Cooking School Experience
Before I told my husband Emmanuel, who is French-American, that I wanted to go to cooking school in Paris, I first had to do some prep work. I wanted to let the idea simmer in his head a bit, so that he wouldn’t immediately dismiss it.
“I have an idea I want to propose to you, but I don’t want you to laugh.”
He looked at me, not entirely sure where I was going with that, but pretty certain of one assumption. “How much is this going to cost me?”
“Wait. Listen to my proposal: I want to go to cooking school. I want to write a novel inspired by my experience in cooking school.”
As I anticipated, he was not immediately convinced. I had to make the deal more delicious, “If you pay for cooking school I’ll cook dinner every night… Well almost every night.” My husband smiled at the promise of gourmet meals, and agreed I should do it.
I signed up for Intensive Beginning Cuisine because I didn’t want to wait four months to start. I have to admit I felt like a fraud the whole time. I made friends with many women whose dream was to become chefs, and I felt embarrassed that I knew so little about cooking or the different types of honeys or that “sweet bread” was not actually bread at all. I’m a very competitive person, but even I was shocked by the extreme competition in the kitchen and the total disregard of some students and Chefs for the feelings of others. Welcome to cooking school! I quickly discovered that the best way to survive the course was to put my ego aside and enjoy the experience.
Cooking school opened up my senses but it also toughened me up.
I recall one day—by this time I had progressed to Intermediate Cuisine—when I was in the kitchen making one of my favorite dishes. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was busy making my dish when we ran out of the ingredients. (We were never given enough to make the full recipe—this was just the way it worked.) So I asked the Chef in charge to please get me some milk. He barked at me. He was upset over something--someone had clogged up the sink and then left and I caught him at the exact wrong moment. He stormed from the kitchen, ordering the Pastry Chef from the kitchen next door to “baby sit” us. When the Pastry Chef entered, he immediately reprimanded us for being messy. Of course, he singled me out in front of everyone and pointed to my stove. I knew it was a mess but I just figured I would clean it at the end since I was so busy making four dishes at the same time. He ordered me to clean it up that minute. Defying the Chefs was not an option, so I stopped what I was doing and started cleaning. But that wasn’t enough. He continued to harp on me about the mess…about the way I cleaned…about anything he could think of. I couldn’t defy a Chef, but I could ignored him. And so that’s what I did. I’m not a child; you tell me once and I’ll get it done. I felt his continued harassment was unnecessary. He disagreed. Since his verbal assault couldn’t reach me, he got physical. He grabbed me and screamed in French that no one would hire me if I was messy. I felt so violated at that moment. You have to understand that when you are in a hot kitchen, cooking while in the middle of an adrenaline rush and a man grabs you, it feels like you’ve just been raped. I know that sounds so dramatic, but when a man feels entitled to stop you in your tracks, put his arms on both your shoulders, and get in your face because he refuses to be ignored (no matter where you are), he violates your space, your boundaries, and your sense of safety. Legally you can’t do anything about it, but the feeling of powerless still runs its course in your veins and your heart. I finally broke away from him and in my horrible French I told him I didn’t care if nobody hired me because I was going to own my own restaurant and I was going to be doing the hiring!
I had hoped to be done with him, but in Superior Cuisine the same Pastry Chef was assigned to our class. I grit my teeth and tried not to give him the evil eye. I dreaded having to present my finished recipe to him. I didn’t care for him or his comments. I secretly fantasized about putting urine in my yellow sauce and having him taste it when he had to score it as my own secret revenge. Of course, I never did.
And I never cooked for my husband either. But I did go to see my wonderful hypnotherapist, who helped me release my unconscious negative associations with cooking. That was the part I didn’t tell my husband: Yes, I did want to write a book about my cooking experiences, but I also wanted to create new experiences to replace the old ones that plagued me. See, for me, as I was raised, cooking was something only women did in servile roles. They cooked for men, and those men felt entitled to make demands and judge and never show appreciation. Growing up I never saw cooking as creative, but after cooking school, even though I still encountered Chefs who would scream at and try to belittle me, I felt empowered by what I had learned to create. Now that I have a fresh start, I look forward to the day when I can open my own restaurant Hungry Woman in Paris that serves Nouveau Chicano Cuisine.