'Tis the last rose of summer,
Left blooming all alone,
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
No flower of her kindred,
No rose bud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh.

I'll not leave thee, thou lone one,
To pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping,
Go sleep thou with them;
'Thus kindly I scatter
Thy leaves o'er the bed
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow
When friendships decay,
And from love's shining circle
The gems drop away!
When true hearts lie withered
And fond ones are flown
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone?

For the last few days, I've been in culinary school at the Ecole Ritz Escoffier, here in Paris. Unlike the structure at the Cordon Bleu, the other major school in town, classes here are much smaller and more concentrated. There are only five other students in my class, and two chefs along with an assistant/translator. The other students, aside from one other American tourist, want to become professional chefs, and if they complete the six week course I'm enrolled in (but obviously won't finish), and an additional ten week course, they are qualified to work as low ranking cooks.

I think the fundamental point I'll take away from my experience is that going to culinary school is extraordinarily helpful as a supplement to all my reading. I've got tons of theoretical knowledge. There's an almost 400 book library of nothing but food and food writing sitting on my shelves. Well, sitting in storage until I move into my apartment in New York, at least. As long as you don't ask me too actually cook, in fact, I could probably sound pretty convincing as the chef/professor, especially if the students thought I was the chef and kept the questions to a minimum.

And yet, I didn't know until this week how to properly fillet a fish. As the picture above shows (obviously, I've cropped out my ridiculous head), that obstacle's been dealt with, under the patient eye of someone who's gutted and filleted thousands of fish. (The poor victim in the picture, incidentally, is the inimitable rascasse, the traditional base of the saffron rich fish soup bouillabasse, the trademark dish of Marseille.) To have the chance to slice up that great a fish, impossibly fresh (after all, I pulled out the blood red gills myself), made the course worth it alone. But over the week, I've had that kind of experience over and over again - making Italian meringue, sauteeing fish to keep it crispy, cutting vegetables to a proper brunoise, slicing a genoise cake into even slices rather than slicing angling down towards the bottom, peeling mushrooms, reducing a cream sauce, and so on. Doing things and having someone tell you that you did it wrong is a great way to learn (although, I didn't attempt to make a genoise by creaming the flour with the eggs, like one of my classmates today), and I was told I was wrong a lot of times. But I don't think I'll make those mistakes again.