Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0670018228
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Average Customer Review: (From 26 total reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description:
A delightful true story of food, Paris, and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream

In 2003, Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six-year-old American living and working in London, returned from vacation to find that her corporate job had been eliminated. Ignoring her mother?s advice that she get another job immediately or ?never get hired anywhere ever again,? Flinn instead cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream?a diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry is the touching and remarkably funny account of Flinn?s transformation as she moves through the school?s intense program and falls deeply in love along the way. Flinn interweaves more than two dozen recipes with a unique look inside Le Cordon Bleu amid battles with demanding chefs, competitive classmates, and her ?wretchedly inadequate? French. Flinn offers a vibrant portrait of Paris, one in which the sights and sounds of the city?s street markets and purveyors come alive in rich detail. The ultimate wish fulfillment book, her story is a true testament to pursuing a dream. Fans of Julie & Julia, Almost French, and Eat, Pray, Love will be amused, inspired, and richly rewarded by this seductive tale of romance, Paris, and French food.

Customer Reviews

Nice, but disappointing by C. Rubin
I bought this book based on the glowing reviews it received on this site. After all, it combined two of my great loves — cooking and France - as subject matter. Unfortunately, I am still struggling to finish it. There is nothing compelling or terribly interesting in this story which is prosaically written. It doesn’t come to Bill Buford’s “Heat” or any of the Michael Ruhlman books. Eh…

Trials and triumphs in the world’s most famous cooking school by Veggiechiliqueen
The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry is a riveting memoir of one woman’s journey through the hallowed kitchens of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Fresh from a corporate layoff in her London office, Kathleen Flinn chases her childhood dream to attend Le Cordon Bleu, encouraged by then-boyfriend Mike. Kathleen’s love for cooking came as a result of necessity: after her father’s early death from cancer when Kathleen was a teenager, she took over cooking for her family, eventually exploring the works of Julia Child and other cuisines. As an adult, her job in journalism allowed her to dabble in food writing and to indulge her love of restaurants, cooking, and food around the globe (including a brush with food poisoning from undercooked pig kidneys in China).

Kathleen’s witty observations of Cordon Bleu demonstrations and classes are culled from 600 pages of personal notes, 120 hours of audio recordings, and selections from the 300-plus recipes in the Cordon Bleu curriculum, so readers are instantly immersed into the grueling world of elite chefdom, including less appetizing ventures such as gutting fish, removing tendons and glands from chickens and guinea fowl, beheading rabbits, and chopping live lobsters in half (this book is definitely NOT for the squeamish). However, such visions are tempered by sweeter notes, including puff pastry and delicate sauces described in detail.

Kathleen describes her new friends and classmates in detail, along with her continuing explorations of Paris and her struggles to improve her rusty French. One of the book’s most touching moments involves a visit from her sister, who had planned on studying at the Sorbonne but gave up her place (and her dreams of studying in France) when their father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Small moments of everyday Parisian life provide a pleasant counterpart to break up the monotony of daily classes. Other domestic affairs include Kathleen’s marriage to Mike, a visit from annoying houseguests, and several medical emergencies.

The Sharper Your Knife includes many of the recipes alluded to in the text, and the back of the book thoughtfully includes a recipe index for faster retrieval. Traditional selections include Beef Braised in Red Wine, Chicken Cordon Bleu (which has no affiliation with the school), Rabbit or Chicken with Mustard Sauce, Chocolate Souffle, and Duck With Orange Sauce. Some of the author’s personal favorites include Minestrone Soup, Gumbo from Paris, and Banana and Nutella Crepes.

Weak entre in the new “Find Yourself thru Vacationing” genre by Laurel962
Since the mega-success of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love”, there has been a corresponding uptick in the number of autobiolgraphical books about people (mostly all women in their 30s) chucking it all, and finding soul-fulfilling contentedness in SOMETHING (anything) besides ordinary life. I suppose it is a natural reaction to all the books of the 80s and 90s, in which people (again, mostly women) found hitherto unforeseen joy in having kick-ass corporate jobs….in the new economy of the 21st century, what with downsizing and layoff and the technology bust, there isn’t a lot of joy in corporate America (or Europe) and it suddenly sounds wonderful to be doing something else….something more aimless and wild…heck, actually what it sounds like are all those books of the SEVENTIES that suggested you chuck it all, and hitchhike around the world and “find yourself”.

I guess my mom was right when she said “everything comes around again”. Well, here it is.

In this, her first book, Kathleen Flinn is a highly paid internet mucketymuck for Microsoft (*a TEENSY detail she um, forgets to mention but which is highly critical to her actions) who gets laid off, undoubtedly with the kind of severance pay and benefits that equal more than an average person earns in a lifetime. No, Ms. Flinn doesn’t mention who she worked for, but amazingly she loses her job in London, and doesn’t have to A. move back to the US or B. get another job FOR OVER A YEAR and C. she has enough cash to live in Paris, in luxury apartments, for over a year and D. attend an expensive, legendary cooking school … oh, and sorry I nearly forgot — she also got have a very cool wedding on a private island in Florida.

Inbetween, we get to read of her experiences at Le Cordon Bleu, the most famous cooking school in the world. They have official “branch” schools all over the world, including the US and Canada, but Ms. Flinn only wants to attend the Paris school, despite her grade-school level French. Much of the book is centered on her difficulties in communicating at school, and in every activity (from renting an apartment to ordering pizza), but we are never told why she choose to attend classes in a language she is not fluent in when, for example, there is a respected Le Cordon Bleu in Las Vegas and another one in Ottawa, Canada….and it can’t be the many charms of Paris, because very little of the book shows us Paris, or any part of France. No wonder, because the school is very demanding, and poor Ms. Flinn has to move her fiance overseas (he quits his lucrative job to do so, and “somehow” there is enough money for both of them to spend the year not working, in a luxury apartment, and eating out all the time) and also plan her wedding. Mike, her fiance, is an incredible stand-up guy — the perfect boyfriend/fiance/husband who will do anything for his woman, plus he’s handsome, successful (a pilot, an executive, etc.), very romantic, and he never argues or quarrels or leaves wet towels in the bathroom, or hates being in a country where he doesn’t speak the language. ‘Cuz he’s perfect.

Actually, the blurb on the cover says “the author discovers the love of her life right in front of her”, which had me thinking way until the halfway point of the book, that “perfect Mike” would reveal himself to be a creep, and that Ms. Flinn would fall in love with one of her Chef instructors! that’s how one-dimensional poor Mike is portrayed. But it turned out just to be confusing book-jacket blurb kerfluffle.

It turns out that what you learn at Le Cordon Bleu is how to cook very elaborate, very caloric old-fashioned “French restaurant food” — everything pureed and covered in creamy sauces. (If your parents ever took you out to eat at a ‘fancy’ restaurant with a French name, you know what I mean.) They seem insulated from anything that has happened in culinary history since around 1961. I’m not a professional cook, but it seems to me that this kind of “training” would be of minimal use to anybody hoping to work in or run a modern restaurant — and tellingly, Ms. Flinn’s classes are entirely attended by non-French students — not one is native French. In the entire 3-part, year long program, all her fellow students are either Asian, non-French European, Canadian, or American. Quite a few, including Flinn herself, are spending about $30,000 grand in tutition, plus living expenses in one of the world’s most expensive cities PLUS a year lost at a paying profession — to attend cooking school and then HAVE NO INTENTION TO COOK PROFESSIONALLY or work in a restaurant.

Now — this strikes me as awful peculiar. I don’t think the same would be true for students attending the Culinary Institute of America, for example. I appreciate people wanting to make a 180 degree career shift, in mid-life, but I admit that I am baffled by anyone wanting to make a huge investment in schooling, living overseas, etc., and yet “has no idea” why.

It’s certainly not to “live and work in Paris”, because with the demands of the school, Ms. Flinn doesn’t get around Paris all that much — she’s on the buses and trains a lot — and she never really hones her French beyond simple words.

There are places she goes — like the giant food market, Rungis — that I would have loved to have heard more about, or even seen some pictures (why is it that these new “find yourself” travelogues never seem to have any photos, when digital cameras are so tiny and easy to carry along?), but they are of less interest to the author than blow-by-blow descriptions of sauces she has made or puff pastry she practices on or the occasional small kitchen snafu (a duck falls to the floor!).

Actually, what I carried away was the strong feeling that, though she never admits to this, Ms. Flinn planned all along to write an “expose” about Le Cordon Bleu, and sell the manuscript, and that the cooking school and year-off in Paris, was all upfront costs to the eventual bestseller she was hoping for….investing her “Microsoft millions” into something even more lucrative. If so, then the subject is deceiving, because this is not about wannabe chef finally daring to live her dream — it’s an investment scheme. Not nearly as charming.

I did learn one genuinely interesting (though never fully explained) thing in the course of this book — the famous cooking school trains its chefs to cook on OLD ELECTRIC RANGES…yup, the kind of stove your mom probably cooked on. Yet, any restaurant in the world of any quality would use a very different kind of large, commercial gas range that is much hotter and fussier to work on. From my personal experience, I know it is very difficult to go back and forth from electric to gas, just on a home stove for home cooking — I can’t imagine how hard it would be to translate very complex, elaborate “gourmet” cooking styles and recipes this way! My guess is, it would be awful, and it would at the least badly confuse a new chef and retard their intial progress at a real job. It suggests something never discussed in the book — that maybe a very expensive French cooking school with unreliable electric ranges, and whose students are all foreign and not French, is maybe….MAYBE…sort of a tourist scam and not the place that real French chefs go to train.

I can’t prove this, but prior to reading this book, the idea would have never entered my head — like anyone else who likes cookbooks and cooking tv shows, I figured “Le Cordon Bleu” was the best of the best. Now, I seriously gotta wonder. Just like with Ms. Flinn — after several hundred pages of her life experience, I actually know less about her than I did on page one.

The Real Thing by Ted Bergey
Certainly a very interesting read. Our daughter was a 2001 Grand Diplome graduate, and so many of the author’s experiences ‘rang true’ to her description of the difficulties encountered, working with the mercurial chefs and the French people whose outlook is so very different from the Canadian take on things.

She worked ’sous-sol’ [in the prep kitchens] and translated for one term, learning even more about the organization from within. We had fun trying to guess who the chefs were, as described in the book, from her encounters related to us during the training and work ’stages’.

The author’s training experiences are very well described, enjoyable reading for foodies, and fun for cooking ‘wannabes’. [Think of armchair gardeners who read seed catalogs in the winter]. Her personal life crises and wedding planning are an additional plus in a well told tale. Consider reading Ruhlman’s book on training in the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) if you enjoy this shared experience.

Definitely a book that you will enjoy and recommend to friends.

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