St. Joseph Native Explores Paris’ Less Storied Attractions Before Studying at Le Cordon Bleu Cooking Academy

The musician and St. Joseph native, Anthony Glise, holds 11 diplomas from seven countries. He normally spends his time immersed in music, concerts, recording CDs, and writing university textbooks. He is also the only non-French composer ever elected to the French Film Commission and has held professorships in the United States and Europe for more than 35 years.

After decades of international residence, Anthony has visited virtually every tourist destination in Europe. That’s especially true of Paris, which is just one hour from his home in northern France. However, as he said, “Once you’ve climbed the Eiffel Tower a few dozen times with visiting friends and family, you want some different experiences.”

Not for the Faint of Heart

Some of Anthony’s favorite “different experiences” include the Paris Sewer Museum, where you actually go down into the ancient sewer lines. Initially built in the 1300s, a majority of the modern Paris sewer system was constructed by Napoleon, who considered this massive system of subterranean tunnels to be one of his greatest accomplishments.

“You have to hold your breath a little,” laughed Anthony. “Until a few years ago, the tour included a boat ride through the underground rivers of sewage where you peacefully floated through the fragrant Parisian excrement.”

“Unfortunately,” he added, “they recently stopped the boat rides since occasionally a clumsy tourist would fall out of the boat and have to be fished out of the hideous waste water. Now, you walk on the paved sidewalks next to several miles of the sewage canals and visit the underground museum that explains the construction and maintenance of Paris’ sewer system, which is the largest in the world.”

“Largest” is not an exaggeration. Paris has over 1,300 miles of sewage canals, many of which are over 15 feet high (about the size of a subway tunnel), which transport over two million cubic meters of waste every 24 hours.

Another of Anthony’s fringe-favorite tourist sites is the Paris Catacombs.

“By the early 1800s, the Parisian cemeteries were literally overflowing. The pressure of piling one body on top of the previous was so severe that the foundations of neighboring houses often collapsed, and corpses would tumble into the residential cellars.”

“There is even 18th-century documentation that if you lived near the larger cemeteries, you couldn’t keep milk because the airborne bacteria from decomposing bodies caused the milk to go bad in a matter of hours.”

To address those sanitation issues, Napoleon launched a 2-year-long project to have every cemetery in Paris exhumed and all the skeletal remains relocated into a massive, 150-mile labyrinth of tunnels under Paris, which now holds over six million skeletons—over three times the number of people who live in Paris today.”
“Ironically,” he continued, “the workers eventually got bored with simply stacking the remains and they started making designs with the bones.”

“In one section of the Catacombs, they even constructed a little chapel complete with a baptismal where workers attended church services—all made out of skeletons!”

These more extreme touristic sites are fine if you don’t mind fragrantly offensive or macabre experiences, but what do you do once even these touristic destinations become old news?

“You study something!” Anthony said with a laugh.

Even Further Off the Beaten Path

Anthony’s most recent adventure was studying at the famed Parisian cooking school, “Le Cordon Bleu,” where Julia Child, TV star Giada De Laurentiis, Mary Berry, and countless other celebrated chefs learned their craft.

“I cook with a vengeance and have studied with several excellent chefs, but a chance to study at the Cordon Bleu in Paris was something I’ve always dreamed of,” and this summer, Anthony’s dream came true.
“The classes focused on sauces and juices,” he said, “and we built a seven-course meal every day, each dish with a different sauce. Sauces and juices unify a meal. They add a magical depth to the food and turn a good dish into a culinary masterpiece.”

In traditional French cuisine, there are many categories of chefs who work in a professional restaurant, and each chef has very specific duties.

As Anthony explained, “Besides the ‘Maître Chef de Cuisine’ who oversees the entire kitchen, you have the ‘Sommelier’ who manages the different wines for each course.”

“Then,” he continued, “you have different ‘Sous Chefs’ who assemble the meals, and each Sous Chef typically has a specialty in meats or vegetables, etc.”

“There’s also the ‘Pâtissier’ who manages cold appetizers, pastries, and desserts, and finally the ‘Saucier,’ or Sauce Master, who is responsible for warm appetizers and sauces for everything on the menu.”

“I wanted to study sauces,” he said, “because a Saucier is considered third in command in a professional kitchen. They have to know the recipes of each course and pair them with a sauce that complements, but doesn’t overpower the featured ingredient.”

While there are only five “Mother Sauces” in traditional French cuisine, there are countless derivative “Daughter Sauces” that involve additional steps and ingredients.

“My current favorite sauce is a green crab coulis, which is a daughter sauce of a fish velouté, or fortified fish broth,” he said.

“You sauté baby crabs in olive oil, flambée them with cognac, and deglaze them with white wine. Then you keep adding fish broth, slowly reduce everything for several hours, then add butter, cream, and crush, strain, and reduce everything again for the final dish.”

“This isn’t fast food,” laughed Anthony. “Many sauces can take from five hours to several days to prepare, but as our Master Chef said, ‘If you take time, you taste love!’”

So next time you’re in a new city, visit the obligatory tourist spots, but then take a few steps off the beaten path and take a class on anything that interests you and if you decide to study cooking, you won’t just go home with pictures; you’ll take the experience home in your tummy and you can reconstruct those memories over and over again in your own kitchen.