Final Cuisine Exam: Prickly as an Artichoke

The good news is that it's over and I did not receive an emergency call telling me I failed the exam and to please not present myself at tomorrow's graduation. The bad new is that I choked on the choke.

For the most part, my classmates and I went into yesterday's exam relatively calm. For those of us also in pastry, the worst exam was already over. I got to school about an hour early yesterday and learned that news had leaked from an undisclosed source that the exam would be veal stew or fish in white wine sauce. Great. I studied those two recipes for a bit, then we all went up to the exam kitchen to pick our tokens.

I got the fish. I was happy not to get the stew, which is a horrifically bland, geriatric mix of boiled veal, white button mushrooms, pearl onions, and cream sauce. As if it wasn't white enough or nutritionally deficient enough, it's served with white rice. In Cameron's words, it's "the most boring recipe on the planet." It's easy enough to make, though, and a bit of a giveaway for the exam.

The fish was just as easy, though a little tastier. The five of us who got fish had to fillet half of a brill (a large, flat fish similar to sole), chop up the trimmings and fish head along with vegetables for fish stock, turn six potatoes, bake the fillets, and make a white wine sauce with tomatoes. The sauce and the filleting were the technical part of the dish, and they took up most of the time. It all went well, and I was happy with my final dish.

Brill in White Wine Sauce with Pommes Anglaises

The real trouble came with our official technical test. Just like in pastry, where we had to roll out a short sweet crust, every student had to perform the same technical test for the final cuisine exam. We were asked to turn an artichoke, which consists of snapping off the stalk, trimming off the side leaves with a paring knife, lopping off the top and bottom of the choke, and carving out a bowl from its base. You then boil it in a "blanc," a simmering pot of water, salt, flour, and lemon juice that is supposed to help the vegetable retain its color, and then dig out the fuzzy interior in order to serve something inside, like a sauce or brunoised vegetables.

We've turned a handful of artichokes in class this semester, and I've always been pleased with how mine turned out. My knife skills have improved, so my artichoke should have been as nice as, or nicer than, the previous ones... right? Nope. My artichoke was a prickly little nightmare. I received a paltry little guy in my basket of vegetables with a thin bottom and precious few leaves. I'll spare you the details, but after boiling over twice-- something that never happened to me in class-- and starting the blanc over when I realized the choke was undercooked, I tried to dig out the fuzzy interior with my spoon and the whole thing fell apart. It was the worst turned artichoke in my class. The horror. It's a little like messing up spaghetti when you normally produce perfectly assembled feasts.

Not that I would ever mess up spaghetti.

But now it's done-- and I'm done! Good-bye to the LCB kitchens and that endearing little submariner hat. Our graduation is tomorrow morning, and I will return to admiring artichokes at farmers' markets but not eating them myself because I am of the humble opinion that artichokes taste like plastic. And they're prickly suckers.