Turns out that in this case, I didn't need to. I got lucky. The school and its team met and exceeded our expectations. Now I have the experience to do a much more considered evaluation of residential cooking schools, should we ever do another. Here are the lines of questioning I'd follow to make sure any experience was as good as the one we just had.
Confirm that you like the terroir, and that the school honours it.
Seems obvious, but worth saying: Don't go away to a foreign cooking school unless you really love the cuisine, because you're going to be completely immersed in it. Any proper culinary experience should be sunk into the place it's based, sourcing locally, exposing you to local producers, drawing the food and wine from local traditions. In a cuisine more foreign to us, it might be appropriate to learn the basics of a national cuisine (Moroccan, Thai) in one place. But France and Italy are highly regional, and if you're considering either of those places you want to exploit that. Had fondue or Fish Provencal been on the menu, I would have been suspicious. Of course, that did mean a week of duck, goat's cheese, garlic, pastry and vast quantities of rose. Abstemious vegetarians would have been horrified.
Ask for agenda specifics.
Many cooking schools provide only sketchy outlines. I now realise just how different schools could be. Our days started at a civilised 9 and usually ended at 6, but every moment in between was packed. It wasn't unusual to work on six or eight dishes a day. This might have been too rapid a pace for some. Others might have wanted more. Try to get a specific agenda. Ask what recipes you're doing and how long you'll be spending in the kitchen. How much free time will you have? What's the balance of sightseeing to cooking and is that sightseeing related to the food?
What are the facilities like?
We loved the dual-centre aspect of our Gascon course, going between restaurant facilities and a home-style kitchen. The latter had been carefully designed to accommodate students, however, with plenty of room for each of us to have our own workspace. Other cooking schools have complete workspace/stovetop/oven set-ups for each student. I think that would have been overkill for our small group, and we learned from each other by all working at the same counter. There's no right or wrong here, but there could be a lot of variables and it's worth asking. Note that for very tall people, counter height can be an issue, especially if you're bending over one for six hours straight. If standing for long stretches is an issue, ask about stools.
Teacher-to-student balance.
Obviously, the better the ratio, the more attention you'll get. But this isn't just about numbers. It's worth asking how much the teacher demonstrates v. how much you actually produce. How hands-on are the instructors as far as evaluating your individual style and coaching you, specifically? Assuming you're in a foreign country, what are the instructor's native languages? You're probably going to want to get into significant detail, and you want to be able to do that in a language you share. Check out TripAdvisor, which is probably better at giving a clue on this kind of thing than a school's marketing material. Personalities are important to making a course work, and you want to try to get a sense of what the people running it are actually like.
What other types of people?
Speaking of personalities ... the other people on the course are the big, intangible factor you can't control. It's definitely a risk factor for this kind of holiday. You're going to be thrown together with people you've never met, to spend almost every waking minute with them for days. We were lucky to have a fun, generally homogenous group. Yet one with enough variety in age, sex and life experience to make things interesting. I have a friend who went to a similarly formatted course in which her other students ... two much older people, somewhat unfriendly, with no interest in socialising ... cast a cloud over the whole thing. Our host told stories of hard drinking, hard partying groups with more interest in the unlimited wine than in the nuances of pastry prep. Had people like that been in the same class as us, it would have been tough going. It's hard to predict, but you can certainly ask questions about average ages, where people tend to come from, what people's interest levels are, etc., to at least try to end up on a course with classmates of similar outlook.
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