Who Cut The Cheese?

Normally, a crime committed with a knife at a dinner table would involve blood and screams.  Mine was different.  The meal was almost over.  We had waltzed through the appetizer and main course with a deceptive ease, pausing to refresh ourselves with a bit of green salad before soldiering on to the cheese course. 

That was when it happened.  A slight mishap with a cheese knife and my reputation was ruined.  Yes, I admit it.  It was I who cut the cheese—the wrong way.  When I passed the cheese platter, I was met with an accusing stare, which traveled from my bewildered face down to the bit of cheese I had just cut.  It looked perfectly fine to me.  It was the end of a piece of Comté, and I had done what I assumed was the logical thing, I cut a straight line across what was left of the slice.  Leaving a small piece of cheese with rind on three sides.  Quelle horreur!  That is just not done.  Seeing my confusion, my tablemate, who just happened to be my husband, took pity on me, a poor, ignorant foreigner, and patiently instructed me on the Fine Art of Cutting Cheese.

It’s not as easy as it looks.  The idea is to cut the cheese so that everyone has a go at the tender core, where the crème de la crème lies, soft and sweet.  Cheese cutting is a decidedly democratic act.  Everyone at the table is entitled to the same level of quality.  Quantity is a more personal choice.  No one will blink if you decide to sample a nice wedge of every cheese on the plate.  They will, however, cringe if you mangle the morsels with your deficient cutting skills.  Once you have shared in the communal platter of pleasure, it is passed on down the table like a holy relic.  Which means that should you mess up, your gaffe will be immediately obvious to the person sitting next to you.  When it comes to cutting the cheese, there’s no place to hide.

To make matters even more complicated, cheeses come in many different shapes and sizes, from classic wheels, to soft rectangles, to heart-shaped cutie-pies.  Without taking out a slide rule or a compass it is difficult to carve out an equitable wedge, one that is perfectly placed to not only deliver the best of what your cheese has to offer, but also leaves a similarly delectable and easy-to-cut piece for your dining partners. 

What to do?  Fortunately, several cheese lovers have made instructional videos for the great unwashed and uploaded them to YouTube. Even if you don’t understand French, you will appreciate this one, posted by the Franco-German TV channel Arte, designed to teach the basics to Germans and is easy to follow.  This video is particularly heartwarming because you can see that even the French reporter interviewing the cheese vendor makes gaffes at this delicate mealtime moment (note the look on the cheesemaker’s face when she cuts the blue cheese).

Never fear, after you absorb a few rules, you will get the hang of it.  Basically, do unto others as you would have them do unto your own wedge of cheese.  Leave the good stuff for everyone, take your share of the rind, and when possible, cut a wedge.

The Christmas Underground

Forget the eggnog, Christmastime in France is when everyone pulls out all the stops and stuffs themselves with the most luxurious foods around: lobster and smoked salmon, caviar and champagne, fois gras and chocolates—it’s as if the holiday table were a buffet at the Cannes Film Festival.

This year is no exception, crisis notwithstanding. Supermarkets are at war over who has the best deals on oysters, towers of chocolates loom over store displays, and your waistline expands just browsing the aisles. That said, all that stuff adds up at the checkout counter, especially since when it comes to holiday entertaining, France is a friendly country, and those who don’t invite at least a dozen people over on the big day are considered slouches.

How to pay for all that without going into hock? There are ways. For one, I have detected a Christmas underground. There is an untold volume of undeclared traffic in holiday goodies. For example, friends of my in-laws, who are otherwise virtuous, church-going upholders of the law, seem to be the leaders of a chocolate smuggling ring. The details are shady, but every year a large Tupperware box of excellent chocolates appears at my in-laws courtesy of this couple, who do mysterious pickups at non-descript parking lots, and then sell their goods to their friends at bargain rates.

These networks seem to be very intimate, word-of-mouth operations. Just the other day, I was surprised to arrive at the home of an acquaintance and see a table full of vacuum-packed whole smoked salmons. Wondering if they had decided to have a bagel-and-lox-a-thon, I asked what was up. No, despite the recent frenzy for bagels (including an – urp – bagel hamburger) that was not it. It was another black market Christmas affair: I order a ton from my secret source, and you buy top quality at cut rates. I felt a pang of envy and wished that I was in on the deal. I wondered whose hands needed to be greased, and what the secret password was. I’m not usually one to defy the law for illegal or mind-bending substances, but good smoked salmon is an entirely different matter. Sign me up for next year.

The French Grand Tour

Back in the 18^th century, upper class Europeans were fond of making a “Grand Tour” that included visiting France, Italy, and Austria, with a little bit of Spain or Germany thrown in for extra flavor.  It was a rite of passage, a way of furthering one’s cultural education, and of showing the folks back home that you were a worldly sort. 

Today, at least in France, the Grand Tour has headed west—to the Far West, to be exact.   It seems like every French person I meet who has the means has been to, or is planning to go to, the American Southwest.  At first I thought this was due to an overabundance of cowboy movies being broadcast on French TV.  I still vividly remember the first time I saw John Wayne speaking fluent French in a dubbed Western—a shock like that leaves psychological scars that can take years to heal.  But I now think this obsession goes beyond Hollywood, and speaks to the mythic image of the US in the minds and hearts of millions of French people. 

After over a dozen years in this country, I’m still amazed when I realize how many people here and in other places see Americans as essentially cowboys.  And no matter how many times you tell people that your grandfather was a hat maker from Vitebsk, when they look at you they still see someone blonde and freckled who grew up on the Great Plains. 

But there’s another essential reason that tens of thousands of French people trek halfway across the planet to roast in southern Utah—it’s frigging gorgeous.  This fact was unclear to me until recently, when I got so tired of hearing about the Southwest from the French that I actually went there.  Aside from a visit to the Grand Canyon when I was five (when my main interest was avoiding falling in), I’d never been, a fact that made me burn with shame when faced with so many delighted reports from my neighbors.   So a couple of years ago, I packed up my French husband and son and took them on a mini-version of the French Grand Tour.  I say “mini” because we didn’t have the time to do the classic tour, a Herculean event that takes at least three weeks and includes the Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Arches National Parks, Monument Valley, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Yosemite—and for the truly possessed—Death Valley.

We settled for the Grand Canyon and Zion, with a side trip to Joshua Tree on the way back to California.  We were enchanted, enraptured, enthralled, and every other over-used adjective you can think of.  Even though I grew up about an hour from the Mojave, I never appreciated the desert until adulthood.  A decade in the confines of New York City probably had something to do with my newfound appreciation of wide-open spaces.  In any case, I became hooked on red rock, and this past summer we made another excursion, this time to Monument Valley, Arches and Bryce Canyon.  The only part of the tour I take issue with is the obligatory stop in Las Vegas, but I will complain about that in a future post.  

So, thanks to the French, I am now a one-person promotional campaign for the American Southwest.  Go!  It’s beautiful.  You’ll never see cowboy movies the same way again.

April Showers

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After an interminable winter, people are wandering outside this week to get a taste of sunshine, an element that now feels as priceless as caviar.  Like goldfish bobbing to the surface of their aquarium to gobble down food, we turn our heads up and gulp down the few rays of sunlight that pierce through the clouds. 

This was one of those record-breaking winters, not just in terms of quantity of snow and cold, but length.  No one has ever seen anything like it, not the vegetable guy at the market, not the old lady downstairs, not even the weather service. It’s been so cold that it is mid-April and most of the trees still have no leaves.  Plants whose buds usually start to open in late February are only daring to flower now.  Who knows what kind of havoc this is going to wreak on food prices in the coming months, not to mention hay fever season.

Not only has the cold and grey had a serious impact on health and happiness on an individual level, but it seems to have also eaten a hole in the country’s psychic ozone layer.  The number of scandals and predictions of doom has skyrocketed in the French media, which is not known for its sunny outlook even under the best circumstances.  First there was the dreadful revelation that the budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, the guy in charge of cracking down on tax evasion—has been hiding money in a Swiss bank account and not paying his taxes.  Apparently, he has been sleeping in his car to avoid the press.  It is still unclear which is his worst sin:  hiding the money or admitting that he lied about it.  An elected official being linked to financial scandal is not an unusual occurrence in France, in fact it is so common that no one seems to think it’s a problem for a president to be under suspicion of fraud, or for a jailed politician to be elected again once he gets out of the clink.  But what is unforgivable in this case is that the guy not only lied, but then he admitted that he lied.  That is simply not done.  What usually happens is that an official investigation drags on for so many years that by the time it goes to court, everyone has forgotten what the original fuss was about.  What was he thinking?  Must have been the weather that got to him.

But if that wasn’t bad enough, today's revelation is that the Grand Rabbi of France is not only a plagiarist, but also he lied about his academic credentials.    I can only imagine the Talmudic discussions that are going to come out of that one.  If you can’t trust the Grand Rabbi, who can you trust?  Really, what I’d like to know is who is this guy in the first place and why is he so grand?  What makes him any grander than any other rabbi?  Why is this night different from any other night?  If not now, when?  All I can say is—feh. 

You’ve probably noticed that I’m casually sauntering away from any discussion of the overall atmosphere of gloom and dismay that has settled over the current president, François Hollande, and his cabinet.  (On top of everything else, the president's camel got eaten in Mali).  I don’t feel qualified to even begin to sort that one out.  Though he seems pretty OK to me, I hesitate to say that out loud or I could get punched out in my conservative suburb where half the population turned out for a march against the legalization of gay marriage.  Don’t get me started…

Instead I think I’ll just sit on my balcony and soak up those rays and think about what plants I’m going to pot this weekend.  That is, if it doesn’t rain.

The Vacation Vortex

It’s coming soon…The Vacation Vortex.  That’s when you and your entire family get sucked into a dizzying whirlpool of getaway plans and family visits.  Or getaway from the family visits, depending on your status.  Every year there’s a local ritual, whereon you ask everyone you know what they are doing this summer, then nod dutifully while they recite their complicated plans (“…five days in Sardinia and then the kids are going to spend a week with grandma in Normandy while I paint my cousin’s house in the Ardeche…”), and then promptly forget everything they just told you.

But it really doesn’t matter because the only thing you need to know is that in July and August you won’t see anyone.  You may bump into the occasional lone wolf loping through the ghost town that was once your bustling neighborhood, but basically, you are on your own.  Not that anyone actually takes two months of vacation, but since they are staggered throughout July and August, and since kids and parents often fly off in different directions at different times, and stores close for at least three weeks, it feels like everyone but you is doing precisely that. 

When you live abroad, the Vortex tends to whirl at an even higher speed, because you have to fly all over the world to even find the family that will slowly drive you crazy over the course of your stay.  Not that you don’t want to see your family, but if you are from a faraway place like California and it’s a once-a-year reunion, it tends to get rather intense.  It’s one thing to visit with your parents for an evening or a weekend, and it’s another to spend two weeks with them 24-7.

But I can’t complain.  While my carbon footprint this summer will be off the charts, my frequent flyer millage will climb ever higher until I can take yet more flights to more faraway places.  When I get back I will have reconnected with my Southern California roots and remember why it was that I left in the first place.  I will cherish my French suburb with renewed enthusiasm and savor the taste of espresso at the coffee stand at the covered market.  My apartment will seem so quiet and welcoming.  I will be at peace.  But then it will be time for the rentrée….

Vive La Loire

I was on assignment in the Loire Valley last week (ooh, that sounds so important) for an article on hotels, and it soon became obvious to me that only a fool would live in the Paris area for three years without having visited this gorgeous area. Being that fool, I hereby confess that my previous feelings about the Loire Valley had to do with a trip I took there with my family back in the Dark Ages, when computers were house-sized and the only people who had cell phones were the characters on Star Trek. While I seem to recall that the castles were very pretty, my memories of those royal abodes are mixed with scenes of domestic angst where my younger brother, who was three at the time, rebelled against incessant castle-viewing, and my mother, who still can’t understand why a three-year-old would not be interested in French history, furiously stormed one chateau after another.

I think my primary revelation was that there’s a lot more to the Loire than castles. Without launching into a guidebook entry, I’d like to point out that this languid river valley has a lot of other things going for it, like a) hundreds of kilometers of bike paths (there’s a long-term plan to make it possible to cycle from the Loire to the Danube); b) pretty hotels that are about a third of the price of similar digs in Paris; and c) that languid river—a natural, wild river that has never been strangled by canals and dams.

Actually, there are at least three rivers here that look like they are posing for an idyllic landscape painting: the Loire, the Cher, and the Indre. None are deep enough for serious river traffic, but you can paddle down them on a canoe or a kayak, or sign up for a ride on a traditional flat-bottomed boat. The view was so green, so peaceful, so relaxing, that all I really wanted to do was sit on someone’s veranda and read a book for a week or so. Of course, the intermittent rain and occasional hailstorms served to remind me that one of the reasons that Parisians leap-frog this lovely area at vacation time and head further south is that it shares a good portion of Paris’ soggy weather. After, all, it is only an hour or two south of the city. But that’s just it! It’s only a couple of hours south of the city. And if you can’t get to Spain or the Côte d’Azur, why not go to the Loire? These days, you can even find things to do there with a three-year-old.