When I told Sara why I
was there, she looked a little sad. The
last spot had just been filled on the trip, so there wasn’t any room for me to
go. She put me on a waiting list, just
in case someone had to cancel their seat, and wished me luck.
Just as I got to the
door, she called me back in. “Since you’re
free that day,” she said, looking back and forth at me and at her computer
screen, “would you be willing to be a Demo Assistant for the ‘Classic and
Modern Sauces’ short course?” I thought
about it. I didn’t really think I was
qualified to do that…but how could I say no to a question worded like
that? “No, Sara, I would be absolutely
unwilling to help out. I’ll sit at home
and hope someone can’t go on the awesome trip to wine country.” So, I agreed, reluctantly, to spend the day
at school helping people make sauce.
Perhaps it was a little
naïve of me, but I figured that this demo wouldn’t be very full. I mean, if I saw a class entitled “Classic
and Modern Sauces” on a list of courses, I think I’d automatically rule that
one out of my preferences. After all,
how much application do French sauces really have in a home kitchen? And what fun would it be to return home with
three containers full of sauce? I was
pretty sure it would be a small class.
I showed up, as
directed, one hour before the demo was to begin. My instructions were to help the chefs with
anything they asked, and I was a little nervous. The cuisine chefs are notoriously more
intense than the pastry chefs, and I was definitely (though the office
disagreed) not qualified for this.
To my pleasant surprise,
one of the two chefs was Chef Hervé, my favorite pastry chef, and the other was
Chef Didier, a cuisine chef with whom I have been acquainted, and who has
always been polite to me. Chef Hervé
laughed a little at the thought of a pastry student helping with a cuisine
demo, but said that I could come in handy, and asked me to set bottles of water
on the table and run the camera for the demonstration portion. Can do, Chef!
When Chef Didier was
ready to begin the demo, he walked over to me and told me, politely, that it
was unnecessary that I was by the camera, and that he would rather Chef Hervé
do it. I resigned to the back of the
room with the other three students (all cuisine upper-classmen) and took notes
the entire demo. I realized why Chef
Didier wanted Hervé behind the counter with him: this is the one time he could get away with
teaching a Demo in French, so he wanted Chef Hervé to be his translator. The class was a great opportunity to practice
my French, and I found that I would have done a pretty good job translating for
Chef Didier if he had asked me to.
The demo was
interesting, but not terribly captivating.
The Chef made five different sauces, with the students (adults, mostly
in their 30’s to 50’s) doing three in their practical. I paid close attention and took really
detailed notes, fully aware that students would be asking me questions about
how to perform sauces that I had never tasted, nevertheless successfully mastered.
After tasting the Chef’s
finished products (which were all amazing, of course), the other students and I
cleaned up the kitchen and prepared to lead our two classes (each about a
quarter of the people in the demo) to their lab kitchens. I had been chosen to work in Chef Didier’s
kitchen, since it is widely known that he much prefers to speak in French
because his English isn’t great, and I let it slip to one of the cuisine
students that I am fluent.
As soon as I led the
class to the kitchen, Chef is really upset, quickly explaining to me (in
French) that the chicken stock and flour is nowhere to be found, and that it
was supposed to already be at each student’s station. Not liking the fact that he was already
upset, I quickly descended into the production kitchen, ready to haul a huge
bucket of chicken stock and a bag of flour back up to the lab kitchen. Lucky for my tiny muscles, though, I
discovered the problem: the students who
set up the labs simply forgot our second tray of ingredients in the production
fridge. So I hauled the tray (which was
huge and probably 35 pounds) to the kitchen and saved the day.
The students were
great. Some of them were very
comfortable in this group-kitchen situation, and others were clearly not. Chef Didier (like many of the cuisine chefs)
has a tendency to throw pots and smack the counter and other loud gestures, and
every time this kind of thing happened, half of the room jumped and their eyes
got big. My job was easy and difficult,
all at once. I was to walk around the room,
checking on everyone’s sauces, and give the students whatever they needed. If they needed something like an extra bowl
or another egg yolk, life was good. If they
needed advice and direction, I had a choice: guess according to what I saw in
the demo or call the Chef (who was always busy) over to my student. Luckily, the choice was usually pretty easy,
and no one failed a sauce because of my misdirection.
A few students burned
themselves, so a good portion of my time was spent tending to their wounds,
which was a legitimate function for me in the cuisine kitchen.
When everyone had
finished, the other student in my kitchen and I cleaned up, chased students
down who forgot things in the kitchen, returned unused ingredients to the
production kitchen in the basement, and went home. It was a long and tiring day, lasting from
10:30am to 4:00pm, but it was fulfilling.
Though I don’t think I would volunteer to help with another cuisine demo
(I maybe got a little lucky with the simplicity of sauce), I would definitely
do a pastry one.
The best news in all of
this: Not only did I get this great experience and some great conversation with
two chefs, but there were so many people on the waiting list for the Wine and
Cheese trip that they scheduled a second one in a few weeks, and I am
automatically on the list. Score!
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