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.

American Food in Paris

Though I’ve been trying to ignore it, there is no question that the phenomenon is spreading.  American food is hip in France.  While this seems impossible to any rational being with functioning tastebuds, it is equally impossible to ignore the trend.  There is a veritable engouement (which means “infatuation” but sounds as gooey as the insides of a jelly doughnut) for classic American taste treats.  Believe me, no one is interested in fusion food, they want brownies, cupcakes, and bagels. 

It’s been years since I saw my first brownie in a Parisian bakery.   I have since learned how to pronounce it, because my first attempt was met with a blank stare.  “Ah!  Un brooNI!  Vous voulez un brooNI!”  And this was years before Carla’s entrance on the political scene.  Then there was the crumbUL, which was quickly followed by muhfFIN.  This was all perfectly acceptable, especially because the French make brownies, crumble, and muffins so much better than we do. 

But I can’t bring myself to try a baGUL.  I’m sorry, but for me, any bagel that doesn’t come out of a sweaty shop with a huge, steaming bagel boiler just isn’t the real deal.  I can’t imagine that those dainty rings, delicately displayed next to croissants, could ever approximate Absolute Bagels on Upper Broadway.  While its entirely possible that the French bagel tastes better than an American bagel, for me, that’s beside the point.  I want my bagel to be chewy and leaden, that’s part of the experience.  You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

Because there is a dark side to the Frenchification of American food.  Take hamburgers.  I’m not talking about those 25€ versions in the chic restaurants, I’m talking about the frozen ones in the supermarkets.  Already cooked, bun included.  Or the same horror in a microwavable version.  Nobody seems to understand that even the greasiest burger stateside is made to order.   Even in the best Parisian bakeries, the ones that also sell sandwiches, you’ll see pre-cooked hamburgers sitting on the counter in their buns.  La honte!

Lastly, I feel I must speak out about the presence of Budweiser in hip bars.  When I see Parisian trendoids paying exorbitant prices for the dubious pleasure of sipping that sad excuse for a beer, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Especially when the majority of Parisian cafés and bars have excellent Belgian beers on tap.  What is this country coming to?

On Eating

“It’s the ingredients!” my mother used to shriek when we first lived in France back in the 1970s. Giddily bouncing around the covered market in Bourg-la-Reine, she would lustfully ogle fresh fruits and vegetables, giggle over the almost-alive fish glistening on beds of chopped ice, and gape in wonder over the huge variety of dairy products, most of which we had never heard of. I would roll my eyes and tell myself, with superior 12-year-old wisdom, that my mother was nuts, which she is (but that’s another story), but in this particularly instance, she was spot on.

Because the real reason that you can eat so well in France is that the building blocks of cooking are vastly superior to those in certain other English-speaking countries, such as the US. After all, if you build a house out of, let’s say, straw, it’s not going to hold up anywhere near as well as one of brick (sorry, I’ve been spending too much time with a six-year-old). And if you throw together a salad with a baseball-hard and equally tasteless tomato and some watery, if pretty, lettuce, you are obviously not going to get the same effect as with a sun-ripened coeur de boeuf and a mitt-full of delicate feuille de chene.

It’s not that the French even necessarily cook better than Americans. It’s that there are better things to eat here. In fact, I think American chefs are rather masterful in that they can actually cook so well under extremely challenging culinary circumstances. A case in point is my lunch today. I had forgotten all about it and suddenly realized I was starving. I opened up my refrigerator and pulled this and that out in the hopes of coming up with something edible and found myself eating an endive salad with chopped walnuts and vinagrette and a sandwich on a fresh baguette with pâté forestière. As I was about to take a bite I reminded myself that this simple lunch would cost me a bloody fortune in New York. True, I make a thing out of going to the local covered market and buying fun stuff like that (whereas an alarming number of my French friends go to the supermarket—“no!” I tell them “think if your culinary heritage! Don’t do it!”—whereby my friends look at me as if I am nuts, and I am, but that’s another story). But the fact of the matter is that all those fun and delicious goodies and good produce are there, if you are willing to go out and look a little.

So I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that beyond whatever health benefits, ecological benefits, and economic benefits there are to eating locally produced, fresh food, there are also the intrinsic bon vivant benefits: the intense pleasure of eating good things. For the moment, France has not yet entirely caved in to the bland convenience of supermarkets. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Mighty Maïté

I don’t know when it was that someone told me about Maïté. A sort of Julia Child of southwestern French cooking, for years Maïté had a TV show, La Cuisine des Mousquetaires, which spawned a long list of cookbooks, including the legendary La Cuisine de Maïté. But while Julia regaled us with her semi-aristocratic huffing and puffing, Maïté is a working class food goddess, who was first discovered when she was the official cook for her home-town rugby team. She specializes in simple, traditional recipes. She’s as solid and unflappable as those rugby players, and her home-cooked charm is 100% southwest. I came across this excerpt on YouTube. Watch closely as she coos sweet nothings to nervous eel that she is about to flog with a blunt instrument.

Tomatoes—the Sequel

Now I've done it. I went back to the open-air market this Sunday, and as usual, I went to the butcher. It was freezing cold and my family was waiting for me to get home and make lunch (yes, I have bowed to cultural pressure and actually fix a Sunday lunch), but I really needed to buy some meat to stock up the freezer. The butcher greeted me with a knowing smile, and waited for an opening. We chatted about this and that as he ground meat and sliced steaks, and then I mentioned that he must have a lot of work since theirs is pretty much the only butcher stand in the market. "There used to be six of us," he started, and before I could say "steack haché" he had launched into a long and involved discourse on the dwindling supply of butcher shops and how the kids these days aren't interested in working that hard, and the changing times, and lots of other stuff that frankly I couldn't understand because he took a quiet confidential tone and it was very noisy in the market. It was interesting, but I'm not sure that I want to get into a detailed discussion about the economics of the meat market and taxation of small businesses every time I want to buy some hamburger. I can't complain too loud, though, after all, I started it last week (see post below).

I have to admit I have a weakness for talking to the merchants at the open-air market. Now that my French is finally decent enough to be able to be able to catch most of what's going on, I like to get in on the running commentary that usually swirls around the stands, a combination of jokes, cooking advice, gossip, and simple math as your bill is totaled up. It's not all selfless camaraderie—the sellers know that the stronger the connection they make with the client, the more likely he or she is to become a regular, which is important when there are 6 other stands all selling the same green beans. Still, I really admire the people who work in the market. They have a killer of a job—they wake up before dawn, lug dozens of cases of produce or other foodstuffs into a truck, drive dozens (sometimes hundreds) of kilometers to get to work, then unload the truck, set up their stand, and then spend 5 or 6 hours selling their product at breakneck speed to hundreds of customers who are all impatient and need to get home. Some of the people I've spoken to never have a weekend (they work several different markets) and rarely take vacations. And yet, many of them truly seem to enjoy their work. If you ask them, they'll say, with a mixture of pride and resignation, that it's not an easy life, but it suits them. They throw themselves into their demanding lives with a verve that makes me almost jealous. They shout, they laugh, they curse, but most of all they seem incredibly alive. When I think of my own tepid forays into the job market, I feel pretty wimpy in comparison...

The Decline and Fall of the Tomato, and other food tragedies

I’ve got to stop getting involved in political discussions with vendors at my local open-air market. Sooner or later, I’m going to get bopped on the head by an impatient customer behind me in line, waiting anxiously for their épaule d’agneau. It doesn’t take much. All I have to do is say, for example, how much I like a certain rather raggedy-looking cut of steak (araignée) that the butcher offers. “It’s not particularly beautiful, but it sure tastes good,” I say. That gets him started. “Exactly,” he says, "you won’t see this one in the supermarkets. You see, madame, customers are being trained by the supermarkets to buy according to what looks good. They offer nice, neat packages of pretty meat. But what about the taste?” Then we’re off and running. I nod my head vigorously and he goes on about how fruits and vegetables are getting more and more perfect-looking, and losing more and more flavor (“when something looks that perfect,” he confides, “you know something is wrong”) and I chime in about how in my country you go into a supermarket and see mountains of gorgeous, but tasteless fruit. Soon we are both bemoaning the rise of the perfectly round, utterly beautiful tomato that has a skin so tough you have to poke it with an ice pick and flesh so firm you could use it as a baseball. Before you know it, the butcher is providing me with arcane information on European Union regulations that the big industrial food groups are using to force the little guys’ hands. I look behind me sheepishly and apologize to the man behind me, who far from being annoyed, looks amused and says “I love it!”

I think they like talking to me about this stuff because a) it’s a subject dear to them, and b) they are tickled to find out that there are Americans who like food (from what I’ve gathered, most French people think we all greedily gulp down MacDonald’s and Tastee Freez seven nights a week). What they don’t realize is how distressing it is for food-loving Americans to come to France and find that even here, in the El Dorado of gourmet cuisine, modern living is threatening the ability to eat well. Supermarkets are everywhere, fast food is invading, but mostly, no one seems to have the time or energy to cook anymore. It’s enough to curdle one’s béchamel. It’s not all doom and gloom, mind you—there are still lots of open-air markets, local farmers, and eager shoppers, but it is a little scary to see that people here are starting to eat like…well, Americans.

I could go on and on about this subject, but fortunately, a lot of other people have already done so, like the folks at Slow Food, and the radio host Jean-Pierre Coffe, so I won’t—at least not here. But that probably won’t keep me from talking tomatoes with the vegetable vendor at the open-air market, I’m afraid….

Starbucks attempts to invade Paris

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, there is nothing new about the subject of this post. Starbucks first set it's sticky, mochachino-stained fingers on Paris a couple of years ago, much to my horror and the seeming indifference of the average Parisian. I, a stalwart advocate for the preservation and advancement of the classic smoke-filled Parisian café, felt pain and agony for the local corner cafe owners, already an endangered species in many of the more upscale parts of the city. To my great relief, Starbucks has not seemed to have made a huge impact on this city, where the very idea of take-out coffee is strange and somewhat disturbing. It is mostly young people who are smitten with the place--the fact that it is American and modern makes it cool and hip, much like MacDonalds (yes, believe it or not, MacDonalds is cool here).

Still, there is something about the Starbucks presence that intrigues me. How does the average Parisian deal with the dizzying array of choices presented at the take out counter? This is a country where coffee basically comes in black, decaf or "au lait," and where a cappuccino is still pretty exotic. Starbucks has managed to convince Americans that it is perfectly normal to order a "skinny regular vente" when asking for a cup of coffee. Their marketing depends on it. But what happens here? Will they ever get French people to believe that a sugary milkshake is java? I forced myself to enter the giant Starbucks in front of the Gare St-Lazare to find out. Sure enough, there was a big sign behind the counter explaining very carefully how you too can become a demanding American Consumer. A chart with arrows shows how to choose your milk, your coffee, your syrup (!), your size, etc. Maybe it will work, but it just seems so very un-French. An abundance of choices usually throws the French mind into a state of paralysis, and who in their right mind would ever think of putting soy milk in their bodies, let alone their coffee! Only time will tell...