Cooking Your Way through Europe

Cooking schools, cuisine classes, and culinary courses in Europe

Rather than just taking home from your next trip tales of that fantastic tagliatelle alla bolognese in Italy or the blanc de veau you ate in Paris, why not return with the skills to recreate all those great European meals in your own kitchen?

Cooking schools and cooking classes while traveling—wether hfor an afternoon or a full week—are becoming all the rage, and it's not hard to see why. You're getting the kind of genuine cultural insight no number of churches and museums could ever give, you're engaging with the locals on something about which they are truly passionate, and you're gaining a new skill (or at least new recipes to add to your repertoire). And, of course, you get to eat all your mistakes (mmmm...mistakes).

Like I said, you can learn to cook in Europe on every kind of course from a top-flight culinary school—such as France's famed Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (www.cordonbleu.net)—to posh and popular tourist-oriented cooking courses, such as, in Italy, the courses run by cookbook authors Lorenza de' Medici in her medieval Tuscan monastery (www.cuisineinternational.com), Giuliano Bugialli in Florence (www.bugialli.com), or Mary Beth Clark in Bologna (www.internationalcookingschool.com).

To track down the ideal European culinary vacation for yourself, our partner site InfoHub.com (www.infohub.com) will hook you up with hundreds of cooking courses and classes across Europe.

In the meantime, here a recipe for genuine homemade tagliatelle alla bolognese.