UBC Instructor Eric Arrouze Guides Ambitious Students Through Six-Week Pilgrimages To The High Temples Of The Cuisine

If you are an amateur cook--literally, a lover of cooking--you are always trying to sharpen your skills. You can be self-taught through reading or "distantly taught" by the Food Network or you can attend cooking classes. Some of those are given by culinary stars and, unless you volunteer, nothing touches your hands except cutlery, glassware, and napkin; at others, everyone rolls sushi in unison and you come away with basic abilities.

If you're very ambitious but not about to quit your day job, you dive in the deep end and come as close as you ever will to feeling part of the kitchen brigade in a seriously high-end restaurant. Or university. However, even from a venue as well-equipped as UBC's Food, Nutrition, and Health Building, it's not often that the aroma of fresh foie gras hitting a sizzling-hot pan drifts across campus. But this isn't an undergraduate-level course; this is getting to grips with the world's most highly rated cuisine with a real French chef.

Eric Arrouzé doesn't just show and tell, he makes you do it, the Chaucer professor who asks you to stand in class and read Middle English aloud with him, correcting and steering you every step of the way. The class is small enough (seven or eight; mussel juice made the figure illegible) that each student gets plenty of individual help.

Tonight is the penultimate session of six weekly classes on the Culture and Traditions of French Regional Cuisine: Parisian Cuisine. The focus is not steak frites or croque monsieur, but grand, classical dishes with names that call up gauzy images of opulence, luxury, and well-upholstered banquettes, bottoms, and wallets.

Arrouzé packed an impressive résumé in his hand luggage when he headed for Montreal in 1993. Still only in his mid-20s, he had already cooked in Corsica, Geneva, the Alps, and for Albert of Monaco, Catherine Deneuve, and other celebs at a Riviera five-star hotel.

Three years in the belle province and he was off to Vancouver and Le Crocodile. In 1997, he moved into teaching and is now a popular fixture at UBC and elsewhere (including private kitchens) and through his subscription-based "e-learning cooking school" at www.911cheferic.com/.

Tonight's is a live class and, as usual, students volunteer to work in pairs, with Arrouzé watching that we all play well and fairly together. If, for instance, you made dessert last week, you won't get stuck with this week's crí¨me brí»lée with cinnamon and Grand Marnier (the next step up from the crí¨me caramel you learned in Week 1).

Along with another Angela, I'm allotted the first course: seafood vol-au-vents. Qualms about all that rolling and folding I learned in high school disappear when Arrouzé produces a package of frozen puff pastry. All we have to do is stamp out discs of various sizes and place them on a cookie sheet. Baking is not my forte, so I sneakily persuade the other Angela that it's hers while I clean and cook mussels that, along with halibut, shrimp, scallops, and mushrooms, will nuzzle together in a creamy sauce.

Arrouzé has simmered the requisite fish stock ahead of time, but when we do try this at home, we can refer to instructions in the "textbook", a thick stack of recipes and culinary information he has assembled. Students are scattered around the kitchen peeling, chopping, and whisking, but our instructor is on top of it all, correcting some overeager sautéing or calling everyone over to watch him demonstrate a technique, such as searing those thick slabs of foie gras.

Our main course, tournedos Rossini, rarely appears on today's menus because of its prohibitive cost. (Do the math: filet of beef topped with foie gras; a dark sauce aromatic with truffle paste from a little $30 jar.) Meanwhile, others are preparing asparagus gratin Argenteuil, even nicer in spring, says Arrouzé, when white asparagus is in season.

That's only one snippet we learn. Another is that the baguettes on the table are from the Real Canadian Superstore because its version uses imported French flour. Between courses (memorable, and to think that we did this ourselves), we read aloud from the textbook about noted early-19th-century chef Marie Antoine Caríªme.

Next week, while munching on pheasant and boudin blanc with a morel sauce, students will hear of Vatel, chef to the Sun King. Classes are as much about the culture and foundations of what we're eating as the ingredients we've learned to work with. And that's only right because, after all, this is university.

The Culture and Traditions of French Regional Cuisine moves to Normandy (January 31 to March 7, $575), with classes at Karma Kitchen (1363 Railspur Alley, Granville Island). For information on this and other courses, call 604-822-0800 or visit www.culinaryarts.ubc.ca/.