Anyone idly wondering what might be required to join the workforce of tomorrow (as opposed to the local gang or prison population) could do with a preparatory stint with 15 Femmes en Avenir, a program that combines nine months of training at the Institut des Métiers de l’Artisanat du Val d’Oise cooking school and a paid stage in a big kitchen in Paris: Fouquet’s, La Plaza Athenée, Le Meurice, for example. The school provides basic training; the stage is active duty in the trenches. “I saw myself in a cosy restaurant, with jolly cooks singing love-songs as they broke eggs into the pan, and five solid meals a day,” George Orwell writes in “Down and Out in Paris and London,” before going on to describe, in witty, acerbic detail, the merciless demands and intractable hierarchies of hotel kitchens in the City of Light. But then that was a long time ago….
Situated in the northern suburban commune of Villiers-le-Bel, in Department 95, just to the north of the banlieues of the 93, which George Packer writes about in last week’s issue, the school offers 15 Femmes en Avenir (15 Women in the Future) to women living in the banlieues to the east of the commune, mainly in and around Sarcelles, all of them recent immigrants or children of immigrants, nearly all from the former French colonies in North Africa, especially the Maghreb.
Now entering its sixth year, the program is the brainchild of the celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse, who, as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, was obliged to give something back to his community. “I am in the field of cooking, so I wanted to give something related to that,” Ducasse told me late this spring, when I was in Paris. “I met with Jérôme Chartier, who at the time was a deputy of the Val d’Oise, at an amateur cooking school we had in Paris, and the idea evolved naturally,” he said. Ducasse’s idea was to offer a pathway to self-sufficiency and social integration to marginalized immigrant women, many of whom raise children as single parents. (Women who are single mothers are more likely than others to fall into poverty, even in France. Also, women are pitifully underrepresented in Paris kitchens.) Applicants usually learn about the program through the local unemployment office, and are vetted before being selected by a jury of cooks to attend the school for free. If they complete their studies, they will receive a CAP diploma in cuisine, which, coupled with their stage, will insure a job, of some kind at least. As for the selection process, there is one quality that is valued above all others: “motivation.” “They have to feel it in their stomach that this is something they’d like to do,” Quentin Vicas, who runs the program, told me.
But wait: before you master a successful canard à l’orange or a perfect crêpe, you must first meet the usual job requirements, the ones having to do with self-mastery; cookery is almost irrelevant at this point. You may be blessed with a wonderful palate and a culinary creative streak, but if you can’t cope with the discipline of arriving on time, or standing on your feet for twelve to sixteen hours a day, or working under a tight chain of command in tight quarters with strangers, mostly men, you may as well not bother. It’s a long slog to the top, and you have to be able to take the heat (both literal and figurative) without losing your sang-froid or focus (speed accompanied by precision and obsessive attention to detail is especially prized), or your ability, above all, to work as a member of an équipe, a team. The good news is that if indeed you are capable of la maîtrise de soi, the cut of one’s jib simply does not matter. At least not in an ideal world.
“Absolutely nothing has changed since the attacks in January,” Ducasse, who is also a member of the Good Planet Foundation, insisted. (Vicas told me, with the slightest hint of umbrage, that the response of the women had of course been one of “devastation, like everyone else!”) “The origin of the difficulty is something different,” Ducasse went on. “It’s necessary for each culture to be represented and for each culture to live in harmony with the other. It’s not a question of skin color, country of origin, or religion. It’s just humanism, respect for the other. The one good thing about globalization is that we are exposed to all cultures, and we can learn from each other.”
I visited the I.M.A. class early one morning, just as the students were nearing completion of the program and their stages, and preparing for final exams. Villiers-le-Bel felt like an ordinary New York suburb, a bit like Jackson Heights or Flushing; it was hard to imagine that it had been one of the sites of widespread rioting that swept the banlieues in 2005. When I arrived, all of the women were busy at their stations, preparing the lunch menu, a three-course meal with two options, which is served to the public in an adjoining dining room at a modest price. They were dressed in classic chef uniforms—calots, black-and-white-checked cotton trousers, white aprons, and white jackets with their names embroidered on them: Laure, Naouel, Chantal, Kadidiatou, Djamilla, Danielle.... Each had been given a gift of a Lejeune mallette, filled with spatulas, knives, skimmers, and so on, whose contents a latecomer, who had had a problem getting her children to school, showed me. The cases come with keys, and she locked hers up, as had all the others.
Patrick Margery, who has been the sole professeur practique since the program began (the women also take classes in business math and English), has been a chef for more than forty years. He has worked at Maxim’s, Le Procope, and Ledoyen, among many other restaurants, and two years ago received a Croix du Chevalier dans l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole for his connoisseurship of exceptional produce. His current job description is “un formateur humaniste.” No argument there: Margery is the incarnation of the seven virtues; he keeps the women on track and keeps their spirits lifted, though, admittedly, he has on occasion been cited for being a tad professorial. He was in his office, receiving the shipments of food for the day. “No mussels?” he asked the deliveryman. “They didn’t send any,” the man replied. An immediate adjustment to the menu had to be made.
In the meantime, cries of help from the kitchen began to be heard: students shouted, “Chef!” Chef!” from every corner of the room, as they peeled potatoes, broke eggs into simmering water, prepared an almond paste for trout, carved up a shoulder of veal, and so on. Four Rosinox cooking stations were fully active, and sometimes things began burning and spilling over, as pans on the heat were forgotten while another crisis presented itself.
“Chef! Qu’est-ce qui se passe? C’est pas normal!” the latecomer wailed, looking at the pile of tattered crêpes she had produced, one after another. “I am the queen of crêpes!” she cried. But her crêpe pan gone untended and had overheated. Cooking is a jealous and unforgiving mistress.
Another student held up a saucepan and looked at Margery helplessly.
“Mais, c’est pas un beurre clarifié!” he exclaimed in disbelief as he examined the burned substance she presented. He started over, patiently explaining the process one more time.
“Ça, c’est trop fort!” he cried, as another student began pouring a proper beurre clarifié into an egg-yolk mixture. He took the ladle from the student and held it on high, as a thin stream fell into the egg base. “C’est une sauce Hollandaise,_ _but it’s not President Hollande who created it!” he said, giggling a bit madly and scampering off to the next station. “Allez, allez! Comme ça!” he said to another student, as he grabbed her whisk and vigorously traced figure eights in the mixing bowl.
“C’est bien fait,” he remarked objectively to one student upon observing her meticulously cut tomatoes and a mound of microscopically chopped herbs. She went on to make potato purée, which she formed into quenelles and sautéed in butter. “I had a friend who worked with Joël Robuchon,” Margery remarked to me. “He cried because he had to pass the potatoes through the sieve again and again when making Robuchon’s purée de pommes de terre. Robuchon used a kilo of butter, but that isn’t the secret, as most people think. The secret is that the butter must be froid. The colder the butter, the silkier the purée!” he declared. “You won’t find that written in any of his books!”
By eleven-thirty, everything was ready, and after the meal had been plated the kitchen was put to rights. It was sparkling clean, as if it hadn’t been used in years. The dressing room was filled with shrieks of laughter and excited chatter. A little later, the students emerged, transformed, wearing tight jeans and colorful tops, their hair coiffed or lacquered or pulled back in a ponytail of lavish, tight curls. One woman wore hers in dreadlocks. She was clad in camouflage pants and gray suède wingtips and a dark T-shirt that read “I Met God, She’s Black.” Even the chef was transformed. I scarcely recognized him in the hallway, sans toque and an old-fashioned chef’s tour de cou: he wore just a Henley cotton sweater, jeans, and well-worn chef’s shoes.
One of the women, Naouel Seddiki (she of the surgically precise tomatoes), was completing her stage at Le Meurice, and I visited there later to tour the kitchens with Marie-Aude Laurent, the public-relations manager, and to talk with Naouel and with the chef de cuisine, Christophe Saintagne. Naouel was free only for a few minutes before being summoned to her station to prepare for the lunch service, so we exchanged numbers and agreed to meet later. Seated in the chef’s dining room, a black room decorated with a gold oval table and backlit bottles of vintage Château d'Yquem, which lined the walls, Laurent and I chatted about Naouel. We had both sensed her sweetness and vulnerability but Laurent brought up her strength and her enormous will. “She said to me, over and over, ‘Cooking is my passion. It’s not for earning a living. It’s my passion.’ Elle a de la force!”
At the far end of the room was a one-way mirror with a view onto the kitchen. Everyone was going calmly about his work, when Chef Saintagne arrived. I asked him whether it was always like this, and he said yes, always. He stressed the importance of a quiet kitchen, because the calm was protective, allowing his team to become absorbed in the task at hand and to focus on details. Speaking of the 15 Femmes program, he told me that it was “the social space” that most interested him. His focus was the children of the women, and what he was trying to figure out was the best way to enable the women working with him to reëstablish the importance of the mother, pride in the mother, respect for the mother, as someone who is able to earn the money to care for her family, and to set an example for surrounding families. “And in my kitchen, which is made up mostly of young men in their twenties,” he added, “it’s just as important that they don’t forget about other people living among them. I am very happy to have someone who is not at all from their milieu working alongside them. We are obliged to remain very, very humane.”
Just before I left Paris, I met with Naouel on a hot, humid afternoon, and we walked around Sarcelles, where she lives with a roommate in a women’s shelter. She is a petite woman in her early thirties, with pale skin, vivid blue eyes, and dark hair. She reminded me a bit of Isabelle Adjani. She was wearing denim bell-bottoms, sneakers, a close-fitting T-shirt, and a long-billed black ballcap. As we walked from the train station, she told me that she had been born in a small town in Algeria near the border with Morocco and was married young, to a neighbor, with whom she has a fourteen-year-old son, who lives with her parents. A few years ago, she married a cousin and moved to Paris, but quickly learned that she had made a mistake. “My husband wanted me to stay at home. I said I wanted to work, and he said no. It was impossible, so I left.” His parting words: “You’ll be lost on your own.” “It’s always been a problem,” she told me of her independence. For example: “Whether or not I wear the veil is my choice, and mine alone. I will not have someone telling me that I must.” Before she was accepted into 15 Femmes, she said as we walked from the train station along the Avenue Paul Valéry, which was teeming with red roses in full bloom, life had been very difficult. She knew no one and was completely alone. Being separated from her son has also been an enormous strain. “Ça me fait mal au coeur,” she said. “It makes me heartsick, but I tell him that I am doing this for both of us.”
Walking through the grounds of a cité, we passed a young boy with a Band-Aid over his left eye. A wet brown satin comforter spilled out from an open window. Clothes spilled out from others. The lawns were parched and littered. We walked over hill and dale through a small park dotted with golden oaks that made it feel like autumn. When we reached an allée, Naouel pointed out her room, hung with tidy green curtains. “I come home, fall into bed, and go to sleep immediately,” she said. “I sleep like a baby.”
At the beginning of July, Naouel took a new job, as commis de cuisine, at Hexagone, a restaurant in the Sixteenth Arrondissement opened last year by Mathieu Pacaud, the son of Bernard Pacaud, the chef of the Michelin three-star Paris restaurant L’Ambroisie. Her new hours: from 8:30 A.M. until 3 P.M. and from 5:30 until midnight. “I said yes,” she said. “I told them, ‘Je suis capable.’ ”
