KITCHEN PRACTICE 1 — Pantry Audit
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Chapter: French Cookery 1 — Foundations & the French Pantry

TASK
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Audit your own pantry against Chapter 1's own list, and note which
missing items are needed soonest.

WHAT TO DO
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Go through the chapter's own pantry section item by item and check
off what you already have on hand:

  [ ] Unsalted butter
  [ ] Salted butter (for the table, not for cooking in this course)
  [ ] European-style, higher-fat butter (worth seeking out for later)
  [ ] A modest, genuinely drinkable dry white wine
  [ ] A medium-bodied red wine
  [ ] Herbes de Provence
  [ ] Fresh thyme, a bay leaf, and parsley (for a bouquet garni)
  [ ] Kitchen string

Then look ahead at what's coming:

  - Chapter 3 (stocks) needs a bouquet garni and, for a brown stock,
    real bones — if you're missing kitchen string or fresh thyme,
    that's the most urgent gap.
  - Chapter 5 (hollandaise) leans on good unsalted butter with a
    real, high fat content — European-style butter is worth having
    on hand by then, even if a standard unsalted butter works for
    the earlier chapters.
  - A dry white wine is used earliest (Chapter 4's velouté and
    Chapter 6's pan sauce), so it's worth having before the red.

WHY THIS MATTERS
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Unlike a highly specialised pantry, most of French Cookery's own
staples are available at any well-stocked supermarket — the real
discipline here is in which grade or version you reach for (unsalted
over salted, a genuine drinkable wine over a bottle labelled "cooking
wine"), not in sourcing something exotic. Doing this audit now means
Chapter 3's stock doesn't stall on a missing bundle of fresh thyme.