Is your French good enough for a cooking school in Paris?
Published: September 27, 2011
A year or so ago, Stripes ran an article in its travel section titled Paris: Three stars for do-it-yourself lunch at cooking school. The lunchtime course, offered by L’atelier des Chefs, purported to have you in and out of the kitchen with a full belly within the space of an hour for just 15 euros. Sounded great to me. The downside was that the course was entirely in French.
While I’d taken that fine language way back in high school, all those years of study hadn’t really translated into anything usable on a practical level. Although I knew it was unlikely that I’d understand much of what the chef was saying, I took a chance and booked the class for a friend and myself.
The cooking school’s website, where you must go to reserve a class, is in French, but it proved pretty user-friendly. And since you didn’t need to send off any credit card details, the fear of a depleted bank account never came into play.
Despite the ease in booking the course, walking into the chef’s studio last week, I was filled with trepidation that we’d be subject to rigorous grilling and weeded out for our language skills not being up to snuff. I need not have worried. As I tried to spit out my first sentence en français to the sympathetic young woman manning the till of the attached shop, she gently prompted us to speak English. Phew!
I asked her if we’d be OK without very good French and she reassured us we’d be just fine, as the chef spoke some English. So we scrubbed up, donned plastic aprons, and joined our group of two other women for a grand total of just four students for that particular session.
The first question the chef, an approachable and upbeat young woman named Jeanne, posed to her students should have been easy: Does anyone know what we’ll be cooking today? The answer had been plain for all (French speakers) to see at the time of booking, and I knew that carrots in ginger was on the menu, but I had assumed the main course was going to be fowl of some description. Wrong.
The answer was pavé de lieu jaune, a white, rather dense fish by the looks of the raw pieces in bowls in front of us. Jeanne gave us the low-down on how to slice the carrot into uniform half moon shapes without mangling it in the process, how to separate the green from the white on the shallot, and how to mince a lemon peel. It was amazing how ineptly I’d been handling these rote tasks all my life, and I vowed to finally get around to buying myself some decent knives.
Although Jeanne instructed in French, she was happy to clarify and answer questions in English as we carried out the assigned tasks. The carrots simmered away as we breaded the mystery fish and fried it up in a butter-and-olive-oil mixture. A quick few minutes later we were plating up our culinary creations and digging in. A supplemental fee of 7 euros each got us a glass of white wine, a turbo-charged shot of coffee and a rich and chocolatey brownie with cream that was simply to die for.
Jeanne and the friendly young staffers on hand mingled with us and answered questions -- mine being if they were annoyed when people with lousy French turned up. Jeanne laughed and said it could be difficult when the classes approached maximum capacity of 16 students, but they’d always manage. So, if you, like me, were hesitant at the thought of trusting that rusty high school French, fear not.
You’re in for a relaxed, rewarding and nonjudgmental experience at the Atelier des Chefs. And that fish we ate? The woman who first welcomed us into the studio ran it through an online translator, and voila! It was Pollock. Pollock? I would never have imagined it could be that good. That’s French cooking for you.
