Author Tackles Creme Patisserie and More

‘I’d long dreamed of moving into food writing,’ Denise Roig explains in ‘Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School’ (Signature), which documents the rigors of wrestling with flour and butter, the temperaments of teachers and her fellow students’any or all of which could explode and often did in the heat of a baker’s kitchen. Roig, who grew up in Pacific Palisades and graduated from Palisades High in 1965, will talk about her book on Friday, July 31 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. When at age 56 Roig signed up for a professional program at The Pearson School of Culinary Arts, she did it almost breathlessly, not because of her passion for French pastry, but to escape the monotony that had set in after years of teaching writing to university students, who had a lackadaisical attitude. The school was located just blocks from her home in Montreal; she passed it every day on her way to and from work at Concordia University. It wasn’t as if any school would have inspired her, Roig was interested in baking and thought herself a pretty good p’tissier. She had been a serious baker at 17, having learned at the side of her mother, Jacky, ‘a baker without equal.’ Feeling awkward and conspicuous because she was the oldest in the program and the only American, Roig elected at the start not to reveal her intention of writing a book. She wanted to blend in, be a student among students,’ she told her husband Ray ‘Beauch’ Beauchemin.   The school offers the only government-supported pastry-making program in English in Montreal, and is considered to be as professional and competitive as the more expensive and ‘snootier’ male-dominated French counterpart: the ITHQ (l’Institut de tourism et l’h’telerie du Qu’bec). There were 23 women and one man, Qiang, in Roig’s program that year, 2003.   Roig’s intention was to write a journal of sorts with each chapter punctuated by a recipe, and she received a $10,000 Canada Council Grant to help with the cost of not working for a year. ‘I pitched the book a month into pastry school,’ Roig says during an interview at her parents’ house in the Palisades. ‘I saw this as an exploration of how we learn to master something, observing myself and my classmates. How do we get perfect at something?’ Her efforts at hiding her book plans were soon revealed, but by that time, she was integrated with her classmates, who were encouraging. ‘I filled up five notebooks,’ she says. ‘I took notes on everything: paper towels, books, my official textbook and even in the margins of my recipe cards.’   In the first year of the project, Roig asked members of her woman’s fiction group to read the first three chapters and was surprised by their unanimous response. ‘They said, ‘We want to know about Denise as a character.’ Now I had five people urging me to write the ‘B’ role’the other part of the story.’ Roig reworked the manuscript, splicing her own thoughts, feelings, fears, and triumphs into the narrative. She describes the classroom, the Lab as it is called, the rotating oven, the blast freezer, and the giant Hobart mixers. Her uniform, a white, high-necked chef’s jacket and houndstooth-check pants, must be worn every day. No jewelry, not even a wedding ring, is permitted; fingernails must be kept short and unpolished, and students must wear a hairnet at all times.   Readers learn about her teachers and Roig’s assessment of each one, along with recipes and technique. She appreciates Claudette’s high expectations and hyperorganization, and Ardis’s food science and know-how and womanly warmth. But she loves and so appreciates the humanness of Alfred, a short, bald, teddy-bear of a chef, who is the teacher for the biggest module of the year”Creams, Fillings and Glazes.’   ’With Alfred, we laugh, we learn, and we come out better people,’ she writes. The year is tough as Roig must balance the eight-hour, highly intense school days while laboring under her own self-doubts’her track record of quitting (the Juilliard dance program), memories of her haunting eating disorder’and maintaining a home life with Beauch and their daughter, Georgia, a special needs child. She makes friends, especially with Jen, who sits on the other side of her in class. She’s 18, but they become pals and are often are paired together for class assignments. ‘There is an evenness about her,’ Roig says. ‘I watched her grow up that year and although she grew up making Duncan Hines, she was talented right away.’ Roig came to appreciate her school, a working-class school, which she learned was more what the real world of professional cooking resembles. ‘Our teachers told us that we were going to be apprentice chefs for a long time, we were not going to be creating masterpieces right away. This first year was not a year to be creative. It was all about repetition, repetition and following what the chef tells you. Qui, Chef!’ In the end, Roig realized that, for the first time, she was part of a team. She had bonded with these people. ‘Even with the pressure, the laundry, the fights, I’m part of something here,’ she writes. ‘I’m a girl again, a girl among girls (plus Qiang, whom we treat as one of the girls), giggling about boobs and boys while we learn something new. I’m learning the real, non-corporate, non-buzz-word meaning of teamwork. This is my team.’ Since last September, Roig and her family have been living in the wealthy United Arab Emirate of Abu Dhabi, where Beauch was hired as deputy foreign editor of the National, an English-language newspaper owned by the royal family. While living in an Arab state more than 6,000 miles from Montreal has required some adjustments, Roig has baked a tremendous amount. ‘It is comforting for me and a connection to my neighbors. You have to reach out to people, so we have invited many people to our home for breakfast or dinner.’