A Culinary memoir

A pair of black and white checkered polyester pants are one of the many memories left over from my culinary days.  The bottoms are worn and black, thick from grease, smudges from kitchens past.  My chef’s knife.  The blade I must keep sharpened more than normal.  I rarely use the chef’s knife from school; my initials carved into the blade near the handle by my ex-husband in a baking lab gone bored. The smell of flour; soft cotton that has been woven with the fragrance of yeast and grass, a smell that only the Gods could have melded.  Eggs. The 100 pleats in a chef’s hat representing the 100 ways you can cook an egg.  Mis en place; the phrase that means ‘all things needed’; carrots, onions, celery and parsley are a basic mis en place.  Each class we had to chop these ingredients into different cuts depending on the dishes we cooked for the day.  It always smelled like Thanksgiving.  Now memories of my childhood, my family and cooking are melded into one mis en place.  

    Baking and Pastry was my forte. Funny thing as I discovered a year ago I am allergic to wheat, barley, malt and yeast.  Now I am having to re-learn all of these beautiful pastry traditions with all new ingredients.  My dream was to go to Paris and become a Pastry chef.  An internship at the Ritz Escoffier was my vision.  I wanted to learn from the great masters of baking and gastronomique.  It was my hope to discover old recipes that had never made it across the border into the US.  To understand the perfection that came from baking the most perfect croissant.  A croissant actually means a thousand layers. A thousand beautiful layers of perfectly folded pastry.  It should be crispy and it should taste as though it was made purely out of butter and yet you cannot find the butter hidden amongst the layers of crisp flaky perfection.  Paris, the city of lights.  An internship and a dream.  Although life took me many directions besides this dream, I still managed to get to Paris.

     As the plane came to land in Paris you suddenly noticed the light.  After flying all night you suddenly found yourself very aware that the darkness had settled behind the veil of the morning sun.  You looked down and no longer saw the ocean but instead this beautiful scene as you had always imagined it to be.  The hills were green and you could almost see the vines of the vineyards below.  I was lucky to be on the right side of the plane as I looked out my window and there it was, the Eiffel Tower!  In all its glory the sitting glistened in the sun.  Gold tipping the roofs of many buildings and the white marble of statuesque monuments gave shame to the sun itself as it highlighted such things.  

     I got off the plane and found my way through customs.  My mom was there waiting for me.  It was so wonderful to see her and yet so odd to see her for the first time in a foreign place.  We made our way to the taxi station and found a handsome French man to take us to the hotel. Paris is a beautiful city, but like most cities it has its darkness too.  The red light district was not a place to venture; although I did drag my mother there to find the one metaphysical bookstore in all of Paris – only to find it closed and very small I might add.  There are areas that have graffiti and trash and you can see why many travel books write of pick pockets.  But then there is another side to Paris.  You walk by the River Seine and can find yourself lost in the bookstands and the paintings for sale all along the banks.  I love old books.  Books that you can imagine are one of a kind or rare or haven’t even been touched since the lover of the writer who purchased the book only to support him. The smell of mold and paper in the center of the binding of an old book is much like flour to me.  It reminds you of something…