Stagiere

In 2001 I spent a year in a Paris kitchen as a stagiere. I may not have learned how to cook, but I did learn how to be a chef.

In 2001 I became a stagiere in France. My friend Marc had convinced me to. He’d persuaded me by explaining that the only way to kick my French A level on to fluency would be to spend some time amongst the natives. More importantly he was going and had organised the interview, so all I needed to do was latch on to his coat tails to fulfil a requisite part of my degree in Hotel and Catering. It was a course I had been drawn to because the front cover of the prospectus had a photograph of a chef chopping parsley. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a chef, more that I knew I didn’t want to be an accountant or lawyer or any other job that involved sitting, suited with a pen and keyboard close to hand - I’d decided I’d done enough of that at school. No. Now, I felt like standing, wearing a big white hat, and brandishing a knife. So, with a year of tertiary study and a brief interview behind us, Marc and I headed to Hyatt Regency, Charles de Gaulle for 11 of the most formative months of my life.

The first thing to note is that the Hyatt Regency Charles de Gaulle is its location; it is not actually in glamorous Paris but is instead knitted into the roundabout road infrastructure of France’s main airport along with dozens of other dull hotels. It is not a hotel of individual beauty, or of rare luxury; it is a perfunctory place that houses homme d’affaires who are either flying in or flying out – An upscale halfway house for the business class whose expense accounts afford them a cut above the 3-star Campanile or Mercure. It is therefore not a place filled with the blushing giggles and hand holding of iconic Parisienne romance, instead it is a place of cut suits, square briefcases and grave faces - faces that belie a brain bound to a whirring wheel of intense meetings, spreadsheets and looming deadlines. The architecture resembles the clientele; stylish, sharp and cold; huge swathes of glass, and exposed steelwork. An unapologetic brutalism I imagine not dissimilar to the office of Blofeld’s accountant. It was within these confines I was to become a kitchen stagiere, a lowly position I had been given due to my inability to speak French in a way comprehensible to French people. It turns out reading Moliere and Beckett is not relevant preparation to a customer facing position in a 4-star airport hotel. Marc’s linguistics were judged to be better, so he was allowed the honour of becoming a baggagiste (bellboy).

Having had the wind drop dramatically from our sails by our new location and position, Marc and I continued our course of disappointment when we were shown our accommodation for the next few months. We were to stay at the budget hotel next door, the rather hopefully named, “Premiere Classe”. A one- star establishment where you could rent a room for a tenner and buy both condoms and lasagne from a vending machine in the foyer. The rooms were three quarters covered in thick lino, the ceiling the only surface deemed worthy of a stucco finish. The television was padlocked into a cage bolted to a high corner of the room and the windows opened a mere 3 inches so that you could neither jump to your death nor escape without paying. My favourite feature of the room was the one-piece-plastic-mould-bath-cubicle, a place so bijou I could simultaneously brush my teeth and shower whilst sitting on the loo. I can’t speak for Marc but having spent my secondary education in a boarding school and having just come from university halls, I felt oddly at ease in my room. It felt homely in its blandness and functionality - ugly and institutional were what I was used to, and even the scratchy sheets and slender single bed felt strangely comforting. I lay my clothes out on to the second bed in my room and keenly awaited my first day as a chef.

I’d somehow always imagined myself as a chef, had just presumed that I had a natural ability with food, and that soon enough I’d be dipping tasting spoons into sauces and wafting fragrant steam into my nostrils to pass judgement on the work of others. I was arriving with the nonchalant arrogance of a second-year university student who hadn’t really completed a proper days work in any of his previous 20 years. Not that I was an intentionally lazy or bad person, I had just managed to coast along through large parts of my life never having to shoulder any real responsibility or consequence. I was oblivious to my immaturity, totally ignorant to the mechanics of real life and work and was in the throes of enjoying my time at university where the most useful things I learned so far was how to imbibe myself into a drunkard stupor as economically as possible. Not in my deepest thoughts could I have imagined the grinding machine I was about to become part of; the hours, the work, the characters, the visceral madness of it all.

On my first morning in the kitchen I proudly robed myself in the blue and white checked trousers, jacket, and toque of a chef. I wrapped the strings of my apron around my waist and tied it tight at the front (Something I’d seen other chefs doing). I turned the top of the apron over the knotted waistband and folded a torchon through the band on either side of my hip. Dressed in the garb I entered the kitchen and was given a guided tour, in English by the sous chef. The first thing to understand about a large scale, industrial kitchen is that it is uncomfortable, nothing is made for the ease of its participants, everything exists for sustained practicality – you bend to it, not it to you. All surfaces are either hot or sharp, the floor is dangerously slippery, and the atmosphere is thick with steam rising from troughs of boiling stews and vats of bubbling stock. Voices are loud and direct. Communication passes in clipped words from harassed faces edging towards anger. All actions are swift, deliberate and urgent – like an aggressive west end chorus line constantly performing its showstopper. It is intimidating, it’s dangerous, its loud, and it’s hectic, but I couldn’t help but feel a deep surge of excitement.

That first day in the kitchen I was dispatched to the banqueting section and given a huge gastro of baby spinach. It was explained to me, in English, that I was to peel the stalk along with any part of the spine that came with it from every leaf in the gastro. If you can imagine how many leaves of baby spinach you can hold inside a tray 53cm x 33cm x 20cm then you can imagine how long that task took me to complete, especially as a second and then a third gastro appeared in front of me before the end of the day. After 10 hours I asked somebody if I could go home. I had spent 10 hours aimlessly peeling the spine and stalk from the back of baby spinach; no explanation of its final destination, no indication if I was doing a good job, in fact barely any communication whatsoever. I had handled so much of the soft leaf that I had blisters on my fingers and thumbs. It was a brutal initiation; my back ached, my hands were stiff, but worst of all I was totally confused. Confused by the seemingly mindless task, confused by the rat-a-tat delivery of the language, confused by the alien environment – it was nowhere near the experience I had expected. The next day came and I was rumbling spuds in an industrial tumbler to remove peel. The equipment was chunky and the ingredients heavy. To finish the potatoes, I had to scour through the mostly naked vegetables and remove, by hand any slithers of skin that had survived. To do this I had to source a peeler. To find a peeler I had to discover the word for peeler in French. This was before the days of easy access google, before I could type words into a phone and wait for it to repeat back a francophone translation. So I spent more time than I had, urgently trying to find a friendly face that could help me. I went from chef to chef, miming a peeling action and completing my idiot look by saying, “peeler” in a slow drawl. I was answered by head shaking, back turning and the face screwing of non-understanding. Then finally, at my wits end a peeler appeared in front of me. There were many scoffs, sniggers and mean smiles about the faces, and I realised I was the butt of some joke. I had absolutely no idea what the joke was; it hurt. If there was one saving grace to my poor command of colloquial French it was that I couldn’t translate the humdrum of noise about me, couldn’t pick up the idiomatic insults I’m sure were directed towards me, instead it fell away to white noise and I found solace in my incomprehension.

To not understand the language spoken around you is normally a tortuous experience. It is totally isolating; no information coming in and no information passing out. It is a sure way to feel personally disconnected from those around you. However, on this occasion, in these harsh, unforgiving surrounds, I realised my inability to understand those around me was a saving grace. When all that was coming my way was the snide remarks of a brigade of badly educated, poorly paid, overworked, immature men not understanding them was my greatest device of mental survival. Sure, I knew I was rubbish in the kitchen, but I faced a monumental challenge; I’d never worked in such a place and there was scant information or direction offered. I can’t claim that carrying on was a conscious decision driven by an phlegmatic core, it was more a learned action from coping with the drudgery of school. I put my head down, didn’t complain about the aches, the hours, the remarks or the idiocy of my work which I was certain had been reduced to inane tasks invented to keep me out the way. I let the French language that I was there to learn slide off me; when the head chef came out to harangue me for not shutting the fridge door, for leaving the hot tap running, or for my mere existence I happily watched his hands windmill and gesticulate whilst having absolutely no idea nor interest in the mean words he cast towards me.

So passed my first two months in the kitchen; in general working very hard, trying to be useful, but ultimately knowing I wasn’t really contributing. I could feel myself being passed from one section of the kitchen to another, each one not really knowing what to do with a stagiere who couldn’t cook and who couldn’t really speak French. In those first months whilst the chefs of the kitchen were writing me off, and generally busying themselves with handing me uncomfortably miserable tasks I realised I was slowly changing. The aches were becoming less, my mind learned to run blank through the mundane, repetitive tasks, my footing became surer, and I became sharper around the kitchen; skating between sections, whizzing about the place, plucking ingredients, picking equipment. I learned to sustain myself on titbits snatched from cooling trays, and to pick delicious, soft chicken meat from the boiled stock carcasses, to effectively use my torchons like heat proof whips, quickly deployed then holstered back around my apron string. I befriended the laundry lady who not only washed my home clothes, but more importantly had slow, understandable words of encouragement for me. Most of all, most critically, I was learning the language of the kitchen.

After two months I knew almost all the vegetables used in the kitchen by their French names. There were herbs and spices which I didn’t even know the English name for and was discovering in French: Estragon, Lauriel, Noix de Muscat, anise. Enchanting, wonderful words combined with delicious, exotic flavours; I revelled in their repetition. Fish, oils, flours, equipment; loup de mer, Grondin, huile arachide, farine de ble, Robo, epoucher my vocabulary was growing and with it my comprehension and confidence. I was learning the idiom of French through my love of the kitchen vernacular and it was beginning to pay dividends. I was able to eavesdrop on conversations and rarely, but importantly I was able to add an opinion, a punch line, an observation that raised an eyebrow or produced a smile. I was slowly edging my way into the core of the kitchen, identifying the characters, making friends. With my new-found abilities and relationships, I was given more responsibility, I was given tasks of genuine use and importance. It started with heavy, horrible duties that whilst I disliked I could see had a point. Passing gallons of piping hot chicken stock from their cauldron in to smaller gastros, draining boiling oil from deep fat fryers then cleaning them out and replenishing them, washing out huge fridges, repacking, recovering and updating cold foods; they were all important tasks that added to the quality of the kitchen output. With every task came lessons, lessons mostly burned into my skin or cut into my fingers; l learned that wet cloths conduct heat incredibly efficiently, steam hurts and that almost any cut can be bandaged with a clod of blue roll and a wrap of clingfilm. I learned that the kitchen is always overstretched and under resourced and that to be effective you have to be canny. Nobody cares that the light doesn’t work in the fridge, that the laundry gave you oversized trousers, they only care about output and productivity. It is a harsh but character building environment in which you are forced into improvisation. If the first two months helped develop my kitchen stamina then the next couple of months helped develop a foothold, a grasp, an understanding of the wherewithal and whatnot needed to not only survive the harsh surrounds, but to thrive.

My first real chef job came in the butchery. I became responsible for slicing and stacking the huge, cured legs of Parma ham. It was an ingredient totally alien to me. Whilst I may have grown up eating a broad range of Asian foods, my understanding of quality European cuisine was virtually non-existent. All I knew was that the jambon in front of me, and its translated English counterpart, ham, were two very different things. To taste the French ham, I cut a greedy chunk from the unsliced, thick end and swiped it into my mouth. It was horrible, a thick, clawing saltiness that laboured about my mouth with a deep porcine flavour teetering on farmyard. As I continued to chew, the dried meat clumped, and I ended up sucking on a slowly leaching meaty gobstopper. It was an altogether unpleasant experience; one I wasn’t in a hurry to repeat and one I couldn’t understand why anybody else would ever want to have. I continued slicing the ham for a couple of hours every morning over the next couple of weeks, not once snatching another tranche. Until one day I was so desperately hungry and thirsty that a thin slice seemed to trot its way from the machine to my mouth. It was an entirely different experience; no claggy fat, instead a wafer of intensity which collapsed onto my tongue in a delicious porky pile before lightly cloaking itself around the hollow of my mouth, prickling my tongue with its saltiness then trailing depth of flavour down the back of my throat. It was exquisite, sublime, so different to the thickly flavoured blunt node I had eaten before, and it carried the mark of a special ingredient – it tasted like nothing I had ever eaten before, yet simultaneously familiar, simultaneously comforting. From that day on, I gorged.

I mastered the massive and intimidating spinning wheel of the ham slicer – surely one of the most dangerous bits of equipment ever devised. I became practised at cutting the meat from its plastic netting, shaving off excess fat and loading the lump on to the metal ledge. I’d set the blade spinning and adjust the depth to a distance I knew would produce the perfect slice – thin enough to see the shadow of your finger through, but thick enough to keep shape and carry its own weight. All primed I began the backwards forwards motion that pushed thin tongues of ham through the blade and into my other hand that waited precariously close on the underside. It was a ridiculously dangerous operation, made even more so because I never used the guard which meant I gripped the ham with my hand. As the ham fat warmed and melted with the contact it become more and more greasy rendering the whole process stupidly perilous. I survived unscathed, but one of the other chefs didn’t. She had been slicing ham, unguarded after a long shift and as her hand slipped forward off the meat her whole forearm fell forcibly on to the blade. I didn’t see the harm, but I did witness the aftermath; the blade stopped at the bone and when helping to clear the mess I felt like I was swabbing the floor of a field hospital. Every now and then there would come a reminder like this of just how dangerous the kitchen can be. As well as that lady who I never saw again I watched a man lop his finger straight off with a cleaver, another, burn his hand so deeply from a searing pan handle that he exposed the inner working of his thumb, and one final guy slipping and hitting his head with such force a lump the size of a goose egg sprang instantly from his temple. There is real danger in every kitchen and, at some point, no matter how careful you are, it will find you.

Chefs work with an idiotic disregard for their own personal safety that crosses into senseless. They wear scars like medals and boast of their endless endurance. It’s a fool’s game, a macho drive to self-harm, drug abuse, broken marriages, depression and, if left long enough, total self-destruction. It’s a mindset that permeates all levels, from commis to head chef, relentlessly dogging out those who don’t jump aboard as weak or unworthy. Any trace of sensibility, self-care or respect is identified as weakness and bullied in a blunt, sometimes physical manner. It’s not dog eat dog, it’s chef abuse chef and its stupid, but it’s the way that kitchen and many others like it worked for years. It’s even more stupid that the atmosphere is infectious, it dares you to stand up to it, to work as hard against it as it does against you; it goads you in to taking up the gauntlet and It’s only a mad few who decide to pick it up. That’s why many chefs are vagrants, are aggressive, ego fuelled balls of tense energy, because they are the only ones dumb enough to think that constant abuse within oppressive and dangerous surrounds is ok. I became one of those dumb few.

I began to revel in the madness, began to ferret about the place, learned to sneer at the more civilized, suited workers of the front desk or the reservations team. To hold in contempt every other department of the hotel who we considered, “them”- those people who couldn’t hack our world, the ones who took an hour for lunch whilst we ran in to the canteen, targeted something hot and portable, snatched it, then exited without breaking step. They were the people who led a civilized life free from destructive levels of booze and fags. The ones who had a real chance of bettering themselves, climbing the ladder, becoming managers with a proper salary and proper benefits whilst most chefs scuttled about for a few years before burning and crashing. Marc not only thought I was mad; he knew I was mad. He was doubling his salary in tips, wore a sleek black polo shirt and slacks and worked reasonable hours. He had even started dating one of the French receptionists; a beautiful girl from Biarritz, who wafted sophistication from her blonde bob and beamed a coquettish smile that started at the edge of her lips and ended in playful turning of her hair. Ladies like her were beyond me, beyond my imagination as I was morphing into a kitchen grub; constantly covered in the dirt of endeavour, glazed with a sheen of sweat and always on the move, always harassed and behind schedule. I had become part of a brigade of delinquents, a collection of outsiders who had found their sanctuary in the ardours of the kitchen. It was a place that suited them because nobody expected anything aside from hard, bloody work. I learned that for some there is comfort to be found in being flogged, a freedom to be found in lack of expectation, and satisfaction to be had in hard manual labour. At that time, in those types of kitchens, it was expected that chefs would fester in the hot bowels whilst the civilized ones would serve and be served upstairs in rarefied air. All parties understood the arrangement and happily complied. I had become one of the underworld, and with my rag tag mates and new habit of tucking a knife into the back of my apron I looked right and felt right.

6 months in and I was qualified to handle food directly destined for paid consumption. I had done my time, I hadn’t withered, I had become stronger – lithe and malleable. I was given the customer facing task of cooking and carving chicken at the buffet. My job started by sliding saintly, Poulet de Bresse on to a heavy spit. Once I’d spiked 3-4 chickens and locked them into place I jerked and lifted the pole up into its impractically high position just above my head. I set the rotisserie turning at the perfect 3 revolutions per minute and with a match lit the pilot light, gave it a sharp blow and admired the long line of flames ignite like stunt side pyrotechnics. During cooking, any escaping juice and rendered fat dripped down on to waxy, Ratte potatoes which had been tossed together with thick stalks of rosemary, halved bulbs of garlic, and a fistful of crunchy fleur de sel. It was a beastly machine that exuded blunt heat and force, but its output, its final product was delicate perfection – the texture of the chicken was faultless, tender and moist, brimming with juice and flavour; the skin, bronzed and rendered crisp, yet still guarding a thin underlay of deeply flavoured melting fat. It was glory on a plate; the very definition of perfectly roasted chicken. To the customers I served cuisse ou blanc with roast potatoes and chicken jus, but when I had my chance, when there was chicken leftover and the serving suggestion was up to me; I’d pile my plate with sticky rice, fork on two thick thighs, dragging with them as much skin as possible, then pour over jus enough to leak through the rice and cover the base of the plate. Finished with a good pinch of sea salt, I’d clingfilm the plate, transport it home and greedily, almost salaciously gobble it down back in my room. That dish holds a very dear place in my heart: unfussy, unsurpassable roast chicken with the sticky rice of my childhood flooded with well-made chicken jus. It is one of those dishes where every mouthful is the same, no acidic highlights, or bitter complexities to mull over, just straight forward, deliciously unfussy comforting monotony. At that time when I was lonely and exhausted from the idiocy of my relentless 16 hour day, when I had no friends or family with whom to share a thought, when all around me was uncomfortable and foreign that meal offered consolation; a way to make myself feel better, a self- served kindness, a pause in the madness of it all.

I became expert at carving the chicken into 8 perfect portions: two thighs, two legs, two entirely white breast portions, and two breast portions attached to wings. It’s a most satisfying and efficient exercise to carve a roasted chicken in this way. Learning the exact places to insert and chop your knife through so you miss the grind of hard bone and instead come up only against the slight resistance of ligaments and tendons. It’s much better than attempting to slice thin pieces from the breast then wrestling the brown meat from its bone - a method so fiddly and so impractical it can only frustrate and make you feel like a failure. There is so much to be learned about cooking from the simple process of portioning. It is such an accessible and satisfying exercise in anatomy and knife skills that any would-be-cook should devote a decent amount of time to its research and practise. It forces you to see the animal in its entirety, to appreciate the nature of the different component parts – it educates you to becoming a better cook. With new skills in my hands and more French words in my head I began to enjoy my work, interacting with customers, joking about with other chefs, and most importantly I began to feel like a genuinely useful part of the brigade; worthy almost of respect.

Alongside the buffet ran the a la carte section; the place where the very creme of the kitchen worked, those chefs who had weathered the industry long enough to be given free range to develop and execute the very highest offerings of the restaurant. They were amazing to watch, a formidable, beguiling spectacle - I looked on, longingly. They were so seductive in their movements, so skilled in their work. They commanded their space and they moved about each other with purposeful fluidity, never harassed never harried, just calmly committed to working through their workload, executing each dish as perfectly as the last. I will always remember the way they interacted with their ingredients and their equipment. It was mesmerising, as if both were an extension of themselves, somehow organically connected to them to carry out their bidding. Their touch was so light, so tactile as if convincing ingredients into their places with a flick of their wrist or a crumbling of their fingers; they were so prescient in their work, so aware of one another, so aware of their environment; no timers, no instructions, no wasted motions, no mistakes. Amongst the controlled chaos of hot pans, flames, knives and the suffocating pressure of mounting orders they were the calm, mesmeric eye of the storm. They made me want to be like them, inspired me to want to be part of their gang, to do what they did - how they did it. The very best part of carving endless chickens was watching those boys at work and every now and then being called over to talk to them, to be trusted to fetch for them and to be respected enough to be shown glimpses of their modus operandi.

One memorable day the head a la carte chef, Manu invited me into his world and taught me how to make an omelettes aux fines herbes. He demonstrated the art of warming butter to bubbling over a medium high heat and adding the beaten eggs. He moved the eggs about with a spatula, expertly controlling the pan temperature by pulling it on and off the gas. Shaking the pan with his left hand and working the eggs with a spatula in his right he showed the consistency of loose, baveuse eggs, gave it 20 seconds to set and then rolled the omelette in on itself and on to a plate in one single action. The omelette was perfect, uncoloured, unlike the browned omelettes I knew. After a precise scattering of chives, chervil and parsley along the length and a grind of black pepper he served it up; no other garnish, just a perfectly cooked omelette, centre stage, centre plate. It was an amazing lesson in the complexity of simplicity, the art of execution. It was such a privilege and so inspiring to finally work alongside people of high skill, to finally see the highest output of the restaurant machine I had sweated so many hours for.

It’s really these guys, the Manu’s of the kitchen that occupy the daydreams of those who wish to be chefs. When people sit back into their office chairs, fingers linked behind their heads contemplating a life of cooking it’s chefs like him that they see. When they fantasize of broadening their weekend cooking to a professional level, it’s those boys they inhabit; barking orders, commanding the pass. What so many wannabe chefs don’t realise is the reality of what it takes to achieve those positions, the years of graft, of sacrifice and abuse that have to be weathered before you are deemed worthy of even approaching a frying pan or an open flame. But I suppose that is the beauty of a daydream – it doesn’t have to be tempered by reality. To fulfil the role of a chef, to play the part properly you must be determined and durable first and intelligent and skilled second. It’s no surprise that the most celebrated chefs of that era were men and women who teetered close to the edge. To succeed at the highest levels of cooking it takes an unflinching, almost psychotic level of single-minded determination mixed together with an artist’s level of creativity all bound within an indestructible corps. I have so much respect for those who occupy the highest echelons of the cooking trade; what they give up for what they do deserves only admiration.

As I approached the end of my stage I became increasingly frustrated that it was only now that I was beginning to learn how to cook. This might sound like an odd comment, the presumption being that for almost a year I surely must have been immersed in constant cooking, but it’s just not like that in big kitchens. I had spent so many hours on elemental prep, so many mind-numbing days passed hunched over piles of ingredients to which I applied only singular processes of preparation. Actual cooking was done by only a small percentage of the brigade – those who had completed a proper culinary education. I had basically been a tall hat skivvy, one of many in that kitchen and in the industry as a whole. I was there to basically be chewed up and spat out by the great mincing machine that is a large hotel kitchen. But it wasn’t all for nothing. Far from it: when, Marc and I talked about that year, much of it was negative, the location, the pay, the job, but I realised I had learned so much about myself, what I was capable of enduring, physically and mentally. I had been pushed hard, shoved far out of my comfort zone, but instead of crumbling I had learned to adapt and thrive. I had unearthed a grit that I never realised I had, had never had to call on before. Relatively, my life to that point had been a pretty easy ride. That year gave me confidence, confidence in my own abilities to withstand physical and mental ardour; I had an inbuilt resilience that without that stage I never would have known about. I implore everybody to put themselves in a similar situation, to test your mettle and to realise your worth.

There are physical, culinary ticks that are stained on me from that year; I can’t stand a constantly running tap, can’t leave a fridge door open for even the merest second too long, and I prep even the simplest meal with the tidy discipline that the kitchen bestowed on me, but there are also the mental traits tattooed deep into my dark matter that I know I can fall back upon in everyday life. To this day I still look back on that year as possibly the most important of my life so far. It is the year that I became a chef. I might not have learned how to cook, but I did learn how to be a chef.