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Greta Alfaro, In Ictu Oculi: "Bêtes-Off" show, Conciergerie
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We are writing from Texas. Our internet connection is terrible right now, so this will have to go up somewhat unedited.
We gave up our
Paris apartment on June 18 and fled to Bretagne, or Brittany, in an
attempt to choke back the despair over our imminent departure. We
made a circuit of towns along the Breton coast, which was never less than interesting, and often
crazy beautiful, and above all, constituted another leg of the A.S.
Byatt Heritage Tour, the Baie des Trépassés chapter of
Possession
(“How can I come if you cannot hear the little thing dancing?”)! O, the blasted heath and crags of Pointe
du Raz and the homey, tidal stench of Audierne! And the
rose/coral/salmon rocky shoreline of the Île de Bréhat, which is
what Mars looked like back when it had water!
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| A washed-out pic of Bréhat, or Mars--this is the best we can do with the colors. |
The colors of rock,
water, and sky were so wacky that they burned out both the red and
blue cones in our eyes and temporarily blinded us with awesomeness.
Then we crossed the border to Normandie to visit Mont-Saint-Michel,
which is famous for having the Very Worst Restaurants in France. (It
ought to be famous for bugs: we inhaled swarms of flies and gnats—Le
Prof caught a fly in his mustache and almost fell off his bike, which
should learn him not to sport moustaches—and on the train back to
Paris we were continually brushing ants and baby spiders out of our
bras.)
That,
Mont-Saint-Michel that is, brings us from the subject of Despair to
that of Food, about which several of you Gentle Readers have
requested more information. Where do we start, after five months? First, with
La Potiche's inability to edit for continuity on the I's, we's, and
they's. Le Prof is a game eater with great knife skills in the
kitchen, but nobody has ever accused him of having a palate.
At
dinner in Quimper, Le Prof stunned La Potiche by identifying the
citrus segments in our refreshing langoustine tartare as pink
grapefruit, and making a neat comparison between the chive-crème
fraîche mixture dolloped on top and the Axelrod onion dip that is La
Potiche's favorite food back home. Then he reflected, “Langoustine:
that's a kind of melon, right?” For what it's worth, Le Prof has
been known to refer to grapefruits as “cantaloupes,” all smaller
fruits as “apricots,” and basil as “spinach.” (“I never
called an apple an apricot!”
Le Prof shrieks defensively.) (In the interests of not being a jerk, I will point out that a langoustine is a kind of shellfish, like a crawdad.)
Most of our French
eating consisted of French food we cooked at home, three meals a day.
Thus, we begin with the grocery notes:
- The bread, cheese,
and wine are as good as they say. Great baguettes are, uh, great,
though we had a hard time rustling them up outside Paris, except in
Avranches, where a baker near the Scriptorial produced a good pain
ancien (the name for traditionally made sourdoughs), a good chausson aux pommes (puff pastry stuffed with apples), and a damn good pain aux raisins (puff pastry twisted in a circle with raisins):
if your pain aux raisins doesn't contain a swirl of yellow pastry
cream to moisten the raisins, find another bakery. While we were
gearing up for our final weeks in France, the best baguette of 2012 was
elected! But sadly, we didn't make it up to Montmartre for a tasting.
Somebody else can let us know if it matched up to 2011 baguette.
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| Raw milk Camembert |
- Le Prof's Fromage
of the Week tastings turned into a Fromage of the Every Other Day.
His favorite: a peppery, moist Saint-Nectaire. La Potiche's
favorite: raw milk camembert, lovingly dented by the thumb of your
fromagère to make sure it's just ripe enough and tasting like
nothing we've ever had at home, for €5.
- The wine: O, the
vins naturels from Le Garde-Robe! O, the cellars of Burgundy!
With Profs. K and J we toured the Côte d'Or, and also visited the Patriarche cave at Beaune, where we
tasted eighteen wines, ranging from the interesting to the
Way-Too-Sublimely-Complicated-For-Us-To-Understand. Some of the
flavors we detected: green apple, pepper, rose, litchi, cherry,
plum, mulberry, blah blah blah. Also, maple syrup, prosciutto, bananas
foster, and haricots verts. Because your vigneron isn't working hard
enough, if you can't taste Thanksgiving in New Orleans in every sip!
Even though La Potiche was spitting, she worked up a pleasant little
buzz, but she wasn't sick all night, the way she usually is after
four sips of wine, because it was an educational experience, not just
a gluttonous one.
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| Snackie. Vin naturel. |
|
- Also delicious
were the juicy prunes, roast chickens, honeys, dried sausages, crème
fraîche, terrines, and jams (our B&B proprietor in Pontorson
made her own superb caramelized rhubarb jam (!), one of the most delicious things we ate in France, but any market carries a
rainbow of fruit varieties. “Plum” is not a flavor. “Reine
Claude” and “Mirabelle” are flavors). We easily bought almost any
ingredient we wanted (exceptions below): chipotles in adobo, cock
sauce, sherry vinegar, sesame oil, smoked paprika, peanut butter,
fenugreek, quinoa, kimchi, ssamjang. Some of the wonderful produce is unavailable
back home, like wild asparagus (which is not actually asparagus but
does make your pee smell funny); Charentais melons; mâche, a very ephemeral salad green (which we
can get at home, but not in such a pristine condition and not for a
couple euros per whopping sack full); Spanish clementines that really
do taste like a holiday, because they hadn't been picked too green to
travel 3800 miles in a shipping container to go moldy for U.S. Christmas
consumption; heirloom apples with winy flavors (prosciutto!
tiramisu!) unknown in the U.S.
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wild asparagus
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- Cauliflower!
La Potiche's favorite lunch was half a cauliflower, Greek yogurt with a
spoonful of black cherry preserves, and three grapefruits (as Anaïs
Nin remarked of June Miller, La Potiche likes oysters and grapefruit
and will eat nothing insipid) or their
equivalent in summer fruit. (“You
are...a Fruit Eater,” Prof. E. observed at lunch once, having
watched her consume a quart of cherries, two nectarines, four
clementines, and a small melon). Every
day after lunch, she'd throw herself on the couch, groaning, “I
ate too much cauliflower. Again.” As M.F.K. Fisher remarked in The
Gastronomical Me, French
cauliflowers
are different: they are starchier, sweeter, and give
off less water and fewer bad smells while cooking. They also grow
into much more compact heads, curling up all fractally, so you get a
higher flower-to-stalk ratio than from the cauliflowers back home.
And when, after virtuously steaming them, you toss them with pepper,
Breton salted hand-churned butter (which costs the same as
run-of-the-mill butter at home), and fleur de sel de Guérande (which
costs a little more than run-of-the-mill salt but is infinitely more
satisfying), they make a lunch that you can't quite seem to stop
eating till you need to throw yourself on the couch, thinking about
M.F.K. Fisher and how her third husband wrote an essay claiming that,
famous gourmand or not, her favorite breakfast was steamed zucchini with
butter. She divorced him, but went on eating piles of zucchini,
and sometimes peppers and pickles for lunch, and never gave a fig for
men's opinion, also like June Miller.
Then there are the sweets. Maybe you're one of those “I'm not a
sweets-type person” people, like June Miller, also according to
Anaïs
Nin. We rather think that
if
Anaïs had taken June pastry shopping, instead of shoe shopping,
June might have, like, widened her horizons (incidentally: you want
to know what the women of Paris are wearing? They're wearing jeans
cut-offs over black tights, and sneaker-wedge-heels: stilettos
enclosed inside sneakers so you can't actually see the heel. And
summer scarves, and leather jackets in 85-degree heat. We have
nothing more to say about fashion in Paris.) Le Prof and La Potiche
weren't sweets-type people either, before they went to Paris. Then, on
two trips to
l'Étoile d'or, they blew a hundred euros on candy,
which is why they never took their weekend jaunt to Strasbourg.
Instead, they instituted Sweetie Time after lunch every day. (Which
is when they eat candy and pastry,
smear themselves in pitch or black paint or grease or something, and leap about naked in their tree house to the chagrin of their sisters.)
Even if you're not a sweets-type person, if you like food,
you should experience the wonderful, unexpected flavors and textures
of really good French pastisserie and confiserie. You mostly don't
have to pay a hundred euros; that was just a bacchanal (the Kestener
Atlantique--a chocolate-coated, salted-caramel and brown-sugar sablé bar--goes for €6). Most things go for €2 or less. And here's some advice: you can buy items similar to these at any patisserie, and
you'll still say, “Wow, that's so much better than the XYZ at
home,” if you're lucky enough at all to live in place where XYZ=espresso éclairs. But for the two euros you'll be paying, you might as
well seek out the best, the “Wow, I didn't know they made this good
on this PLANET.” That is why we are going to help you by telling
you what's best (our food peregrinations were informed very heavily
by
David Lebovitz's blog and Chowhound. Thanks, people.):
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| croissant, Blé Sucré |
- The
Kayser coconut-chocolate financier, which tasted like the best,
moistest, American-style cupcake La Potiche had ever eaten, and La
Potiche prides herself on being a cupcake connoisseur.
Unfortunately, it appears to be off the menu now, but the plain,
chocolate, pistachio, and raspberry are pretty good, too.
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Vandermeersch's kouglof, a sugar-crunch-topped yeast cake studded
with golden raisins, recommended by D. Lebovitz.
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Blé Sucré's croissant, recommended by D. Lebovitz as the best in
Paris. It was, indeed, the best of the 12 or so croissants we
tasted, made of the most ridiculous BEST puff pastry ever, all the
layers caramelized and standing crisply, meltingly apart. No other
croissant even came close. NO OTHER CROISSANT. Really. The pain au chocolat was perhaps even
more delicious, though, as Prof. D noted, it would have been better
with darker chocolate.
-
Pierre Hermé macarons were out of this world. Even the parfums that
we thought would be weird (carrot-orange, and jasmine—La Potiche
didn't like jasmine-flavored things before) were divine. Don't tell
us about Ladurée macarons, because Ladurée's are, frankly, crap.
Even supermarket macarons are tasty little figments, but any place
that flavors a macaron like Fruity Pebbles and charges you €3.75
for it is CRRRRRRRRRRRRRAP, unless they call it the Fruity Pebble
macaron, in which case, that might actually be kind of clever. But
that's not how it played out.
-
The rhubarb, pear, and passionfruit pâte de fruits (fruit jelly candy) of Jacques Genin.
Each one's only the size of your thumbnail, and it will cost you
like €2, but it packs such a flavor wallop it's worth it.
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Breton salted caramels. On Breton salted caramels days, Sweetie Time
consisted of two caramels, and then, once our jaws were deliciously
fused together, we had to stop. Also a flavor wallop.
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Arnaud Delmontel, who is in my opinion the most criminally underrated
baker in Paris, makes an apricot-pistachio bear claw and an
outrageous bichon au citron: a puff pastry half-moon filled with
zesty lemon Bavarian cream. His was the best puff pastry we tasted
after Blé Sucré's. (His baguette aux grains, covered with
poppyseeds and other seeds, vies with the Kayser baguette and the Top
Baguettes for Top Deliciousness.)
-
The immortal Pruneski, however, has vanished from this earth, and we
are sorry that none of you will be touched by the pruney angel that
touched us. We will experiment with making them at home.
There are things
we miss. Like...
- Tingly oily
Sichuan food, which we'd last eaten in London. We had some
better-than-adequate Sichuan on our third-to-last evening in Paris,
but it wasn't tingly, since it lacked Sichuan peppercorns, and the
flavor would have been richer with dribblings of red chili oil.
- Milk that doesn't
go bad after a single day. We didn't mind grocery shopping every day
to stock our tiny fridge with the day's rations, but we did mind
throwing away a whole bottle every day. Parmalat was okay till we
chanced upon several bottles that had rotted on the shelf, and now we
can't abide the cooked-rotten flavor. Also, we miss grass-fed.
- French yogurts are
delicious, but most stores and
markets sell only individual servings in tiny pots, even if they're
charming little glass or ceramic pots, but we don't like the waste,
so we wound up going to a Greek deli for a bucket of Greek yogurt
once a week (which was not a hardship, especially since we were a
little bit in love with the proprietor). We'd have made our own
yogurt, as we do at home, but then there was the milk situation.
- $1
sacks of fresh corn tortillas, for those days when life is too awful
to bear unless you can whip up a vat of guac, slice up some radishes
and Whatever, and throw yourself a personal taco party, at which you
devour fifteen or twenty tortillas in a sitting.
- The French
red-spotted heirloom lettuces are ravishingly still-life-worthy, but La
Potiche, who eats about a head a day at home, must admit that she's
got a hankering for the American kind of garden lettuce that isn't
bitter. In general, foods have a slightly more bitter profile in France:
lettuces, radishes, olive oils, sodas, even candies.
- We also
miss kale. Ahhh, we love kale, we eat about four bunches a week at
home, but there is not a bunch to be found in Paris. If you want a
good time, check out the Chowhound France conversations about kale,
and whether or not you can buy it in Paris. Belligerent English and
American ex-pats argue for days and weeks about whether or not the
curly vegetables they've seen at their own, special neighborhood
markets are kale. They're not; they are frisée, which is not kale.
We've been to twelve or fourteen different street markets, including
the own, special ones mentioned on Chowhound, and they have No Kale.
And for the record, every foodie in Paris thinks that his own,
special neighborhood market is definitively the best in Paris, but
the ones that we visited were all awesome for different reasons;
there was no objective Best, just the subjective one.
It would be silly to write a food post on Paris without a restaurant
report. However, we don't dine out that often, our food budget being
confined to the maintenance of our prune-stuffed prune supply. And we generally don't take photos in restaurants. But
we did eat some notable restaurant meals, mostly when we were
traveling and couldn't get to our kitchenette, or due to the extreme
generosity of family and friends (thanks, Profs. D and H! Thanks,
Prof. E and Grad Student N! Thanks, Profs. K and J! Thanks, Mom and
Dad, for the anniversary dinner!). And so, notable restaurant food:
- Couscous.
Early in our stay, we watched the marvelous movie The
Secret of the Grain
(La graine et le mulet,
which would lead you to believe that the Secret is le mulet),
about a man who loses his job and decides to invest his life's
savings in starting a couscous restaurant. We were all, Ick,
couscous, guess this movie's going to be a tragedy. That was because
we had only eaten couscous at home, where at its best it was a pasty,
Play-Doh-tasting blehhh. But, because we are highly suggestible, the
movie made us say, “Mmm, couscous,” and go out to the 10th
in search of some. Were we surprised! Couscous made correctly is
just as delicious as a Pruneski; it is rich, nutty-semolina-tasting,
fragrant, bouncy, and rolls delightfully around your astonished
tongue; with harissa and an inexpensive stew of carrots, celery,
chickpeas, and raisins, it makes a feast! We are going to learn how
to steam it properly, because, in Quimper, we ate some take-out
couscous that tasted like couscous from home: quel horreur!
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Corails de coquilles St. Jacques: which is to say, the red-orange
bits of the scallop. When you buy whole scallops in the U.S., you
are probably not getting the blob of bright scarlet attached to the
round white nut. (You are not seeing the eyes, either, which are
terrifying.) That scarlet blob is the coral, or roe, or gonads, and
when it's sautéed in butter (it curls into a firm comma-shape) and
sprinkled with mâche and a little red wine vinegar, that is a salad
of scallop gonads, and it tastes a bit like lobster.
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At various Parisian restaurants, the most memorable dishes were:
gouges out of a family-style terrine of pork with cornichons; morel
risotto; a perfect poached egg served in a foam of something (memory
begins to fail); steak frites; parmentier topped with mashed sweet
potato; new potatoes topped with crème fraîche and salmon roe; a
bouillon crémeux of spring peas topped with crab meat and a salad of
pea shoots, mint, and fenugreek leaves; pork belly; simple white
beans cooked with lamb; a mi-cuit, or partially baked molten
chocolate and caramel pudding; vanilla madeleines that were, unlike
any of the madeleines we'd ever eaten stateside, buttery, light, with
only a hint of sweetness. At La Régalade, Le Prof ordered vanilla
pots de crème with passionfruit coulis, and to his surprise, was
actually served pots: two of them, both containing a serving. They
were exquisite. They might even have been better than the rice
pudding à la grand-mère that La Potiche ordered: the best kind of
rice pudding (vanilla bean, arborio, full cream, and cooked-down
milk), served to her in a pint jar. A whole pint for her to dip out
of! “C'est tout pour moi?!?” La Potiche cried. “Tout pour
vous,” the waitress agreed. It is heaven to be served more rice
pudding than you can possibly eat in a sitting.
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| In Normandy, even the candy looks like fruits de mer. |
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In Normandy we dined at modest, homey restaurants serving: a
buttery, warm spinach mousse, fish pâté, rabbit terrine, a fine
skate wing cooked in cider, verbena-infused crème brulée, duck
breast with boysenberries, tarte tatin (upside-down puff pastry-topped apple pie), a really nice assiette de fruits de mer (seafood platter) with scrumptious bulots (sea
snails), icy-crisp oysters, and pear-stuffed crêpes with vanilla
crème anglaise and caramel sauce. La Potiche isn't mad for crêpes,
the same way she isn't mad for, say, breakfast cereal—it's just
there, nothing special—but a crêpe filled with homemade
vanilla pudding is something else.
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In the Dordogne, we ate goose gizzard salad, which is to say, goose
gizzards sautéed in goose fat and sprinkled with a little mâche and
vinegar (notice a salad theme?). Have you ever eaten a slice of
bacon whose lean, meaty part had a little myoglobin-y aftertaste of
liver? That is what a goose gizzard tastes like, and you dig in the
same way that you go to a friend's house for brunch and accidentally
eat the whole platter of bacon.
- We visited Burgogne, Le Prof for both sociable and professional
reasons, and La Potiche for sociable reasons—and to complete the
first leg of the M.F.K. Fisher Heritage Tour! La Potiche LOVES to
order her travels around the travels of women writers who go by their
initials. So La Potiche forced Le Prof to scuttle over to Dijon's Halles
an hour before breakfast, just like M.F.K. and the women of Dijon in
The Gastronomical Me. And then, in the beautiful,
rose-festooned hilltop village of Vézelay, right “on the road to Avallon” (although the mill restaurant where
M.F.K. ate the truite au bleu is, according to other travelers on the
Heritage Tour who've blogged about it, no longer a fine place), La
Potiche ordered a lunch that perfectly satisfied her expectations of
the “spicy, winy” food M.F.K. felt too surfeited to describe
properly: oeufs en meurette (poached eggs in a red wine and mushroom
sauce). Pork cheeks served on little toasts of pain d'épices with
red wine and cloves. Pain d'épices is Dijonnais spice bread made
with rye flour, honey, fennel seed, and ground mustard, and sounds
kind of vile, but is actually well balanced and tasty. The
slow-cooked meat with the wine and the profusion of spices, not to
mention those little trenchers of bread, tasted like exactly how I imagine a dish
that the dukes of Burgundy might have ordered back in Le Prof's day.
For dessert, La Potiche got a clafoutis aux cerises, made with ground
almonds (clafoutis is a batter cake studded with fresh fruit, often cherries--cerises--or pears). La Potiche has had lots of clafoutis, but never thought
they were anything to write a blog post about till she tried this one
with ground almonds. Prof. J got a crème brulée that was bruléed
by brushing it with violet liqueur and setting it afire. Isn't that
a GREAT idea? Forget those little torches! We finished up the meal
with petits fours: hazelnut meringues, grape (because we were in
Burgogne) pâtes de fruits, and something else La Potiche can't
remember anymore.
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Jan Davidsz de
Heem, Nature morte au citron pelé (1650), Louvre
|
La Potiche will wrap up this post with our hotel restaurant
in Paimpol. For the price of an average bistrot meal in Paris, we
got the most surprising, elaborate meal either of us had ever eaten.
Most of the components were delicious. A few were not. All were
very well cooked, and the ones that weren't satisfying to us weren't
so because of bad cookery, but just because we weren't always willing
to follow the chef on his or her personal voyage to NeverNeverLand.
But overall the meals created such a circus-like experience—loud,
delicious, completely over-the-top fun, and kind of vulgar—that we
will never, ever forget the marvelous time we had eating them. Here
is a description, to the best of our ability, although we know that
there must be items we've either missed or misidentified.
We began with an unexpected amuse-bouche: a nugget of foie gras
rolled in pistachios and dark chocolate. And tiny pellets of gizzard
(?) cooked, coated in chocolate, and served on a round garlic
crouton. And a scoop of foie gras ice cream, with flaky sea salt,
fine cracker crumbs, and raspberry coulis. Though foie gras was, for
obvious reasons, not something we'd meant to eat, our bouches were
amused, and pleased: the foie gras ice cream was the kind of thing
we knew that people made but had hoped, till that point, that nobody
would ever serve us, but it was tasty, and the salt, crumbs, and
raspberry were exactly what it wanted (other than, of course, wanting
not to have been the liver of a force-fed goose, but I digress).
Le
Prof's starter was the oyster plate. It included: a whole oyster
served inside a chilly gelatin made of its own brine; two trimmed
oysters served in gelatin rounds made with brine, trimmings, and
cream; a baked oyster (no surprises there, but then La Potiche,
absorbed in her own starter, declined a taste). When the waitress
cleared the plates, she told Le Prof, “You didn't eat your feuille
d'huitre.” “Excuse us?” we said, completely unable to understand what she'd said, because so far as we knew,
oysters didn't have leaves, but Lo and behold, the oyster leaf
(Mertensia Maritima) is
the leaf of a seaside plant that tastes exactly like an oyster. When
Le Prof popped it into his mouth and expressed his wonderment, the
waitress went away and came back with a tiny platter containing one
more oyster leaf, for La Potiche.
La Potiche's starter was the langoustine plate. It contained three
langoustines, two langoustine/onion beignets (delish), all bathed in
a tasty langoustine broth dotted with corn-kernel-sized crevettes on
a plate streaked with an interesting chocolate/langoustine-stock
reduction. Also, a raw quail egg yolk in its shell on a cracker piped with stars of
violet cream had wandered onto the plate, mistaking itself for a langoustine-flavored starter. La Potiche must admit to
not really liking violet-flavored things, though Pierre Hermé could
probably turn her around if he made a violet macaron, even a violet-langoustine or violet-foie gras macaron, because he is a genius
who could convince her to eat anything so long as he'd piped it onto
an almond shell.
For her plat (main dish), La Potiche had a rouget with potatoes (completely
traditional), a fried little zucchini flower, marinated baby
artichokes, a negligible artichoke risotto, another chocolate sauce
(with balsamic this time), a coffee-flavored sauce (no), and white
pepper foam teardrops (yes). There were some powders dusted on her
plate, but she was losing her ability to keep track of things and
can't tell you what flavors they were. And that's also why she can't
really tell you what was on Le Prof's plate, except for cod,
cantaloupe balls, a heap of caramelized onion confit, green onion
something, mackerel, potato purée, spots of raspberry sauce, several
sprigs of cinnamon basil, and a crisped black fish skin forming
a St. Louis arch over the whole. He also had two sauces, some baby
crevettes, and a bunch of powders, we think.
For dessert, Le Prof got the crème vanille, and neither of us
remembers what was on the plate, except that it wasn't really a crème
vanille. La Potiche got the basil macarons. Which translated into
three pink-and-green basil-flavored macarons stuffed with what we
think was basil-flavored rice pudding and a plastic liquid-delivery
system that looked kind of like an IV but delivered basil syrup.
Plus a lime-green sugar corkscrew. And a sprig of very sour lemon
thyme. And a scoop of raspberry sorbet, some strawberries, some
melon balls, and a dusting of homemade sugar pop rocks that fizzled
when she ate the sorbet. (Le Prof found his pop rocks first.
“Ahhhh,” he said, “Something is...exploding...in my mouth. Do
YOU have something like that on your sorbet?”)
But nothing they served us was so interesting as a dish that appeared
during lunch, two days later, at the same restaurant, where La
Potiche also ate a passionfruit dessert sauce with passion-banana
sorbet (YUM). Sharing the plate with her duck breast and two
ellipse-shaped pads of purple mashed potato (one of which was stuffed with
confit) and homemade black onion Pringle, appeared a round slice of Jell-O salad.
Or a macaroni salad? Or, a Jell-O macaroni salad, stuffed with more
confit! Jello-O macaroni salad stuffed with duck confit was not what
we were expecting to eat in France. But pourquoi pas? France was for
exceeding expectations.
Au revoir, France. Au revoir. Au revoir......................................
