I've already driven the heel of my hand into the creature's fleshy back, dislocating the shoulder blades with an oddly satisfying crunch. Then I swing the knife, a hefty, glinting cleaver, aloft.
A ghost's voice, a familiar, wobbly baritone, urges me on: “You just have to have the courage of your convictions.”
Wham! Off go the creature's ugly feet. As if in approval, the ghost offers a throaty chuckle. “You MUST go wham,” Julia Child says.
Though she died in 2004, North America's most famous food enthusiast is speaking to me from a screen hanging below the ceiling of a teaching kitchen at George Brown College's culinary campus in downtown Toronto. On TV, Julia is surrounded by plucked poultry. “The chicken sisters,” she calls them.
I'm with chicken sisters too. My classmates are two dozen middle-aged women sporting crisp white aprons and designer knives. They are bankers, lawyers and professionals – women who, by day, are demanding, no-nonsense administrators. Every Wednesday night for a month, however, we let a little recklessness into our lives, trooping to George Brown in pursuit of a lofty and elusive ideal: to cook like Julia. To master even a handful of her recipes that so inspired our mothers, changing them from cooks into chefs.
Maybe we too are looking for a transformation. Place a steel cleaver in our hands and, before long, we're communing with our own inner “wild” Child, swapping cheerful confessions about the bosses and clients we imagine splayed and dismembered on our cutting boards.
“I will never tell you who I am thinking about,” murmurs my friend Moira, a poet, as she saws through the back of a luckless carcass of Grade A poultry.
Cook Like Julia is one of a few dozen custom courses George Brown began offering in recent years to companies, organizations and social networks to build teamwork and feed what Joe Baker, who oversees community programs at the college, says is a growing interest in home cooking. “People are coming back into the kitchen,” he said.
From the first night, our teaching chef Anne-Marie Shubin knows she has her work cut out for her. We are alpha females. Our BlackBerrys don't stop bleeping. Jack the Ripper would kill for the forged knives we pull from our briefcases for each class. We clutch coffee cups that smell suspiciously of red wine. We talk knowledgeably about Paris menus without knowing a soupçon about French kitchens.
Ms. Shubin wisely bribes us outright, indulging us with samples of Julia's best recipes – food that she and sous-chef Albert Haddad (by day a dental surgeon) have prepared: boeuf bourguignon, leek flamiche, chicken fricassee.
Then, almost as good, she shares Julia's cooking secrets. We murmur happily, clapping with pleasure when she demonstrates how to properly slice an onion, carve château potatoes, spatchcock a chicken and sauté everything with more butter than most of us would eat in a year.
“This is not North America,” she says, cocking a knowing eye at the class. “Butter is your friend.”
By day some of us are officers and some of us are foot soldiers. In Julia's kitchen we are equals – enlisted women all. We have two hours to follow Julia's detailed and precise instructions. This means teamwork. Like good kitchen serfs, we form our own feudal system. There are onion dicers, meat whackers, lardon cutters, vegetable peelers and sauce reducers. We drip sweat over blazing hot gas ranges. We crawl on our hands and knees to ignite stubborn gas ovens. We lug pots as heavy as bowling balls to bath-sized sinks where we scrub and sanitize shoulder to shoulder.
When one team forgets to place a protective cookie sheet under a quiche pan, Ms. Shubin eyes the smoking sludge at the oven's bottom and announces: “You must clean your stoves when you make a mess.”
