Review of Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School
“A beautiful story of a writer's adventures in the world of baking: instructions in puff pastry become lessons in eating and living well. Wise, funny, and warm—Denise Roig's Butter Cream is a sumptuous read—both confection and feast. I loved every last bite.”
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“Denise Roig's Butter Cream proved to be a very pleasant (dare I say 'tasty') surprise. When it first rose out of the package, I had my doubts, saying to myself, 'I hate butter and I'm not all that crazy about cream, so this book starts off with two strikes against it.' But this is a case of literally not judging a book by its cover. Or perhaps a case of making sure to read the fine print in the subtitle: 'A Year in a Montreal Pastry School.' In fact, by the time I got to 'fin' 250 pages later, I realized. I had undergone a thoroughly enjoyable (and educational) experience, not to mention a much greater appreciation of all those pastry-chefs-in-waiting who aspire to creating the crème caramel sans parallèle.
Roig manages to combine the light and light-hearted in the world of intense pastry-schooling (and the fine art of baking) with a real grasp of the various human interactions involved in such an endeavour. These interactions reflect both those between teachers and students and among the students themselves. Roig's strengths lie in her ability to reveal human interaction in circumstances both rewarding and nerve-wracking. Not that this should come as a surprise: Roig is an established, veteran writer of both non-fiction and fiction, with several collections of short stories (A Quiet Night and a Perfect End and Any Day Now), and an experienced freelancer with more than 30 years in the field.
Through the teacher-student connection, we witness the intensity of the actual learning program: how one goes about creating the various basic ingredients that go into the classic pastries and desserts. Through the connection we also get the intensity of the interpersonal clashes and bonds that the students have to sort out for themselves. The following excerpt from the chapter entitled, 'Butter Cream 101' encapsulates Roig's approach:
It's the start of Module Nine. Whipped Rising Batters: choux pastry (the light and fluffy stuff of which eclairs are made), sponge cakes and meringues. I've got a killer cold, as do Michele, Rena and Trina. Everyone's hacking. Baking fatigue has set in. But Claudette is jolly this morning: 'In this trade you have to be enthusiastic even at one in the morning!' she says, and proceeds to teach us the most basic cake on the planet: le génoise. Sponge cake, my mother would call it. Génoise looks, even tastes, simple. After all, it's only made with eggs, sugar and flour. But this is French pastry, so it isn't. Génoise is a fragile little thing.
A sense of fragility and the overcoming of deficits, both personal and social, threads its way through the book. So does the idea of growing, of fulfilling certain dreams, of being able to look in the mirror while congratulating oneself. Roig has the ability to pass these feelings on to the reader and to make all of us appreciate what goes into achievement, what it means to accomplish something, and the sacrifices that need to be made in order to do so.”
“With TV channels devoted to food and the cult of celebrity chefs, gourmet cooking is fast becoming the latest obsession of millions. One such "foodie" is Montreal freelance journalist, writer and teacher Denise Roig. After years of teaching journalism, she'd had her fill of students who couldn't construct a grammatical sentence. One day, she stopped at the neighbourhood store of the Pearson School of Culinary Arts and unexpectedly found herself following her passion for baking.
Published by the Winnipeg-based Signature Editions, Butter Cream is the captivating chronicle of her experiences, a memoir of her time in the kitchen learning new things -- not only about baking, but also about herself. Like Bill Buford in his bestselling memoir Heat, Roig put her career aside to become a food writer. Then she headed back to school for a year to learn how to make pastry and desserts.
Roig lays it all out in the narrative, honestly sharing her fears about why she is there and whether this is a wise career move for her at age 56 and the oldest member of the class. The hard days are very hard, forcing her to look deep within herself to try to understand her frustrations and anger: "I hate being last or weakest," she writes. "I hate not knowing what I'm doing, hate being the slowest, the oldest. I like being good at things, which is one of the reasons this pastry course is so hard on me."
But alongside the fears and the struggles, she shares her passion for baking (beginning when she was 17) and the memories of learning from her mother, aunt and grandmother, who made the family desserts from scratch. The book is studded with recipes, for butter cream and crème caramel, biscotti and breads. Each recipe is a link to key moment in her story, whether about the thrill of learning new ways to make old recipes, or the fear of making a new recipe the wrong way.
She bonds with many of her fellow classmates, their lives converging with hers, creating a shared experience. Some are there are there to make a career of pastry and baking, others simply to learn. Throughout the year they come together and sometimes even tear apart, the pressure and the pace wreaking havoc on personal relationships. There is a darker side to her story, too -- the intolerance of some toward the six Chinese students in the class and the theft of someone's gear leading to the dismissal of a classmate. The push and pull between the instructors also create difficulties, putting the students between their teachers.
Roig writes with the passion of a devoted foodie. She describes the recipes and the resulting pastries so clearly and with such affection that one wants to run off to the bakery to pick up a few pastries. In between, she peppers the book with snippets of her own life and history -- her background in dance, her beginnings as a writer, stories of her family and children. In some places this works, but in others the personal tidbits can be rather jarring, as they force the reader to pause to figure out the connections.
Her writing is clipped and to the point. The short sentences evocatively capture the highs and lows, the need to practise a skill until it becomes second nature, the realities of working hard. Roig also frankly depicts the difficulties between people working together closely for extended periods of time: the petty arguments, the exasperation and the exhaustion, the frustrations that build into fights. In the end Roig realizes it the sum of the experiences that keep her going, the enthusiasm and the camaraderie of her classmates balanced by the hard work and struggles.
Butter Cream is a charming book about the courage to follow one's passion and the rewards of taking such a chance.”
“After a tired day of teaching, Montreal author Denise Roig lingered over a photo of happy pastry makers – and it changed her life.
Inspired by the picture on the back of a cookbook, Roig decided to live her dream. She would attend Montreal’s Pearson School of Culinary Arts and then use these credentials to become a food writer. And why not chronicle her school adventures into a culinary memoir? Piece of cake. Right? "The idea for the book came from the fact that I needed to escape," explains Roig. "And my closest friend gave me a chocolate cookbook by Canadian Living. Well, on the back there was this picture of women baking, and I thought they looked so happy.
"I realized that if I did this thing I wanted to do for a long time, I could bring my dreams closer." Roig insists that if you follow your dreams, you never know what can happen. What happened to Roig was her third published book, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School, complete with recipes lovingly culled from her time at "food boot camp."
Revealing the culinary secrets of food professionals, Butter Cream offers a turbulent insider account of pastry school survival. Through the eyes of Roig, readers watch her bake and bond with 24 classmates, as they all strive to become pastry chefs. In the book, the school’s pastry kitchen is a metaphor for life – rife with friendships, enemies, and of course, recipes gone bad. Although the school’s 22 exam modules provided constant challenge, writing a book while attending school was the ultimate test.
"I wrote during class time, with lots of my notes on recipes. I thought I would come home each night and put my notes into the computer," says Roig. "But I was too tired. It was test after test; the expectations kept growing and people did fall apart. I barely had time to breathe, let alone write.
"So it took me almost a year to rewrite my notes. Right after school, I went on self-imposed retreats to a monastery outside Montreal to decipher the rest of my notes."
Another item Roig completed after graduating was a series of sixteen holiday baking stories for the Montreal Gazette. She plans to continue writing food stories from her new home in the United Arab Emirates, while her husband works as the foreign editor for an Abu Dhabi newspaper.
"I had always been interested in food writing, but I didn’t have any credentials. These days people need more credentials besides saying ‘Oh, I love to bake!’ Now that I’m a qualified pastry chef, with a book, my hope is to write food stories from Abu Dhabi. I was shocked that French pastry is very big there. So this is one story I plan to do.
"The secret to making great pastry is international. It’s about passion and devotion – in any country. You don’t do pastry to make tons of money, so you better love it.
"It’s kind of like writing. And look at me, I’ve chosen these two professions.”
“Roig's Butter Cream is the memoir of one year spent completing the French pastry program at Montreal's Pearson School of the Culinary Arts. The year unfolds in 251 pages of breathless present tense. Readers accompany Roig to the pastry classroom or "lab" by day and to her kitchen for the late nights of baking homework, vicariously taste blissful mouthfuls of cream, and witness the endless race to fit everything in when one is mother, wife, writer, and student. The narrative voice is unabashedly authobiographical: the "I" narrator has authored the same collections of short stories as Roig herself. Classmates and teachers appear under their own names in the book and the acknowledgements. I was struck by her candour--confessions of exam jitters, of being the oldest student in a class of youngsters, even of earlier bouts with an eating disorder. Rather than being a confession, it is a memoir. But while memoirs are typically written by famous people who move in circles of equally famous and therefore interesting people, Butter Cream is a memoir of interesting people, told by someone who simultaneous signals and diminishes her expertise--perhaps uneasy with the genre's need to engage readers through the celebrity of its author? While Roig points to the extraordinary tenacity and talent of Montreal chefs--those at Pearson, in their own bakeries or Montreal's top restaurants and hotels--the climactic moments of the book have to do with triumphs in the classroom, gestures of friendship, and the emerging dynamic of a group that starts the academic year as a heterogenous bunch and becomes, through dint of trial, error, and bomb scare, a team.”
“In Denise Roig's honest memoir, the pastry kitchen becomes a metaphor for life with all of its rough edges and unpredictabilities. By the end of her yearlong course, Roig has cut through the conflicts to recognize the beauty of relationships that, like butter cream, hold together when handled just right. This is a charming book, written with sensitivity and verve.”
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