Desserts that demand to be taken seriously

Rain is streaking sideways outside my window, providing the perfect excuse for me to postpone yet again a trip to the mobile phone store, where certain humiliation awaits me as I attempt to open a French mobile phone account while speaking very little French.

Instead, I will tell you about my first day at cooking school yesterday. We were instructed to show up at 1:15 for orientation, and I arrived an hour early because I am fairly neurotic about being on time. I wandered around the Place Vendôme, looking at giant diamond necklaces and watching very tanned, pampered people arrive at the entrance to the Ritz in sleek black cars. Lucky people.


Outside the school entrance.



Finally it was time, and my classmates and I gathered in the tiny École Ritz Escoffier library. Introductions were made, badges were assigned, passwords were discussed. There are about nine or ten people taking the beginning César Ritz course; one Swiss and one Brazilian man, a Russian woman, a Taiwanese woman, and five girls that speak a combination of Japanese and English.

Then they herded us down the long, low-ceilinged subterranean passageways of the Ritz basement to the laundry, where a friendly man eyeballed us for sizing purposes and assigned us our uniforms. Back in the women’s locker room, it became clear that my shirt was comically short in the sleeves, and the pants were uncomfortably binding in the waist. I really, really hate elastic waist pants, and of course the official Ritz pants are high-waisted, elastic numbers with a snap-fly and tapered legs. Not a great look to be sporting in the world capital of fashion. I headed back to the laundry room and exchanged them for a size “2” (I am fairly sure these unisex uniforms are available only in sizes 1, 2 or 3), which of course turned out to be huge on me. I estimate that a size 1 is about a U.S. women’s 4, and a size 2 is about a U.S. women’s size 16. The new pants had about four extra inches of fabric in the waistline, and will require me to fold them over at least twice and wear a belt to keep them from landing around my ankles. The new jacket is much better, just a bit too long in the sleeves. Sigh.


The dreaded pants.



Silly self-portrait with jacket on.


We changed back into our street clothes and settled ourselves in the demonstration room. The instructor, Chef David Goulaze, is also going to be our teacher in the practical classes, at least for the first week. The demonstrations are open to the public for a fee, so there were about 19 people there, mostly women. The English translator will also be working with us, and told us to expect to work on stock and chopping vegetables today, and to “take our vitamins” because Chef is very energetic.

He sprung into action and began to make the pâte sucrée for a pine nut tart. The dough is spread with a layer of raspberry jam, and then covered with almond batter and finally sprinkled with pine nuts and baked. Midway through the lesson when it was almost ready, the classroom began to smell incredibly toasty and nutty and my stomach began to growl. He served us slices with a small scoop of almond ice cream on top that he had made earlier. I think the ice cream was my favorite dish of the day. It was outrageously creamy and smooth; I could probably eat it every day happily.





While the tart was baking, Chef began the process of making strawberry granita. Here’s a picture of the strawberries being boiled in sugar syrup (it’s taken of the mirror secured above the work area, so that you can see into the pots on the stovetop):




The granita that he’d made in advance for us to sample didn’t harden up very well, so it survived for about ten minutes in a very slushy state before it melted entirely into sweet, strawberry-flavored liquid. He said that the combination of very sugary fruits and the liqueur he’d added had probably conspired against him. I find it very reassuring that even at the Ritz, cooking is filled with pratfalls and unexpected results. Here’s how he prepared the glasses, layering the granita with fresh strawberries and toasted almonds to balance the texture:




Finally, he began making an orange crème anglaise and a sauce that our recipe book calls “mint vinaigrette” to accompany molten chocolate cakes. It really was a vinaigrette, prepared with olive oil, lemon juice, pepper, mint and sugar, and was meant to be simply dotted on top of the crème anglaise to add color and a bit of herbal flavor to the heaviness of the custard sauce. Works for me. At one point the milk he was heating for the sauce began to boil over, and the audience gasped collectively. He saved it in the nick of time, laughing good-naturedly. He and the translator seem to be having a lot of fun at their jobs, and overall appear to be jolly, warm people. That’s a big relief to us students; we were talking at the break about how none of us knew what to expect, and how we were worried that we might be humiliated or mocked for our lack of experience. Not so.

Here’s Chef plating the molten chocolate cakes:




And here’s the result:



The flourishes and decorations placed atop the finished products are what amazed me most. I think about thirty percent of the class was spent on plating and final presentation; you can see how he has added so many elements to the cake, like blackberries, currants, orange peel, mint leaves, vanilla, and so forth. I said to the woman sitting next to me, “Desserts don’t look like that in America!” I think the sensibility lately in our country has been to err on the side of simplicity, naturalism and restraint. Here, the adornments are beautiful and over the top and done with a respect for pure aestheticism that I think is perhaps more typical of a traditional European approach. For example, check out these desserts in the window at Fauchon:







That fruit tart is food porn, plain and simple. It has that Laura Mulvey quality of “to-be-looked-at-ness”, and eating it seems like a secondary aim. It demands to be admired visually. I am starting to understand the extent to which the line between food and art is very, very blurry in Paris. Has someone written a doctoral thesis on this yet? Probably.