French cooking class served up loads of fun - The Vancouver Sun

With an overriding theme of "Have fun, study your classics and stay Zen," three boutique courses in Paris offer distinctly separate approaches, all catering to different culinary interests. They bend preconceptions by adding descriptors like "relaxed," "healthy" and even "inexpensive" to the mix.

A good course can also rekindle a passion for cooking that is often lost in the frozen food aisle of the supermarket.

The intimate courses centre around the creation of three-course meals that are consumed with gleeful abandon at their end and with class sizes that max out at eight people, instructors can cater to students' interests and offer an interaction you can't get at a formal school like Le Cordon Bleu. Students can come just once or as many times as they like and many locals often become regulars.

At L'Atelier de Fred, Frederic Chesneau serves up not-necessarily-French dishes like Tahitian-style smoked salmon tartare, plays a lounge music compilation called Music to Watch Girls By and keeps your wine glass full. Fred's course is also cheap and his chocolate tart alone is worth the trip.

Quite simply, Fred gave it all up to do what he loves and this may be why his plan works. A ten year-veteran of event planning in the often-incestuous French film industry, in a country where people change jobs but never careers, Fred's is not the traditional road from rags to riches.

This "doing what he loves" idea shines through in his classes -- learning seems to come as a natural result of hanging out and having fun with Fred, rather than giving you the impression you've been learning for three hours.

CREDIT: Joe Ray, Special to the Vancouver Sun

Frederic Chesneau prepares fish for an evening cooking course.

Part of this is due to kitchen's size where anything over the five-student maximum would be a crowd. Fred refers to it as "convivial."

The night I'm at the studio, there aren't any girls to watch; it's me, Fred and two brothers from Colombia: Alejandro and Eduardo Martinez.

"We're doing it to learn -- we don't know how to cook anything," says Alejandro.

Fred jokes with the brothers and class happens in a mix of French, English (Fred does just fine) and the brothers' occasional rapid-fire Spanish.

Fred keeps things moving, but also keeps things fun and fun is the key to L'Atelier.

"I want to have a good time and show others a good time too," says Fred. "I don't want to be working with people [clients] who aren't fun to work with -- I quit a job where I made good money, but that's not what motivates me."

While Fred is fun, Fred is also frugal, and this is part of his niche. His prices are cheap in the good sense of the word -- 50 euros (about $80 Cdn) for a three-hour course. Plus, the food you create won't break the bank when you reproduce the meal for friends.

"Most of my dinners for any given night cost about 10 to 12 euros ($15-18 CAD) to reproduce," says Fred.

He also knows when to splurge and get the good stuff. For a mushroom risotto, Fred gets (very expensive) girolle and cepe mushrooms at the market, and the Parmesan comes from an Italian co-op.

Sitting down to the meal, all is well. A smoked salmon tartare appetizer balances the fish with cucumbers and lumpfish caviar all swimming happily in lime juice and olive oil.

Fred serves the risotto in covered Asian rice bowls. It rocks. Some of the mushrooms have disintegrated into tasty goodness, while the girolles stick around to make the eater especially happy.

By dessert, the tart has had just enough time to cool off, following Fred's "Don't put it in the fridge to cool -- it's forbidden!" doctrine. A shot of milk added at the end of the mixing of the liquid chocolate has given it a beautiful sheen.

"My mother can't wait for us to come home," says Eduardo while licking his lips, "She can't cook!"

The princess (yes, the princess) Marie-Blanche de Broglie covers traditional French cuisine through and through at her school, La Cuisine de Marie-Blanche.

Clad in a work dress, an apron and New Balance sneakers, she greets her clients below the portrait of one of her many ancestors of high military rank. It's a funny juxtaposition, but she pulls it off well.

"Some people are fed up with the [often frozen] food they're getting at home," says Laurent Potonniee, the princess's business director. "Their parent's generation was one of simplification, but they still have good taste. Now some of the clients we have are 30 to 40 year-olds who want to learn a plate that they've seen in a restaurant.

As comfortable in English and Spanish as in her mother tongue, the princess conveys a sense of ease as she directs the goings-on in her kitchen. She is a friendly and gifted teacher who puts everybody to work and makes things happen with effortless ease.

Her classic approach is certainly the most pedagogic, including a break in the class where she actually dictates the recipe while her students copy furiously.

"I make them copy the recipes down on purpose and fixes it in their heads," she says.

From a purely bohemian point of view, this isn't as much fun or easy as when Fred just gives you a photocopy of the recipes, but Marie-Blanche is convinced it's better for the long run.

"It forces you to understand it better," concedes 19-year-old student Daniela Fernandez Vigil.

"We're excited to go home and show what we've learned," adds Mariana Landa, also 19. Landa, Vigil and two friends, all from Mexico City are all in the middle of 20 courses with the princess.

Frederique Lauwerier's Diet Cafe concentrates on healthiness -- a daunting task in the Land of Cheese. Like Fred's, Diet Cafe is rather chic, and relatively inexpensive at 80 euros ($125 Cdn) per course, but there won't be a chocolate tart at the end. You could imagine Frederique eating the Princess's relatively heavy cooking about as easily as you could imagine Martha Stewart giving a show on her favourite dive bars.

Frederique's approach is all about staying Zen. She explains most of what you need to know about her theory while sauteing some onions, "To cook, you only need olive oil or peanut oil." Butter, it seems, doesn't get any shelf space in her fridge.

A dietician and pharmacist by training, Frederique has the aura of a person whose real age would surprise you. She's far from fat, and just as importantly, far from too thin and has a healthy glow not seen on most Parisian faces.

Whatever her age, she comes across as very comfortable with herself and very good with people.

The food made at Diet Cafe tastes healthy without leaving the feeling that you're missing out or that you'll be hungry at the end of the meal.

Frederique guides her students through a vanilla-scented sea bass tartare surrounded by finely diced beets in hazelnut oil. Whether it's with this or a pumpkin soup with sauteed scallops, the beauty of the preparation, the freshness of the ingredients and the flavours they create when combined make you think of a haute cuisine restaurant much sooner than a health-oriented cooking course.

Occasionally, a "diet" tinge does come through, as in a fructose-sweetened tarragon-scented ice cream served with sauteed, honeyed pineapple, yet in a similar jasmine tea-scented version with pears, it tastes just fine.

"I come to Frederique's courses because I feel less guilty about what I eat, but it also gives me more confidence when I go to the market," explains Parisian Florence Cotar. "I'm less afraid when I shop at the market and more inspired to try new things."