My Life in France Read online

  The next class began in October. I signed myself up for a six-week intensive course, and smacked my lips in anticipation of the great day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Le Cordon Bleu

  I. CHEF BUGNARD

  AT 9:00 A.M. on Tuesday, October 4, 1949, I arrived at the École du Cordon Bleu feeling weak in the knees and snozzling from a cold. It was then that I discovered that I’d signed up for a yearlong Année Scolaire instead of a six-week intensive course. The Année cost $450, which was a serious commitment. But after much discussion, Paul and I agreed that the course was essential to my well-being and that I’d plunge ahead with it.

  My first cooking class was held in a sunny kitchen on the building’s top floor. My classmates were an English girl and a French girl of about my age, neither of whom had done any cooking at all. (To my great surprise, I’d discovered that many Frenchwomen didn’t know how to cook any better than I did; quite a lot of them had no interest in the subject whatsoever, though most were expert at eating in restaurants.) This “housewife” course was so elementary that after two days I knew it wasn’t what I’d had in mind at all.

  I sat down with Madame Élizabeth Brassart, the school’s short, thin, rather disagreeable owner (she had taken over from Marthe Distel, who had run the school for fifty years), and explained that I’d had a more rigorous program in mind. We discussed my level of cooking knowledge, and her classes on haute cuisine (high-end, professional cooking) and moyenne cuisine (middle-brow cooking). She made it quite clear that she didn’t like me, or any Americans: “They can’t cook!” she said, as if I weren’t sitting right in front of her. In any event, Madame Brassart decreed that I was not advanced enough for haute cuisine—a six-week course for experts—but that I’d be suitable for the yearlong “professional restaurateurs” course that had conveniently just begun. This class was taught by Chef Max Bugnard, a practicing professional with years of experience.

  “Oui!” I said without a moment’s hesitation.

  At this point I began to really miss my sister-in-law, Freddie Child. We had grown so close in Washington, D.C., that when people said, “Here come the twins,” they meant me and Freddie, not Paul and Charlie. She was an excellent, intuitive cook, and, to scare our husbands, we’d joke about opening a restaurant called “Mrs. Child & Mrs. Child, of the Cordon Bleu.”

  Learning to cut a chicken with Chef Bugnard

  Secretly, I was somewhat serious about this idea, and was trying to convince her to join me at the Cordon Bleu. But she couldn’t tear herself away from her husband and three children in Pennsylvania. Eh bien, so I would be on my own.

  It turned out that the restaurateurs’ class was made up of eleven former GIs who were studying cooking under the auspices of the GI Bill of Rights. I never knew if Madame Brassart had placed me with them as a form of hazing or merely because she was trying to squeeze out a few more dollars, but when I walked into the classroom the GIs made me feel as if I had invaded their boys’ club. Luckily, I had spent most of the war in male-dominated environments and wasn’t fazed by them in the least.

  The eleven GIs were very “GI” indeed, like genre-movie types: nice, earnest, tough, basic men. Most of them had worked as army cooks during the war, or at hot-dog stands in the States, or they had fathers who were bakers and butchers. They seemed serious about learning to cook, but in a trade-school way. They were full of entrepreneurial ideas about setting up golf driving-ranges with restaurants attached, or roadhouses, or some kind of private trade in a nice spot back home. After a few days in the kitchen together, we became a jolly crew, though in my cold-eyed view there wasn’t an artist in the bunch.

  In contrast to the housewife’s sun-splashed classroom upstairs, the restaurateurs’ class met in the Cordon Bleu’s basement. The kitchen was medium-sized, and equipped with two long cutting tables, three stoves with four burners each, six small electric ovens at one end, and an icebox at the other end. With twelve pupils and a teacher, it was hot and crowded down there.

  The saving grace was our professor, Chef Bugnard. What a gem! Medium-small and plump, with thick round-framed glasses and a waruslike mustache, Bugnard was in his late seventies. He had been dans le métier most of his life: starting as a boy at his family’s restaurant in the countryside, he had done stages at various good restaurants in Paris, worked in the galleys of transatlantic steamers, and refined his technique under the great Escoffier in London for three years. Before the Second World War, he owned a restaurant, Le Petit Vatel, in Brussels. The war cost him Le Petit Vatel, but he had been recruited to the Cordon Bleu by Madame Brassart, and obviously loved his role as éminence grise there. And who wouldn’t? The job allowed him to keep regular hours and spend his days teaching students who relished his every word and gesture.

  Because there was so much new information to take in every day, it was confusing at first. All twelve of us cut vegetables, stirred the pots, and asked questions at once. Most of the GIs struggled to follow Bugnard’s rat-a-tat delivery, which made me glad that I had developed my language skills before launching into cooking. Even so, I had to keep my ears open and make sure to ask questions, even if they were dumb questions, when I didn’t understand something. I was never the only one confused.

  Bugnard set out to teach us the fundamentals. We began making sauce bases—soubise, fond brun, demi-glace, and madère. Later, to demonstrate a number of techniques in one session, Bugnard would cook a full meal, from appetizer to dessert. So we’d learn about, say, the proper preparation of crudités, a fricassee of veal, glazed onions, salade verte, and several types of crêpes Suzettes. Everything we cooked was eaten for lunch at the school, or sold.

  Despite being overstretched, Bugnard was infinitely kind, a natural if understated showman, and he was tireless in his explanations. He drilled us in his careful standards of doing everything the “right way.” He broke down the steps of a recipe and made them simple. And he did so with a quiet authority, insisting that we thoroughly analyze texture and flavor: “But how does it taste, Madame Scheeld?”

  One morning he asked, “Who will make oeufs brouillés today?”

  The GIs were silent, so I volunteered for scrambled-egg duty. Bugnard watched intently as I whipped some eggs and cream into a froth, got the frying pan very hot, and slipped in a pat of butter, which hissed and browned in the pan.

  “Non!” he said in horror, before I could pour the egg mixture into the pan. “That is absolutely wrong!”

  The GIs’ eyes went wide.

  With a smile, Chef Bugnard cracked two eggs and added a dash of salt and pepper. “Like this,” he said, gently blending the yolks and whites together with a fork. “Not too much.”

  He smeared the bottom and sides of a frying pan with butter, then gently poured the eggs in. Keeping the heat low, he stared intently at the pan. Nothing happened. After a long three minutes, the eggs began to thicken into a custard. Stirring rapidly with the fork, sliding the pan on and off the burner, Bugnard gently pulled the egg curds together—“Keep them a little bit loose; this is very important,” he instructed. “Now the cream or butter,” he said, looking at me with raised eyebrows. “This will stop the cooking, you see?” I nodded, and he turned the scrambled eggs out onto a plate, sprinkled a bit of parsley around, and said, “Voilà!”

  His eggs were always perfect, and although he must have made this dish several thousand times, he always took great pride and pleasure in this performance. Bugnard insisted that one pay attention, learn the correct technique, and that one enjoy one’s cooking—“Yes, Madame Scheeld, fun!” he’d say. “Joy!”

  It was a remarkable lesson. No dish, not even the humble scrambled egg, was too much trouble for him. “You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made,” he said. “Even after you eat it, it stays with you—always.”

  I was delighted by Bugnard’s enthusiasm and thoughtfulness. And I began to internalize it. As the only woman in the basement, I was careful to keep up an appearance of sweet good hu
mor around “the boys,” but inside I was cool and intensely focused on absorbing as much information as possible.

  As the weeks of cooking classes wore on, I developed a rigid schedule.

  Every morning, I’d pop awake at 6:30, splash water across my puffy face, dress quickly in the near dark, and drain a can of tomato juice. By 6:50 I was out the door as Paul was beginning to stir. I’d walk seven blocks to the garage, jump into the Blue Flash, and roar up the street to Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There I’d find a parking spot and buy one French and one U.S. newspaper. I’d find a warm café, and would sip café-au-lait and chew on hot fresh croissants while scanning the papers with one eye and monitoring the street life with the other.

  At 7:20 I’d walk two blocks to school and don my “uniform,” an ill-fitting white housedress and a blue chef’s apron with a clean dish towel tucked into the waist cord. Then I’d select a razor-sharp paring knife and start to peel onions while chitchatting with the GIs.

  At 7:30 Chef Bugnard would arrive, and we’d all cook in a great rush until 9:30. Then we’d talk and clean up. School let out at about 9:45, and I would do a quick shop and zip home. There I’d get right back to cooking, trying my hand at relatively simple dishes like cheese tarts, coquilles Saint-Jacques, and the like. At 12:30 Paul would come home for lunch, and we’d eat and catch up. He’d sometimes take a quick catnap, but more often would rush back across the Seine to put out the latest brushfire at the embassy.

  At 2:30 the Cordon Bleu’s demonstration classes began. Typically, a visiting chef, aided by two apprentices, would cook and explain three or four dishes—demonstrating how to make, say, a soufflé au fromage, decorate a galantine de volaille, prepare épinards à la crème, and end with a finale of charlotte aux pommes. The demonstration chefs were businesslike and did not waste a lot of time “warming up” the class. They’d start right in at 2:30, giving the ingredients and proportions, and talking us through each step as they went. We’d finish promptly at 5:00.

  The demonstrations were held in a big square room with banked seats facing a demonstration kitchen up on a well-lit stage. It was like a teaching hospital, where medical interns sat watching in an amphitheater while the famous surgeon—or, in our case, chef—demonstrated how to amputate a leg—or make a cream sauce—onstage. It was an effective way of delivering a lot of information quickly, and the chefs demonstrated technique and took questions as they went. The afternoon sessions were open to anyone willing to pay three hundred francs. So, aside from the regular Cordon Bleu students, the audience was filled with housewives, young cooks, old men, strays off the street, and the odd gourmet or two.

  We learned all sorts of dishes—perdreaux en chartreuse (roasted partridges placed in a mold decorated with savory cabbage, beans, and julienned carrots and turnips); boeuf bourguignon; little fish en lorgnette (a pretty dish in which the fish’s backbone is cut out, the body is rolled up to the head, and then the whole is deep-fried in boiling fat); chocolate ice cream (made with egg yolks); and cake icing (made with sugar boiled to a viscous consistency, beaten into egg yolks, then beaten with softened butter and flavorings to make a wonderfully thick icing).

  All of the demonstration teachers were good, but two stood out.

  Pierre Mangelatte, the chef at Restaurant des Artistes, on la Rue Lepic, gave wonderfully stylish and intense classes on cuisine traditionnelle: quiches, sole meunière, pâté en croûte, trout in aspic, ratatouille, boeuf en daube, and so on. His recipes were explicit and easy to understand. I scribbled down copious notes, and found them easy to follow when I tried the recipes later at home.

  The other star was Claude Thilmont, the former pastry chef at the Café de Paris, who had trained under Madame Saint-Ange, the author of that seminal work for the French home cook, La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange. With great authority, and a pastry chef’s characteristic attention to detail, Thilmont demonstrated how to make puff pastry, pie dough, brioches, and croissants. But his true forte was special desserts—wonderful fruit tarts, layer cakes, or showstoppers like a charlotte Malakoff.

  I was in pure, flavorful heaven at the Cordon Bleu. Because I had already established a good basic knowledge of cookery on my own, the classes acted as a catalyst for new ideas, and almost immediately my cooking improved. Before I’d started there, I would often put too many herbs and spices into my dishes. But now I was learning the French tradition of extracting the full, essential flavors from food—to make, say, a roasted chicken taste really chickeny.

  It was a breakthrough when I learned to glaze carrots and onions at the same time as roasting a pigeon, and how to use the concentrated vegetable juices to fortify the pigeon flavor, and vice versa. And I was so inspired by the afternoon demonstration on boeuf bourguignon that I went right home and made the most delicious example of that dish I’d ever eaten, even if I do say so myself.

  But not everything was perfect. Madame Brassart had crammed too many of us into the class, and Bugnard wasn’t able to give the individual attention I craved. There were times when I had a penetrating question to ask, or a fine point that burned inside of me, and I simply wasn’t able to make myself heard. All this had the effect of making me work even harder.

  I had always been content to live a butterfly life of fun, with hardly a care in the world. But at the Cordon Bleu, and in the markets and restaurants of Paris, I suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject. The best way to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food—the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.

  I had never taken anything so seriously in my life—husband and cat excepted—and I could hardly bear to be away from the kitchen.

  What fun! What a revelation! How terrible it would have been had Roo de Loo come with a good cook! How magnificent to find my life’s calling, at long last!

  “Julie’s cookery is actually improving,” Paul wrote Charlie. “I didn’t quite believe it would, just between us, but it really is. It’s simpler, more classical. . . . I envy her this chance. It would be such fun to be doing it at the same time with her.”

  My husband’s support was crucial to keeping my enthusiasm high, yet, as a “Cordon Bleu Widower,” he was often left to his own devices. Paul joined the American Club of Paris, a group of businessmen and government officers who met once a week for lunch. Here he met a pump engineer who introduced him to another, smaller group of American men who were wine aficionados. Frustrated that most of our countrymen never bother to learn about even a fraction of the good French vintages, the members of this group pooled their resources and enlisted Monsieur Pierre Andrieu—a commandeur de la Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin (a leading wine-and-food group) and author of Chronologie Anecdotique du Vignoble Français—to explain the wines of each region, answer oenological questions, and advise them on how to pair specific vintages to foods.

  Every six weeks or so, the men would meet at a notable restaurant—Lapérouse, Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque, La Crémaillère, Prunier—to eat well and drink five or six wines from a given region. Occasionally they went on outings, such as the time they went to the Clos de Vougeot château, in Burgundy, and went through practically all the caves of the Côte d’Or. Paul especially liked this group because it had no formal membership, no leader, no name, and no dues. Each meal cost six dollars, which covered food, wine, and tip—and must have been one of the greatest deals in the history of gastronomy.

  II. NEVER APOLOGIZE

  BY EARLY NOVEMBER 1949, the gutters were full of wet brown leaves, the air had turned cold, and, now that it was too late to benefit the poor parched farmers, we were spattered with rain almost every day. Then it turned really cold. Luckily, Paul had just bought a new gas radiator for 81. We’d turn the gas up to full blast and sit practically on top of the heater to keep warm in our crazy salon, like a couple of frozen monarchs.

  Paris
in the cold

  Paris was exploding with every kind of exhibit, exhibition, and exposition you could think of—the Salon d’Automne, the automobile show, the Ballet Russe, the Arts, Fruits & Fleurs display, and so on and on. Thérèse Asche and I took a trot through the annual art show in the Palais de Chaillot, and after forty minutes on the cement floor in those drafty galleries our lips had turned blue and our teeth were chattering. We ran out of there and downed a couple of hot grogs to act as antifreeze.

  Later, Hélène Baltru reinforced our suspicions that the wet Parisian cold was especially bone-chilling. During the German occupation, she said, Parisians rated their miseries as: first, and worst, the Gestapo; second, the cold; third, the constant hunger.

  Hélène’s war story made me think about the French and their deep hunger—something that seemed to lurk beneath their love of food as an art form and their love of cooking as a “sport.” I wondered if the nation’s gastronomical lust had its roots not in the sunshine of art but in the deep, dark deprivations France had suffered over the centuries.

  Paul and I were not deprived, but we were hoarding our francs for the months ahead. After I’d written two politically provocative letters to my father, he had not replied. Instead, he’d deposited five hundred dollars in the bank so that I could buy some decent winter clothes. This put me in a quandary. I was grateful for his help, of course, but did I really want to accept his money? Well, I did. But when Pop offered to help launch Paul “into the big time,” we declined politely but firmly.

  November 3, 1949, marked our one-year anniversary in Paris. There was a slashing rainstorm that day, just as there had been a year earlier. Looking back, it had been a year of growth. Paul’s personality had enlarged, he’d gained further wisdom, if not salary, and he had continued to expand and refine his artistic vision. I had learned to speak French with some degree of success, though I was not yet fluent, and I was making progress in the kitchen. The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.