The Last Phone Booth in Manhattan(65)
The chef adjusted his apron and continued, “And for those of you who are joining us from abroad, welcome! Welcome to Le Cordon Bleu! I asked if you were all ready for your culinary adventure to begin?”
A few voices peppered the air with a “Oui!” or an “Oh yeah!” and our instructor gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up, while a look of relief washed over Gabe’s face. The class would be taught in a mixture of French and English. Still tough, but not entirely impossible.
“Je m’appelle Chef Audren Claude, and I will be teaching you the delicate art of French cooking over the next several hours. Let’s begin—on y va!”
A sous chef slapped a slimy dead octopus on our station, and I practically leaped into Gabe’s arms in horror. “What the hell is that?”
The sous chef gave me a dirty look, perhaps having been offended by my alarm. “C’est poulpe,” she said and kept moving along to deliver the rest of the octopus carcasses to the other students.
I leafed through the recipe pamphlet again and scanned what else we’d be making. “Gabe, I’m not going to lie, if they bring out a whole lamb for us to flambé, I think I’ll pass out right here.”
“One recipe at a time. Let’s deal with Ursula over here, and then we can worry about Lamb Chop.”
I sucked in some air and turned to the appetizer instructions. “Step one. Turn octopus inside out like a pair of chaussettes and then beat it until pliable.” I looked up at Gabe. “What are chaussettes?”
Gabe typed the word into his Google Translate, our new best friend, and said, “Socks?”
“Turn the octopus inside out like a pair of socks? And then beat it until pliable? This sounds so barbaric. I don’t really have anything against this particular octopus. Maybe if it killed my family or betrayed our country I’d feel differently,” I (kinda) joked.
We were so busy trying to figure out how to begin that we didn’t notice Chef Audren at our station until he started beating our octopus mercilessly with a mallet, shouting, “C’est comme ?a! Comme ?a!” The octopus bounced around the countertop, and my eyes bulged more and more out of my head with each and every blow.
Chef Audren turned to me and held out the mallet. “Okay, ma chérie, your turn.”
“Oh, um . . . don’t you think it’s been through enough?”
“Non, non! Encore! It needs to be soft like butter.” He wrapped his hand around mine, which was still apprehensively holding the tenderizer, and together we started hitting the rubbery body until it looked like a deflated version of its former self.
“Bravo! Now it goes into the pot,” Chef Audren ordered.
Once he left the station, Gabe looked at me, eyes wide, and said, “Remind me not to piss you off. Once you got going, I wasn’t sure you were going to stop.”
“It actually was a cathartic stress reliever once I put the idea that I was smashing the heck out of some poor sea creature out of my mind.”
“A poor, tasty sea creature, we hope. It will not have suffered for naught,” he said consolingly.
“Okay, but next time, you get the mallet.”
“Deal.”
We struggled just as much through the next two courses, our giggles eventually turning into grunts of frustration, and the five-hour workshop was beginning to feel more like a day and a half. But it was our final course, the dreaded chocolate soufflé, that almost made us abandon ship.
Chef Audren explained the process thoroughly, emphasizing that the most difficult part about baking a successful soufflé is to not overwhip the egg whites. Apparently, if you do, they don’t have the elasticity needed to expand in the oven, which is the most common reason it would collapse—and according to the chef, that was a serious no-no. A sunken soufflé was almost a sacrilege, so I tried to listen to all of Audren’s instructions before diving in. Meanwhile, Gabe had already started pouring things into bowls and whisking ingredients to and fro.
“I don’t think you’re doing that right. You need to add the sugar in slowly and mix it in in small batches, like a quarter of a cup at a time.”
“I don’t think it makes much of a difference,” Gabe said as he continued to dump the entire cup of sugar into the fluffy egg whites, their shape collapsing under the weight of the granules.
“Yeah, I kinda think it does. Didn’t you listen to Chef Audren? He said that the egg whites need to stay lifted and fluffed in order to ensure that it stays inflated while it bakes.”
“It’s cooking class, not rocket science. I don’t think it’s as technical as all that. Besides, I’m sure it will taste great regardless of if it looks like a pillow or a pancake.” He grunted as he continued to whisk the egg whites together with the sugar.
I raised my hands in defeat. “Okaaay, but if Chef Audren starts to freak out because our soufflé looks like some roadkill found on the side of the Champs-élysées, don’t blame me.”
I let Gabe take the lead on the soufflé, opting to step aside rather than argue. I grabbed a few sprigs of mint and started to chop the herbs with the new knife skills we practiced, making sure the tips of my fingers were tucked in like Chef Audren had showed us. When he came around, he peeked into our mixing bowl and instructed, “Plus moelleux,” with a gesture of his hand lifting higher and higher and continued his inspection of the other students’ work.