Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris - Hardcover

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 Chapter 1

Paris / Steak Frites

I’m not a voracious carnivore, but there’s something about being in Paris that makes me want to sink my teeth into a bloody piece of beef. Perhaps it’s the French paradox, the seductive theory that a diet rich in cheese, meat, and red wine actually lowers choles­terol. Perhaps it’s watching all those sexy French women purse their lipsticked mouths while slicing through a juicy chop.

Steak frites is a relatively easy thing to order if, like me, you’re still struggling to master those nasal French vowels. The words fly off the tongue, without any hidden surprises—unlike, say, asking the waiter about preservatives only to find out you’ve interrogated him on condoms. But, as I found out during one of my first meals in a classic Paris bistro, ordering a steak leads to more questions.

“Quel cuisson désirez-vous?” said the waiter in an offhand way, like asking my date of birth or my hair color. He wore round glasses, a white shirt with a black bow tie, and a long black apron that reached past his knees. It was difficult to discern who was older: him or the desiccated leg of ham hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room.

Thus far I had tricked the waiter into thinking I spoke French, but now, I realized, the jig was up. Medium, I thought, and tried a quick, desperate translation. “Uh . . . moyen?”

A look of weary disappointment crossed his face. But he’d been around enough American tourists to know what I meant. “À point,” he corrected me.

Later I would memorize all my steak vocabulary—the hot sear and chilled interior of bleu, the rosy glow of à point, the tough brown gnaw of bien cuit. I would learn how to enjoy a steak the French way—saignant—with a magenta center and juices that ran red. But at that moment I just repeated the words after him and washed them down with a gulp of wine.

I’ve wanted to live in Paris since I was six, when my family and I took a summer vacation to Europe. We went to London first, gray and proper, where we spent a week shivering into our teacups, even though it was mid-July, and I stared in terrified fascination at the Mohawked punks in Piccadilly Circus. Then we arrived in Paris, which was ablaze in a high-summer heat wave. It seemed alive, Paris, alive with warmth, and days that never ended, and beautiful people on the streets wearing beautiful clothes and speaking a beau­tiful, strange language. Every aspect of the city assailed my senses: the grand buildings in pale limestone, the parks teeming with half-naked sunbathers, the taste of baguette dipped in chocolat chaud, the seesawing sound of the sirens, the imprint of wicker café chairs against my sticky thighs, the Coca-Cola poured from chilled glass bottles that turned tepid without ice cubes, the smell of fresh crois­sants and ripe cheese and human sweat. It was all so new and differ­ent from the only place I really knew, our home in the sterile suburbs of Southern California. I didn’t like everything, but it all gripped me, holding me in an embrace that I would come to know was Fran­cophilia.

The trip has gone down in Mah family lore as the nadir (or ze­nith, depending on who you’re talking to) of my brother’s rebellious teenage years. He spent a lot of time plugged into his Walkman while my parents coped by drinking red wine. As our voyage con­tinued, they—my parents and brother—seemed to grow more and more matted and worn, more impatient to return home to their own routines and clothes and space. In contrast, I became more energetic as the days passed.

“I want to learn French,” I proclaimed. It felt like my destiny. After all, hadn’t my parents given me a French name, Ann Marie? They responded with wan enthusiasm, dampened even further by the sticky oppression of our hotel room. We’d had a long week of sightseeing, my parents juggling the manic highs of their nursery­rhyme-chanting young daughter with the manic lows of their ado­lescent son. My mother considered French impractical, a pastel bonbon of a language, the linguistic equivalent of empty calories, unlike her native tongue, the useful, fibrous Mandarin Chinese. If you have any experience at all with Chinese mothers, I’m sure it will come as no surprise that I ended up studying Mandarin.

By the time I made another trip to Paris, twenty-two years had passed. The second visit was with my husband, Calvin, who had lived there for a few years during and after college. He showed me two sides of the city—his old haunts in Belleville, a scruffy neigh­borhood in the twentieth arrondissement, contrasted by the sweep­ing grandeur of Haussmann’s boulevards. Unlike so many childhood memories revisited, Paris didn’t disappoint. The city was on its best behavior during that vacation, all bright, clear June skies, a profu­sion of flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens, and unusually patient waiters who refrained from speaking English when I tried to order in French. They say you’re supposed to be in love in Paris, and I was, headily—with my husband, with the beautiful city, with the slim flutes of Champagne we drank while gazing at the rushing fountain on place Saint-Sulpice.

Is Paris addictive? Maybe. After that trip I abandoned all other holiday dreams. Every penny saved, every vacation week earned, was earmarked for France. We visited in the winter to shiver under covered skies that never brightened; we went in the summer to bask in the sizzle of light that stretched until eleven o’clock at night. And each time I left, I craved more. More crusty baguettes split length­wise and spread with butter and jam. More wrought-iron balconies adorned with window-box geraniums. More Art Nouveau métro stations, more walks along the Seine, more surprise glimpses of Notre Dame caught from the bus.

When I wasn’t in Paris, I sometimes dreamed of living there, of making a home in one of the ornate stone buildings that give the city such elegant propriety. What would it be like, I wondered, to be­come part of a neighborhood, to be greeted at the café with a hand­shake, to have the woman at the boulangerie prepare my baguette without asking, to commute home by crossing the Seine? I wanted to know bus routes, to have secret shortcuts, to greet neighbors with a murmured “Bonjour.” Most of all I wanted to watch the seasons change in the market, to consume and contribute to my own small patch of French terroir, to participate—if only for a short window of time—in the small, prosaic, unbroken traditions of French cuisine. I wanted to buy a galette des rois on Epiphany and chocolate bells on Easter and foie gras at Christmas. I wanted those traditions to be mine, however temporarily, even though I knew that was a dream both impractical and abstract. We had American passports, not Eu­ropean ones. How could we navigate France’s notoriously Sisy­phean bureaucracy? How would we support ourselves without working papers? How on earth would we ever convince one of its wooden-faced civil servants to allow us to stay?

There was one possibility but I didn’t believe it would ever happen. Calvin’s career as a diplomat meant we moved often between overseas assignments—he’d already served in Turkmenistan, New York, Bei­jing, and D.C. Why not Paris? And yet it seemed far-fetched to hope for such a plum assignment, even though Calvin spoke fluent French and followed French politics as avidly as he did the National League baseball standings. The American...