Age and Treachery

There’s an old saying that age and treachery will beat youth and skill.  I don’t know about the treachery part but there is something to be said for age.

I’m certainly not the typical student in my class – in fact, I’m the “old lady”.  Other than one guy in his 40s, I’m by far the oldest with at least a good 10 years on everyone else.  And I’m lucky in the sense that I’ve never really felt my age – when I was a kid, I was always at least a year or two younger than most of the students in my class, and when I got older I was fortunate to have many friends and colleagues who were either much younger or old enough to be my parents.  So while I don’t usually think about age, once in a while I do get a stark reminder.

This week I had a few big reminders about my age and experience.  As I detailed in my last post, our dish on Monday was Boudin Blanc, a white sausage flavoured with port, allspice and black truffle.  It’s actually quite a good sausage, although I don’t think this particular recipe is a great example.  Since I had the weekend to think about it before having to prepare it in class, I did what my experience and learning-style tells me to do: I made a small batch at home.  I busted out the Kitchen Aid and grinding attachments, and worked through the recipe at my own speed, taking the time to taste everything more than once, make some notes, and get it right.  I think it turned out pretty well.  I also took the time to test a few plate presentations, one of which worked nicely, the other of which was a complete disaster.

When we got to class on Monday morning, things weren’t going exactly to plan.  The sausage stuffing thingy was broken and we only had one grinder, so we had to grind our meat, process it in a food processor, and stuff the casings using a piping bag (yikes!).   As well, we had Chef 2 supervising the practical, and he seemed to have some different ideas about the technique we should be using and that got more than a few people confused and frustrated.  But fortunately for me, I knew the taste and texture I wanted and I ignored the chaos and just did my thing.  Other than a bit of a mess trying to stuff the casings using a piping bag the class went very smoothly.

I even had the chance to break out one of my tricks – fruit carving.  I spent a little over a month in Thailand a few years ago and studied at a cooking school in Phuket learning, among other things, fruit and vegetable carving.  I am not very good at it and I don’t practice nearly as often as I should, but a few apple “leaves” looked pretty good on the plate and, I think, impressed the Chefs a little bit.  By the time I got a picture of my plate the Chefs had taken a few bites, but you get the idea. 

On Tuesday we had another of our seminar classes, this time on wine.  I was simultaneously looking forward to this one and dreading it.  I was looking forward to it because it’s a topic that interests me, but I was dreading it because I was afraid it would be too basic.  The class was presented by a smart, funny, and very knowledgeable sommelier brought in by the school.  The presentation was very thorough, covering topics like world wine production and consumption, wine regions, how vines grow, wine labeling, grape varieties, etc, but sadly, not much practical information for future chefs.  I would have hoped that this material would have been covered in the Basic Cuisine program, and that by this time we’d be talking more about wine pairings, tasting, and more advanced topics. 

 

In fact, we spent three hours talking about wine and never tasted one drop, which I thought was really odd.  What’s the point of explaining the difference between Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay if you aren’t tasting them? You can’t learn a damned thing about wine from a slideshow – you have to smell and taste. But, as one of my classmates pointed out after, some of the students in our class aren’t yet 19 years old, the legal drinking age in the Province of Ontario.  Oh yeah… right…

The sausage fest (LOL) continued this week with Saucisse Toulouse aux lentilles.  I was pretty happy with what I made.  I guess they really want us to get comfortable with making sausage.  I found it quite tasty and I would LOVE to get this dish for the exam.

Somewhere in here we also made a Pot of Feu of Duck.  We had the practical class right after the demo so this one passed as a bit of a blur. Not the prettiest dish ever, but I do love duck.

The last class of the week was another workshop – this time Le Travail du Saucier– the work of the Saucier. Whenever I think of a Saucier, I think of these clips from the very awesome HBO series Treme.  The dialogue is written by Anthony Bourdain, by the way (note: dialogue NSFW).

In this workshop we had to prepare Lapin aux Pruneaux (braised rabbit with prunes), chicken baked in a salt crust with Sauce Zingara (“gypsy” sauce – one based on tomato sauce, but with mushroom, black truffle and pickled ox tongue) and a tarragon sauce, and steaks with a couple of different sauces – in our case we chose Sauce Bordelaise (red wine, veal stock, and bone marrow) and Sauce Diane (a mushroom and cream sauce).  Another hard-core old school French menu – no molecular gastronomy here!

A project like this is only as good as the team effort.  I was very glad to have someone on the team who was a little more adept than I would have been at butchering the rabbit.  But more than a few times the effort got a little unbalanced in terms of workload and a few things fell through the cracks (and that was noted by the Chef), but I was able to walk out of class Friday afternoon feeling pretty good about my work.

And there was no way I was going to let Friday be a bad day – it was my birthday.  I’m at the age where I don’t make a big deal about my birthday (36, by the way).  More than anything I consider another year a badge of honor and experience.  I’m so much more confident about what I’m doing than I would have been when I was 16 or 26.  I’ve tasted more things, worked with more people, seen more of the world, and have an understanding of myself and my temperament that I don’t think is possible in an 18 year old.

So even though I feel like the cranky old lady in class sometimes, I’m glad I’m doing this with some life experience behind me.  I may not feel my age, but I wouldn’t trade those years of experience for anything.

Upcoming this week is a sole dish and two more workshops – time to get studying!