So this is going to be my first time signing up for this Book Club Friday thing… so bare with me 🙂  This week I’m going to share with you: Under the Table: Saucy Tales from Culinary SchoolÂ
A deliciously entertaining memoir about one woman’s adventures in the student kitchens of the legendary French Culinary Institute — flavored with celebrity chefs, eccentric characters, and mouthwatering recipes.
To anyone who has ever dreamed of life in a French kitchen, imagining days filled with puff pastry and sips of vintage wine, Katherine Darling serves up a savory dose of reality in this funny, fascinating, and altogether delightful account of her time spent slaving over a hot stove, wrestling with veal calves, and cleaning fish heads at the French Culinary Institute in downtown New York City.
As she goes from clueless amateur to certified chef, Katherine and her quirky fellow students learn the secrets behind the art of French cooking and frequently find themselves the objects of scorn and ridicule as their teachers wage psychological warfare over steaming pots of bisque. The kitchen, they soon discover, is no place for soft-hearted romantics. It’s a cutthroat world, and no one ever made a souffle without breaking a few eggs — or cracking a few heads together. From the basics to the final exam, Darling reveals everything that goes into the making of a chef.
Filled with delicious food lore and trivia, and including dozens of classic and original French recipes, Under the Table takes readers deep into the trenches of one of the world’s most prestigious cooking schools — and shows what really goes on behind the doors of every great restaurant kitchen.
My take:
Not going to lie, I liked, maybe even loved it. For someone who would absolutely LOVE to go to Culinary school, it just made my drive that much more fierce, although, truth be told, I’m not sure if they were as mean and gruff as the writer talks about I could take it :). I didn’t want the book to be over when it was because I wanted to know more. I’m not sure what more there is to know though. At times, there were parts of it that didn’t quite seem real to me and the ending of the chapters were so passay, otherwise this was a good book and loved it!
I rated it 4 out of 5 stars.
And here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say about the book. And I have to say, what they said, I agree 🙂
