Campbell Cassandra - The sharper your knife, the less you cry: love, learning and tears at the worlds most famous cooking school

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Table of Contents

Praise for The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry

I can never get enough of true stories about people who stop in the middle of their lifes journey to ask, What do I really want? and then have the guts to actually go get it. Kathleen Flinns tale of chasing her ultimate dream makes for a really lovely bookengaging, intelligent and surprisingly suspenseful.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry is an engaging story about a fantasy fulfilled. Its Under the Tuscan Sun goes to cooking school.

Michael Ruhlman, author of The Soul of a Chef

Although I cant cook my way out of a sac de papier, I found this book a joy to read. Its a compelling story about learning to cook and learning to love at the same time, told with humility, humor, and passion.

Bill Radke, host of NPRs Weekend America

Kat Flinns vivid story of her adventures at Le Cordon Bleu Paris had me smiling page after page. Its about what you should always think about in the pressure behind a hot stovethe pure romance of cooking.

Jerry Traunfeld, author of The Herbfarm Cookbook and The Herbal Kitchen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathleen Flinn has been a writer and journalist for twenty years. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, USA Weekend, Smithsonian, Mens Fitness, and The Globe and Mail (Toronto), among many other publications. She divides her time between Seattle, Washington, and Anna Maria Island, Florida.

For Mike

There are not enough words in any language to say how much I love you.

AUTHORS NOTE

This book is drawn from my personal experiences while studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 2004 and 2005. Although every character in this book is based on a real person, most of the names have been changed, including those of all the chefs. In a handful of cases, Ive altered identifying details to protect privacy. In a few instances, time has been compressed and events rearranged for the purpose of story and narrative.

Readers should know that I paid my own tuition and that I waited to tell Le Cordon Bleu about this book until I had written and sold the manuscript. Drawing on my background as a journalist, I wanted to be treated like any other student so that I could tell an objective story. During school, I kept a journal that ran more than 600 pages, recorded about 120 hours of audio from demonstration classes, and took detailed notes on the 300-plus recipes in the curriculum. That material, along with interviews of students, school staff, and alumni, form the basis of this book.

This account is not meant to describe what every student experiences while attending the worlds most famous cooking schoolonly what I did.

PROLOGUE

THIS IS NOT FOR PRETEND

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon, or not at all.

Harriet Van Horne, Vogue (1956)

As a little girl, while other children played house, I played restaurant. In our basement, I set up two sets of child-sized chairs and tables topped with fabric remnants and plastic flowers. I scrawled menus in crayon, featuring the likes of licorice soup, Pez casserole, and cotton-candy pie. I pretended to prepare everything for my guestsoften imaginaryon a broken-down Easy-Bake oven. My parents viewed it all as an overzealous game of tea.

I think of that now, as I stand here in ill-fitting kitchen whites in the middle of a cramped training kitchen in Paris. My handwritten notes from the days demonstration, sheathed in a protective plastic liner, sit crowded within the twenty-two inches Im allotted on the nine-foot-long marble worktable. My blue-handled knives lie neatly along the edges of a scarred plastic cutting board. I feel the heat from the electric stove at my back. A chef who has headed a legendary Paris restaurant now prowls this kitchen, barking out orders in French.

This is not for pretend.

As weve done three or four times a week since January, my Basic Cuisine class gathered this morning en masse, on time and in uniform. We first watch a chef move through a three-hour demonstration; we anxiously take notes, as we must repeat his lesson in a training kitchen later. This afternoon, Im searing thick magrets de canard for a classic preparation of duck lorange. Magrets are the breasts of Moulard ducks force-fed corn to fatten their livers for foie gras, a process that fattens everything on the duck. We must take care with the sauce, a slightly complicated preparation that requires cautious reduction of veal stock and orange juice, the sweetness tempered with vinegar. Our potatoes and carrots must be turneda cut that transforms an otherwise unremarkable vegetable into a precise seven-sided torpedo shape.

This is my life now. I am no longer a corporate refugee, sitting in my cubicle with photos of Paris tacked to the wall, dreaming about learning to cook at the worlds most famous culinary school. Three months ago, I walked out of my office for the last time, in my hands a heavy cardboard box filled with what felt like my entire life. A knot hit my throat in the elevator on my way down. Its hard to know how to feel when you leave a job; its even harder when a job leaves you.

Ive traded that life for days spent soaking up heat in the kitchen or absorbing knowledge from the chefs. I chop, braise, grill, roast, and saut. Every session in the kitchen feels like an exercise in stress loading. We must complete our recipes within two and a half hours, shifting raw, whole ingredients into a finished, attractive dish presented to the chef on a warmed plate. The food must be hot, it must demonstrate technique, and, above all, its flavor must appeal to the meticulous taste buds of the French chefs.

Some of my classmates have cooked professionally. About half plan to go on to work as chefs. I fit into neither category. I just want to learn to cook. Some days it goes well, sometimes it doesnt.

Today, the chef is not in good humor. His mercurial moods have earned him a nickname from me, the Gray Chef, not only for his graying hair but also for the clouds that sometimes follow him into the kitchen.

I take care as I arrange and finish my dish and present my plate to the chef for my daily grade. He does not smile as I put it down in front of him. Chef takes a quick taste with a spoon, and his dour face darkens. Suddenly, a wrath is unleashed. My offense, ostensibly minor: a too-sweet sauce. But to the Gray Chef, this symbolizes a shameful culinary trespasshe believes I have not followed his mantra, to taste, taste, taste while cooking.

CEST HORRIBLE! he shouts at me. With that, he begins a rant. a nest pas difficile!... Pourquoi prsenteriez-vous ce plat?!... Vous ne pourriez pas servir ceci!

I snatch at words, trying to comprehend. You, serve, no, and this.

He slams a meaty fist against the counter, inadvertently tipping the edge of the plate Id just presented. It spins hard on the marble worktable. The tense kitchen halts as the students freeze midmotion. Chefs face grows visibly red as he escalates his fierce attack on me in rapid-fire French.

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