Dreaming of Le Cordon Bleu Paris

When you dream, dream big. But remember that dreams mean a lot of hard work. People might help you realize your dreams by repeatedly nudging you forward or opening a door for you or mentioning an opportunity, but only you can make the dream happen.

And sometimes  if you help others with their dreams, they achieve their dreams and goals because they do the hard work and they follow through — you just provide the encouragement, the elbow in the ribs.

Life is short, so follow the dreams that you can realize, with a little elbow grease, of course.

And what food-obsessed person doesn’t dream, at least sometimes, of attending culinary school in France? Or doing a stage at some respected restaurant in Paris or the provinces?

Le Cordon Bleu Paris, the very same cooking school attended by Julia Child, still offers dreams as it were to a wide variety of students. The school now fills a starkly modern building in Paris’s 15th arrondisement and doesn’t at all resemble the quaint place where Julia out-onioned a cadre of G.I.s dreaming of becoming chefs.

True, Julia wouldn’t recognize the commercialization there now.

But it’s still a palace of dreams, one where the aroma of frying onions or sizzling sausages perfumes the air, a place where  you instantly cross over to another side of existence and forget the drama of failed relationships and the pain of tight budgets and the heat of the summer, a place where art reigns and beauty sustains.

Traditionally served with mashed potatoes and a glass of white wine, delicate boudin blanc comes from Rethel, in the Champagne Ardenne region. Try a boudin blanc recipe from Clotilde at Chocolate & Zucchini, if you can find real French boudin blanc. If not, then look at Ms. Glaze’s recipe from Pommes d’Amour.

You might want to read more about day-to-day life at Le Cordon Bleu Paris:

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School (2007), by Kathleen Flinn.