Le Chef Is Seriously Pissed Off

By DENIS BOURG

2017.©DENIS BOURG. Le chef isseriouslypissed off.

French born in Vittel, Vosges, eastern France, 1954. No 3 of 4 boys, grows up in small village, mass on Sundays, little sh*t rest of the week. Every school holyday in grandparents farm, did everything except milk cows & drive tractor. Comes 14 and 'l'âge bête' lasting longer than expected. Numerous head scars. 1970-72 cooking school in Contrexéville, two diplomas thinking 'What a f***k am I doin' here?...' 

Head Chef at 18, French restaurants next 20 years. 

Full time chef: Brittany, Alps, Cannes, Vosges, Switzerland, French & Dutch West Indies Boston, Washington DC, Cape Cod & the Kennedys, Maryland, Paris, Ireland, Ibiza, London (37 years!). 

42 jobs in all. 70 to 100 hrs/week. 

Personal Chef to Mick Jagger, Prince Khalid Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, bil-lionaires businessmen, Lords & Ladies... Another 20 years for the hyper wealthy. 

My favourite dish : young women.

Have become an excellent photographer, my formidable passion for the visual and all beauty. 

Very proud Dad of two gorgeous daughters, Jessica & Poppy, living with their Mums. Many memorable relationships, a few disastrous ones. Enough to have become a good Buddhist for the past 30 years. 

Not in a monastery, though. Amen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DENIS BOURG
• Release date: Sep 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781386326373

DENIS BOURG

French born in Vittel (la flotte) 1954. No 3 of four boys, grows up in small village, goes to mass on sundays, little sh.t rest of the week. School holydays in grandparents farm,  did everything except milk cows & drive tractor. Comes 14 and "âge bête" lasting longer than expected. Numerous accidental head scars. 1970-72 cooking school Contrex 2 diplomas thin-king 'What the f***k am I doin' here?' Full time chef: Brittany, Alps, Cannes, Vosges, Switzerland, French & Dutch Caraîbes, Boston, Washington DC, Cape Cod & the Kennedys, Maryland, Paris, Ireland, Ibiza, London (30 years!). Head Chef at 18, French restaus next 20 years, Personal Chef to Mick Jagger, Prince Khalid Abdul-lah of Saudi Arabia, billionaires business-men, Lords & Ladies... another 20 years for the wealthy. 40 jobs in all. 70 to 100 hrs/week. Become excellent photogra-pher. Very proud Dad of 2 gorgeous daughters, Jessica & Poppy, living with their Mums. Many memorable relation-ships, a few disastrous ones. Enough to have become a good Buddhist for the last 30 years. Not in a monastery, though. Amen. Yummy girls still my favorite dish.

Book preview

©2017∂enisßourg  LE CHEF IS SERIOUSLY PISSED OFF

Those of you who might be expecting these pages to contain yet another famous/anonymous batch of recipes à la con or à la Tante Marie, or some other, are advised to look a bit closer.

This odyssey traverses just over 35 years; also 41 kitchens, eight countries and four islands; concocting an astronomical amount of gastronomic grub along the way, for the voracious, famished millions - usually unknown and unseen, and variously referred to as customers, guzzlers and professional ball-breakers (among other synonyms): them.

The maths fiends have already done their mental calculations. Average time spent in a job: less than one year. Well spotted, you’ll go far...

Damn! He doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet, I hear you say. Perhaps he’s routinely getting the boot, or (alternatively) jumping before he’s pushed?

Well, before we go any further, a word to the wise: just get rid of your crutch-assisted thinking and your cherished blinkers, and stop pulling your face like you’ve just sat down hard on your piles.

The length of time spent in a given job is proportional to one’s resistance to the unbearable; on the far side of boundaries of endurance already pushed back several times: Out there - where one engages the infernal as a daily way of life. Or, if you prefer it served with a bunch of daisies, a normal working week averages out at 98 solid hours. Which makes your little 35-hour weeks look a little comical, (or perhaps that’s just my sense of humour...)

You feed between 900 and 1000 customers a week at phenomenal speed; sixteen hours a day, six-and-a-half days a week, four-and-a-half weeks a month, for years on end, over three decades. Some f***ing life.

Have you ever seen what can happen to the chef’s nut (singular) in the thick of the action? Like when the dining room is full to the brim with 60-150 peasants, every last one of which wants to eat at exactly the same time? (A la carte, naturally...) Ever seen an undernourished chef in the merde? Professionally compromised to the point of going ape shit? Mmm? No? It’s a sight not to be missed, especially when the crew amounts to just yourself and another slave en cuisine at most - and often less than that.

Dans la merde is a universal culinary expression, so don’t look at me like that. It means the state of being utterly submerged in it at service time, if not for most of the day. Crushed like a bug by the avalanche.

In a kitchen, you can wither away to nothing - in short order - or you can go the other way and swell to gigantic proportions in even less time. You can starve or stuff yourself to bursting point - yes, literally explode. I’ve seen it.

So, bon: for you the word chef invokes a fat, bovine-featured slob with a big moustache à la Gauloise, an equally generous conk purpled by alcohol and a paunch that obscures his view of his own sandals and his wedding tackle? Who pigs out in secret, who puts his béret on as soon as he takes his toque off; a lazy sod who pretends to be sorting paperwork in his shoebox of an office while the commis sweat their asses off behind the stove like African mules? Something comme ça?

Fortunately or not, that’s never been my reality - although this species is alive and well, for all to see. I’ve always worked alone, ultimately - with occasional assistance from one or two others; depending on the boss’s degree of humanity.

I’ll make no bones about it - I find it a tad trying to have anyone standing over me, breathing down my neck, with their like-this and not-like-that, tradition this, conformity that, their go-n-get-a-haircut-you-fucking-hippy-what-will-the customers-think, and so on. Shit, let me breathe, let me live, let go off my prunes for a minute. Here, smoke!

Since my way of working in the kitchens invariably involves the complete creation, the making and serving of every single dish on the menu, I might as well tell you about the mammoth task of food preparation – the eternal mise en place - (say me-zon-plass) the essential Bouffe (boof) of fashioning each dish from a pile of raw ingredients to the impeccably-styled, primly-plated result that lands gracefully on the customer’s exquisite, crisp pink tablecloth.

And from the genesis to the finale, there’s one supremely unnecessary, utterly superfluous component to any and every culinary creation of mine - and that’s some dickhead telling me what to do! Christ above, I know only too well what needs doing!

I wash my hands between 500 and 700 times (conservative estimate) per day. It gets to the point where I don’t bother turning the tap on and off any more, just to save those vital few seconds. (In the interests of saving water, I just leave it on a gentle  trickle).

Your hands and your fingers are always dirty, sticky, greasy, food-stained, caked with salt, littered with cuts and burns; your nails could be a mechanic’s, constantly manipulating raw meat, fresh fish, gritty vegetables and a bottomless list of other revolting food items. Food stains. Food stinks. They penetrate your skin. Even your own, pre-owned underpants - the ones with a kangaroo pocket in the front and the suspicious-looking blotches at the back - become a complete and permanent olfactory record of the menu.

The tips of your thumb and forefinger are the tools-of-the-trade when it comes to seasoning; be it with my own mix of salt/black pepper from the mill (that’s dirty salt to you, oh ignorant one), powdered spices, or dried or freshly chopped fresh herbs. Whether for preparation or service, these extremities are perpetually dressed in a fine coat of salt. You’re always seasoning something - any given time between 8am and half-midnight the following day. (Oh, before I forget - Aunty Claire’s top tip: wash your hands before you go faire pipi or you could get it dirty). As for the insistence on using the fingers, heed the lesson from my training days, when some smartarse in my class was salting his potage directly from the salt cellar: the top came off suddenly and he found himself with a 500g mound of table salt in his soup pan. Imagine the expression on his face (and the expressions from his mouth...)

In a restaurant - I’m not talking about a hotel kitchen but strictly about an independent restaurant kitchen where I work - you do everything yourself, from A to Z.

Between ordering the deliveries and the methodical but frenetic process of putting away (which takes forever), food deliveries invariably arrive altogether and simultaneously; a shambolic, unsorted mountain of all shapes and types of ingredients that will take a minimum of two hours just to break down and put to bed, while you mourn the loss of those two precious hours of manic preparation.

Soups, potages, veloutés, consommés, bisques, hors d’oeuvres, pâtés (hot and cold), mousses and terrines (hot and cold), meats (red and white), poultry (wild and domestic), venison, everything fishy (flat, oval or round) - including shark and dolphin!!! (Remember Flipper?) Shellfish, lobster and the larger bluish homard (for two), crayfish, langoustines, prawns of all classifications and sizes, shrimps, frogs’ legs, snails, crabs, funny-looking molluscs; the client scoffs everything - (like a pig at times - seriously), be it grilled, roasted, poached, au bain-marie, deep fried, en papillotte (foil-wrapped), en cocotte, en casserole, skewered, sautéed, oven-baked, pan-fried, à la con (freestyle), steamed, braised, boiled, broiled, stuffed, en sauce...et cetera, et cetera. Every fresh vegetable you can think of, from the market and the supermarket, all those dried haricot beans that cause flatulence and a fear of getting into a lift with anyone who’s fond of them. And not to be forgotten, a massed medley of composed salads together with thirty-odd cold condiments; sauces, vinaigrettes, mayonnaises and the whole rainbow of their offspring.

All kinds of stocks give birth to all kinds of possible and conceivable hot sauces: beef, veal, chicken, fish, seafood, venison: all meat glazes and semi-glazes. Buckets full of garlic butter, snail butter, shrimp butter, shallot butter, coral butter: quintals of melted butter (salted and not, clarified or not) and hectolitres of cream. And the tonnes of raw and cooked food that pass through your fingers in spare parts. It takes a golden touch a rocket up your ass.

You obtain a meat glaze (glace de viande) by reducing down a 50-litre cooking pot of brown watery stock over minimal flame for two days; to a velvety-syrupy consistency with a pretty, natural shade of brown. You top it up with water in proportion to the slow evaporation, while also reducing the size of your pots; decanting as you go. You’re still with me? Good, we’ve barely begun.

Gâteaux, cakes, biscuits, bûches, brioches, breads (all kinds), puff-pastry, short pastry, canapés, amuse-gueules, omelettes soufflées, (flat, rolled up and lace-thin, olive shaped, stuffed), donuts-beignets[1], sweet, multiple-essence crèmes, sweet and savoury soufflés, sweet and savoury flans, sweet mousses, tarts, pies, ice creams, frozen desserts, crêpes and quiches - to say nothing of the little one-off improvisations, innovations and creations borne of inspiration or accident.

If you’ve already disengaged and are lost in the fog at this point, don’t worry - you’ve got several hundred pages of explanations coming your way that will peel off the boules in question and throw some light on all this.

Despite the monstrous task of running a restaurant kitchen single-handed, I say ‘no zanquiouverymeutche’ to the hotel brigade, to anything regimented, to army-style crew-cuts, to toques, neckties and name-tags (false modesty in all its showiness), to the food-chain hierarchy and every concomitant pea-brain with a bit of rank who thinks that makes the sun shine right out of his ass. (Just restating my position, in case you didn’t catch it first time around).

And now I’m going to tell you something else, but keep it between us. The Punches who wear a toque (a chef’s hat; once cloth, now paper) available in a range of heights and sizes – are acute and chronic sufferers of the big-head syndrome, which is contagious. So be warned, especially those of you who’re easily impressed by next to nothing.

When you’re a bit on the short side, you might compensate with false heels, n’est-ce-pas? These guys need the equivalent of a fireman’s ladder.

Do you have any idea what kind of constant pain in the butt it is, actually wearing one of these toques? It just falls off, continually; into a frying pan, a pot, a sink full of washing up water, into the dustbin, on the floor, onto the flame of a gas burner; it makes you sweat, raises heat-prickles on your head, itches, falls off again, loses its pristine shade almost instantly, hits the pots and pans that hang at head-height around the stove, blocks your vision, slips forward, acquires food or fat stains when you push it back into place, gets wet when you wash your hands, hits the cooker hood, plunges into the soup - etc. And don’t even get me started on the halfwit who tiptoes up behind you and crams it down over your head to your ears, or lifts it up while your hands are full, places a raw egg on your head, replaces the toque quickly and gives it a hearty downward slap. The retard strikes again!

This infuriating piece of attire is compulsory uniform at chef school, au bahut (say ba-‘y). Why is he telling me all this? Has he got a bug up his ass or what? I hear you thinking loudly, shaking your head just before your fit of hysterics.

Well, granted - I do have a bit of the thing about the f***ing toque - but it’s more about the mentality it represents. As the local defrocked curate would say, a shit haircut and a frock does not make a monk. Bon, on continue.

A hotel or restaurant brigade may number from ten to fifty (plus) chefs. You specialize and become a Chef de Partie[2], responsible for one section of the kitchen: Le Légumier attends solely to the sculpting and cooking of vegetables, soups, purées, garnishes, chopped onions, shallots, garlic, fresh herbs etc. Le Rôtisseur will only look after meat - all kinds - poultry, game, cochonnailles (all the piggy bits) and man the grill at service time.

Le Poissonnier only deals with fishy stuff from sea and river: shellfish, every type of seafood. Le Garde-Manger busies himself with all kinds of salads, crudités, cold starters and dressings - the big chief of chopped parsley.

Anyone born in the 50’s will remember their grandma’s garde-manger, used long before the fridge - a kind of cage made of soft mesh and wood, hung from the ceiling.

Le Boulanger - the breadmaker. Well spotted, René. Le Pâtissier - makes all the desserts, cakes, pastries, puddings, icecream, sweets of all kinds.

And then Le Saucier, who (yep - good guess) makes all the stocks and sauces, is usually second-in-command: Le Sous-chef. Each one of those Chefs de Partie has one or more Commis - a nonsensical, hierarchical word meaning junior dogsbody, every-shitty-job-going, bullying-not-out-of-the-question.

You may also encounter Le Communard, who cooks strictly and solely for the staff -and no, he need not have communist sympathies.

Last comes Le Chef Tournant, who can do any of the above at any time and who helps out wherever he is needed - a real chameleon. That’s normally what you do as a head chef, without a crew (or with a meagre one). In some high-calibre French restaurants, those with one to three Michelin stars, you will also find a Chocolatier-Confiseur and a sugar specialist.

And finally shows up the Big Chief who really runs the kitchen; the costs, the menus, the tasks, the orders and the deliveries, and who can work at any and all of the above stations. I was a Head Chef at 18 years old.

It takes just over 15 years to make a good one, they say. Mr Zeil (pronounced ‘Zaye’) - our Chef de Cuisine - used to gently break our balls by informing us of that fact at any and every opportunity. Straight from the horse’s mouth - no room for lazy sods and other winkers in his kitchen. Eyebrows knitting, he had a stare that struck mortal fear into you as he said it. It’s an uplifting sentiment to hear when you’re still in your first year at chef school - grade zero, especially as you’re racking up the cock-ups one after the other, as if you were putting together a famous collection.

A good chef can automatically identify any smell in any part of the kitchen at any given time, whether you’ve got 30, 80 different food items (or more) on the go at once. He guides himself by ear, nose, eyes and instinct: ever aware of the cooking stage of everything under construction. Half a square centimetre of the tip of your forefinger is all you need to taste. (A chef who doesn’t taste is an asshole). Some clever dick will tell you that you must taste with a spoon, not your finger (hygiene, you know.) I’d say up yours and I’ll tell you why later. Actually no, I’m not going to make you wait that long. It’s dead simple - unless you walk around with a teaspoon in your pocket to show how professional you are, you don’t have time to look for a f***ing spoon at tasting time which may be any time throughout the next 16 hours. Your finger, on the other hand, is always...to hand. And frankly this kind of sentiment is like mustard up the nose to me, for its petty insistence upon pompous, misguided fucking rules.

As you may have gathered, I don’t tend to mince my words before serving them up. If in doubt, go back to the title of this work. Bon, on continue.

In a restaurant kitchen, you’ve got a piano - a stove - with six, eight or twelve burners, gas being what’s best for freakish, high-speed cooking (NOT to be confused with fast food). Also, one or two ovens, a grill, a twinned deep fryer, a salamandre (wall-mounted, inverted grill at eye level) and two or three double-door, stainless-steel fridges (armoires frigorifiques in French) for your mise en place. And a 100-200-litre chest freezer. Not overly equipped, but sufficient to handle two hundred customers a day. That’s right, like you say, not much bigger than your petite, crappy kitchen at home.

The in-depth details will bubble to the surface later as we travel through sunny Ardèche (Provence), Switzerland, snowy Haute-Savoie (the Alps), the tiny island of Cannes-Saint-Honorat, Vittel (where I was born), Brittany, Hautes-Vosges (Lorraine), the island of St Martin in the French Caribbean, the island of Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean, Washington DC, Cape Cod in Massachussets, Maryland, Ireland, Paris and London.

I started my life as a cuistot (cook) at the sad and moronic age of 16. I spent the first twenty years as a Chef de Cuisine, exclusively in French restaurants, and the next twenty as Personal Chef to millionaire businessmen, to Lords & Ladies, ze British aristocracy, castle owners in San José, Ibiza, and celebrities as diverse as Mick Jagger, Prince Khalid Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and the Aga Khan’s mother-in-law. What I serve up here is the potted amalgam of my tribulations.

My eldest daughter Jessica arrives in the world in 1990 in Kingston, on the outskirts of London. That year, looking back, it will cost me my marriage when I vow never to set foot in another f***ing kitchen again - in a bid to end the pounding of my nervous system and that of my familial harmony into the ground, six and a half days a week, 15 hours a day. My child - when will I ever get to see her, hein?

As it turns out, however, the new millennium finds me still dragging my ass around en cuisine; dreaming all along of packing it in for good this time, choking on fixed and frustrated dreams of turning my life around in the cheap jacket I’m wearing. All of which gives you a preview of my bouncing around from one kitchen to the next. New kitchen, same old crap - and that’s putting it nicely. Don’t worry, you’ll soon realize how appropriate the title is, how well the cellophane sticks to the sweet.

It all starts with the faint, growing sense of having been conned... Oh? That’s familiar? You’ve just been feeding hordes of clients, morning, noon and night, 29 or 30 days a month, without rest or stint - not a single day off - without once sitting down in a 15/16 hour day. No weekends, no time to breathe or recuperate. Compliments to ze chef fly around like leaves on a windy autumn day, to which you reply with a rude gesture involving your left hand in the crook of your right arm; thrust up at a 90° angle towards the waiter who’s just signalled from the dining room, with your tip safely tucked in his pocket.  When you actually manage to see your girlfriend, you’re so absolutely done-in that you just bite each other’s features off, due to the inevitable call-of-the-jungle withdrawal symptoms. You don’t even check your expletives any more and argue with practically anyone - especially the waiter (loufiat) - though these altercations were one-offs (unlike those I would have with a certain termagant. You’ll find out whom I mean a bit later on...) Being perpetually worn out with no rest in sight promotes some seriously pessimistic tendencies, reinforced by the ever-present, unmitigated obsession of the next service. You drag this mountain of shit along at the bottom of your soul and, to add insult to injury, are always sleepy (30 hours sleep a week doesn’t seem to help). Tough shit.

You manufacture thousands of dishes (roughly 5000) a month, while running like a raving lunatic just escaped from the asylum, sweating like a pig with a face burnt by butane gas. And this is just the ambient temperature. The heat culminates to the point where you don’t even notice it anymore. It’s only the odd moment when you feel, faintly, a tiny draft drifting over your sweat that tells you you’ve reached total saturation; dripping from every inch.  Your salary (hahaha!) resembles breadcrumbs in a shaggy carpet. Even if you’re useless at maths, you know that the turnover for the month floats between 25 and 30 thousand USD, and you’re aware that the bastard has the nerve to pay you - in his magnanimity - $100 a week. Chef’s percentage: 0.5%. All this, at just 18 years of age.

That’s what I get for performing at this tempo without attracting a single complaint – ever - about the superb quality of the food served, except for the occasional impatient sod who’s been kept waiting a bit too long for his plate.

In short it is une grande comédie and I’m not laughing much. But don’t despair; this book won’t be such a sad affair. I guarantee you’ll find plenty to chuckle over (in my misery and misfortune). And then you’ll stop laughing suddenly because your life looks or has at some point looked worryingly like mine. And everything on two feet has a tendency to look the same, n’est-ce pas, fellow biped? We’re so fortunate, us humans, they say. It appears that one attains maturity when one realizes that nobody comes to the rescue. Ah! The bastards! They’re all running away! That’s when you get a sudden urge to suck your thumb and scratch your balls at the same time, with a seriously worried look on your face.

Right, let’s get back to our pots and pans. I’m not going to let you kick your heels any longer as we are going to begin at the beginning. Once upon a time, aged nine or thereabouts, I was making my first gateau for my lovely Maman for Mother’s Day. It was a build-up of cheap little rectangular biscuits dipped in coffee, stacked up on a plate five-high and layered with sweetened crème au beurre. Sixteen little piles, side by side, and you had what looked like a square cake. Sometimes I also made caramels (toffees). Quite often I prepared some soup at lunchtime for my beloved grandparents, who were farmers, and whose home, at the other end of the village, was my second home as a child.. In the summertime, they’re in the fields most of the day, everyday, whether the sky is blue or grey. I spend most of my school holidays during the summer helping out at the farm and in the meadows. I vaguely (really, it couldn’t be more vague) remember my brothers at the farm... Needless to say that there’s an ever-present aroma of cow shit hovering around the stables, swallows nesting among the beams under the ceilings in the barn, the granary and the attic.

Whatever the harvesting involves - making hay, planting crops, gathering in the crops, you’d find me with my four-tooth pitchfork or a rake (hand-made by Grandpa), both taller than me, behind the green Deutz tractor or around the barn.

My memory of ‘going to cut the grass for the rabbits’, with Grandpa in the still warm evenings, always appears in soft-focus. He would sharpen his upside-down scythe with his grey whetstone (which he kept in a hollowed-out cow’s horn) with a speedy back-and-forth motion, often without looking, and then he would mow the grass in perfect half-circles. I felt quite proud filling up the twin-handled metallic basket with huge armfuls of cool, sweet-smelling grass and walking back with a basket twice my size alongside my Grand-Père, with his scythe balanced on his shoulder.

After each early summer morning spent mowing the meadows, among the lowing cattle, tractor engines rumbling in the distance and the birdsong above, the mechanical reaper fixed to the side of the tractor was dismantled and it was sharpening time for the serrated blade back at the farm. Tooth by tooth; there were at least fifty. Grandpa would hold it at arms length with both hands and I would turn the crank round and round, revolving the pinkish circular grindstone steeped in water.

I would fetch the cows from their enclosure outside the village and take them back after Grandma’s intensive milking, then help to feed the chickens, the rabbits, the pigs in the sty, the sheep in their fold (where a new born lamb would sometimes be bottle-fed) and take a salt lick in to the sheep or hang it outdoors for them from a low branch by rope. There would be wheat, oats and barley to be threshed, winnowed and carried upstairs to the granary in 50kg Hessian sacks of grain that moulded around your shoulder; which is a good aid to balance for a 13-year-old. We unloaded massive carts of hay and straw, loose or in bales, into the hayloft, right up to the roof with Grandma arranging the stack as skilfully as she would the carts in the fields. One hot afternoon Grandma and I were coming back from the fields with a huge load of loose hay, seated three metres high on top of one of those old-fashioned carts with the metal-rimmed wooden wheels- chariots à bandage- pulled by Coquette (our mare). We were going down a slope (the same one where I would later have my crash). The hay was held together by a system involving a long, bent pole, a rope like hair with a middle parting, and the whole tightened together with a rustic tension system in the rear. You would also apply the brakes (shaped blocks of wood activated by a small crank) to each back wheel separately. That was scary - imagining Grandma losing control of Coquette and the massive load gathering momentum. You could just hear her distressed neighing and her horseshoes sliding on the road. Quite a fright, especially when the back wheel is bigger than you are and the whole thing looks absolutely gigantic. And then there were the apples, pears and peaches, the strawberries, the four varieties of prunes, blackberries and redcurrants for jam, the cherries picked high up in the trees (with the same rounded wire basket used for shaking the washed lettuce leaves and for collecting the eggs from the henhouse).

The worst job of all - for my three brothers and myself - had to be the beans. Climbing beans, crawling beans, small beans, large beans, dry beans, spotted beans, black beans, red beans, white beans, yellow beans, flageolets (those big-f***er beans) and of course the green beans. And then came the peas; whole days spent picking in the garden or in the fields. You’d have to shell them all, enormous basketfuls. Feed them into the narrow necks of those nightmarish green bottles and - more mercifully - into glass jars. Then the bottles were corked, jars were hermetically sealed with those orange rubber things and the whole lot was boiled under a tarpaulin held down with small planks and heavy stones in a huge buanderie - an old fashioned autoclave with a rounded lid, under which a fire was lit. That was Grandfather’s job.

After that came the autumn harvest: chestnuts, walnuts, snails (what do you mean, yuk?) - very nice with garlic butter, especially the one my Dad makes - chopping parsley ‘n’ garlic in a glass with scissors, homemade-style. Hazelnuts in the wild and - later on - grape-picking, fodder beets, carrots, potatoes, gorgeous freshly-pressed apple juice from the big wooden press (which gives you the trots), mild cider, homemade wine and prune alcohol distilled in the village. (It’s illegal now, so I’m counting on you not to tell anyone.) Grandma always makes an amazingly sweet, syrupy liqueur, with peach stones and peach-tree leaves that we pick for her, infused in red wine. Super good.

Five minutes from my grandparents, you’d find the cheese-dairy, where two brothers make huge, metre-wide wheels of gruyère, and also produce butter and cream. Nearly every evening I’d arrive with my handcart and two empty, battered churns and they’d fill them up with some puron, poured from a large rubbery pipe. That’s a watery liquid that looks like sour milk with solid bits in it. No, René, not for breakfast but for the pigs. The story doesn’t end there so don’t start sulking, OK?

The excitement of going into the woods with the grown-ups, watching them load the heavy logs onto the same carts (swiftly transformed to adapt to the nature of the load in any season) made for high adventure, sitting on the wing seat of the tractor, back on the road with the mud flying in the air. Back at the farm, Grandfather would start his homemade circular saw, activated by a separate engine linked to a driving belt. I, or one of my brothers, would rub the inside of the belt with a resin block, to prevent it jumping out.

Wood sawing could last a week, and then chopping time would begin. My three brothers and I would share the axes and build mountains of chopped wood, which would then be neatly arranged under a few sheds into vast piles for winter use. At my grandparents’ place, there’s a wood stove in the kitchen and a wooden box (la caisse à bois), which we’d fill up every winter’s night from the same twin-handled metallic basket. I would also, as would my brothers, chop wood for a few sweet old ladies in the village - and the next village over - and weed out their gardens. I told you I was a good boy.

Then you’d accompany Grandfather to the beehives, to retrieve the honey, rubbing your tummy (yummy-yummy) and getting copiously stung. They would never sting him. There was also a time to assist him in the making of his ropes, using the already home made strings. You’d help Grandma to pot her jams through a green plastic breakfast bowl (formerly) -with its bottom cut out- that would fit perfectly onto the jar, preventing a serious mess. Grandpa would use the same plastic bowl, washed and placed upside down on our heads, for cutting our hair, from the age of four to around nine (you must have heard of la coupe au bol...?)

The most beautiful image I can remember? A foggy autumn morning, watching over the cows with Laurent, the youngest of my two elder brothers, on the edge of the forest: some kind of magic in the thick, opaque mist and the rising sun, as I ran to warm up, through the tall grass wet with dew, in my gumboots.

In the winter, a pig was slaughtered and that’d give me the creeps. Poor pig, screaming to death; restrained on a wooden ladder laid across the same large oval wooden cuve (vat) used for the grape-wine harvest, during which you would crush the bunches of grapes barefoot, with your trousers rolled up. I’ll never forget the slit in its throat through which the blood would pour out into a bucket - later used to make black pudding. I just felt like puking first and then passing out. I’d get two pails - Grandma’s light aluminium milking pails - full of boiling hot water for her to scald the dead piggy to aid the scraping of the bristles. This was done on a snowy day and you could see steam evaporating from the poor cochon. Afterwards, an uncle would start sawing it in half lengthwise, with a handsaw. Fromage de tête en aspic (literally head-cheese - cooked bits of the pig’s head in jelly) set in bowls, whole sides of lard;  poitrine - salted and preserved with crystal sea salt in a saloir (a stone trough so large you could lie down in it, with a wooden lid, where the deceased, dismembered pig would pass the winter). The hams were hung up to dry from a hook on a beam in the granary. Strings of sausages, pig’s-feet vinaigrette, lard soup, crépinettes, (minced pork shaped to look like brains), etc. Everything preserved without a fridge, rustic style. No food poisoning, no sudden shits in the middle of the night.

My good Grandma makes the best apple jelly and the best quince jelly I remember ever tasting. In her kitchen, she has a long table that doubles as a kneading trough and which also made the perfect hiding place for food under the nose of the Germans during the occupation. Cylindrical in shape and invisible to the eye, with a removable top lined with red PVC, if you stand right next to it it simply looks like a table (unless you’re little like I was at the time, which doesn’t count). Here she keeps her ingredients for everything patisserie, and Grandpa’s favourite crunchy-rice chocolate, which my best friend and I nibble at in secret when nobody’s looking. When asked about it, we would just both shake our heads in synchronicity, denying with a throaty non and tight lips. Not us.

My beloved Grandma died a few years ago; but don’t be surprised if I still talk about her use the present tense. It’s just too hard not to.

In my nine-year-old child’s mind, I knew that if she were ever to be stung by either a wasp or bee, she would swell up and die of suffocation. So, during the regular summer heat waves (I remember a morning when the silver mercury read +45c)[3], whether at the harvesting of the cereals or making hay, I would always bring her her old, dark brown handbag; a Sunday church bag recycled into a first-aid box where the antidote was kept. I was quite proud to carry it for her.

During the war (the ’39-’45 one, in case you thought I meant ’14-’18), Grandfather was a prisoner for five years and worked on a German farm; well treated. I remember nice and clearly a moment in the early ’60’s, when Grandpa and I were lifting potatoes in the fields above the village. A yellow VW Beetle (ladybird) stopped at the bottom of the furrows. The driver was the owner of that farm, come all the way from Germany. The war hadn’t affected their friendship. While Grandpa is imprisoned, Grandma runs the farm by herself and raises her three children - my Mum and her two younger brothers. France is under occupation (in case you’d forgotten). She hides her provisions inside the kneading trough. The German soldiers often come into the kitchen (young woman, no husband around) but believe it or not Grandma is not afraid of them, as she told us many times. ‘The first one who gets close, I whack him in the face with my stick.’ (Je lui fous un coup d’trique sur la gueule) The same stick she uses on the cows. She is not the bluffing type.

Her apple tart is always crispy and sprinkled with caster sugar and her beignets (regional donuts), flavoured with homemade Mirabelle brandy, are always super good: never oily. Yeah, my Grandma was what you would call a good cook with a heart to match. I will always love you Grand-Mère and you too Grand-Père, up there in the Cosmos. Always.

Little by little, I find myself casting around for an Ecole Hôtelière - chef school to you - with my beloved parents. Thonon-les-Bains was the best in France at the time, but too far, and too expensive by far. I am 14, it is 1968 - the year when seriously pissed-off students erect barricades in the streets of Paris and cobblestones learn how to fly. In fact, I get parachuted into the C.E.T. Hôtelier at Contrexéville, a thermal spa, 12 km from my village section Cuisine. Contrex: the mineral water that gives you the shits - but don’t tell anybody. That’s where my Dad works.

What goes through your mind, when you’re 16...? Making an ass of yourself with your moped and your mercury-blue sunglasses, trying hard to impress les minettes – the young Parisian girls vacationing in the village. Making your friends laugh in class, smashing bulbs and windows in (usually) abandoned houses in my god-forsaken area with Mimi (the same childhood friend), snowball fights with your classmates in the courtyard during English lessons, putting lit bangers in fresh cow shit and through people’s letter boxes, digging tunnels in haystacks where you’re forbidden from going, and of course dreaming of taking a young chick there with you. Dream on, Marcel...

My youngest brother and I would organize moped races in the furrows - between rows of beets, trying to uproot as many of them as possible with a single passing kick. This is the idiotic age. For some it goes beyond the sell-by-date, by several years. There are even those who never move on at all...

The year of my Brevet - 16 again - I hit a wall at 60kmph, shattering a half-metre of flat roof tiles leant up against it, at the wheel of a go-cart two metres long. The dump where this takes place is on a steep hill; the sort of slope for which the go-cart is designed (by me, I should probably add but keep that bit to yourself). I shall explain the prototype and then you’ll understand the head-on collision with the wall. For the chassis, you’ve got two wooden lintels pointed at the front with a foot-rest looking like a capital A, and fixed onto both axles. Small wheels with pinkish tyres in front for smooth ride, and two metal, spoke d wheels a metre in diameter at the back. No need for a horn: the f***ing thing is so noisy you can be heard miles away. For the steering, a thin cord or reinforced length of baling string, tied at both ends to the front axle; and a real car seat from an old Renault 4 Chevaux (4horses) virtually sitting on the back axle; or, if you prefer, a rustic and retarded version of a dragster without an engine. Damned comfortable The handbrake - two bits of wood linked by a metallic wire - I discovered (at great speed and a bit too late) doesn’t brake, but instead barely brushes against the back wheel, before jumping off its fixtures and wrapping itself around it. What clever dick said that if you thought about everything, you wouldn’t get caught out?

How did I crash into that wall...? Errr, simple, really. At 55/60kmph down one of the village slopes, a sharp bend appears suddenly on the right. I lock the front wheels but the go-cart carries straight on. Ah, zut alors ! Blast! Shit! Mummy!!! I might as well have gone down the slope on both back wheels, like a proper wheelie. Nearly forgot to tell you that on the back of the car seat, there’s a classmate of mine, here for the weekend with the idea of revising for the exam and getting some country air. We are seated back-to-back. My cousin follows on his moped and informs me later of the actual speed. All of a sudden comes this sharp bend in the road, with our defunct steering and 110kg, seated on two frail pieces of timber and a house-front getting bigger by the second, windows wide open with an elderly couple having their four o’clock semolina. In a flash I see Mum, Dad, things, brothers, things, schoolteacher, cows in flowery fields...

‘Juuuuummmmmmpppp!’ I bawl through the metallic racket. He does; I vaguely see him from the corner of my left eye hitting a square concrete post while seeing myself landing on the kitchen table, still full of hope. He came out of it with a sore shoulder. I didn’t half catch it: nasty gash on the forehead, bloody face and serious bruises. Result: twelve stitches. On coming round, immediately after the crash, the first thing that leaps to mind as I lie under my cart is: the blades of grass are brown. I’m face down and I know I’m bleeding. In the weird silence, the first thing I actually hear is the comment of some female villager: ‘I knew it, I knew he’d fall flat on his face, he always comes racing down here like a lunatic!’ (the Micheline mother, a local peasant with her high-pitched voice. Later I’ll piss in both of her special dairy-milking gumboots for those words.) That’ll teach her.

I can feel a presence, a crowd gathering. Second comment: ‘Go and fetch him a sugar cube soaked in rum!’ Still lying flat on my stomach, seriously groggy, I manage to answer: ‘I don’t like rum.’ I vaguely remember a neighbour helping me onto the back seat of his Simca 1000 Peugeot. Mum’s horrified and I see her sorry expression and my own shock in the mirror - my face is yellow and covered with fresh and dried blood.

The go-cart is a write-off, but soon I’ve built a new one, with a plastic cockpit for protection this time. It only gets one single outing on the village main road, which is also a slope. It seems to suffer from the same problem: the tendency to skid across the bend rather than follow it around. You could hear me coming from quite a distance, a warning for others to move out of the way. That day I landed sideways under a bench in front of someone’s house, where a little old man called Victor had just got up to enter his home: lucky for him. The cart remained stuck under the bench, the plastic cockpit parallel to the ground. Amen. What did you say, René?...you’ve got a problem with my driving?

That same year, as I rode back home from seeing my first real girlfriend on the well-polished Mobylette (moped) that Grandpa lent me, I misjudge a 90° turn, uprooting a concrete bollard in passing. I remember glancing at the speedometer, which (again) reads 60kmph, and then nothing. At that precise moment I realize that the straight line dives at once past a huge bump in the road, and that the right-angle curve to the left is already there.

I was seated on the luggage rack behind the saddle for maximum speed, as I was late and lagging way behind the pécore (peasant) who accompanied me on the journey - he had to get back to milk his cows. We had a nickname for him - la Grisette (the name of one of his cows). We were expected home together, you understand...

Some four and a half hours later I wake up in a doctor’s surgery somewhere in the Haute-Saône (the neighbouring department to my Vosges). Four and a half hours in deep space. Three youngsters - a girl and two boys in a metallic blue Renault 8 - have picked me up in the meadow below the bend. At the time, wearing a helmet was not compulsory, so I didn’t have one.  On the backseat of their car I vaguely remember asking if Grandpa’s Mobylette was done for; panicking despite not knowing where I was. They told me, much later, that three cars and a biker had seen me but hadn’t bothered to stop - as I lay spread out right there in deep sleep among the daisies, a few metres from the moped with its front wheel resembling a figure 8.

The ambulance, a Citröen DS Estate with little curtains in the windows, takes me to the Vittel hospital, sirens blaring, still in some comatose limbo. I’ve yet to realize that I’ve left two healthy canines behind in the tarmac, broken off at gum level. Also that the trousers of my first-ever suit (it’ll take me 30 years to buy a new one) are torn to shreds, that I have a seriously deep cut under my left knee and the usual bumps, scratches, peeled-off skin, and blacks-and-blues. I don’t remember feeling any pain while lying down in the ambulance. I slowly come to a fuzzy, disjointed awareness that I’m lying on a wheeled trolley (unable to move or speak) with men in white standing nearby; and then the true pain (laced with fright) sets in when I catch a glimpse of a surgeon with an enormous stainless-steel syringe - a short, fat needle like a pencil. Anti-tetanus. He drives it straight into my guts up to the hilt. I faint, switch off.

After this episode, one of these f***ing overzealous gendarmes makes me take a breath test (souffler dans le ballon). Consider the raw nerves of my broken, non-devitalized teeth for a second. Dad is here and my Mum must physically holds him back so he won’t brain the copper after driving his kepi down to his chin first. I can feel my parents, I can sense them around but I don’t see them, from my state of shock, lost in space on some hospital bed, not understanding why I am bare-assed in one of those ghastly loose gowns tied up at the back. I just saw my Willy. Strange world.

Now I must take you back to the ambulance ride. What I recall quite clearly as I half-lay, half-sat propped on an elbow, apart from the speed of the drive, is the appearance of a black Citröen Traction, (the French car par excellence favoured by both cops and robbers in the ’40s) keeping up with the ambulance driver. I can see it through the back windscreen and the space between the two little curtains. My Dad - I know it’s Him! To tell you the truth, I’m distressed, moved,