The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (2 page)

He winked and passed her the freshly wrapped chicken. It landed heavy in her hand. She looked thoughtful. “What is it?” I asked.

She looked around, leaned forward, and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “I don't know what to do with the other parts of the chicken. I only know how to cook the breasts.” She shrugged, embarrassed. “But thanks for your help.”

As she pushed her cart away, her daughter in tow, I stopped her. I could not let this woman go without knowing what to do with the rest of her chicken. By chance, this supermarket happened to be carrying the paperback of my first book. I fetched a copy. I flipped to a recipe for braised chicken thighs with mustard and then to one for stock.

At first, she didn't believe it was my book. I showed her my driver's license. “I'm not trying to sell you a book,” I assured her. “I'm happy to buy it for you. I can't explain it, but I just really want to help you.”

For the next hour, I led her around the store, making notes in the margins and writing new recipes in the notepad that I always carry in my purse. We discussed why she bought so many boxes and cans, and as we did, I slowly convinced her to clear out most of them from her cart and replace them with the real food that the boxed versions attempted to replicate. A three-pound beef roast replaced four shelf-stable individual pot roast dinners. When rounded out with inexpensive vegetables, the roast would yield a dozen servings for the same price.

“You know, I can't thank you enough for all this,” she said earnestly as we made our way to the checkout, where, as promised, I bought her the book. “At first, I thought you were some crazy person. But this feels like Wonder Woman stopping to help fix a flat tire.” She and her daughter waved an enthusiastic good-bye. I didn't even get her name.

That afternoon stayed with me. It awakened a curiosity that I hadn't realized I had. Somehow, I knew this chance encounter was going to change my life.

—Julia Child

CHAPTER 1

—Andy Warhol, pop art icon

 

 

 

 

Standing on the stage delivering the graduation speech at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris is not the optimal time for an existential crisis.

Yet there I stood in my simple black dress, speech in hand, dwarfed by the vaulted gilded ceilings of the opulent ballroom in Le Club du Cercle just off the Champs-Élysées. Two years earlier, I had awaited my diploma sitting right where this year's graduates were now.

The school knew that I would be in Paris to lead a culinary tour and asked if I would speak. I'd said yes, flattered, before thinking the whole thing through. The applause at my introduction drifted away during the eternity it took to walk to the podium. I silently surveyed the rows of the immaculately dressed audience. In the front sat two of the many young Japanese women in full celebration kimonos, their small hands carefully folded in their laps. Behind me, a dozen instructor chefs in tall toques spanned the width of the stage in a single row, waiting. I hid my panic behind a manic smile.

What was I doing here? What words of wisdom could I possibly offer when I wasn't sure what to do next with my
own
life? At age thirty-seven, I had realized my lifelong dream to graduate from the world's most famous cooking school. But what was I supposed to do now?

I kept hearing two questions again and again, often from the same people. “You graduated from culinary school, where is your restaurant?” and “When are you two having kids?” I had no answer for either.

A lot had happened since I'd left school. I'd settled into married life in Seattle while my husband, Mike, had joined a start-up company. We'd experienced the usual stuff of life as it marched unrelentingly onward; friends and relatives got married, others divorced, a few had children, and a couple got sick. I dealt with the curious, feast-andfamine life of authorship. Two days after I read to a packed crowd at the James Beard House in New York, I stood before an audience of three at a bookstore event in San Francisco, and
that
included two of the store employees. The next week in Milwaukee, a quirky woman wearing her sweater inside out asked me to sign a book—to her cats. I wrote, “Dear Mr. Hinkel and Winkie Pie, I hope you enjoy the book, especially the parts about the fish.”

About three weeks before this trip to Paris, Mike had a strange premonition. “I'm going to join my dad on his vacation in Mexico after all. I can't explain it, but I feel that if I don't go, I'll never see him again.”

Within minutes of Mike's arrival at his dad's time-share, something went wrong. His dad, Floyd, pawed awkwardly against the dresser and suddenly fell heavily forward. Mike caught him and they tumbled to the floor. A doctor arrived on the scene and said Floyd had suffered a small stroke. A standard procedure to break up the stroke-causing clot led to a massive brain hemorrhage, sending Floyd into a coma. Mike arranged for an airlift to a Miami hospital for possible surgery. After an agonizing thirty-six-hour wait, doctors declared that nothing could be done. Over the next week, we watched helplessly as Floyd slipped away.

On a clear May afternoon, Mike broke down as he delivered the eulogy at a packed church in Spokane, Washington. “He was my best friend . . . the best man at my wedding and . . .” Mike stopped, fighting back tears. His sister came up and took his hand. “I always wanted to grow up to be just like him.”

We left for Paris three days after the funeral. When the seat belt light dinged, we finally exhaled. We felt a strange sense of relief, as if leaving the grief and stress behind.

Standing at the podium with all this fresh in my mind, I cleared my throat as I surveyed the audience sitting in quiet expectation. I unfolded my speech. The sharp crinkling of paper echoed loudly in the vast room. I looked at Mike just offstage, proudly gripping a video camera. He tipped his head forward in a nod of encouragement. I folded my speech back up.

“So, today you've earned your culinary degree. What are you going to do with it?” I asked. “How many of you know? Raise your hands.” A small group held their arms aloft.

“Here's what some of my classmates did with theirs.” I talked about the friends I'd met at Le Cordon Bleu. Sharon had labored at Internet start-up companies, but now resided as a chef and kosher caterer in her hometown of Tel Aviv. Lely had traded corporate marketing to run a cooking school in Jakarta. Jose had left his job selling shoes to attend Le Cordon Bleu and was now an apprentice in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Madrid. Isabella, a former psychologist, had worked as the private chef for a Russian paper baron and later moved to Los Angeles, where she taught cooking classes in French to Hollywood celebrities' kids. Chinese-born and British-bred LP had been an attorney in London, but she now managed a French wine import business in Shanghai. Another friend had returned to work as a management consultant, but did pro bono work analyzing food distribution issues to combat hunger in places such as Mozambique.

“People ask, ‘What can you do with a culinary degree?' The reality is that you can go anywhere and do anything,” I continued. “You're only limited by your passion and your imagination. Be open to the possibilities, take chances. Your career doesn't have to be traditional. It doesn't even have to be in a restaurant or even in a kitchen.

“For some reason, your passion for cooking and your desire to nourish people led you to this moment and place in time. Consider for a moment what success looks like when passion enters the equation. Is it money? Is it fame? Or is it having the strength to follow that passion? To have the will to go down a path you never thought you'd venture?”

I looked at the students' faces. Most were impossibly young. “No matter what, remember that life is short, shorter than you think.” I looked at Mike again. I thought back to our final moment in the Miami hospital with his father, to the last time I saw my own dad when I was thirteen, and the tear-filled interviews that I conducted writing obits in my early twenties. “It can be gone just like that,” I continued, and snapped my fingers in front of the microphone. The sound echoed like a stone dropping into a well. “You think you'll figure it out someday, only to find that someday never comes.” My throat caught on the words. “One thing that I hope you'll do is try not to focus on what other people expect from you. At one point in my life I was so concerned about the next rung on the corporate ladder, and only later realized I missed the entire point of the climb. Find something
you
believe in. Then, just do it. That's what matters.”

The crowd applauded, but the toques rustled behind me.
“Où est la traduction?”
Where is the translation? I heard a chef ask. Between the funeral and being unsure of what to say, I'd turned in the speech too late for an official translation. Everyone agreed that if I did it on the fly in my paltry French, we'd be there all night. For once, most of the chefs couldn't understand
me
.

At the reception, as I was clutching my champagne, a radiant young woman approached. Her silky yellow-orange robes and sequined headdress perched atop her jet-black hair reminded me of an extra from the Elizabeth Taylor version of
Cleopatra
. Hessa hailed from Bahrain, but she spoke English in an accent more befitting a midwestern college sorority sister with a twinge of Valley Girl. “I, like, really identified with your speech. I'm such a question mark. How do people figure out what they want to do? What are you doing? Do you have a restaurant?”

Before I could answer, the fabulously suave Chef Savard arrived at my side. He had changed from his chef's whites into a tan suede blazer and black turtleneck to striking effect. After kissing me on both cheeks, he asked, “So,
chérie,
tell me, what are
you
doing with your culinary training? Are you and Mike going to have any children?”

I downed my champagne.

 

Despite our emotionally fragile states, the trip started well. Fresh from our flight, Mike dropped our bags in the tidy rental apartment near Rue Moufftard in the 5th arrondissement and immediately went downstairs. He returned with a pair of warm, fresh baguettes and a small bag of goods from a nearby
alimentation,
the Parisian equivalent of a convenience store. We ripped greedily at the still-warm bread, slathering it with sweet French butter and finishing each bite with a sip of cold, bracing Chablis.

Jet-lagged, we napped mightily until dinnertime. We awoke, disoriented, to the sticky summer heat and crimson twilight, the distinct wail of French ambulances drifting through the open shutters. Half awake, we slipped outside to experience the city as if in a dream. The wide sidewalks reflected the heat of the day as we reacquainted ourselves with the marvels of seventeenth-century architecture and the brazen yet sophisticated female nudity of modern French advertising. We saw Parisians sitting at small round tables, sipping tiny espressos or glasses of wine. We walked the streets to the Seine, drew in deep breaths of its earthy scent, and looked out over the late summer sunset. We felt strangely at home.

The speech occurred at the start of our trip, but our primary reason for being there was to lead a vacation tour organized by the American Automobile Association. It was billed as a “culinary tour of Paris”; Mike and I agreed to take a group of Americans through an abbreviated version of our life in the city. The week the tour started, we met Sabine, the tour operator in Paris. “It is a small group, yes, but the people here have all read your book and are very excited to meet you both.” The group was a diverse mix that ranged from a paralegal to a flight attendant to a wealthy Florida homemaker who wielded a diamond ring the size of a baby food jar.