Mastering the Art of French Eating

by Ann Mah

  I wanted time to slow down, to stop. But suddenly it was April and we were celebrating my birthday at one of my favorite restaurants, a sleek fish bistro called Les Fables de la Fontaine, where I gazed at my plate of perfect, firm-fleshed, brown-buttery sole meunière and wondered how I’d force the food past the lump in my throat. The next morning Calvin left. And then I wept for the rest of the day.

  I tried to stop—I wanted to stop—the tears were embarrassing, not to mention messy. But my eyes kept betraying me, releasing a slow leak that increased with every human interaction. Already minimally weepy as I ordered a grand crème at our local café, my tears overflowed when the kind owner, Amar, patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Bon courage!” I cried at the doctor’s office, where the Australian receptionist urged me to keep my chin up. I cried in the stairwell of my apartment building when I ran into my downstairs neighbor, the male half of a tiny elderly couple. He paused in the middle of complaining about the water stains on his ceiling and asked if I would share a glass of wine with him and his wife from time to time.

  I was making a spectacle of myself. Worse, I was confirming French stereotypes of Americans: that we’re overemotional and indecorous, indiscreet about our personal lives. I had never seen a Frenchwoman crying on the métro. Heck, I had never even seen a Frenchwoman eating on the métro. Yet there I was on the platform at École Militaire with tears cascading down my cheeks. I longed to blow my nose, but my only tissue was already sodden.

  When I got home, I found our apartment empty and forlorn, echoing every sound in the building. The neighbor’s TV upstairs sounded like a furious mob; the métro below was like the deep-throated rumble of an earthquake. Though our windows shone with clear spring light, I went to every room and switched on all the lamps. The light reflected off the walls, making the voluminous, high-ceilinged rooms feel a little cozier. But the hours until dinner and bedtime stretched before me dry and uncompromising and lonely. Now that Calvin was gone, I had switched from willing the time to slow down to hoping it would race by until his return.

  Desperate for distraction, I ransacked the fridge, where I saw the carcass of Sunday’s roasted bird. It went into a big pot for stock, and I found some vegetables to accompany it, taking a long time to peel and chop the carrots, onions, and celery into a careful dice. I put them in the pot with the chicken bones, added cold water, and brought everything to a boil.

  Standing over the stove, I skimmed the broth and then lowered the heat so that bubbles flickered across the surface. The stock perfumed the apartment with cozy, chicken-y warmth, a scent I remembered from my childhood, when my father used to simmer a giant soup pot late into the night. It was the smell of comfort and safety, of hugs and love and classic children’s books—of home. At least for a few hours, I had managed to replace the clean, soapy smell of my husband with something almost as comforting.

  Calvin and I had moved so often that I’d grown used to thinking of home as the place in the world where we lived together. But even without him, this was still my home, still a place of retreat, and I had never considered leaving it. Besides, where would I have gone? Calvin and I didn’t have a permanent address; we didn’t own any property. And though I loved my parents, I couldn’t imagine moving in with them for a year.

  “Try to take advantage of being in Paris,” Calvin told me before he left. He’d said it partly, I knew, to comfort me, because he felt rotten seeing me so sad. But as I thought of him on the airplane, buckled into an aisle seat, hurtling across the sky to a country where he’d never been, I realized that his words were also the advice of someone who loved Paris and had left it many times, someone who knew the city and understood what it meant to live without it.

  I stood at the window, peering through the swirled design of the wrought-iron balcony, at the cars whisking by on the boulevard Raspail. I reached out and plucked a cluster of dried petals from the bright geraniums in my window box. Sunshine flooded suddenly into the apartment, bleaching the carpets and the couch, shining on the parquet floor. Paris was still there, in all its elegant, decadent, luxurious beauty. And I was still in Paris, the city I’d dreamed about for so long.

  Andouillette à la Sauce Maury

  Patrick Maury’s favorite way to eat andouillette is, he admitted, costaud, or heavy, with its creamy mustard sauce and gratinéed cheese. He told me that this recipe pairs well with a white wine like Chablis or the region’s Champagne, which cuts the sharp scent of the sausage. In the States andouillette is made by gourmet-food producers like Fabrique Délices and sold by mail order nationwide. Fromage de Chaource is a soft and creamy cheese local to the area surrounding Troyes. If you can’t find it, Brie makes a good substitute. The hit of ratafia—a strong alcohol, sometimes fruit-flavored—is optional. Finally, if you are not an andouillette enthusiast, this recipe is also delicious with poached chicken breasts substituted for the sausage.

  Serves 4

  4 andouillettes de Troyes

  1 tablespoon unsalted butter

  1 shallot, peeled and minced

  ¾ cup dry white wine

  1½ tablespoons whole-grain Dijon mustard

  ¾ cup crème fraîche or sour cream

  Ratafia (optional)

  Salt and pepper to taste

  ½ pound fromage de Chaource

  In a dry pan, or under the broiler, brown the andouillettes, turning them until all the sides become golden. Meanwhile, heat a sauté pan over medium heat, melt the butter, and add the minced shallot, sautéing until soft. Add the white wine, bring to a boil, and reduce the liquid by a third. Stir in the mustard, crème fraîche, and dash of ratafia, if desired, then bring to a boil and simmer for a minute or two. Taste and season with salt and pepper.

  Turn on the broiler. Transfer half the sauce to an ovenproof baking dish and add the browned andouillettes. Cover them with the remaining sauce and top each sausage with a quarter-inch-thick wedge of Chaource cheese. Broil until lightly browned and bubbling, about 10 minutes. Serve with steamed potatoes and a little choucroute or sauerkraut.

  Chapter 3

  Brittany / Crêpes

  The morning after Calvin left, I pushed myself out of bed and into a routine: gym, tea, breakfast, desk. I stared blankly at the computer screen until the clock in the corner told me it was time to catch the crosstown bus. My friend Elena had invited me to have lunch at Breizh Café, a crêperie in the Marais that featured a distinctly Parisian Franco-Japanese aesthetic, with minimalist cube tables, tatami mats on the floor, dabs of wasabi in the vinaigrette, and scoops of green-tea ice cream adorning the desserts. She was there when I arrived, sitting by the window with the light shining on her dark curls. We greeted each other with double-cheek kisses, a custom I’d noticed that all expats living in France seemed to adopt, no matter where they came from.

  “How are you?” she said.

  I hesitated before answering. “Fine.” I had met Elena only a few months before, at a cocktail party in Neuilly thrown by a friend of a friend. We instantly discovered a shared New York history and mutual interest in good food—la bouffe, as the French call it—and the pursuit of eating adventures, heedless of our waistlines. Since then we’d seen each other a few times, swapping tales of expat miscommunication—Elena was American, with a Swiss husband—and sympathizing about the grim state of freelancing, whether in graphic design (her) or journalism (me). But we were only just creeping toward friendship. I still felt shy about revealing my problems.

  “Have you heard from Calvin yet?” she asked.

  I nodded. “He e-mailed me last night when he got to Amman.” I swallowed, a hard, dry gulp of air, and fell quiet.

  Elena was sensitive enough to let my silence pass. She handed me a menu, and we communicated in the way we knew best: by admiring, considering, and then dissecting our food options. Would I get the galette complète, a thin buckwheat crêpe filled with ham, cheese, and egg? What about the o
ne with cheese and mushrooms? Should we order two different galettes and trade bites? And how about splitting a leafy side salad with wasabi dressing? I knew we would be friends—not just lunching acquaintances but real, secret-swapping, worry-soothing, laughter-exchanging friends—when she agreed with beaming enthusiasm to share everything.

  “How’s work going?” Elena asked after we had ordered.

  “Pretty slow,” I admitted. I had finished revisions to my novel a few months earlier and was now in the laborious, contemplative process of trying to start a new book. “I’m having trouble concentrating.”

  “Oh, honey, he just left. It’ll get easier.”

  “I’m worried about spending too much time alone. You know what it’s like working from home.” I was grateful for the time and space to be able to write, but as a moderately social person I’d craved daily human interaction even before Calvin had left.

  She nodded. “When Stéphane works late, I sometimes go the whole day without talking to anyone but the cat.”

  “I might start stalking our building’s gardienne, listening for the vacuum, just so I can pop out and talk to another person for five minutes.”

  She laughed. “Call me, okay? Before you start stalking the gardienne, just give me a call. We can meet up for coffee or lunch anytime.” She nodded a little bit to emphasize her words, to encourage me, and I felt a rush of gratitude. Calvin and I had several friends in Paris, both old and new, but we had socialized mainly as a couple. I was still trying to build that web of friends, colleagues, and neighbors that constitutes a community.

  The food arrived, and Elena and I both pulled out our cameras and started snapping photos, not for any real reason but because the food looked pretty in the natural light. I admired the contrast of melted Emmental cheese against the thin pancake’s dark and lacy beauty before picking up my knife and fork. The galettes were crisp, almost tough, difficult to cut, and chewy with the buckwheat flour’s deep nuttiness offset by soft, oozing cheese.

  We chewed in silence for a moment, then looked up from our plates, our eyes bright. I felt my mouth sweep into a smile, a real one. “How’re the mushrooms?” I gestured toward Elena’s plate.

  “Shiitake,” she said, almost reverently. “Do you want to taste?” We exchanged pie-shaped wedges and resumed eating.

  After we’d cleaned our plates of every delicately dressed mesclun leaf, every tender mushroom slice, every last butter-crisped buckwheat crumb, Elena turned to me and uttered a word I was hoping to hear: “Dessert?”

  I don’t usually eat dessert at lunch. But you know what? It’s not every week that your husband leaves for Baghdad. We flagged down the waiter. “Deux crêpes au caramel beurre salé, s’il vous plaît.” Two crêpes with salted butter caramel.

  “Du café? Du thé?” he asked.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est du thé au sarrasin?” Elena pointed at the menu. “Buckwheat tea—have you ever heard of that?” she asked me. I shook my head.

  “It’s tea from Japan,” the waiter replied. “Made from roasted buckwheat grains.”

  “On va essayer,” Elena said. “Sounds interesting.”

  The crêpes arrived first, folded into triangles, each a contrast of crisp edges and spongy centers, drizzled with golden butter caramel sauce. I cut mine in half, and the liquid pooled into a golden, sticky, salty-sweet, faintly bitter puddle. Between bites we sipped the tea, a pale yellow liquid steeped in a small, heavy Japanese metal pot. “It tastes a little like toast,” Elena said.

  I breathed in the tea’s nutty fragrance. “You know, I have had this before. At a Japanese restaurant in New York.”

  “Don’t they make soba noodles out of buckwheat?”

  “I think so, yeah.” I took another sip. The tea, I realized, connected the Paris restaurant with its Tokyo branch, forming a sort of bridge between two cultures that use the same grain in very different ways. “But buckwheat seems like an unusual link between France and Japan.”

  “It grows everywhere in Brittany. Have you ever been? The coast is so wild and beautiful.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve always wanted to go, but we didn’t have a chance before Calvin left.”

  Elena picked up the teapot to refill our cups and then set it down with a thump. “You should go! You should take a trip up there. Oh, Ann, you’d love it—it’s so gorgeous—all green fields and jagged coastline. And the food! The crêpes are even better than here.”

  “Go to Brittany? By myself?”

  “Why not? It’s an easy train ride. And you could rent a car right at the station. You won’t get lost with a GPS.”

  “I’ve never really traveled by myself before. Not overnight.” Even as I said the words, I realized how silly they sounded. This was France, not West Africa or rural China. Traveling here wasn’t that complicated; it didn’t involve facing danger or hardship.

  “Look.” Elena put down her cup. “Your husband’s away, but you’re still in France. You’ll only be here for a few years. Why not take advantage of it? Il faut profiter, as they say.”

  “Profiter,” I repeated, remembering Calvin’s words before he left.

  Later, after we had paid the bill and kissed each other good-bye, after I had taken the bus back home to my echoey apartment, double-locked myself inside, and turned on all the lights, I sat down at my computer and began to research train tickets to Brittany.

  * * *

  * * *

  The first thing to take into consideration when you’re planning a crêpe-eating expedition in Brittany is the region’s size. It’s enormous—divided into north and south and then divided again into départements—too big to visit in its entirety over a weekend or even during the span of a two-week holiday. No, tackling this territory requires careful planning and selection. Should one go north, to the seaside resort towns of Saint-Malo, Dinard, and Cancale, once the favored retreats of vacationing Victorians? Or should one venture south and west—far, far west—to the farthest tip of France? All the Bretons I talked to in Paris encouraged me to visit their province. But only one, Sophie Le Floch, pulled out her address book and wrote me a list of people to meet and places to visit.

  “If you want to learn about crêpes, you have to go to Finistère,” she said. As a native Bretonne and the owner of one of my favorite Parisian crêperies, the popular West Country Girl, Sophie certainly knew what she was talking about. She tore a page scrawled with names and phone numbers out of her notebook and pressed it on me.

  And so I booked myself a ticket to Quimper, a modest city 350 miles west of Paris, the capital of the département called Finistère. The high-speed train from Paris tore through the countryside until Rennes, when it switched to the normal track and slowed. As we passed towns with Breton names—Vannes, Lorient, Rosporden—the other passengers disembarked. By the time we arrived in Quimper, the train’s last stop, I was the only person in my carriage. Finistère doesn’t mean “Land’s End” for nothing.

  Quimper has a quaint charm, with narrow streets, timber-framed houses, and enchanting little footbridges that span the three rivers flowing through it. At the train station, I picked up my rental car and headed toward the center of town with one destination in mind: place au Beurre. Translation: Butter Square. Yes, this town—arguably the crêpe capital of the world—values dairy fat so highly that it actually has a square named after the stuff. Once the town’s marketplace, where salted butter was traded with great ferocity, it’s now a pretty, pocket-size, cobblestoned hub that is the home to half a dozen crêperies.

  I chose one of them, Au Vieux Quimper, for lunch. Inside, I found a dimly lit room with lace-covered windows, tables and chairs in honey-colored wood, and customers sipping apple cider from little bowls instead of glasses. My savory galette burst with cheese, bacon, and mushrooms cooked in cream, a heavy load of dairy and pork enclosed in a buckwheat wrapper of incredible delicacy. I wanted to scrape out t
he rich garnish so that I could better savor the crêpe’s crisp edges and spongy middle and taste the rough, nutty graininess of the buckwheat itself.

  Next to me a pair of older women gossiped their way through a lunch of plain buckwheat crêpes smeared generously with salted butter. One of them had a small bowl of something thick and creamy, which she ate with a spoon. What was it? Cream? Yogurt? She caught me staring, and I shifted my gaze. The waitress arrived to clear their plates. “Désirez-vous un dessert?” she asked the pair. “Une crêpe au caramel au beurre salé, peut-être?”

  I was only midway through my savory crêpe but my ears pricked up at the mention of salted butter caramel.

  “Du caramel? Dans une crêpe?” The woman across from me raised her eyebrows so high they practically touched her blue-tinted hair.

  “C’est une sauce au caramel, faite maison”—a homemade caramel sauce—explained the waitress.

  I began to feel confused. Weren’t these women locals? Why weren’t they familiar with salted butter caramel? Wasn’t it traditionally Breton? One of the great sweetmeats of seventeenth-century corsairs (or something like that)?

  “On peut tenter,” the friend said after a lengthy pause. But she sounded pretty doubtful, even as she agreed to try it.

  Ah, I thought, they’re tourists! They don’t know salted butter caramel. I congratulated myself on being more culinarily savvy than a French person. It didn’t happen often.

  The waitress came to remove my plate, and I asked for my own crêpe au caramel au beurre salé. When it arrived, I slid a knife through its center so that the sauce flooded the plate, a sticky, sweet-salty pool deepened with a note of brown butter. The pancake was finer than those I’d eaten in Paris, the sauce more sugary. And yet—did the caramel overwhelm the tender crêpe with its sugary richness? I scraped out the sauce and took a bite of plain crêpe, savoring its lacey edges and soft center.