Julissa Penaloza 803
Part 2 (Questions 9–20)
Directions (9–20): Below each passage, there are several multiple-choice questions. Select the best suggested answer to each question and record your answer on the separate answer sheet provided for you.
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Reading Comprehension Passage A
...Despite being overstretched, [Chef] Bugnard [of the Cordon Bleu cooking school] was infinitely kind, a natural if understated showman, and he was tireless in his explanations. He drilled us in his careful standards of doing everything the “right way.” He broke down the steps of a recipe and made them simple. And he did so with a quiet authority, insisting that we thoroughly ...view middle of the document...
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It was a remarkable lesson. No dish, not even the humble scrambled egg, was too much trouble for him. “You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made,” he said. “Even after you eat it, it stays with you—always.” ...
I was in pure, flavorful heaven at the Cordon Bleu. Because I had already established a good basic knowledge of cookery on my own, the classes acted as a catalyst for new ideas, and almost immediately my cooking improved. Before I’d started there, I would often put too many herbs and spices into my dishes. But now I was learning the French tradition of extracting the full, essential flavors from food—to make, say, a roasted chicken taste really chickeny. ...
But not everything was perfect. Madame Brassart [the school’s owner] had crammed too many of us into the class, and Bugnard wasn’t able to give the individual attention I craved. There were times when I had a penetrating question to ask, or a fine point that burned inside of me, and I simply wasn’t able to make myself heard. All this had the effect of making me work even harder.
I had always been content to live a butterfly life of fun, with hardly a care in the world. But at the Cordon Bleu, and in the markets and restaurants of Paris, I suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject. The best
way to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food—the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the...
