By Kathleen Flinn (’92)
[Viking Adult, 2007. 304 pages. $24.95 hardcover]
Reviewed by Elizabeth Burke-Dain

Most of us end up in jobs at the periphery of our dreams. The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry allows us to witness the struggle and rewards of pursuing the impossible.

Flinn begins her tale with being fired from her tony job at a major software company in London. Against her mother’s wishes, the 36-year-old Flinn decides to sell everything and enter the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in Paris, where she will learn the art of classic French cuisine. She parades before us a brace of snooty French chefs, competitive culinary students, and some pretty disgusting degustations. In the center of this crunchy outer story structure is the creamy romance between herself and Mike, whom she eventually marries at a monastery in the French countryside.

The best bits in the story are the visceral descriptions of uncooked animals and how they are hacked, disemboweled, and deboned. Did you know that in France they leave the heads of hares on their skinned bodies so that the consumer can differentiate them from cats? Or that no matter what kind of animal is being cooked, every part of it is eaten?

The ability to objectify something such as a lamb must be as vital to a chef as it is to a surgeon. That’s especially true here in France, where the eating public consumes every part of a cow or pig with delight—often in a cream sauce.

Tensions arise when Mike, Flinn’s new husband, has an accident while parasailing on a trip back home in Seattle. His sternum breaks, necessitating a recovery time of several weeks. Flinn, in her quest to finish her program, has to decide whether to stay in Seattle to nurse Mike back to health, or fly back to Paris. Mike urges her to go, and she reluctantly returns to Paris to spend the next few worried weeks wandering around the city, looking for a new apartment, and crying.

Back at school, in her distraction Flinn makes the terrible mistake of serving a dish on a cold plate—a felony at Le Cordon Bleu. Then she develops a serious kidney infection right at exam time. Mon dieu! She has to do her written exam at home, and the practicum must be delayed until she can get back on her feet. Luckily, she is well-liked and the rules are bent in her favor. Either of these incidents could easily have knocked out even the most hard-core contenders, but Flinn is not deterred. She finishes her exams with great fanfare.

Classic French cuisine is not meant to be improvised. This is driven home on several occasions recounting Flinn’s often-hilarious faux pas in the kitchen. However, Flinn is a good student and a compassionate teacher, and at the end of each chapter she provides a recipe version that can be made by the amateur. In France, for example, coq au vin is made with the blood of a rooster. Flinn provides a delicious and less sanguine recipe that can be made in your own kitchen—even if you’re fresh out of rooster blood.

I recommend this book to anybody who wants to or intends to make a major life change. However, the joy of the book for me lay in the kitchen scenes, where Flinn learns the basic recipes from the masters of the trade. I’m planning to make the cassoulet. While my beans have been soaking for days, I’m still searching for the duck confit legs. Bon Appetit!