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Sculpture
by Marcel Schmit circa in the
Tomb
of Alfred Dreyfus and his family. I
noted that one
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Sunday, September 16 I’d been looking forward to it, so when we saw that
there was a long line of people waiting to get into the Ecole Superieure de Cuisine
Française yesterday afternoon, I hoped Tom would not object. He didn’t.
We waited patiently for an hour and 20 minutes. We noticed that the people leaving after
taking the tour seemed to be quite pleased.
The woman in front of us in line had a daughter about
10 years old. They were hungry. The woman asked us to watch her daughter
while she went in search of a bakery with sandwiches for sale. We agreed.
Once again, we are thought to look like trustworthy, dependable
grandparent-types. The Ecole is a technical school that is run by the
Chamber of Commerce. Listen up, all
you chamber of commerce types: this
chamber is doing something truly useful for its community. It is training the kind of working
professionals that business needs. The Ecole trains not just chefs, but bakers as
well. And there is a leatherworking
and upholstery school. The
leatherworking school turns out beautiful handbags and other things. They only accept and train 24 students per
year. All are just about guaranteed to
find a salaried position – many with Hermes. Our group of 50 tourists (all French except for the two
of us and a young Japanese couple) was very focused and attentive. A few asked good questions. One man in particular was good at asking
the kind of questions that get a dialogue going. We decided he must be an academic. Another giveaway was the knapsack on his
back, plus the fact that he was wearing a tweed jacket. One of the cooking demonstrations was for a crépinette of beef – very, very similar
to a dish that I recently had in a Parisian restaurant. We also saw a reine being made – in this case, poultry prepared with mushrooms
and supreme sauce, in a pastry shell. In the bakery, we witnessed the making of baguettes and
madeleines. We were each given a free glass of beer and two small
loaves of bread, courtesy of one of the two sponsors, a cereal/grains
company. The other sponsor of the
school is Métro, a company that owns Cash and Carry (By the way, I recently learned that the discount
grocery chain, ED, is owned by Carrefour, the big box store chain that has
kept Wal-Mart out of At one point in the tour, only the two of us and the
young Japanese couple could figure out which direction our group of 50 was
supposed to go next. I wonder what
that means. It was a long tour, but worthwhile. I wish all chambers of commerce would do
such useful things as run schools to give young people respectable
professions where they are just about guaranteed a lifetime of salary. It seems that too often, chambers are just
there to criticize and lobby. I made soup for dinner, and then we went out for
another long walk. When we were almost
home, a couple pulled up next to us in their car and asked how to get to the
Panthéon. I gave complete directions,
and the couple seemed quite charmed by my heavy American accent and quite
satisfied with my answer. Today we go to the Institut de France to visit the
immortals of the Academie Française. |
