Modern Living: A Franglais Challenge To Cordon Bleu

"You can't just learn French cooking from a book," advises Julia Child—author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In fact, insists the doyenne of haute cuisine in America, the best way to master the arcane art is to go to school and learn it. "It's like music. If you don't know scales and chords and fingerwork, you can't do much except slop around." A culinary Juilliard School, by Child's definition, "must be extremely well-run by someone who is absolutely devoted to it. And it must be in France, of course."

Hence—of course—La Varenne, a new French cookery school in Paris sponsored by Child, fellow cookbook Authors James Beard and Simone ("Simca") Beck, and other gurus of gastronomy on both sides of the Atlantic. What sets La Varenne apart from any other school of la cuisine classique in France is that it is run—efficiently—by an Englishwoman, Anne Willan—and it is the first full-scale school to offer lessons in English as well as French. Without mincing any mots, the well-financed academy has set out to challenge the haughty Cordon Bleu, the 80-year-old citadel of French culinary tradition that has become a synonym for distinguished cookery.

Wine and Criticism. La Varenne is by no means an academy for chefs. Consultant Child, citing the eminent Paul Bocuse's definition of a chef as "a general who commands an army," prefers to think of the school as "a clearinghouse for everyone who is even the tiniest bit interested in cooking." The interest is evident. Since its opening last month, without advertising, La Varenne's New York office alone has received more than 1,000 requests for brochures. Enthusiasts from all over the U.S. have signed up for La Varenne courses (from a week at $339 to two weeks for $831, including hotel). The school may be the hottest thing in Franco-American relations since crèpes suzette.

Named after François-Pierre de la Varenne, a 17th century French chef who wrote four treatises on food that are recognized as the first modern cookbooks, the Franglais school occupies an old restaurant building on the Left Bank's fashionable Rue St. Dominique. Unlike the Cordon Bleu, which shuns up-to-date kitchen machinery and has, in the polite words of Gourmet Writer Craig Claiborne, "an aura of the last century," La Varenne has two bright, buzzing, modern kitchens. One is at street level, used as the working classroom; the other, on the second floor, is for demonstrating the technique and art of cooking.