PARIS — Butter and chocolate. That's what it is all about.

The food tips are about butter and chocolate. The conversation is about butter and chocolate.

Well, maybe life is about butter and chocolate. Or at least it's about how to recognize the good (French) from the less good (everything else).

That's a central lesson, if not the only one, when you drop in on Paule Caillat for her personalized gastronomic tour of Paris and a chance to get hands-on experience cooking up a nap-inducing four-course French lunch.

The thoroughly bilingual Caillat runs one of the many cooking and food classes in Paris, and by many accounts, it is among the best.

"Today, everyone takes cooking classes. Even the French," says Caillat, a pixyish, opinionated former fashion professional who switched to the food racket about eight years ago.

Caillat's take is this:

You and a small group of other food adventurers meet up with Caillat at the Oberkampf subway stop fairly early in the morning. Then it is quickly off to the nearby outdoor market.

Stall after stall offers fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, sausages, cheese, a bewildering array of olives and more. The air is peppered with the shouts of stall owners, anxious to attract customers to their wares.

It's important, Caillat says quite seriously, to know what you are doing at these open markets. There are three levels of products on sale: General goods, often surplused from wholesalers; high-end surplus goods, chosen by vendors as the best of what's available; and finally, artisanal, family-grown fruits, vegetables and other goods — a category increasingly rare.

Every level has its place and price, depending on what you intend to use it for.

We race through the stalls, selecting a handful of cheeses, fresh fennel that will become a side dish for lunch, an armful of baguettes. Joining us is Christophe Brun-Desvernes, a youthful freelance chef who helps out when classes are a bit larger than usual.

The menu for the day depends, in part, on what is available in the market as well as the desires of the class.

Poultry? Veal? Pork? Do you want to make a souffle?

Should dessert be fruit-based or chocolate-based?

The answer: always chocolate.

Our shopping cart loaded, we rush off to one of Caillat's favorite wine shops, Julien Caviste, operated by a young couple who tend to favor less-well-known French wines over the better-known and more expensive one from Bordeaux and Burgundy.

With several bottles of pinot gris tucked into our bags, we are on to Caillat's apartment in the Marais. In her charming, cluttered and well-equipped kitchen, we doff coats, put on aprons, wash hands and get to work.

It swiftly becomes a three-ring circus. Some chop vegetables. Others butter tiny tart tins. Brun-Desvernes vigorously whisks cheese into a bechamel sauce and egg whites into a froth for the souffle. Caillat supervises trimming, stuffing and breading the tenderloins that will be the main course.

But first, we sample the cheeses selected hours earlier at the market, along with our first bottle of wine. They range from soft and savory goat cheeses such as Selles Sur Cher and Crottin de Chavignol through a delicate Fourme d'Ambert (blue cow cheese) and a firm Comte. Each is more delicious than the last.

Caillat points out that when it comes to cheese, much is up to the taste of the individual. Do you like it ripe and redolent, or fresh and grassy? There's no right or wrong.

THE BETTER BUTTER

As we chop and stir, Caillat returns frequently to her theme that the quality of ingredients, particularly in butter and chocolate, makes a big difference. Most American butter, she says (and she knows what she is talking about; she travels frequently to California) is too full of air and water for serious cooking. And also, forget the salted stuff; that's mostly brine, which does no one any good. Add salt later if you need it.

French butter, she notes in a handout, has a butterfat content of 82 percent while the required percentage in American commercial butter "stoops to a mere 80 percent."

We assemble pastry for apple and chocolate tarts. We peer carefully at the stove where the stuffed meats sizzle. We sniff dreamily as the twice-cooked cheese souffle shuffles in and out of the oven.

We taste the wine.

And we listen as Caillat lectures about the importance of terroir (specific details about the land and weather where things come from, and how they are made or grown), the importance of butterfat in butter and the importance of high levels of cocoa butter in your chocolate.

The French require such information on their labels. Cooks in France, she says, typically use chocolate labeled with 70 percent chocolate liquor or more.

"But more about that later," Caillat says, not for the last time.

As we cook and stir, Caillat at the stove, Brun-Desvernes at the oven, a knock at the door brings one more to our party. She is Rose Besone, a young Californian studying hotel and restaurant management in Paris and working part time as an assistant to Mme. Caillat. An unmatched assortment of chairs are dragged to the table.

"In one minute, the souffle is finished," Brun-Desvernes announces.

Quickly, the cheese plates are cleared away and the individual souffles arrive, topped at the last minute with fresh herbs snipped with scissors. We dig in to what feels like intensely cheese-flavored air, and then proceed to the rest of the meal, the stuffed chops crisp and the long-sauteed fennel tender and delicate without the strong taste of licorice you might have anticipated.

Conversation, as one might expect, centers on food. Caillat recollects the food of her childhood, which was simple, she says, in the extreme. Aside from salt and pepper, the only spice in the family cupboard was — perhaps? — cinnamon or nutmeg.

"French food is the art of simplicity," she says.

Good ingredients, a little butter, some salt. Who needs much more?

Even garlic, she says, tends to be overused by American cooks. Perhaps they are unduly influenced by the Italians, she suggests.

FRANCE RESURGENT

For years, Caillat says, French cooking went into an unimaginative slump. Yes, there was some excitement around the less-is-more phenomenon of Cuisine Minceur. But food action moved elsewhere, to California and Asia.

Today, she says, the buzz is back. Chefs hold strong to traditional French themes but are adopting the fusion style popularized in California (and might we say Hawai'i?) as well as the refined presentation and rigor of the absolutely fresh ingredients insisted upon by the Japanese.

Soon, it is time for dessert. An apple tart, lovingly laid out slice-by-slice by the eager students, gets center stage. Tiny tarts filled with a deep rich chocolate ganache that strained the whisking skills of everyone in the room are passed around.

Conversation slows. A few last drops of wine are poured. Coffee is savored. The morning is complete.

After a much-needed rest, the afternoon portion of the day begins. It is time to walk off lunch and begin building an appetite for dinner.

Paris is crammed with tiny cheese, wine, meat and fruit stores. The trick is to know who does things well and honorably.

Caillat says she knows some of the best and will show us.

We launch into the Marais, with the first stop a spice store operated by a somewhat eccentric gentleman who opens when he wishes. Alas, he is not open today; he is on vacation.

But there are other stops, including a confectioner, another elegant wine store, the redoubtable and somewhat intimidating cookware store E. Dehillerin (see sidebar for navigating this institution), a place for the best chocolate in Paris ("look for the percentage of cocoa butter on the label," Caillat reminds us again), cluttered food shops near the old Les Halles market and finally to the famous — and famously expensive — bakery Poilane. While this brand has a modern factory pumping out thousands of its famous crusty sourdough loaves for shipment worldwide, the original bakery marches on, operating out of a storefront venue near Saint-Germain des Pres.

With Caillat and Besone bickering amiably over whether Poilane's sourdough is as authentic as that found in San Francisco, we go through the back of the store to the blackened 100-ton brick wood-fired ovens in the basement. Loaves are being shuffled in and out of the roaring oven on huge paddles. The yeasty smell of baked wonders is almost overwhelming.

"For some reasons, my clients always say this is the highlight of the tour," Caillat muses.

Either butter or chocolate can be delicious on warm bread.

Reach Jerry Burris at jburris@honoluluadvertiser.com.