A Paris Christmas: An improbable tale of good food and true love

by John Baxter

  If the sans-culottes expected their rulers to understand their problems, they were complaining to the wrong place. Aristocrats didn’t eat much bread and, when they did, preferred soft white rolls or milk-and egg-rich brioche, closer to cake. So it’s entirely possible that Marie-Antoinette, not understanding the need of the poor for something simply to fill their bellies, could have imagined they were complaining of a shortage of breakfast baked goods and suggested, “S’ils n’ont plus de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” (“If they have no bread, then let them eat cake!”) In point of historical fact, she never made the remark. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom the story originated, only ever attributed it to “a great princess”, and probably meant an Italian lady of an earlier century. Marie-Antoinette was only ten years of age when he cited it, and still at home in Austria. But as far as the revolutionaries who executed Marie-Antoinette were concerned, if she didn’t say “Let them eat cake”, she should have.

  As a baker’s son, I was brought up with bread—though nothing like the French baguette, croissant, or pain au chocolat. Just as “cheese” signified only those pale, soap-like blocks of Cheddar, “bread” meant only the dome-topped farmhouse and the square sandwich loaf, both made from the whitest of white flour. This was what his customers wanted: dense, doughy loaves, as symmetrical in shape, uniform in texture, and elastic in consistency as a foam-rubber pillow, and just about as tasteless.

  One didn’t regard bread as something separate anyway. It only existed in relation to its use; like water, which, whether used for washing, drinking, or spraying the garden, was just the same. Beyond “fresh” or “stale”, its quality was no more worthy of discussion than the paper in which the sandwich came wrapped or the plate on which it was served.

  Between continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries, the position of bread could hardly have been more different. For centuries, bread in France signified the gulf between classes: the higher up the social ladder, the more finely milled your flour, and the whiter your bread. Of someone who had all his success early in life, then fell on hard times, the French say, “He ate his white bread first.”

  The bread of the French poor, when they had any, was dark and hard, made from wheat mixed with inferior grains like barley or rye. Unscrupulous bakers sometimes adulterated the flour with sand, even cement. In a French comic book of 1918, which uses Africans from the imaginary country of Bamboula as examples of stupidity, a woman asks the village baker, “Do you add sawdust?” When he assures her he doesn’t, she says, “Oh, then I don’t want it. My husband likes lots of sawdust in his bread.”

  To the French, bread is less a food than a character, with a life story and a personality of its own. If I place bread on the table with the crust down, Marie-Dominique automatically turns it right way up; to display its underside is to show disrespect. Her grandparents still followed the practice of cutting a cross on the lower crust of each new loaf—a nod toward the biblical injunction to Adam and Eve: “Thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.”

  Nor do the French slice bread. The baguette and its larger cousin, the pain, are meant to be torn. This facilitates the function for which it’s best suited. In Eastern cultures, you congratulate the cook by belching at the end of a meal. In France, you rip off a piece of bread and mop.

  Orthodoxy demanded that we detest white bread and praise the stone-ground whole-grain alternative, but my heart wasn’t in it. I retained a soft spot for the homogenous white bread of my adolescence. Naturally, I would serve a couple of pains at our Christmas dinner—but already I was planning to buy one of the plastic-wrapped loaves of pre-sliced white sandwich bread, which were appearing in supermarkets to cater to the increasing number of Americans in Paris. I wouldn’t serve it at the table, but who would notice if I slipped a few slices into the stuffing I served with our piglet? If anything, its soft white texture would blend better than that of the cake-like French equivalent, pain de mie—“crumb bread”. And a small blow would be struck for the spirit of international cuisine.

  17

  The Right Way to Walk

  At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing, turn out your toes as you walk, and remember who you are!”

  —LEWIS CARROLL

  Just before Christmas, seventeen-year-old Louise arrived home with a new notebook, the sort with plastic pages and pockets for business cards.

  “It’s for the cards of restaurants and cafés,” she explained. “Also my florist. And my coiffeur.”

  At seventeen, I’d barely understood the concept of a florist or hairdresser, but Louise is, after all, French, and parisienne at that, so one makes allowances.

  Still, I pursued the question. Pointing to the shelf where we keep restaurant guides, I said, “You could always look them up.”

  She dismissed the massed scholarship of Michelin and Gault Millau with one of those shrugs only the French execute successfully, and which, like that “pouf” sound of casual contempt, they learn in the cradle.

  “But those include all cafés and restaurants. This”—she held up her new cahier—“is only for ma griffe.”

  Though griffe literally translates as “claw”, Parisians have redefined it to mean “stamp”, “label”, or “signature”. It describes the pattern of favourite cafés, shops, walks, meeting places, which each of us imposes on the city and which makes it uniquely “our Paris”.

  A griffe is no trivial thing. As surely as a passport, it identifies one as a bona fide resident, with loves, hates, tastes, and prejudices. Arguments can erupt between friends over which fromager stocks the best Roquefort, which chocolatier the most fragrant grenache, whether Mulot or Fournil de Pierre sells the crustiest baguette, and the superiority of a poissonnier who includes a free lemon and a bunch of parsley with your filet of cabillaud. Even the merits of rival dry cleaners, hardware stores, and supermarkets can trigger bitter fights.

  A griffe, passionately held, will survive its creators. Numerous guidebooks to “Hemingway’s Paris” or “Proust’s Paris” acknowledge this with maps recording in detail the tracks of their subjects around the city. And what is Dublin’s annual “Bloomsday” but a celebration of James Joyce’s griffe, etched in the progress of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and “stately Buck Mulligan” around their, and Joyce’s, onetime home town?

  When he was president, François Mitterand used to browse the bookstalls of the bouquinistes along the Seine near his home on rue de Bièvre, and eat at a little restaurant on nearby rue Pontoise, called La Marée Verte (The Green Tide), which, for reasons even the present owner doesn’t understand—it was like that when he bought it—is decorated in the style of a 1930s ocean liner. Mitterand died in 1996, but locals still speak as if he might at any minute stroll up to a bookseller and leaf through an edition of Rimbaud or ask the restaurateur whether the os à moelle, marrow bones, come with sel de Guérande and not some dubious commercial substitute. His griffe has outlived him.

  Our arrondissement, the sixth, which runs from the Seine up the slope of the Left Bank to the Luxembourg Gardens and boulevard du Montparnasse, is crisscrossed with griffes worn by the great of three centuries. Tom Paine wrote The Rights of Man just a few doors down our street, almost next door to where Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses at the most famous of all English-language bookshops, Shakespeare and Company.

  Since we live in the building where Sylvia and her companion Adrienne Monnier shared an apartment, the tracks of James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound wind up our staircase, as do those of Hemingway, who, at the head of his private army, “liberated” the building in 1944—though not before drawing Monnier aside to ask for her reassurance that Sylvia hadn’t “collaborated”. (Far from it: she’d closed down the shop rather than sell a copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer, and spent most of the war in internment.)

  Other countr
ies have their own version of the griffe. In his story “The Sex That Does Not Shop”, British writer Saki wrote of a man who, about to buy some blotting paper, is stopped by his friend Agatha.

  “You’re surely not buying blotting-paper here?” she exclaimed in an agitated whisper…. “Let me take you to Winks and Pinks. They’ve got such lovely shades of blotting-paper—pearl and heliotrope and momie and crushed …”

  “But I want ordinary white blotting-paper,” I said.

  “Never mind. They know me at Winks and Pinks,” she replied inconsequently. Agatha apparently has an idea that blotting-paper is only sold in small quantities to persons of known reputation, who may be trusted not to put it to dangerous or improper uses.

  Exaggerated? No Parisian would think so. The writer Colette, author of Gigi, so loved a particular ice-blue paper, available only from Papeterie Gaubert on place Dauphine, that she would write on nothing else. She bought it in such quantities that they sold it to her by weight, like potatoes. Gaubert is still there, they still stock the same paper—and yes, it’s still only available by the kilo.

  Marie-Dominique is more level-headed than most when it comes to a griffe. But when she tells me “I am going to the bookshop”, she can only mean the small and independent Librairie de l’Escalier, just around the corner from us on rue Casimir Delavigne. She would never look for new books anywhere else and has been shopping there since she was a teenager.

  Likewise, “I’m going to buy some flowers” means a walk beside the Luxembourg Gardens and along rue de Vaugirard to the florist on the corner of boulevard Raspail, where the owner will greet her as an old friend, and say, “We have some of your favourite lilies, Madame Baxter. They just arrived today. You must have smelled their perfume.”

  Both bookshop and florist are part of Marie-Dominique’s griffe. So, more weirdly, is Troisfoirien, a cluttered store on boulevard Saint-Michel, which sells nothing but factory overstocks. On Monday, its shelves will be piled with cartons of an obviously inedible Italian vanilla dessert. But on Tuesday, the dessert will have been replaced with Bordeaux, or reams of typing paper, or suspiciously unlabelled stereo equipment, all at giveaway prices. Each visit becomes a roll of the dice. The fact that none of her friends have yet discovered the place makes it even more deliciously personal.

  In the same way, though restaurants surround us, we mostly take friends to Au Bon Saint-Pourcain, tucked away on rue Servandoni, between the Luxembourg Gardens and the slab-like side wall of Saint-Sulpice church. A single room, with the menu chalked on a board, it represents the essence of French restaurant-ness. As with so many things Parisian, its chic lies in its simplicity—a fact that has made it a mecca for the literati and showbiz people, like Johnny Depp, who has his Paris home just around the corner on rue Ferou, and Juliette Binoche, who has named it as a favourite.

  One wall is dominated by a huge photograph of the poet Jacques Prévert, slumped at a pavement café with his old dog, both looking dour, as one would expect of the lyricist of that most poignant of chansons, “Feuilles mortes”—“Autumn Leaves”. On another, a rack holds books by regular clients. Diplomatically, François, the owner, ensures that when a writer makes a reservation, his or her latest title is prominent in the front rank.

  But such acceptance takes time. As the food journalist David Litchfield wrote,

  Do not expect any great warmth from Jean-François at La Palette until you have been around for a year or two, any more than you should assume that a table downstairs at Brasserie Lipp is in any way dependent on how many best-sellers you may have written. As Hemingway discovered, the amount of time you spent there is far more important, even if you only ever consumed beer and potato salad. Be patient, and diligent …

  And OK—a few bestsellers wouldn’t hurt.

  18

  The Spice Box of Earth

  “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

  —THE SONG OF SOLOMON 4:16

  “He’s too big,” Marie-Dominique said.

  “They say size doesn’t matter.”

  It was Monday morning. Forty-eight hours remained until I had to start cooking Christmas dinner. The clock was ticking.

  I nosed the car into the big toll-paying gates at Petit Clamart, on the outskirts of Paris. We had the road almost to ourselves. With the schools closed, traffic flowed steadily out of the city as Parisians got a start on Christmas. Back seats were piled with gifts, wine, food.

  Some cars had trees tied across their roofs.

  Fortunately, we didn’t need to find a tree. My mother-in-law’s gardener, Ulisse, would have chosen a sapling in the woods, cut and trimmed it, and set it up beside the big open fireplace. And even if we did not yet have any wine, we did have seven dozen oysters, several kilos of apples, potatoes, and other vegetables, and, happily, our piglet.

  We’d gone back to the halles in Fouras on Sunday morning, to find, to our relief, that M. Mortier had not let us down.

  With almost paternal pride, he carried the pink piglet from the cold room and placed it on the chopping block.

  “Do I disappoint you, Monsieur?”

  “Certainly not,” I said. “He’s delightful.” I looked at Marie-Do. “Isn’t he?”

  She looked doubtful. “How much does he weigh?”

  Mortier checked the invoice. “Seven kilos.”

  Marie-Dominique said, “But don’t you think he’s a little …?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. He’s very nice.”

  “Now as to cooking,” said Mortier.

  I half-listened to his suggestions, nodding, interjecting the occasional “Yes, yes” and “I’ll be sure to remember” and “Wait a minute while I write that down.” Like everyone French, he believed there was only one way to do things correctly—the French way.

  Mostly, I agreed. But not this Christmas. My family had enjoyed the Pavlova. They’d loved the apple crumble.

  We would see how they liked Cajun dry-rubbed pork.

  Back in Paris, I carried the piglet upstairs and laid him on the kitchen counter. Scotty, our cat, came to look. He watched for a while, then wandered off. Relationships in France are not made overnight, and he knew this one was doomed to be brief.

  Thinking of our potential dinner as “the piglet” seemed crass. As the star of our culinary Christmas, he deserved a name. I considered his expression. It suggested an equable, even philosophical personality. No playboy porker this. If any piggy went to market, it was not he. Nor did I see him going “Wee wee wee wee” all the way home.

  Was he the little piggy who had roast beef? Or the one who had none? Could I detect either gluttony or deprivation in that face? Certainly not.

  No, his mien was altogether that of an animal satisfied with his lot. Clearly, this was the little piggy who, embracing the observation of the great rationalist Blaise Pascal that “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to remain quietly in his room”, had stayed at home. Which made his christening simple.

  “Pascal, mon vieux,” I said. “I hope we’re going to be friends.”

  I opened my spice cupboard and took stock of the supply. It was more than ample, thanks to a recent stopover in India, in the huge west-coast port of Mumbai, formerly Bombay.

  Though India was new to me, I was ready to like it. There was almost no country whose cuisine I admired more. From the moment Indian food began to appear in Australia in the late 1950s, I’d been its most enthusiastic eater—and, very soon after, cook.

  We arrived from Paris on a flight that landed at one a.m. Nothing prepared us for Mumbai’s ancient air terminal, a shed the size of an aircraft hangar, seething with mobs of white-shirted men. Some wrestled overloaded trolleys of luggage, with a few imperturbable children invariably perched on top. The others just stood silent, smoking, staring.

  Outside, a wave of heat was made even more suffocating by the yellow light of mercury vapour lamps. Somewhere
out in the night, beyond the glow, was India, but all we saw of it was a sea of people.

  Stuffed into a taxi sagging on a wrecked suspension, we shuddered toward the city, halting with a jolt after only a hundred yards as two men stepped into the road in front of us. They carried a stretcher on which lay, under a white sheet, an obvious corpse. Behind straggled a dozen mourners. The cortege crossed the road, disappeared into the dusty orange murk, and the cab drove on without comment.

  By day, the heat diminished marginally, but the crowds seemed larger than ever. In even the busiest Western city, people move with discipline, flowing in an orderly manner along the pavements, pausing at stop signs, seldom colliding, and, when they do, apologizing politely.

  In India, the crowd doesn’t flow; it boils, seethes, swirls, gathering in pools for no apparent reason, until the flow just as randomly redirects itself down a narrow street with such single-mindedness that one is forced to the wall to escape.

  What were these people doing on the street? Only a few of them were dressed for work or carried anything that might suggest a job. The effect of their idleness was unnerving, as if they’d gathered to witness a sporting event and were waiting for the kick-off in a game invisible to us strangers.

  Friends who knew Mumbai urged us to visit the old Crawford Market, designed by Lockwood Kipling, father of the writer and poet Rudyard Kipling. We found our way there on the first day and stood across the square, staring.

  Nothing prepared us for its oddity. A round tower more suited to a Norman church perched on the roof of a lofty hall somewhere in style between the Alhambra and a British Midlands Corn Exchange. According to our friends, there was a fountain by Lockwood Kipling, somewhere within the complex, while over the entrance, barely visible under the grime and bird droppings, we could still make out his well-meaning reliefs of happy peasants reaping grain.