Tags
cooking class, humor, La Cuisine Paris, life, Paris, Paris markets, travel
“Meet at Metro Maubert-Mutualité, in front of Café le Métro” the message said. My market cooking class was gathering at the oldest outdoor market in Paris to choose the ingredients and determine the menu we’d be cooking that day. I got there early to allow time for the day’s first cafè crème, but when I emerged Chef Justin was already standing in front with several other students. His colleague handed out large market bags with La Cuisine Paris’ logo, and we followed Justin into the market like a group of anxious duckling tourists.
Justin led us past meat and vegetable stalls, while keeping up a steady flow of information about the history of the site, some of the vendors who’d been coming for generations, and prestigious awards won by famous shops like Laurent Dubois for cheese or the bakers with their incredible brioche. After a quick group conference in which duck was rejected (sob!) as well as escargot (I could live with that one), we settled on scallops and—for those like me who couldn’t eat shellfish—salmon. Let the buying begin!
Last month, when I was shopping in Indian markets, it was all about the bargaining. In France, though, your goal is to score the absolute freshest items. Chef was full of tips:
- See these onions and carrots with their greens cut off? Never buy them. That’s the first part to wilt, so a sure sign the veggies are not the freshest.
- Only buy fish with bright eyes and red gills. Headless fish are probably trying to hide aged eyes and gills. (Then again, maybe they just have heavy, ugly heads…)
- The white asparagus is actually the same as the green stuff, but it was raised under a tarp that causes it to grow short and fat instead of tall and thin. It’s a briefly-available treat not to be missed.
- In this stall, wait until Madame is free. That skinny little guy with her is drunk 90% of the time.
- In that stall, the incredible variety of mustards form the essential base for your vinaigrette – and of course no self-respecting French cook would be caught dead with a store-bought vinaigrette.
- In front of the cheese stall, let’s just keep talking in hopes that the proprietor will offer samples. No? Well, we’ll buy some anyway.
- This thing that looks like a cross between a potato and some confused ginger is a Jerusalem artichoke. Most of France survived on them during WWII, and then nobody wanted to eat them for decades. It’s making a comeback, although it needs to be cooked for long periods.
- The thing that looks like a green modern art sculpture is actually Romanesco. It tastes like a cross between broccoli and cauliflower. But the amazing thing is that it’s an almost-perfect fractal (a repeating pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence that reproduces from the large form down to the individual florets.)

Food in hand, we crossed the padlock encrusted Archevêché Bridge over the Seine and back to the school.
As we headed back to the school, I chatted with some of my fellow students, who came from all over the world. Two women had just run the Paris marathon, and one mentioned that it was her twentieth marathon. Another woman was there with her fifteen-year-old son, already an accomplished cook and celebrity chef fan.
In the airy upstairs kitchen with the windows that look toward the Seine, we set out the vegetables and had a quick lesson in basic knife work. (Grasp the knife blade between your thumb and index finger, and curl your remaining three fingers around the handle. Fold in the fingertips on your other hand and use the flat edges of your fisted fingers to guide the blade so there is never a chance of fingertip-tartare added to your meal.)
With that in mind, we got down to getting those scallops out of shells that were remarkably determined not to allow anything of the kind, and then trimming them for cooking.
This was followed by Egg Breaking 101, in which we learned that Mom was wrong. We’re not allowed to crack the egg on the side of the bowl and hope we don’t have to fish out too many shell bits. Instead, the technique is to tap it against the flat of the counter, and then with one hand cupped over a bowl, pour the egg through your fingers (yuck!) while catching the yolk in your cupped hand. (Can we just admit that I am a complete egg-breaking failure and move on?)
With our hand-separated yolks, we made lemon hollandaise sauce. Of course I’ve done that before, but the difference is that here it actually worked. Apparently, when they say not to put the pan directly onto the heat source, they mean don’t even let it get any hotter than you can comfortably touch. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was determinedly not thinking about salmonella as we moved on to emulsifying the sauce.
After vegetables were roasted and scallops seared came the best part of the class. We all sat down together to a fabulous meal of fresh market veggies and fish, baguette, wine, and our roasted rhubarb and fresh strawberry dessert along with market cheese.
Of course, the food was fantastic, but the fun of buying and preparing it, plus the chance to meet so many people from around the world is what makes taking a local cooking class so special.
That was a wonderful look into your day. What a great memory!
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You just can’t believe how much fun it was. I’m not much of a cook, but Justin made it seem so easy.
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Roasted rhubarb . . . must hear more about that!
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It just couldn’t have been easier. I’d been lobbying for the other proposed dessert plan (pear tarte) but was outvoted when everyone saw the beautiful rhubarb in the market. We just cut off the ends, pulled off the stringy bits, and chopped into bite-sized pieces. We spread them out on a baking sheet, sprinkled with sugar, and roasted at 375F/190C until tender (NOT mushy) –about 15-18 minutes. Then we mixed them with the fresh strawberries in some parfait glasses, and topped with whipped cream (with some twists of lemon zest). It made the perfect dessert for a sunny spring lunch. The only problem was that said lunch was already huge, delicious, and followed by the cheeses.
So yeah. I basically waddled out of there.
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What a fabulous experience! And a lovely meal at the end of it.
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I think it was a much better way to see Paris than a guidebook. So, so fun.
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Now I’m starving. What time is dinner?
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I’ve just got to go to the market first. But do make yourself at home!
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Now I’m feeling like I should go shopping. The farmer’s market is open tomorrow. 🙂
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Ah, but will your farmer’s market have giant boxes of snails? Whole huge butt-ugly fish WITH their heads and eyeballs? Cheese made by maggots burrowing around the rind? (And no, I didn’t sample it. Nobody could tell me what had become of the maggots…) Bizarre mathematical vegetables?
Clearly, our farmers markets have a long way to go…
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…awesome post, m’Lady, barb… bon appétit …:):) mwaah 🙂
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So, Seumas… next time you’re in Glasgow if you’ve had one-too-many haggis, you can come by the Hobbit House and have macarons and roast veggies. Really.
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This reminds me how nice it is to do proper cooking sometimes, and just concentrating on that rather than the day to day drudgery of trying to come up with something that isn’t too blahhhh… whilst trying to do everything else as well…
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For me, the true cooking drudgery is not the actual cooking but thinking up what to have. I kind of like the “go to market and have what’s freshest” approach.
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I never knew that about aspargus so I’ve learned something there. In Barcelona, where I live, the markets are great but you need one more tip: always follow the old ladies because they know the best stalls at the best prices!
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Well, I AM the old lady, and I feel very sorry for any misguided foodie who follows me… So I guess it should be “always follow old ladies who are wearing black”.
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hahah You are not old! like fine wine women get better with age!
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And don’t get fooled in the market! If I ask for a bag of four apples, you can bet there’ll be three good ones and one bad one. Every time…
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