Brits blitz Ritz glitz avec frites

Tracey MacLeod takes French lessons in cookery at the Paris Ritz Escoffier school

I may be committing professional suicide here, but I have to admit that, although I'm paid to review restaurants, I'm not very good at cooking. That's why I eat out so often. So when I was offered a week-long cookery course at the Paris Ritz, I grabbed it - at last, I claimed, I'd be able to underpin my critical judgement with a solid grasp of professional technique. Secretly, though, I had another motive. My boyfriend had recently done a bunk, and I fantasised that becoming a brilliant cook might transform me into a man-magnet. My fantasy was only encouraged when I saw how people reacted when I told them I was going on the course - the men started to glaze over and drool, as though I'd said I was taking up lap-dancing, while the women instantly saw me as a Jane Asher-style rival who was going to lure their men away with exquisite fairy cakes.

I quickly put aside any thoughts of meeting Mr Right on the course itself when I met my seven fellow students at the Ritz Escoffier school, which operates out of the basement of the Ritz hotel. They included only two men - Willis, a middle-aged Californian who managed to tell me within an hour that he was a Republican, that he fought in Vietnam, and that he ran a nuclear power plant, and Louis, a Swiss septuagenarian who owns a French restaurant in Arizona called Le Sans Souci, "a Scottsdale landmark for 30 years", as it said on the postcards he proudly handed out. Louis was starting his second week at the school, as were Kirby and Stacey, two glowing young American beauties straight out of Clueless who'd been sent to Paris by their families to improve their French and go shopping. I couldn't help noticing that the girls were rather cool with poor old Louis, and moved away when he tried to sit next to them at lunch. Later, Kirby confided that he had sparked a rumpus in the first week in class by pinching an American lady's bottom.

The theme of my week's course was Parisian Brasserie and Bistro cooking. In the days before Pacific Rim eclecticism and River Cafe fever, this kind of food - hunks of meat in rich sauces, terrines, gratins, souffles - was the international currency of good cooking. Now, though, it tends to be dismissed as fit only for the suburbanites who frequent Cafe Rouge - and, no doubt, Le Sans Souci. I consoled myself with the thought that I could quietly work on my repertoire until, inevitably, it became trendy again.

The schedule included four mornings of hands-on cooking - the rest of the week was spent watching demonstration classes, going to restaurants, and, in the case of the American girls, giving dad's Amex a hammering at the Chanel boutique across the road.

Before we met our tutor for the week, Chef Jean-Louis Taillebaud, the school's administrator gave him a build-up - a protege of the Roux Brothers, he once ran his own restaurant in Covent Garden, Interlude de Tabaillau. "Chefs of his generation were treated like movie stars, so he's extremely knowledgeable and demanding," she warned us, "but he does have moods."

In reality, Chef Taillebaud proved to be a charming, if distant, teacher. Though he spoke good English, he always addressed us in French, which was then translated into erratic English by Laurence, his assistant. Trussed up in our chefs' whites, we gathered around him each morning, and he talked us through the first stages of each of that day's dishes, while chopping vegetables at a furious rate. Then we students all scrambled to complete the various tasks, which ranged from donkey work like chopping onions to scary butchering and custard-making.

On day one, our menu was onion soup, cote de boeuf a la moelle, gratin dauphinois and tarte Tatin - possibly the last meal you would choose to eat during a Parisian heatwave. I was a little nervous about exposing my shortcomings in front of professionals like Louis, and spent the morning chopping vegetables and slicing onions. But as the week went on, we got pushier about grabbing the best jobs. Just as at school, the class divided into swots, show-offs and creeps. Hanna, a portly Swiss matron, swiftly emerged as the teacher's pet, often missing key instructions as she busied herself wiping down a work surface or clearing dishes. A willowy woman called Ruth was Head Girl material. Her uniform was always immaculate, and she volunteered fearlessly for the most difficult jobs, which she carried out faultlessly. Willis was the swot; very keen for the rest of us to know that he was a scientist as well as a gourmet. As for me, I found myself struggling with a desire to be singled out for special praise - I wanted to be recognised as a little better than my classmates. I would leap in with a suggestion when Laurence was struggling to find the right English word. Or I'd spend ages thinking of an intelligent question to ask, then even longer translating it in my head into French so that it would seem like I was really good at cooking and at French. Chef Taillebaud, though, remained oblivious to my efforts.

I'd been expecting some one-on-one tuition, but because the food was prepared collectively, with people swapping tasks and several dishes on the go at once, we never really had the chance to see anything through from start to finish. We just copied what we'd seen Chef Taillebaud do, and he pretty much left us to it. On day one, poor Louis managed to set fire to a pan of onions he was deglazing, while the rest of us stood around gawping helplessly. Chef didn't even notice. Another time, Ruth and I were struggling inside a chicken for so long we missed the preparation of an entire dessert. But the principles did start to emerge. Foremost among them was "respect for the produce" - knowing how to identify quality ingredients and treat them in a way that "privileges the taste". Blanching vegetables was something I'd heard about, of course, but never considered doing myself. And I still cannot understand how I'd managed to get so far in life without learning the art of deglazing, which seemed to form the foundation of nearly every dish.

But I did learn how to poach the perfect egg. There turns out to be a surprising amount of technique involved, using only the freshest eggs, plenty of vinegar, and a nifty rolling technique with the spatula to give them the proper shape. While we watched Chef demonstrate, Kirby shared with me her own special egg recipe - "You put a slice of baloney in the oven till it's real puffy, then put it in a muffin tray, fill it with some egg and bake it." Luckily, Chef didn't overhear. But it was during the egg-poaching demonstration that we got a glimpse of what might have been one of his famous "moods". The eggs he was using turned out not to be fresh enough, so he flounced off to get a new batch, then placed an angry phone call to whoever had ordered the first lot, which he carefully set aside as evidence. But though he continued to phone at intervals through the morning, no one called back. Once, he had his own restaurant, and when he yelled, suppliers jumped. Now he was showing paying customers how to poach eggs. It was like stumbling across John McEnroe coaching in a holiday camp.

The incident reinforced my feeling that there was something ersatz about the experience. I began to feel a terrible fraud each morning, queuing for a clean uniform in the laundry and seeing the dull contempt in the eyes of the Africans who sweated there all day. When I encountered a genuine member of the kitchen staff in the dark corridors of the Ritz basement, I averted my eyes in shame. They knew we were rubes, swanning around in our uniforms, play-acting at being professionals.

But I seemed to be the only one who felt there was a whiff of the theme park about the course. Willis, in particular was pleased as punch with the way the week was going - "it's a serious course, and if you're serious about it, you'll get a lot out of it," he told me seriously. His only regret was that he had paid his $1,200 several months before, since when the franc had plummeted in value; each day, he would scan his Herald Tribune and ruefully calculate how much money he could have saved.

At the end of each morning, we were all more than ready to sit down and eat. We'd set the table and Chef would serve up our morning's work on his demonstration counter, styling each dish carefully so that it would look nice for the photos we all rushed over to take. But there was less enthusiasm when it came to the eating part. The food tended to be rich and buttery, and some dishes seemed over-seasoned, perhaps due to Chef Taillebaud's heavy smoking habit. But he appeared to genuinely care what we thought of the food, and over lunch he would drop the formality, and occasionally loose off a high-pitched, snorting giggle that brought the table to a startled standstill. Towards the end of the week, I risked a bit of lunch-time chat with Louis, who told me this was his second visit to the Ritz Escoffier school. Last year, he had done a patisserie course, he said, and when he'd got home, had put the things he'd learned on the menu at Le Sans Souci, proudly labelling them "a la Ritz". He'd also held his own cookery classes to pass on his expertise, but had had a mishap while demonstrating how to caramelise sugar and had set fire to his chef's hat with a blowtorch. As he told the story, he chuckled sweetly, and I began to rather regret he hadn't yet tried to pinch my bottom.

By the last morning, everyone was weary - the legacy of the previous night's official outing. For some, this had ended in a jazz club in the Latin Quarter, where Perfect Ruth had surprised us by smoking a big cigar and getting up on stage to dance the mambo. Louis, in particular, was looking tired - he clung to the counter during the creme brulee demonstration like a sailor in a high wind. As Chef blasted away at the sugary surfaces with a blowtorch, he warned us how easy it was to burn them and ruin the taste. Then he offered the roaring torch to the rest of us. To a collective gasp of horror, Louis tottered forward and grasped it - the story of his blazing hat had spread, and we were all prepared for the worst. But with consummate control, Louis did his stuff, burnishing the sugar to a golden brown and handing back the torch with a small smile of triumph. Over our final lunch, he told me he would be adding creme brulee and cote de boeuf a la moelle to the Sans Souci menu as soon as he got home, and I last spotted him loading up on Ritz Escoffier merchandise which will knock 'em dead in Scottsdale.

Back in London, I threw a dinner party for eight people, selecting the lightest menu I could from the wintry dishes we'd been cooking - chicken fricassee, gratin dauphinois, haricots verts with ground hazelnuts, and tarte Tatin. Rule one - respect for the produce - went out of the window when I found there were no free-range chickens left in my local butchers and decided to just go for what they had, rather than driving to Sainsbury's. The blanching and deglazing parts went fine, but I realised I had no idea how long anything would take to prepare without the help of seven other people and a master chef. By the time the first guests arrived, I was still rolling out the pastry for my tarte Tatin. Soon, everyone was in the kitchen and a power struggle was raging, with one friend wrestling to take control of the beans while another loudly insisted that we should follow Delia Smith's definitive recipe for gratin dauphinois. The dishes that emerged from the wreckage were tasty enough, though they didn't look like the versions Chef Taillebaud served up, and my annoying friend was still loudly going on about the superiority of Delia's gratin. On the whole, though, the food was well received, and notably subtler and more complex than my usual dinner party fare. I didn't receive any firm proposals of marriage, but maybe that's because the only single man I invited went to France for the weekend instead. Still, I can comfort myself that in my lonely old age, when I can no longer chew, I'll be able to cook myself a damn fine poached egg

The Parisian Brasserie and Bistro Cooking course runs twice-yearly and costs 6850ff, excluding accommodation. A range of other one-week courses includes The A-Z of sauces (15-19 Sep); A Taste of Burgundy (22-26 Sep); and French Christmas Traditions (3-7 Nov); the school also runs 12-week diploma courses for those looking for a career in professional catering. Contact Ecole de Gastronomis Francaise Ritz Escoffier. 15 Place Vendome 75041, Paris Cedex 01 331 43 16 30 50