquid, le jus, was the basis of the sauce, which was mixed with a roux (flour and butter cooked together as a thickener), cream, shallots, a lemon, white pepper (Cros fails people for using the wrong pepper), and an egg yolk. A yolk in the sauce? It was chickeny mussels. It seemed like a lot to take in.
By now the days had stretched to fifteen hours. (“There is so much to get through.”) I was home by nine-thirty. I ate; I showered; I went to bed; I got up at five to catch the bus back. How was I going to practice the dish? I couldn’t.
* * *
—
I met up with Willy for a coffee after lunch. I wondered aloud about Cros’s affect. “It’s so indifferent.”
“He notices only performance,” Willy said.
I had another coffee. I needed to get back to class, but I wasn’t ready. It was going to be a long afternoon. In fact, the class was finishing early tonight, Cros promised, at eight o’clock, because our big exams were the next day. The Practical, the cooking test, would start at 7:30 a.m. Theory would be after lunch. We all had the same thought: Merde. We had been so committed to the food that we had forgotten the theory. When was anyone looking at a textbook? Or the handouts? Between now and exam time, we would be memorizing recipes. At some point, we would also have to start brushing up on the philosophic properties of round fish, flat fish, and sideways fish.
I asked Willy, “Do you remember what you were asked on your exam?”
“Of course.”
I sipped my coffee. “What was on it?”
“The questions may not be the same.”
“I understand.”
“In fact, I am sure they won’t be.”
“But what were they?”
Willy sipped his coffee. He took another sip. I had made him uncomfortable. “Do you really want to know? I mean, does it matter?”
“I’d like to know.”
“Okay.” He looked at me to confirm that I knew what I was doing, and started in on the list—eagerly, it turned out, with the relish of someone who had survived a tough trial but, until now, had never had the chance to talk about it (because, after all, who else would care?).
Not everyone was asked to make the same dishes, Willy stressed, but everyone was asked to make the same kind. There were two sauces based on a mayonnaise, two with a clarified butter, and two with a beurre blanc. “Do you know what a sauce Choron is?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Wow. I didn’t. I got burned on that one. I couldn’t keep it straight in my head.”
“There was a PDT.” PDT is kitchen shorthand for pommes de terre: potatoes. They were to be done either as cocottes (“turned”—snub-nosed, oblong, skinny like a rocket, and sautéed) or à l’anglais (snub-nosed, oblong, very fat, and steam-roasted).
There were two ways of cooking a fish, à la bonne femme (poached in stock) or à l’anglaise (fried).
I was surprised by how much I knew.
“And a shellfish dish.”
“Which one?”
“À la poulette.”
“Really?”
“The one with the egg.”
“The bastard.”
* * *
—
I got up at four, to review the recipes. It wasn’t the Theory that worried me—I knew how to cram. It was the Practical: the clock ticking and my making food for a panel of seen-it-all world-weary French chefs whom I had never met before. (Cros wasn’t allowed to be a judge.)
I arrived. There was confusion. Cros—excited—redirected everyone to an auditorium for a practice run of the Theory test. Until now, Cros had been easy to understand, even for me, because his speech was always
so purposeful. Most of my notes are in French. But Cros was excited by the exam, he clearly loved exams, and there was a complication (the fish hadn’t shown up!), and it had rendered him incomprehensible.
It would turn out that I had misunderstood his instruction. It wasn’t a practice Theory. It was the real thing, the one I had planned on cramming for during lunch. When I was then eating it with Augusto, and flipping through my now useless flash cards, he finally had to ask: “What are you doing? The Theory exam was this morning.”
“It was?”
(I bombed it. I hadn’t looked at a single page of text. Poisson d’eau douce, for instance. Sweet water fish? What could that mean? It means “freshwater fish.” It is a good thing I hadn’t known that I’d bombed it and could then enter the Practical exam full of misplaced optimism.)
The practical commenced at 10:00 a.m. I drew a folded slip of paper out of a toque that determined the exam I would take, A or B. I got A.
Make a sauce Béarnaise.
Make a beurre à la maître d’hôtel.
Make PDT cocotte.
Prepare a merlan à l’anglaise.
Prepare moules à la poulette. (Cros was a dick.)
Except for the moules à la poulette, it wasn’t too bad. On paper, I knew the items.
I took five minutes to write out the ingredients, plus crude reminders (“Fish—don’t overcook!”) and a schedule.
At 10:45, I got ready to present my first dish, the beurre maître d’hôtel, to the two chefs waiting for it behind the worktop. One had conducted the omelet-making lessons. I couldn’t remember his name, but I liked what I’d seen of his manner, firm but gentle. The other was my judge, Hervé Raphanel, the one who had watched the omelet-making with me. I had been used to seeing Cros behind the worktop, uncompromising, indifferent, tough. It was comforting to see these two faces. They looked so soft.
A beurre maître d’hôtel is butter fluffed up with a wooden spoon into a “pommade,” then salted and acidified by a squeeze of lemon. I presented it to Raphanel.