Sunday, October 31, 2021

Tale 8: Paris 1899 - First eighth or so

 The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Bloom. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Bloom, his grandfather Ludovic cuisinier to Herr Bloom. The Blooms were in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Wolfshunds knew, a Wolfshund cooked for a Bloom when the Blooms entertained Emperor Barbarossa. Every Wolfshund knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now that Madame Bloom was Baroness Bloch, Louis Wolfshund was in Paris, ordered to move with with new Baroness so her children would know how a decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste. Once in Paris, Louis cured meat at the feet of the Bloch's formidable executive chefs, two brothers and Italian kitchen tyrants named Ebreo, and whom together taught Louis by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some worthlessly fried ball of bicot merde called 'falafel.' And yet upon retirement the Ebreos recommended a different executive chef with Louis as the mere chef de cuisine. Fortunately, the young and facile Chef Rosenthal had a better offer: the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis was made executive chef to what he knew he'd soon raise to Paris's best kitchen in any house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Bloch ordered him to enroll immediately, Louis, an executive chef of Paris for nineteen years whose food was served to Zola, Rodin, Clemenceau and Rothschild a dozen times each was taking instruction on how to crack eggs. The Rothschilds never made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that this was meant as a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! 

The truth of the matter was the Blochs were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who'd be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to comment that the Blochs employ a chef with credentials any less than immaculate. Jewish or gentile, the Blochs knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Bloch hit upon the magnificent idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu, where he could stun the students and faculty with his quality and become known to a wide gastronomic public as one of the finest chefs of the Third Republic. 

Louis always suspected the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease; he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought Lisette's protestations of disinterest the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out Louis's seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours every day learning to cook like a first-year dishwasher when he knew everything better than his maitres, and have no free moment for Lisette to play with force for the next two years.  

For the first year, the young students at Le Cordon Bleu laughed at Louis like serpents in a vegetable garden, as he knew they would - a Baron's executive chef forced to take lessons in remedial cooking, and from teachers who had not half his experience or skill. Just his mere presence in a place like this ensured no professor would appreciate his professionalism or gift. And while the students snickered at his presence, the maitres critiqued his kitchen technique as though he were a first year sous chef when he hadn't burned a Sauce Bearnaise in thirty years and could make the clearest Consomme to be found outside the kitchen of Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy in London. Surely, were these amateur gourmands true chefs themselves, they would be employed in a grand house like the Maison Bloch, to which he had to return every evening and prepare the night's meal he'd assembled that morning before class.

But in Louis's second year at Cordon Bleu arose a student group inflamed on the eclat of French glory and incensed there would be any French chefs who polluted their cuisine with international influence: discussing with outrage that any French chef would serve a Ratatouille on pasta or drench a Coq au vin in Riesling, and repeat with outrage the oft-repeated claims that omlettes and pates were Tuscan in origin rather than French. Their consciousness of the foreign encroachment sharpened by the subversive threat on display in the trial of Lt. Colonel Dreyfus.  

Obviously these students were passionate about food, and Louis finally made time in his assiduously occupied schedule to attend a group meeting of "Cuisine Francaise pour la France," where he quickly discovered these students to be so incompetent they could barely hold together a Croque Madame. Louis immediately began banging the pots and shouting at these culinary infants like a proper chef and shoved them out of the classroom stoves' way to demonstrate their every error. For this fanatical histrionic he received not jeers but a hail of applause. Over the next six hours, Louis neglected the Bloch's dinner and showed them all the mistakes with which their maitres were instructing them. A student finally asked him in which kitchen he learned, and when he said that for twenty years he's been executive chef in the kitchen of Baron Bloch, the room went completely silent, until someone called out: "Only a Jew would force a servant as loyal as me back to training." the students followed by approving nods of 'd'accord.' A year's worth of rage came venting forth about all the luminaries whose compliments he received, all the absurd dietary demands by Bloch relatives (and all the times he secretly disobeyed them), and how two years of remedial culinary training was his reward. 

It seemed quite sudden that Louis was hailed as the glory of Le Cordon Bleu's first graduating class, but there he was, the head of faculty suddenly taking his instruction on how much raspberry sauce Escofier put on top his peche Melba and how La Varenne's bisque and Bechamel was more butter and fat than the official recipe ever called. 

When a representative of the military was called in to talk about the Dreyfus case and the importance of maintaining the honor and purity of France in all her endeavors, Louis needed no convincing. When he returned to Maison Bloch, Louis Wolfshund was hailed as France's finest executive chef short of Escoffier and Rosenthal, and he'd made up his mind that never again would he serve falafel, charoset. No more brassado bagels, no more Provencal breast of veal served in chicken soup, no more water challah with potatoes, no more carp a la juive in a parsley sauce, no more smoked beef tongue, and no more apple pudding made with matzoh. 

When Louis returned, the Blochs tripled his salary along with septuple overtime for holidays, and he went right on making that revolting food a la juif. 

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