My Not-So-Great French Escape by Cliff Burke

Author:Cliff Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

That night was our first cooking lesson. After the customary three-hour rest in the middle of the afternoon, Annie, Lia, Martin, and I met Pierre in the kitchen. He had already laid out an assortment of vegetables and a large chicken and was flipping through a ringed collection of yellowed index cards.

“I am only somewhat of a chef,” Pierre said. “But my mother was a”—he kissed his fingers—“cuisinère merveilleuse. Many delicious recipes she has left behind.”

He selected three index cards and set them on the counter. “We will start with artichokes à la barigoule. Step one is to take out the heart.”

“That sounds violent,” Annie said.

“It is beautiful,” Pierre said, handing her a knife. He laid an artichoke in front of each of us as we lined up side by side along the kitchen counter.

Following his lead, we each cut the top and then the sides and then the stem, leaving just the base, which was the heart of the artichoke. I looked down the counter to see four perfectly cut artichoke hearts on each of our cutting boards and felt a tiny bubble of pride.

Pierre collected the hearts and put them into a bowl of cold water. He gave us each a vegetable—carrots, onions, garlic, and leeks—and, one by one, described how they should be cut. Flying high on the artichoke heart success, Lia bounced up and down next to me while cutting her carrots.

“Now we take this.” Pierre picked up a box of matches, leaned down, and lit a burner on the stove. “And this.” He placed a pot atop the flame. “Splash in this.” He poured in a generous amount of cooking wine, spaced out the artichokes, and then lined the remaining bottom of the pot with the cut vegetables. “Allow for it to sit. Twenty minutes—done!”

Pierre picked up the soup recipe card and quickly scanned it.

“This one will be even more easy. We need somebody to cut the potatoes and the others to make the mirepoix.”

“Mirepoix?” Annie repeated.

“You do not know it?” Pierre asked.

We all, somewhat ashamedly, shook our heads. Pierre was astonished.

“It is the foundation for French cooking! Charles-Pierre-Gaston François de Lévis, duc de Lévis-Mirepoix. This is nothing to you?”

Hearing the Frenchest name of all time was notable but otherwise meant nothing to us.

Pierre had to calm himself down. “Okay. It is okay. That is why you are here—to learn.”

He demonstrated how to dice each vegetable into roughly the same size. After we had made three rows of green, white, and orange vegetables, Annie pushed them together to resemble a flag.

“Look, it is India,” she said.

“Or the Ivory Coast,” Lia said.

“Or Ireland,” I said.

“It is France,” Pierre said, scooping the vegetables into a pot.

We glanced at one another and giggled, but Pierre was too absorbed in concocting the perfect mirepoix to notice.

“Now that we have the base,” Pierre said, “we need the potato. Many potatoes. This one you will do together as I prepare the chicken.”

We diced the potatoes, and Pierre poured cooking wine into another sizzling pot on the stove before laying down strips of chicken.

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