We have finished six weeks here at Ballymaloe, which means we are halfway through the program. It has gone by in a flash - I cannot remember what we cooked in earlier weeks, and whatever it was that made me so upset on any given day or my trepidation at the approach of the first Bank Holiday weekend seem almost laughable now. It feels like I have been here forever - the farm and animal and bird noises just the normal soundtrack to my life, an almost-complete disregard for wardrobe,1 the weekly rhythm of work/walk/talk/sleep/work/row/talk/sleep, the not-quite but almost blissful surrender to sleep, and the almost-joy with which I greet more mornings than not.
Did I even just say that? GET HELP, I HAVE BEEN HIJACKED, WHO IS THIS PERSON?
A person who has made it half-way through a quirkily old-fashioned but challenging, frustrating but inspiring, exhausting but energizing, eye-rollingly irritating but also completely engaging, did I say exhausting, cooking program in a place that most Americans consider a weird location to learn about food but which is possibly - possibly, I can’t quite drop the qualifiers yet - the most beautiful place on earth and makes me want to stay forever.
Yeah I said that too.
You can’t, of course. Stay forever, that is. As I’ve note, it’s a total bubble, missing only the unicorns. But maybe I can learn to indulge in the fantasy and maybe just maybe some of it will come back to Cambridge with me.2
All this glow is absolutely generated by having completed not just six weeks but the much hyped and definitely dreaded midterm examination. At H, midterms seem to go on for about three-quarters of the actual semester and are an excuse for everything from missed appointments to a stunted social life. Here at Ballymaloe, at precisely the middle of the program, we have one midterm. That’s what we have here tonight, boys. That’s what we’ve earned here . . . apologies, brain still in hockey land.3 But truly, all eyes are finally turning to the Herbs (that’s a hard haitch here) and Technique Examination on Friday.
It’s not a big secret. Here’s what we have to do:
identify ten salad leaves and ten herbs and be able to name up to two recipes for each herb. Or maybe just two herb recipes? Sources are unclear on this point.
show that we are competent in four skills from the list of 35 above. We will have to roll a paper piping bag and dice and sweat an onion, and then we will be assigned two more techniques to do in the kitchen.
As you might imagine, this week has been one of what the Brits call swotting: cutting up chickens and making poached eggs and those damn little piping bags and segmenting citrus and start the scrambled eggs in a cold pan and the omelette in a hot one and fuck me those bags are going to be my downfall. We had a little study hall on Tuesday and a lot of parchment paper died in service to our paper piping bags.
The grade on this goes toward your overall evaluation for the course but reader, you will have to wait to find out because I hear the final grade arrives about eight weeks after the program ends!
Of course, you don’t actually have to take the exams. You can do the entire course, and just get a Certificate of Attendance, without them. And in the grand scheme of my life, the exams do not matter, right? Grades do not really matter, and that certainly should not be the goal here, who’s with me H colleagues? So, I am trying to approach this test in the mode of semper paratus4 but also relaxed. I mean, it’s not like the earth will stop spinning if my hollandaise splits. I am a voice in the wilderness though when I try to explain this to my colleagues here. Yes, yes, of course, first world problems they agree and then return to desperately hoping they aren’t asked to fillet a round fish.
But before the exam, we cook. This week I am back in Kitchen 3 where it all began but this time squashed against the wall in the opposite corner which I kind of hate. Also, while it has a great weigh-up room, it has terrible circulation so is hot and since it is beef week my god do we all stink of beef fat for the rest of the day. My partner is the delightful Aoife from Dublin, who is friendly and nice and completely gives the lie to the whole concept of the Fetus as previously defined. We share an island with Lily from London and Cian (pronounced Kee-an) from Ireland who is a bit of a cut-up but also ambitious, telling Francesco one morning that he’s aiming for all 1s today, and I don’t know if he achieved that but one thing I do know about Cian, he fucking hates making Mushrooms a la Crème with Ginger. This is the worst recipe in the world, he proclaims over and over again while carefully cooking his mushrooms just so and plating the whole thing beautifully.
Here’s what I cooked this week:
a steak, not particularly well, but with Bernaise sauce that absolutely slayed
an aioli that broke so I corrected it but the result was thin
a pear and frangipane tart that would have been nice if not undercooked
a beef burger with the aforementioned Mushrooms à la Créme with Ginger and roasted red onions
mussels with ‘nduja which is totally coming home see them soon on a dinner table near you
Casserole Chicken with Marjoram which is not at all a casserole as we know it but cooked in a casserole and is absolutely delicious
more of those wonderful new potatoes with mint
the ongoing project of Rose my sourdough starter . . . see below for more on her!
and oh hey, it’s puff pastry week at Ballymaloe!5
I keep forgetting to take pictures of things that I’ve made but I suppose that means I am focused on the moment which is a good thing? See above re: becoming absorbed, etc.
Duties included my fave, feeding the hens on Thursday, and herb and veg duty Monday morning which means going up to the glasshouse and picking whatever you are told. In my case, peas, and you all know my feelings about peas but I am a grownup so I tell Haulie the head farm man that I don’t normally like peas but that I hear the fresh ones are magnificent so I’m looking forward to having some and he tells me he prefers ‘em frozen.
Haulie has more family in Boston than in Ireland. Pretty much every Irish person you meet has been to Boston, or their kids lived there for a while, or they have cousins there. It doesn’t really make me feel more at home here but they seem to want me to know.
Anyway, on herb duty you pick masses of whatever herbs are on Haulie’s list for the kitchens, which is a fabulously fragrant job, and then he drives us back to the kitchens with all the goods and you have to divide the herbs up and put them in tins for each kitchen. As duties go, this too is a nice one and I got to wear my wellies.
Wednesday is the day we don’t cook, but have lectures and demos instead. It can be long and tedious (I’m talking about you business of food) but this week was high indulgence starting with cakes from Rory, then petit four6 from Rory, then chocolate tempering and more petits fours from Richard and after lunch, wine with Colm. Then I had to go row. 😳
But I am now armed with some really lovely cake recipes and I actually understand how to temper chocolate and I tasted a truly remarkable wine from Vermont and another really interesting one from Ireland and also one from Georgia (the country, where they were making wine way before even the Greeks) because this week in wine is about sustainability and KNOW THIS: the future of wine is not where its past was thank you climate change. Ten years ago, no one would have thought about wine from anywhere other than the traditional regions but drought and soil depletion and chemical fertilizer and all the other reckless practices of Big Wine have pushed some forward-thinking vintners to develop hybrid strains of grape that will grow well in colder or wetter regions like Ireland and Vermont, and it turns out that you can make some very good wine from these.7 We also heard about the Great Austrian Wine Scandal of 1985, where a few producers brought down the entire industry by juicing their wine with diethylene glycol.8
I don’t know that I am actually learning much about how to choose and pair wine, but between tastings and scandal I can think of worse ways to spend a Wednesday afternoon.
Finally it is Friday and it is hard not to be infected by the giddy tension in the air: a long weekend is just hours away but first we have to take the exam. The School does its best to manage this tension by providing a jolly pizza etc. demonstration in the morning, with many samples, and of course when you have a morning demo you have a coffee and cake break so there was pizza, then cake, then more pizza and pizza etc. for lunch. This absolutely slows my brain down to nap speed, for a while anyway.
But speaking of carbs . . . I HAVE MADE A SOURDOUGH LOAF AND SHE IS GOOD! I am feeling really chuffed about visiting the Bread Shed early this morning to bake off Rose’s first product. It is not perfect - I was a little too excited and probably should have given her another day or two to bubble after her Big Feed on Tuesday. So the loaf is a touch heavy and not as flavorful as future ones will be. And while I refuse to refer to her like other people do here as my sourdough child - I have two human ones and they are PERFECT I do not need a dough one - I am pretty proud of myself for having started Rose, and delighted with her first offspring.9
And now . . . the exam is done! Once the carb coma wore off the blood sugar dip began and then was re-charged by a weirdly calm adrenaline surge. First was the identification part, for which you are ushered into a SILENT Kitchen 1 by the supremely competent and also supremely kind Instructor Finola, and given a worksheet for the herbs and adjacent recipes and leaves. Then, whispering always, you are invited to assemble the Magimix (what we call a food processor) and the Kenwood (what we call a KitchenAid MixMaster but it also can have a blender on it), to present and pour Finola a glass of wine (after which you are told to pour it back in the bottle via funnel because we can’t have a soused Finola running half of the exam now, can we?), and to set a table for a given menu.10
Once you’ve done that, you go back to the dining room and sit around waiting to be called in for the technical exam. You can cut this tension with butter knife and everyone cringes when Instructor Richard comes out and says Harry! How would you like to make some lemon curd today? And Harry from Malta says something like oh I don’t know and Richard says good because you’re not hahahaha as he leads Harry away to his fate. Finally called, I am told that I will be filleting a round fish and making caramel sauce in addition to the required dicing and sweating of onion and making of a paper piping bag. Fish: good; caramel: I have neither practiced nor made since I got here so fuuuuuuuck. But get in that game dammit so I make up my work order and I’m off: onions nice and sweaty under their cartouche hat, fish fillets forever separated from their skeleton by the power of my shockingly sharp filet knife, caramel bubbling away, paper piping bag produced and - oh my god is the caramel crystallizing?! It is sweet jesus that’s a fail what to do but growth-mindset-girl takes over and says to Instructor Sue, my caramel is crystallizing can I start over? No, she says, you cannot. But (leaning in just a bit and lowering her voice) this is like a driving test we don’t want you to fail and you’re being too cautious just put it on a higher burner and swirl when it starts to darken it’ll be fine when you add your water.
Reader, it was. I assume I have passed, as have all my chums.11 Cheers to us, and on to the long weekend.
I am absolutely elated to see Bill and Izzy later this afternoon and we have a lovely if loooooong dinner at Ballymaloe House where I regale them with Tales From the Cookery School.
From the Bread Shed to collapsing exhausted into bed, this day anyway, I am replete and complete.
No we haven’t abandoned clothes here it’s just that I really do not put much thought into what I am wearing when not my whites. Because it really, really doesn’t matter.
Certainly more than a few things are coming back to Cambridge with me, starting with one of those gorgeous cutting boards in the Shop and water kefir grains!
Sad hockey land, as the Bostons were outplayed in the final game of their series and the Minnesotas won the championship. Thanks to all the fellows and gals at home who kept me posted with texts throughout the night. Made me both sad and laughing at the same time when I woke up.
The Coast Guard motto: Semper Paratus, Always Ready.
Including me, there are exactly four people in the world who will get this joke. But we get it.
If you, like me, think a petit four is just those little frosted squares of cake with many layers that came in a Harry and David Tower of Treats and look kind of tasty but are in fact somehow chemically and flavorless, you are so wrong. Petit four literally means “small oven” and came from the idea of baking small cakes in the giant oven in French kitchens after it was turned off. Now it refers to the little one or two bite treats that might come after your meal in a high-end restaurant, like with your coffee or your check. These can be anything from a chocolate truffle to a crisp caramelized shard of sugared puff pastry baked almost black to a frankly weird strawberry wrapped in an almond-sugar-egg white situation. Or an ethereal rosewater marshmallow like we had at Ballymaloe House last night.
To paraphrase Anton Ego: not everyone can make a great wine, but a great wine can come from anywhere.
Otherwise known as antifreeze. It makes your wine sweeter, which the makers thought people wanted but then they exported a bunch to West Germany and the West Germans tested it and all hell broke loose. As a result, however, Austria is now on the forefront of sustainable winemaking because they all had to start over and decided to focus on the future.
I am the only person in America who failed at starting a sourdough project during the pandemic. So this was a singular goal in coming here. And now I am fully on board the sourdough local (it is definitely not an express train the way they make it here).
I feel good about this part of the exams, and had all the recipes for the herbs except I forgot Salsa Verde goddamnit which you can use for the parsleys - curly AND flat - and I can’t remember which one goes in the parsley sauce but I suspect it doesn’t really matter and is bouquet garnie considered a recipe because that def uses parsley. Fucking parsley.
While we hear vague wisps of challenges for others, there were no utter disasters amongst us, although Jen feels that they should tell in the written instructions if you should season something and Lucy, who hates eggs so never cooks them, had to fry an egg the Ballymaloe way and was not happy at all about this. We do thoroughly enjoy the image, related by housemate Nicola, of Instructor Pam walking out of the exam kitchen, shaking her head to clear it, and saying to no one in particular that there are some things you just cannot unsee.
The pear & frangipane tart looks amazing, and the edges are browned. Although I'm much less qualified to say so, it looks done to me.
Is 'njuda the thing that makes the mussels broth orange? What a striking color contrast.
Emojis popped up when I typed pear and orange, but none for frangipane or 'njuda.
Enjoy the visit from your family @
Oh Lisa! Reading about your adventures in cooking and cooking school has been such a pleasure! I am really loving the details about your exciting (and scrumptious) journey!