The Apprentice

My 9 highlights

• On my days off, I furthered my English studies by heading to Times Square. The Paramount on 42nd Street offered two or three movies in a row for the price of one, enabling me to spend most of the day there, immersed in my new language.

• In him the Napoleon complex was carried to perfection, especially when he had imbibed too much of the ordinary red wine at the canteen, a daily ritual.

• Gnocchi à la Romaine

• Thursday provided us with a day off from classes, but not from discipline and rules. The priests' idea of letting boys play in the woods was to make us form a single-file line, with a priest at its head and another at its end, and march us along in that manner. The forest had been the scene of some fighting, and the priests warned us not to touch any military ordnance that we might see lying around.

• I no longer attempted to label my food as one style or another. I simply cooked the way I felt, based on the ingredients at my disposal. That became my definition of American cuisine.

• A good number of the girls who befriended us were hookers, anxious to spend some no-strings-attached time with boys their own age by watching a movie or going dancing. They had a lot more disposable income than we did and no qualms about picking up the tab. These encounters were usually but not always platonic.

• M. Diat chose pheasant en volière (in aviary) as the main course. The presentation called for us to create a true-to-life diorama worthy of a major natural history museum. Each pheasant would appear to be tending two nests, one full of eggs, one cradling newly hatched chicks. As a first step, Chef Duclos had slowly dried the colorful male pheasants' tails, heads, and wings, with feathers still attached, in an oven, and then secured them with large wood skewers into roasted loaves of bread, to reconstruct the bird. He placed a hot roasted pheasant on the bread in the center of the feather decorations. Surrounding the pheasant were nests made of waffled potatoes and straw potatoes secured on small bread pedestals. We filled the nests of waffled potatoes with small pommes soufflées (potato soufflés), imitating eggs, and the nests of straw potatoes with roasted ortolans, which are tiny, fatty buntings, each about the size of a chickadee.

• Unfortunately, like so many sons of great men, the son of Howard D. Johnson, Howard B. Johnson, lacked his father's charisma and genius for business.

• He would cook the whole cap of a cèpe, which sometimes weighed three quarters of a pound, in olive oil with whole garlic cloves in a low oven for forty-five minutes until the moisture evaporated. As