Whisked Off

Field trip: Paris September 13, 2009

No surprise, it’s taken me the whole weekend to recover from 32 hours in Paris. Produce markets, kitchen equipment shops, outdoor cafes, delicious meals, and walking walking walking. It was great.

I packed the night before and woke up 4 times in the night to see if it was time to meet my classmates and Chef Loïc at the Eurostar gate at St. Pancreas. Bleary eyed but in the station at 7:30am I grabbed a croissant at PAUL just to set the mood. Wow, that train is fast! A few hours later we had checked into our hotel and I was lunching on a salmon tartine at a sunny sidewalk cafe in the 15th with Marlies (from Amsterdam), Tom and Patricia (Hawaii), and Katie (Omaha).

We raced back to the hotel to meet Chef and the others for a walk. Wandering the streets of Paris with a French chef is a totally different kind of experience. You are blind to almost everything besides food. We got off the metro in the 5th, braved the trendsters meeting up at Fontaine Saint-Michel and wended our way through cobblestone streets lined with Greek restaurants and pita places. Vertical gyro broilers were everywhere, and each shop window seemed to have more intricate displays of raw meat than the next. I was sure there was some kind of competition. So focused on getting to the kitchen shops in Les Halles, I barely noticed the flying buttresses of Notre Dame de Paris and the colorful Pompidou Centre.

We emerged from the underground Les Halles mall (people swimming in the lowest level!), rounded the corner at the famous Au Pied de Cochon restaurant, and found ourselves smack in front of E. Dehillerin, a mecca for serious cooks since 1820.

The place is a warren of barely lit rooms. Three floors of pots, saucepans, skillets, knives, whisks, sieves, ladles, and every gadget you can imagine. A few of the old men behind the counter look like they’ve been working since opening day, and the shopping system appears to date back to the 1800s too. You find what you want, tell a salesman who looks up the price in a battered three ring binder and hands you a slip of paper with some numbers. You take your paper to the cashier while another man fetches your item. I didn’t buy anything on the spot – at this point I’m not exactly sure what I need – but I will be back with a list.

En route to the hotel we stopped at Bon Marche. It’s the antithesis to Dehillerin. Everything bright and glistening. The food hall filled with row after row of polished fruit; exotic fish on beds of ice; every part of the pig at the charcuterie counter; a myriad of gorgeous yogurts and a bread and pastry counter to die for. I had no problem spending a few Euros before heading upstairs to check out the funky modern furniture section. The French really do department stores well. This was no Bloomingdales or even a Saks. It was beautiful; so serene.  Even the escalators were a work of art.

From there, I crawled back to the hotel with a little time before dinner. I closed my eyes for 5 minutes… and woke up an hour later to the sound of my roommate opening a bottle of Bordeaux. Quickly splashed water on my face, attempted to arrange my scarf “Frenchily” and joined the class for dinner at a nearby brasserie.

Half the tables at tiny Dirigeable (named in honor of the hot-air ballooning experiments that took place in the vicinity in the late 18th century) were set for our group. The meal was simple and wonderful. I started with a salad of marinated tuna with julienned (!) coconut and carrot and followed with the filet of sole with an orange sauce on grilled zucchini and broad beans (both read like poetry in French). For dessert, the choices were molten chocolate cake (but it had nuts) or a crispy baby plum crumble topped with rosemary ice cream. My classmates who chose the mussels and the duck in prune sauce with haricots verts and fried potatoes were delighted as well. My mouth is watering as I type!

Several bottles of wine later we hauled ourselves to a patio bar on the way back to the hotel. One drink and at 11:45pm I headed off to bed. My roommate, who assured me she would be 5 minutes behind me, ended her evening at 5:30am…

The next morning was full on. After a quick croissant and cafe au lait in the hotel, Chef Loïc shepherded us down the street to the Friday morning market on rue St. Charles. It was hard to focus on the market stalls when every shop along the way seemed to be either a famous fromagerie, patisserie, or chocolaterie.

I did come away with two enormous globe artichokes from a farm in Brittany and a chocolate chip brioche the size of a cloche hat.

We made it to Le Cordon Bleu in time for a quick tour of the kitchens before lunch. After that, the show began. For three hours Chef Patrick Terrien made cooking a complex three course meal – including homemade ice cream – look like a ballet. The translator relayed our questions as Chef chopped, diced, pureed, seared and roasted. My hand cramped from taking notes. It was like watching a cooking show but so much better. On a cooking show you don’t get to taste the food!

At the end of the lesson we had Risotto aux Cepes et Copeaux de Parmesan; Filet d’Agneau Roti, Chartreuse d’Aubergine; Pearl Onion and Arugula salad; Coupe de Framboises au Citron Vert et au Fromage Blanc. The lamb was out of this world, and seemed easy to make.