The over/under

now is the season of our (dis)content

The local pub - just a stroll down the road - is called the Goalpost and is surprisingly large for such a small town. A few of the CDCÂ headed over last Friday, and embarked upon a good dissection of the week over pints and gin and tonics and hot whiskeys for the ill (there is a massive cold going around).

During these extended chat sessions,¹ we talk about all manner of things: there is the hilariously forgotten ingredient in a chocolate mousse, the teacher who assigned hand-whisked mayonnaise as a punishment for cracking eggs just for the whites,² and someone’s partner who is just known as The Fetus.³ Sometimes we get a little deeper and someone will confess that they are finding the course - gasp - underwhelming. Most of the CDCÂ have been cooking for a long time, and find it hard to get excited about being assigned scones or shepherd’s pie. We already have our favorite (insert well-known home cook dish here) recipe and the muscle memory is powerful. You maybe don’t care that you also get to make duchesse potatoes and pipe them on top.⁴ I don’t feel so strongly on this as some, as I am learning something on everything - even if it is just don’t over-fill your quesadilla, and I think “get to” is the key, there are opportunities everywhere here, we just need to take them. Because when we get stuck on “have to” the resistance can curdle into discontent.

Doing things The Ballymaloe Way means following the exact recipe, not tarting it up with your own ideas, and simultaneously somehow divining your instructor’s seasoning preferences. But there is method to this madness. These recipes have been tested and tested, so the instructors know that they work. You can go all Fleetwood Mac when you know what works, but not before you’ve shown them that you know. So what we’re also learning is not just standard technique but also efficiency and kitchen discipline which you will need if you are going to be a chef! Still, sometimes that is hard to keep front of mind when The Fetus gets to make the gorgeous cake of the day and you are left with the cranberry sauce.

And while we’re ranting . . . we also get frustrated with the way some students monopolize teacher time whether through unawareness (read cluelessness), lack of preparation (never the CDCÂ!), or youthful exuberance (read self-importance, you didn’t invent cooking school forfuckssake). We tend to hang back, wait our turn, do the clean-up, and generally behave like the mothers some of us are and all of us have/had, when what we really need is to get in the game and be students and demand the instruction we have paid for. Most of the teachers know this, and generally handle the groups well. The ones who don’t - well, they become more pub tea but that’s for another day.

So there’s a bit of discontent nibbling around the edges.

My partner this week is Miguel, from Belgium by way of Barcelona but lived in the Bay Area for years and looks about 27 but is 38 and has a wife and 5 year old son. He is nice and funny and best of all, very relaxed in the kitchen.

Miguel justifiably proud of his eclairs, and also having to go up in front of everyone to manage his yeast because it was ready during Rachel's announcements. Look at that face - beet red.

We’re in the demo kitchen this week, which completely discombobulates me on Monday, because while there is ALL the equipment you could ever need - as befits such a well-known space - it is NOT at all where you might expect it to be so I spend about an hour fekking about trying to find equipment and ingredients and feeling increasingly useless. It does not help that most of the other students in this kitchen are full of the aforementioned youthful exuberance which manifests as early arrival and start to their cooking because apparently they know where everything is, they are doing all the extra cooks and bakes, while playing at extreme-Irish-buddy-buddyness with the instructors and each other, and there is at least one AFS who just looks through me.⁵ This is the overwhelmed part, and some days it is hard to reach the surface when you are drowning in confusion and averageness and age and and a desire to work hard and do well but your thumbs already hurt at 9:30.⁶ Tears (private or blamed on spices) may ensue.

early morning in the demo kitchen, the egg cupboard, looking serious

Our instructors, however, are magnificent: big kindly Gary and larger-than-life Pam, she of the giant pink hair and legendary craic. While the other students in our kitchen shout about with them, I plug away quietly at my station and I think Pam thinks I’m a bit of an enigma but she really liked my chili (a 1!!) and said “you take a while to get going but when you do you really go, girl!” I resist the urge to say well actually I’ve been going all along I’m just not all tra-loo-tra-lay Irish and instead I gather my courage and confess that my chili recipe is better than this. Oh mine is too, she responds immediately, but this one has Darina Allen’s name on it so it is the one we make.⁷

So she gets it, does our Auntie Pam. (This is how they all talk. And fast. And dripping with Irish accent.)

Gary is funny and big-hearted, and gets me through a near-disaster of a Friday when I thought I was going to absolutely nail the profiteroles with warm chocolate sauce and while I did manage to snatch a small victory from the jaws of defeat I had so many fuckups along the way that I actually had to leave the kitchen at one point to compose myself. I thought I’d hidden it well but these instructors, they know all the signs and Gary seemed to check in more often when I returned and helped me over the finish line. Boy did I learn a lot on Friday.

But then my mother’s day card arrived and the day got much better. 🥹

I also kind of crushed my grilled chicken breasts, if I do say so myself, earlier in the week when we made grilled chicken with a satay sauce and cucumber arjard which is a kind of hot-sweet cucumber salad, very nice alongside. You may think this sounds pretty basic, so did I, but before that we had to break down - they say “joint” here which strikes me as completely oxymoronic - said chicken and remove the breasts, and that’s a strong skill to have and harder to do when your instructor is watching and the time pressure is on. By contrast, everyone at butchery class on Thursday evening agreed that it is much easier to break down a beast when the time pressure isn’t on and the kitchen isn’t boiling with heat and activity and all that youthful exuberance.

In addition to the chili and the chicken breasts and the profiteroles, this week I made:

the newest boiled potatoes with mint⁸ - yeah, easy peasy but oh my so good

quesadillas with cheese and wild garlic pesto, guacamole and pico de gallo

fluffy lemon curd pudding

no-knead white yeast bread

the classic Ballymaloe white yeast bread (quite a bit of kneading)

some weird parmesan-coated tortilla chips to go with the chili⁹

individual goat cheese gratins with sun-dried tomahto oil

chantilly cream and crème pâtissière¹⁰ to fill the afore-mentioned profiteroles which were also covered with chocolate sauce

butter made with fresh jersey cream so thick it practically made itself. This may have been my favorite thing I made all week. So elemental. So easy. So good.¹¹

potatoes so fresh they are still covered in dirt; jointed chickens, quesadilla plate, fluffy lemon pudding, the remains of that stupid chili, no-knead white yeast bread, plaited Ballymaloe white yeast bread (with poppy seeds), the monks awaiting their filleted fate, behold the glorious butter (there was a lot more but it went on the lunch tables)

On Thursday evening I had butchery with Leo who is French and also very generous and has the most remarkable French-Irish accent. We broke down a half a lamb and then put it back together again, and my partner Emma from Cumbria and I agreed that this kind of work is surprisingly satisfying, and it must have to do with the really good knife. So I now know all about lamb cuts now and brought home some diaphragm (it’s just muscle, like all meat, don’t freak out) strips to mess about with this weekend.

Me and lambykins, Emma from Cumbria, and that is Leo in the background

We also had a day-long lecture on the business of food given by Rory O’Connell’s sister, Blathnaid (Blah-ned) Bergin, who has a whole restaurant consulting business and is apparently quite a success. The whole thing was a bit of a snoozer to me but she was ok - clearly has tons of experience working with all kinds of eating establishments and was bluntly realistic about the challenges of the biz. For those in the room who are serious about opening their own place - and who live in Europe - it was probably hugely helpful. We Yanks needed a little translating and we sometimes stymied the rest of the group when we mentioned things like health insurance, paid parental leave, etc.

the wheel of where your money goes; lunchtime aftermath of group activities (blergh)

So herein lies the challenge of the BCS business model. Because there are people here who are really serious about cooking, and want to work in a restaurant or open their own cafe or food truck or somesuch. There are also people here who aren’t sure what they want to do but are still serious about cooking and food (raises hand). And then there are the others who seem to be here to fill a few months having fun in Ireland and maybe learning how to cook some things.¹² But we’ve all paid the tuition and it adds to the over/under-whelmingness when the latter group suck all the air out of the room with their chatter during demo and seem more interested in possibly hooking up than in how to best fillet a round fish. I guess you have to have students who can pay, but I find myself wishing there was a little more selectivity in the application process.¹³

Anyway, the over/under is that there is a fire hose of information coming at us, and we’re still sometimes making stuff that we could make at home. But this I know: the next time I make profiteroles at home they will be PERFECT because Gary got me through.

Lord what a ramble this has been, kind of whiny! Here are some pretty pictures to remind why I’m here.

1. Which may alternatively take place around the island in our capacious kitchen or in front of the wood stove in our equally capacious living room or around the tables in our green courtyard.

2. Kitchens are notoriously wasteful so at Ballymaloe we try to reduce kitchen waste as much as possible. Compostable items go in the hen bucket, non-zested citrus peel goes in the candied peel bucket, herb and vegetable scraps to the stock bucket, meat scraps to a separate bucket, and so on. Egg whites, of which there are a lot because we are always enriching one thing or another with an extra yolk, go into a jar in every kitchen. You can use them in many ways, but most of all for meringue, of which there is a lot. One morning, Jen was admonished for cracking two eggs just for the white (she would use the yolks later, but had forgotten in what - there is a lot going on!) and told to make mayonnaise with the yolks as her punishment. She was slightly astonished but then vindicated when she remembered how the damn yolks were to be used.

3. There are actually a few Fetuses. But it is a type and someone always has a Fetus.

4. Although this may have led to one of my favorite comments of the week: “I’m just so happy we’ve resurrected the piping bag.”

5. Remember, AFS = A Fellow Student, so as not to embarrass. Also, the looking-through thing - Sue brought that up a week or so ago. For some of the younger students, we female CDCÂ are invisible. Like literally, they avoid eye-contact, don’t speak to us unless we engage, and generally prefer their own kind. Which is understandable - so do we - but also, there are basic rules of engagement and you people need to learn them! We’re all in this together you know, so maybe try a little maturity? Interestingly, while I thought this was a male thing, as the weeks go by, it seems to manifest most with females. But I should say: not with all. Some of the girlies and boyos as Instructor Pam would call them are delightful and fun, and the more serious youngsters are starting to separate from the others as the weeks go on. It is kind of fascinating to watch all this growth all around, and, ok, yes, I guess I am part of it, too.

6. I have arthritis in the carpometacarpal joint (base of the thumb) in both hands, worse in my right. It is particularly exacerbated by small movements and grip so cooking, rowing, and handwriting. Yesterday I muttered that I was making a hash out of removing the membrane from some monkfish fillets, realizing that I’ve lost a lot of strength in my hands from this too. At which point, kindly Instructor Gary corrected me in his lovely Cork accent, saying “How many times have you filleted a monkfish before? None? Well then, you’re doing a fine job. Now, if this was the hundredth monkfish you’d filleted, that would be a hash. But your first? It’s great!” I love Instructor Gary.

7. So many things wrong with this chili - it cooks small chunks of beef (ok) in a fresh chili sauce (because no dried available? You can’t order them? But they did bring some heat so ok, move on). But the recipe also includes GREEN PEPPERS, and not just diced but SLICED. Why why why? If you don’t already know my feelings about this bully of the vegetable bin (not my original comment, alas), surely you know that green bell peppers have NO PLACE IN CHILI. Also, some students had to serve it with guacamole that was called “avocado sauce” and more pico de gallo. Who does that? I was not alone in my feelings, not many people loved the chili. But apparently I nailed it so 🤷.

8. This is the kind of thing that elicits comments like well I never boil my potatoes with mint at home. Fair, but here we are, and it’s a new way, and lovely. Maybe just add it to your rotation rather than your resistance?

9. I mean, they were eminently munchable, I got to use the big fryer, and a freshly fried tortilla chip is a very good thing. But parmesan chips with chili, whaaaat?

10. Known universally to watchers of baking shows as crem pat

11. Note to self, in addition to chickens, get a Jersey cow when you get home.

12. That latter group is not all Fetuses, either, and they provide much tea with our evening snacks here in Pennywort doyouknowwhatimsayin?

13. I had a whole paragraph here on institutional suggestions for the School but honestly it is kind of boring and not what you all are here for and they’re not paying me for consulting anyway. It wasn’t even very darling, so easily murdered.