There were nine students in my class at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa.
Most of them knew what they were doing.
Some had graduated from culinary schools. One had already spent eight years working in kitchens. Others had travelled from India and Africa to continue their training. There was also a recently retired elementary school principal who, at least, had spent years cooking and baking at home.
And then there was me.
For nearly thirty years, my professional life had revolved around coaching and education. During most of that time, I barely entered a kitchen. I could make instant noodles, fry an egg and, when absolutely necessary, keep myself alive. That was about it.
Then the pandemic changed the arrangement.
Living in the mountains, with restaurants no longer part of everyday life, I had to cook. I followed videos, experimented, miscalculated flour, got temperatures wrong and repeatedly failed to produce a respectable cake. I eventually gave up on cakes and tried other desserts, with equally inconsistent results.
There is a Cantonese expression, laa sau m4 sing sai—roughly, being so flustered that your hands cannot quite keep up with what needs to be done.
That was me in the kitchen.
I could teach a room full of people without losing my composure. Put a frying pan in front of me and suddenly patience became a much more theoretical concept.
But cooking began to show me things I had never noticed before.
A meal that appears effortlessly on a table has already required planning, preparation, timing and a surprising number of small decisions. I began thinking about my mother. There were five children in our family, along with older relatives, and somehow she produced different meals day after day.
She used to complain while cooking, “I’m never doing this again.”
As a child, I concluded that cooking must simply be a terrible nuisance.
Only years later, after spending enough time in the kitchen myself, did another possibility occur to me: perhaps she never had enough time or space to enjoy it. Feeding a family is very different from cooking when you feel like it.
That realization stayed with me.
By then I had also become curious about professional kitchens. I wanted to know what happened behind the food I had spent so many years happily eating and occasionally criticizing. How does a chef work in heat, noise and pressure without allowing a bad mood to reach the plate? How does an executive chef lead a kitchen team? What sort of discipline does it take to reproduce the same standard again and again?
I was not particularly interested in becoming a chef.
I wanted to know how chefs trained themselves.
So I went back to school.
The welcome at Le Cordon Bleu was simple and serious. We met the instructors and administrators, learned the rules, heard about examinations and attendance, and received our knives. The knives came with repeated warnings: they were extremely sharp, so please try not to remove any fingers.
We also needed industrial safety shoes. Black only. No fashion decisions required.
Classes started on time. We had to arrive fifteen minutes early. Phones were not allowed. Neither were recordings. Notes had to be written by hand. Miss five classes and you failed.
The longer I listened, the more familiar all of this began to sound.
For decades, I had been the one setting standards, asking students to be present, practise, pay attention and take responsibility for their own learning.
Now I was sitting on the other side.
The first day cured me of any romantic ideas I might have had about culinary school.
Classes ran one after another, with barely enough time to think about lunch. After two sessions, we went directly into the kitchen and spent three hours standing and practising knife skills. I had to learn French culinary terms while also deciphering English delivered in a strong French accent.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted.
The walk back to my hotel took about ten minutes. It felt considerably longer. When I finally reached the room, I collapsed on the bed with the feeling that if the world ended at that particular moment, someone else would have to deal with it.
The next morning, I went back.
Slowly, something changed.
I discovered that I liked cutting vegetables.
French cooking has precise names and dimensions for different cuts. A vegetable was not simply “cut small.” It had a particular size, shape and purpose. In one soup, every type of vegetable had to be cut uniformly.
For someone who had spent decades working mostly with words, people and ideas, there was something wonderfully uncomplicated about this.
The knife was in my hand. The vegetable was on the board. The next cut was either accurate or it wasn’t.
I began to think of it as meditation with a knife.
When my attention wandered, the result showed immediately. When I rushed, my hands became clumsy. When I was completely present, the knife, the food and the movement seemed to fall into the same rhythm.
Cooking itself remained much harder for me. Heat, oil and seasoning required judgment, and my instincts were not particularly French. I naturally used very little salt and oil, which in classical French cooking could result in food of impressive virtue and very little flavour.
So I practised.
Our instructor, who had been teaching at Le Cordon Bleu for fifteen years, repeated the same sentence again and again:
“There is no secret. All it takes is practice.”
I had said versions of the same thing to students for most of my professional life.
It was rather different hearing it while holding a knife.
Two weeks into the course, I had settled into the rhythm of being a student. I woke at 5:30 in the morning, packed my bag and water bottle, ate breakfast and walked happily to school. The streets were almost empty except for squirrels and rabbits apparently beginning their day at the same time.
At school I changed into my uniform, watched demonstrations, took notes and then went into the kitchen to try to reproduce what I had seen.
The practical sessions still made me nervous.
But I was beginning to enjoy being nervous.
There is a particular freedom in being a beginner. No one expects mastery from you. Failure is not a fall from anywhere; it is simply information about what to practise next.
That was something I had almost forgotten.
Thirty years earlier, my life had taken me into coaching. Over time I became the person at the front of the room, the one expected to know something, to observe, to distinguish, to teach.
Now a badly cut carrot could put me firmly back in my place.
I liked that.
The kitchen also changed the way I ate.
Years ago, my husband and I had gone to an elaborate French dinner in Paris. I dressed for the occasion. Each course seemed to consist of one beautiful mouthful, followed by a very long wait before the next. Wine appeared constantly; since I do not drink, I had little to occupy myself with between courses and was almost falling asleep by the end. Dinner lasted three hours.
At the time, I saw the meal entirely from the dining room.
At Le Cordon Bleu, I began to see the other side of the door.
Every precise cut, every sauce, every temperature, every plate arriving at the right moment involved work I had never thought about. I had spent years judging restaurants by the food, the service and the room without understanding how much discipline was hidden behind what appeared on the table.
Once you have stood in a professional kitchen, even briefly, it becomes harder to complain quite so casually.
I went to culinary school thinking I wanted to understand chefs.
I ended up understanding a little more about my mother, about patience, about practice—and about what it feels like to know almost nothing again.
Perhaps that was what I had really gone there to learn.