Five key considerations when hunting for a residential cooking school

I stumbled on the Gascon Cookery School without a lot of research, encouraged to book by circumstance and a positive review in Country Life magazine.  I quickly realised that there are many variables that determine the quality of a cooking school, and a lot of research I probably should have done.

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.

Cooking school top tips to use in your own kitchen

The lasting value of any cooking school comes from the tips and techniques you pick up while there. Every recipe you could desire is free; just an internet search away.  Getting tips from experts and specific coaching on how your cooking style could be better, however, is a rare and wonderful thing.

Here's an overview of the top things we took away from our days in the kitchen with David and Bernard.

Knives and knife skills are at the heart of all cooking.  Get better at these, and everything else will improve.  I make the common mistake of extending my index finger along the top of the knife, rather than wrapping it securely around the handle.  It slows me down and limits my control.  I'm working on that.  And on the technique of holding whatever I'm cutting with a half-clenched fist, bent-in fingers anchoring the food and protruding knuckles forming a safety guard.  David spotted these issues early on, and corrected me each time I slipped into my old ways, which helped enormously.

Keep your knife steel ready and sharpen up your edges before each cooking session.  Ours lived in a drawer, only used when things started to feel dull.  Wrong!  This simple habit ensures that your blades are always in top shape.

Dread dicing onions because they make you cry?  It's because you're crunching rather than gliding.  Onions release their eye-watering chemical when you bruise their skin.  Which you'll do if you bang or crunch your knife down on them.  Forget that scene in Julie and Julia.  A smooth, gentle glide through the vegetable with a very sharp knife doesn't bruise anything, thus will keep your eyes clear.

When boning out meat, let gravity do half the work for you.  Hold the bone so the meat is falling down and away, then use your knife in swift, small cuts to assist the natural process of the unsupported flesh falling away from the bone.

Stocks are the flavour backbone of so many dishes, and this course confirmed something I already do.  Keep bags in your freezer for scraps and bones.  I always have one for poultry, but need to start one for fish and another for beef.  When the bag fills up, take it out and make stock.  In general, it's always better to buy your meat on the bone.  Not only is it better value for money, but everything you cut off goes into your stock, which then becomes your sauce.

Use kitchen roll (paper towel) to absorb fats from the top of cooling stocks.  I generally put the stock in the fridge and skim the chilled fats off the top, but this inevitably includes stock in the fat.  Fold the paper into a cartouche to cover the surface of your container, and dab.  The rising fat naturally latches on to the paper, leaving you with clear broth.

All those dire warnings about touching pastry as little as possible can be ignored.  David had us treating our shortcrust like bread, kneading it until the glutens formed and the dough felt stretchy.  The result was the crispest pastry I've ever made.

Of course, it also could have been because of this top tip:  When starting out the pastry by cutting your butter and flour together, take lumps between your fingers and raise your hand into the air as you  work the ingredients into crumbs, letting them fall back into the bowl from a height.  This ads air and makes your crumbs finer.

Keep an old wire sieve around for steaming large veg.  Invert it, squash it into the appropriate shape, pop it in a pan of simmering water and put your veg on top.  Particularly ideal for artichoke.

Keep a mix of good quality sea salt and pepper, rough ground, mixed in a container for constant and easy access.  You almost always use the two together in recipes, so why keep going for two separate containers?

Use only light brown sugar on the top of your creme brûlée.  White will never crystallise properly to form the crunchy top you want, and you'll spend much more time on the attempt, warming the cream.  below that's supposed to be cold and dense.  Dark brown, on the other hand, will burn too easily.

Gingerbread isn't just for Christmas.  Play around with using it as a sweet and spicy counterpoint for savoury dishes.  We learned that it's an excellent accompaniment for foie gras.  More surprising was Bernard's technique for warming goat's cheese to put atop salads.  Place your goat's cheese on a thin slice of gingerbread.  Wrap like a parcel in bric pastry.  (This is a North African sheet pastry similar to phyllo.  In the UK, carried by Waitrose or available for order online.  You can use phyllo as an alternative.)  Fry in a pan to crisp the pastry and melt the cheese.  The gingerbread is hardly noticeable as a separate element, but provides a subtle flavour punch that really kicks this basic up a notch.

Finally ... every cooking programme points this out, but most people ignore it.  Read the recipe first, then do your mise en place.  That is, your set up ... measure your ingredients, put everything out and ready for use.  Even under supervision, in an advanced course, a fair few preparations went to the bin because someone had mis-read a step, or mis-measured an ingredient.  Prepare properly for smooth results.

The Gascony Cookery School: I can't imagine residential cooking schools get better than this

I've done a lot of one-day cooking courses, and found something to love about each one.  But this holiday had a new edge: a residential course.  Four intensive days of cooking with a bit of gastronomic sightseeing, deep in the heart of one of France's most famous regions for cuisine.

It was fabulous.   So great, in fact, I'm a bit worried about what will happen if we try another.  No stories I've heard from people who've done cooking-centred holidays seem to be quite as fabulous as the experience we've just had.

The Gascony Cookery School combines the expert attention of two professional chefs with a stunning location and a delectable repertoire of dishes.  Add a week of lovely weather, a pleasant combination of fellow students, and evenings of free-flowing local wines, and you start to imagine the magic.  And, of course, we ate like princes on the gourmet fare we'd created earlier each day.

Given our experience, we'd signed up to the advanced course.  The highlights for me started with plenty of work on butchery skills, including top tips on knife care, boning out a delicate quail, taking apart an entire duck (head and feet still on), tunnel boning that bird's thighs and legs and boning out lamb noisettes.  Stuffing was a revelation.  After working with that quail we wrapped its boneless body around a ball of stuffing, creating what looked like a complete bird for roasting but would deliver effortless, boneless slices to the diner.  (See the photo below.)  Given what a pain quail usually is to eat, this is a blockbuster dish.  We did another stuffing for the duck legs, and yet another for duck neck.  On the latter, the duck skin essentially becomes a crispy crackling casing for a version of pork sausage.

Duck, in fact, was the most memorable meat of the course.  Not a surprise here in the home of foie gras, where a whole industry devoted to the birds' enlarged livers produces massive, unctuously-rich breasts, thighs and legs as a bi-product.  We spent a morning producing foie gras ourselves, from traditional preserving to more modern, gourmet approaches.  (This was a customised touch for us, since it's a feature of the basic course we hadn't attended.)  We treated breasts for air-dried

preservation, making a kind of duck prosciutto that's common in Gascony but rarely seen outside of it.  And is, as you'd imagine, delicious. 

We made confit duck legs after rendering the fat from all the skin scraps and extra parts we trimmed off while breaking down the bird.  When you're paying £3 for a small jar of duck fat, the confit process (simmering meat in its own fat to preserve it) seems outrageously expensive.  When you see how much fat comes off one of these ducks, you realise it's the most simple, organic form of preservation imaginable.  The more I cook, the more I find buying parts only rather than whole birds a huge waste.  You can work miracles with the carcass, scraps and offcuts.  

Pastry work came next on my appreciation list, giving me a new confidence with pate brisee (basic shortcrust pastry for pies and tarts) and a comfort with frangipane that will no doubt make it a regular on our dinner party menus.  On another day, I came to a full understanding of exactly why my Christmas croquembouche was a disaster, and how I can do it again without worry. The course also de-mystified savoury mousses, my experience with a tasty prawn version encouraging me to explore the whole genre more.

I walked away with a sheaf of recipes, but they aren't really the point of an experience like this.  I probably had directions for most of this stuff in the cookbooks already in our kitchen.  It's the tips and techniques that ultimately differentiate a school like this, and I got plenty ... from correcting my knife grip to getting more air into my pastry.  So many, in fact, that I'll devote the next entry to the top tips from the programme.

I have no doubt the quality of both instruction and recipes, plus overall enjoyment, was down to the trio running things.  I suspect I got very lucky on my first try.  I doubt many residential cooking programmes have teams as competent, dedicated and interesting as this.

A winning Anglo-French team
English proprietors David and Vicky Chance moved to Gramont in 2002, and it's easy to see what drew them.  The village is a tiny rural idyll ideally suited to tourism, clinging to a lofty hilltop with views on clear days all the way to the distant Pyrenees.  Fewer than 20 permanent residents live in the string of historic properties that radiate out from the Renaissance chateau at its heart, but holiday lets and cooking school classes can easily double that number.  I worried that the locals might resent the incomers, but it was quite the opposite.

On the first night, we were invited to a barbecue at the pint-sized town hall, thrown open to allow one of the residents to show all his neighbours and friends his photos from his recent trip to the Grand Canyon.  We didn't stay for dinner (David was cooking for us), but that welcoming insight into country village life was charming and, I suspect, not unusual.

Gramont's heart is comprised of a trio of buildings:  the chateau, the Romanesque church facing it and a restaurant called Le Petit Feuillant between the two.  The restaurant, which is also home to an extraordinary little museum on the history of local wine and Armagnac production, is a second anchor to the cooking school.  The Chances renovated a group of old farm buildings in the shadow of the Chateau, little more than a 100-yard stroll from the Petit Feuillant.  As they became close to the owner, Bernard Corbiere, they started to think those renovated rooms could become more than the standard gite or chambre d'hôte accommodation provided by most of the Brits who restore properties here.  David also had a history in restaurants, and the Chances ran a catering company back in the UK.

The rest is history.  And, given the accolades the place is getting in the international press, a very impressive history too.

Cooking alternates between Bernard in his restaurant and David in his impressive farmhouse kitchen, where a large, marble-topped island can accommodate up to eight students at once.  (We had six.)  Vicky is an omnipresent "back of house", keeping everything running and stepping to the fore on market day to lead tours of the local towns.  The three make a formidable team, and the variety of interaction adds to both the education and the overall enjoyment.  You will get more from Bernard, however, if you can follow some basic French as, unsurprisingly, he's far more animated when he can swing into his native tongue.  Had the nuns told me that I'd be using my French to understand the nuances of gourmet cuisine in later years, I might have studied harder.

 One of the points of any cooking school, of course, is that you get to taste what you make, and the dining alternates locations, too.   Most lunches and some dinners were in the picturesque Petit Feuillant, which is clearly a "destination restaurant" for many ... tourist and local alike ... who'll drive some distance across this rural landscape for Bernard's food.  (He's famous for his award-winning garlic soup, and does a mean cassoulet.)  Happy hour started every night by about 6pm on David and Vicky's loggia; essentially a roofed, outdoor dining room running the length of the main house with jaw-dropping views over the countryside.  Al fresco dinners here, sometimes including other British expats who drop in to sample students' efforts (and then reciprocate with a tour of their restored mill house later in the course) are a perfect way to end a day.

Not for the faint hearted
This is a serious agenda that works students hard.  We were exhausted and much in need of those happy hour drinks.  Every dinner included amazement at how much we produced in just one day, and most people turned in by 10 pm.  I sense that many other residential culinary courses pad out the cooking with lots of sightseeing and breaks by a pool.  Our agenda did feature two outings ... one day to a local market, another dedicated to local wine and Armagnac ... but neither made any concession to the prime objective of cooking.  We were in the kitchen before and after the sightseeing.  There's even a bit of deadline pressure, as at least one meal is produced by the team restaurant-style, David organising you into an assembly line to produce elegant, fine-dining style plates at a rapid pace.  Getting a large table served more or less at the same time, with food still piping hot and the presentation of each identical is an art.  Thankfully, on other nights the team plated and served what we'd made, as we slumped in relief.

Both Bencards were keen to get up to our elbows in duck carcasses, of course.  But there's an option for partners who don't want to cook (offered at a cheaper rate).  They dine with the rest of the students and come on the outings, with free time while we're cooking.  We had one such husband on our course, and he turned out to be a brilliant addition.  With no insight into the production, he gave us valuable commentary on the dishes.  The course price is £1,230 per person, which includes all of the instruction, the outings, accommodation in beautifully restored rooms done up in French country style, all the food and free flowing wine and libations throughout.

For both the basic and advanced course, you usually arrive on a Sunday and depart Friday morning.  It's advertised as a six day course, but the first and last days are only dining and arrivals or departures; cooking school is just the four middle days.  When I originally considered the course, four days seemed a bit short.  With this level of immersion, however, it was plenty.  Frankly, I'm not sure my brain could have taken in much more, and I certainly couldn't have kept eating at that pace.

If there's any drawback to cooking school in Gascony, it's the richness of the cuisine.  We were making and consuming dishes that most of us would consider to be special occasion food.  For every lunch and dinner.

It is a glutton's fantasy, but by day four you start to edge towards too much of a good thing.  (Anyone who uses the words "too rich" more than twice a year may want to consider a different cuisine.)  David, Vicky and Bernard wisely know when to pull the plug.

And, of course, by ending such a potent, concentrated experience just a bit sooner than you might want, the Gramont team wisely leaves you hungry for more.  I have my greedy eyes on their charcuterie course.  Or, better yet, if you can get six people together, David will customise a week just for you.  Who's in?

Here's why foodies need to wake up to Gascony

People greeted the announcement that I was off to Gascony for a fortnight with polite puzzlement.

Many had some sense that it was a southern bit of France that was not Provence.  Foodies knew it as the home of foie gras and Armagnac.  Literary fans recognised the home province of d'Artagnan, history buffs the lands of the great Eleanor of Aquitaine.  But nobody I spoke to had ever been here, and even those who could call those headline facts to mind knew little more.

An article in Conde Nast Traveler magazine (read it here) had triggered my curiosity two years ago.  The author had compared Gascony to Tuscany, writing with giddy enthusiasm that the French province was far better.  I wanted to investigate this travesty.  And, given that my husband wasn't keen on the Italian heartland, but is a Francophile who frequently worships at the twin altars of duck and Armagnac, I knew Gascony would be a popular choice.  When we stumbled upon an article about   a cooking school in the region while researching destinations for the husband's big birthday year, it seemed a sign to take some action.

Sitting here on the patio of our gite (holiday cottage) between the ancient towns of Condom and Montreal, eight holiday days behind me and seven stretching ahead, I understand where the Traveler writer was coming from.  The similarities between this place and the Tuscany I know so well are clear ... perhaps one of the reasons I feel more at ease here than in any other part of France I've visited.

Both places share the heritage of the Roman empire, most notably with established roads between towns and a long history of wine making.  In the Middle Ages, both suffered through brutal conflicts (Guelphs v Ghibillines in Italy, English v French in Gascony) that drove their people into fortified hilltop towns. Civil war is hell, but at least the Medieval version left an impressive architectural legacy.  Both were mostly left out of industrial revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, preserving

a highly agricultural, village-based way of life.  That also meant gruelling poverty in both places until very recently, when increases in tourism, food and wine export, and expats restoring old properties have changed the financial base.

The landscape of both places shares sensuously undulating hills, often criss-crossed by vineyards.  Ancient fortified villages sit on hilltops, their venerable church steeples providing navigation points.  Lines of tall, thin trees border the roads, though Tuscany's cypresses give way to poplars and oaks in Gascony.  The Tuscan hills are higher, its woods thicker.  Gascony is a gentler place and, in this verdant month of May, seems a richer, greener one.  Extremes of temperature rule out olive production here, so Gascon vineyards alternate with fields of grain.  Wildflowers dot the verges and wild roses climb through hedges.

The cultural edge, admittedly, must go to Tuscany.  There's plenty of history in Gascony.  Picturesque towns, intimate chateaux, charming little churches.  But few blockbuster sights, and no masterpieces.  If you want a cultural holiday, you're still off to Italy.  If you want to relax, drink in the whole scene and do a little gentle tourism, Gascony's for you.

The pace of life is similar in both places, with the world still coming to a halt for two hours in the middle of the day.  Tourists be damned, we're closing up and going home for lunch.  Because in both places, food and drink are sacred. Both cuisines spring from the frugality of a peasant tradition that exploits beans and stale bread, both start many dishes with the comfortable base of onion and garlic, and both have a thriving truffle industry (though we've yet to bump into the latter in Gascony).  Both stick to local produce and traditions and, by embracing that concept of terroir, it's in gastronomy that the regions differ most.

The duck rules here in Gascony, followed closely by the goose and the pig.  (In Tuscany, beef and wild boar are the celebratory meats.)  Gascony supports neither olives or, surprisingly, dairy herds, so the typical cooking medium is neither olive oil or butter.  It's duck fat.  We pay £3 for a little jar at home; you'll get 1 kilo blocks here for less.  We learned why when we broke down one of the region's famous foie gras ducks.  With up to an inch of fatty skin all over their bodies, the rendered scraps from one duck will keep a kitchen going for a while. And, it turns out, the saturated fats in duck are better for you than either olive oil or butter.  Gascon ducks are bigger and more succulent than any other duck you've had, because they're all corn-fed, gluttonous by-products of foie gras creation.

Something of which I'll write more in a later entry.

This is, admittedly, a heavier cuisine.  There's more of a pastry tradition here, while the Tuscans will default to fruit, ices or gelato in a natural response to their hotter climate.  Potatoes take the place of pasta.  Both regions produce a wide range of wines to wash all that food down with, but here Gascony may have the edge on variety.  Tuscany offers an abundance of reds with some average whites in the minority; Gascony is heavier on whites, and produces lots of roses and reds.

We haven't found any exceptional local bottles yet but, of course, Gascony is a satellite of the ancient regional capital of Bordeaux.  Thus the cheap immediately local shares shelf space with world-beating almost-locals.  But Gascony really edges ahead on the other alcoholic drinks.  Beyond wine, Tuscany offers Vin Santo and Limoncello.  Gascony can give you the sweet stuff in a wine called Floc, three regions of Armagnac production and a variety of Armagnac-based liqueurs.  One of the latter, called Pousse Rapiere, is my favourite discovery of the trip thus far.

On one very important front, Gascony is surging far ahead.  It is, quite simply, easier.  Holidays in Italy always balance delights of food and culture with hard work.  The roads are always in poor repair, processes always seem a bit inefficient and our Italian holiday rentals have been charming but a bit worse-for-wear.  Perhaps we've simply gotten lucky here, but Gascony seems to have moved past all those problems.  Roads are in great shape, signage is clear.  Grocery stores are sparkling models of convenience.  Both places we've stayed are models of renovation, retaining historic elements like beams and stonework while giving us modern, spotlessly clean, comfortably furnished interiors.

In short, the Traveler writer was right.  Gascony is one of the best kept secrets in Europe, especially for gastronomes.  In future entries I'll explain why.

Experimental Reynolds leaves legacy beyond the pretty faces

There's a small show on at The Wallace Collection right now that will captivate anyone interested in the process of creating art.  But more importantly, it will shed new light on an artist we tend to take for granted in England:  Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Anyone with even a cursory interest in art history knows Reynolds was a famous portraitist and an important man in Georgian England.  He founded the Royal Academy, knew everyone who mattered, was exceedingly popular and very rich.  But it's that very popularity which allows us to ignore him.  His paintings seem to be in every English country house, his statue stands over us in the RA courtyard, his portraits of the great and the good illustrate history books.  He's become 18th century wallpaper.

Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint focuses on the innovation of his technique.  It's a small show, with only about 20 paintings in two rooms, but it makes its points brilliantly.

Reynolds was the first portraitist to get his subjects moving, painting them in action shots.  Soldiers on the battlefield, actresses on stage in their best roles and here, the young painter himself.  Palette in right hand, left raised to shield his eyes as he stares out at you, he's cleverly turned the tables so that the viewer becomes the sitter.

When he painted people more than once, he made sure the second portrait looked nothing like the first.  That's illustrated here by two takes on the courtesan Kitty Fisher, hanging together for the first time ever to allow you to compare and contrast.

Much of this innovation was, no doubt, driven by marketing.  Reynolds was working in a competitive market and wanted to stand out.  In the crowded group hangs that characterised the art shows of his day, his creative compositions would have ensured that.  Keenly attuned to modern fashions, he made sure he showed his subjects at the height of current trends.  There's a fascinating pair of portraits of sisters here, in which x-rays revealed he re-painted the hair of the canvass he did first to ensure that both ladies appeared with a current coif when the pair was complete.

Most of the paintings have x-rays displayed beside them, and it's fascinating to see the choices and changes Reynolds made. A neckline lowered here, an arm raised to a pensive pose there, all are carefully considered edits to get to his final result.

If Reynolds was an innovator with composition, he was a bit of a mad scientist with painting materials, and that's explored here as well.  We learn that even at the time he was working, this was an issue, with potential clients worried that his experiments would go wrong.  Some did at the time, more did over time.  Exemplary disasters are displayed here.  Some of those 18th century aristocrats weren't as pale and pasty as you think; the carmine he used for fleshy pinks has faded away.  Other problems have plagued an infant John the Baptist who's been so heavily restored over the years all of Reynolds' nuance has been stripped away.  It's an insipid, uninspired thing now, giving brilliant insight into how the little touches separate the ordinary from the masterpiece.

The show left me hungry for more.  Specifically, for more about Reynolds' relationship with women and their role in the 18th century.  His "proper" ladies are gentle and demure, never meeting your eyes as they coyly look down, or thoughtfully contemplate the horizon.  The actresses and women of more flexible morality stare frankly out of their frames.  In portraits like the extraordinary one of Mrs. Abington displayed here (on the far left of my photo above), Reynolds makes it obvious that these were fascinating, compelling women brimming with confidence.  Were the aristocrats the same, and unable to show it?  Or beaten into submission by social norms?

I know Constable is all the rage right now, but I'm ready for more Reynolds, please.

Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint is on at The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, until 7 June.  It's free, and open until 9pm on Fridays.  There's an elegant cafe in the building's glassed courtyard if you want to combine culture with dining.

Club Gascon confirms why we're off to cooking school

Balancing dinner and a show is never ideal.  You're either bolting down a pre-theatre meal at a ridiculously early hour, or your stomach is growling by Act 2 and you find yourself dining on a Waterloo burrito on the train home.  This time, with theatre on a Friday night and us both off for the afternoon, we thought we'd take another tack:  a big, leisurely lunch.

Our choice was Club Gascon.  As the only restaurant in London celebrating that particular region of Southwest France, I thought it was fantastically appropriate.  We're off to cooking school in Gascony in two weeks.  What better way to set the mood, and do a bit of research on the wines we might look for once we're there?

As it pushes past 17 years in operation, Club Gascon is one of the most dependable and well established of London's fine dining restaurants.  I'm not sure why I haven't mentioned it here before, since I've been here several times. Its location in Smithfield market made it an easy outing from the office when I worked at BT, and I've enjoyed many business lunches there.  All of them with exquisite food and, when we were drinking, an impressive wine list.  The menu has its gastronomic heart deep in Southwest France, with duck, foie gras and armagnac all given near-sacred prominence.

"But don't expect to find this in Gascony," the maitre d' warned.  "We've made it a bit more sophisticated."

Indeed, you're firmly in Michelin star territory here (they've held one since 2002) with artistic presentations, fanatical attention to detail, plates specifically designed for certain dishes, etc.  All served in an elegant, intimately-sized dining room with marble walls, neutral colours and an enormous, seasonal flower arrangement on the bar that could compete at Chelsea. As with any of the capital's pricier restaurants, a weekday lunch allows you to push the boat out for less money.  Currently, the five course spring tasting menu (seven if you count the amuse bouche and pre-dessert) is £65 and the matching five glass wine flight is £35.

Our two revelations of the meal were cardinale pulp and foie gras for dessert (pictured above).  The former is a tangy sauce made from carrots, beetroot and Worcestershire; given my constant quest to find red sauces in the face of my husband's tomato allergy, I need to play around with this one.  The concluding foie gras served with three kinds of strawberries (fresh, compote and dried) and a sweet Jurancon wine made perfect sense the minute the first bite hit my mouth.  Rich, soft, succulent and sweet.  Why didn't anyone think of this sooner?

On the long road leading up to that, we'd started with a creme Catalane (something like a loose flan) heavy with spring herbs, given a sense of the beach with a sea urchin jus.  Next up, white asparagus (pictured left).  I've never really grasped the Franco-German obsession for the fat, pale stalks.  Give me the English green version any time.  But if you're going to do it, then a black pudding emulsion and pork crackling beats the hell out of the usual hollandaise.  The umami blasts continued with the violet tea smoked trout, which made beautifully subtle use of a flavour that, when overdone, can taste like your grannie's talcum powder.  This is where that cardinale pulp came in, adding a nice kick of sharpness to the mild fish.

The wines were all white up to this point.  Each excellent, the unfamiliar Bergerac, Corbieres and Tolosan made me eager to get to know this region better.  The only red, as is usual with most tasting menus these days, came with the main course.  Domaine de L'ocre Rouge's merlot gets my vote for the most interesting wine of the flight, bound to fool anyone into thinking it was something else ... I would have said syrah ... in a blind tasting.  It had all the fruit of merlot but was also elegantly light and a bit peppery.  Probably from the mineral rich soils on this estate where Provence, the Languedoc and Rhone come together.  Perfectly paired with the roast guinea fowl.

My only disappointment?  Having stated our impetus for coming, I'd dreamed that Gascon's staff was going to deluge me with recommendations of quirky little wineries, armagnac distillers and foie gras producers to visit.  I'd pictured the sommelier pulling up a chair, sitting down with a map and giving us some hot tips.  No such luck.  Polite, efficient and pleasant, the staff had a no-nonsense approach, a successful restaurant to run and a private event to set up for that evening.  The quirky discoveries will have to be our own.

In two weeks, we'll be settling into the Gascon Cooking School, surrounded by similar ingredients and ready to drink in the same traditions that inspired this tasting menu.  While I don't expect to create anything at the Club Gascon level, I do believe my cooking will get more sophisticated, and I'll be happy to incorporate more of this kind of French into my repertoire.  Our long, lingering lunch was a fine amuse bouche for the holiday to come.

Here's why you should make an effort to see Shakespeare's King John this June

It was a chilly, grey spring evening in London.  An expectant, sold-out crowd chattered quietly outside historic Temple Church, waiting for the doors to open on the Globe Theatre company's production of Shakespeare's King John.  It's one of The Bard's least-performed plays and, when I saw the exceptional venue, I knew I needed to book.

The 12th century Temple Church is all that's left of what was the vast and prosperous headquarters of the Knights Templar in London.  It's now hidden away in a warren of Georgian legal buildings off Fleet Street, but its distinctive round ante-church, 13th and 14th century stone effigies and association with the romantically doomed Christian military order mean that a steady stream of tourists find their way there during its opening hours.  Despite WWII bomb damage and extensive restoration, it remains one of the most evocative Medieval spaces in London.  What's more, the building actually served as the royal treasury when King John was on the throne.  What better place to see a play about England's least-loved ruler?

I knew it would be special, but didn't realise how special until we started filing in.  They took us
through the main door, at the end of the round bit, which is never open.  We filed through the early gothic portal to enter the year 1216.  The round church was illuminated only by tall, beeswax tapers.  A forest of them cast a golden glow on the bier of the king, on which he lay at rest in his robes of state, golden crown gleaming above his closed eyes.  Around him, brown-robed monks with their cowls pulled far over their faces processed, holding candles and singing Gregorian chant.  I was so stunned by the scene that for a moment, I forgot where I was and couldn't move.

Then we remembered there was no assigned seating, and made a scramble deeper into the church to find a pew.

Staging theatre here is a brave decision and, without the novelty factor of a little-performed play and the rousing action of the plot, I wouldn't recommend it.  A raised, cross-shaped platform made the stage, with a throne where the altar lay below and the audience seated in four pits below each corner of the cross.  It was a clever way to bring the audience into the action and reminded me of the thrilling experience of seeing a production at the Wanamaker Theatre (reviewed here).  But the elevated stage, forest of columns and division of audience means that everyone has a restricted view, and everyone has bits of dialogue they can't hear.

In King John's case, it doesn't really matter.  This is the Elizabethan equivalent of Sir Kenneth Branagh directing Thor.  Hints of the elegant poetry, masterful plotting and well-placed comic quips are here, but it's mostly a convoluted action flick with a lot of excuses for great costumes and rousing sword fights.  It's not high art, but it's good fun and I can see how it would have been a great hit with 16th century audiences.

The plot basically condenses all of the disasters of John's reign into a short period, as if all of his troubles came in a rapid domino effect, and takes plenty of artistic license.  The character with all the best lines, for example, is Philip Faulconbridge, an almost entirely fictional riff on Richard the Lionheart's one documented, illegitimate son.  Eleanor of Aquitaine makes a magnificent appearance in her traditional role as one of the most powerful women in history, while her daughter-in-law Lady Constance turns up to portray a particularly vicious mother-in-law nightmare.  In fact, the strength of the female roles is one of the best things about this play.

The plot is a complicated one, and I'd strongly suggest brushing up on the history before you go.  Shakespeare manages to pack in the papal interdict, battles over John's legitimacy on the throne, court intrigue, rebellion, French invasion, young lovers torn apart by politics and a nephew and potential heir to the throne who dies in mysterious circumstances while in his uncle's care.  The latter, of course, must have been a plot twist so compelling Shakespeare revisited it in Richard III a few years later.

This certainly isn't one of Shakespeare's masterpieces, and I wouldn't bring any first timers to whom you're trying to give a sense of what makes the man great.  It's great fun, however, carries on at a rapid pace and is elevated by a strong cast, many playing multiple roles.  Music plays a strong role throughout, in both church and folk forms, so much so you could call this a Medieval musical.

The Temple Church performances have concluded, but King John returns for a 20-performance run at The Globe in June.  You won't have the frisson of dropping in on a Medieval funeral or sitting amongst tombs, but I'll wager you'll be able to hear more of the dialogue.  One performance is already sold out.  I'd recommend that any Shakespeare fans who'd appreciate bragging rights on seeing his least-seen play, or appreciators of rip-roaring action, get to booking now.