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Product Description
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 soufflé 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.
Customer Review:A22Z7E65CIAB0X
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Summary: Just Awful
As has been noted in other reviews, the author is quite a snob, which becomes increasingly off-putting as the book goes on. Her scathing portrayals of many of the other females (Mimi, Cyndi, Penny, Ricki) makes one wonder if it is legitimate or just more of her competitiveness--it's funny that she seems to be so jealous of Mimi, who has more money, so she attacks her as being "older" and unable to cook, though Mimi ends up as a top student. She seems inconsistent with her background--early on, she is a "double major" in History and English, later she is "pre-med"--probably a Williams first to have a student doubling up on traditional liberal arts pre-reqs plus all the science and math courses required for med school. I just hated this book because in the end I found the author to be so flat out unlikable.
Customer Review:A2I9YL2MU2O4BI
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Summary: wonderful story
If you ever wonder what it would be like to be so interested in cooking that you went to professional training school, this is the book for you. Written by a gifted writer this book will transport you to the French Culinary Institute in NYC. You'll meet the varied group of students that take the course, learn to fear the footsteps of the chefs teaching the course, get a sense of the ribald humor in the professional kitchen. I must say that one of the things I found most enjoyable about the book was the writing style; the book combines vivid descriptions, humor, and a story that moves along at a simmering pace (sorry, couldn't resist the pun!) There's even a few recipes thrown in to try on your own, although I quickly realized that my rendition is probably going to bear only a passing resemblance to what a trained cook could do. I hope there are more books in the author's future!
Customer Review:AFN5RZ7NZ2JB9
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Summary: Unlikable narrator, unfortunate read.
We choose this book for our book club without reading any "real" reviews about it. BIG mistake. All of us wished we wouldn't have wasted our time.
The narrator is catty, rude and gives away the fact that she graduates first in her class (a big part of the mystery in the storyline) in her bio on the jacket. I can't believe that some publisher even thought about printing this book. I guess she still has friends in the business?
Don't waste your time. I hear there are lots of great cooking school books out there!
Customer Review:A1MAJHX6PUM8OV
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Summary: pretty stuck up
I could not stand that typical New Yorker style. For someone from the West Coast, this is so unbelievable stuck-up, it's bordering on the ridiculous. Her condescending descriptions of her co-students, the eagerness to judge people by the brand of their clothing, made me hate the author.
ok, she learns how to cook, but is she a chef? As far as I could find out, she is a writer for a food magazine now.
Well, I am not surprised that someone with her snobby attitude can't hack it in the business
Customer Review:A9RYUR5YP5PEM
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Summary: This is a mixed review
There are things I like a lot about this book. These things include that parts of it are quite well-written, there are some genuine insights into what attending the chef programme at FCI is like, and the recipes work pretty well.
There are things I hated about this book. These things include that other parts of it are ludicrously poorly written, that the author very often comes off as a petulant child, that stories are started but not finished (or told in ways that lessen their impact).
Overall, even when the book works well, it seems like a string of amusing anecdotes about culinary school, rather than a coherent narrative about attending culinary school. Perhaps the subtitle of the book should have warned me about this, but I was still disappointed by it.
One of the main points the author makes is that prior to attending FCI, she was a skilled cook who didn't really understand cooking. She skipped steps in recipes, without realizing what effect that had on the dish. She learned that there's a reason you let dough rest, for example, and when she did it, she found that the resulting pastry was better than when she skipped that step. Well, there's a whole mountain of accumulated knowledge about how to construct memoirs so that they offer more to the reader than a string of memories presented in chronological order. It appears to me that the author is as ignorant of that body of knowledge as she was about the mechanics of cooking before her culinary education. It shows in this book. Much like her pre-FCI omelets were inferior to what she learned to make in Level 1, this memoir is far inferior to what it might have been, had she only known.
Anyway, not a total waste of my time, but I think that this author would have written a better book about this experience had she let it simmer for a few more years.
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