Channeling my inner old lady

Okay, I am not usually one for pomp and circumstance. I don’t know why people like Princess Di so much, I don’t think silver wear placement is critical to a meal, and I don’t believe that not wearing “pants” to a “mandatory court hearing” is “inappropriate”. But my experience at Ladurée, the most famous and fanciest patisserie in Paris, was an amazingly impressive whirlwind of marble, $10 cups of tea and pastries that were emasculating-ly delicious.

The Ladurée I visited is on the Champs Elysée. I hate the Champs Elysée; it’s like if Fifth avenue and the French part of Epcot had an over priced badly-dressed-Spanish-tourist filled baby. I literally only go there to buy phone cards at the world’s fanciest Virgin megastore. I would only recommend taking a visitor there if you didn’t think that they could handle the intellectual rigors of taking the elevator up to the top of the Eiffel towers (“what are all them buttons for? Say, I think I can call my ma from up here. Hey ma! Get off the dang toit!”). This Ladurée, one of there three branches, was opened about five years and is covered in fake second empire French furniture and decorations. Fortunately, it’s a beautifully designed interior, and while not really from 1870, it looks nothing like the awful fake French schlock filling the McMansions that I learned to drink cheap vodka in when I was in high school.

My friend Brooke’s mother and grandmother, who were so unbelievably friendly and good natured you’d think they were about to tell you about a guy named Jesus, took me and some friends out to brunch Sunday. First of all, the menu of Ladurée is just shorter than War and Peace, and when one girl told another that the teas were on page 14, she genuinely tried to find it because, well, there very well could have been a page 14. It took a solid hour to decide what the have, but finely a manned up and ordered the Ladurée brunch special. I guess eating petit fours and viennoiserie isn’t necessarily manning up to anything, but if a “vrai mec” orders a steak anywhere that serves meat, then a “vrai mec” should order the pastry in a patisserie, too.

What came were three tears of sugar, sugar, and for good measure butter and more sugar. There was nice red currant jam, and perfectly salty butter for the rolls. Next was maybe the best thing I ate the whole time: a mini croissant filled with apple jam and glazed with sugar. It was basically a high-class crispy cream and was just really delicious. I then had their famous macaroons. The lemon one was filled with lemon cream and was so good it hurt. There was also a coffee one that was very tasty and a chocolate one that had basically a chocolate truffle inside that was so good I am sure it’s illegal in the states (well, everywhere but Hawaii). There were some macaroons that weren’t great though; the strawberry was dull and the violet-cassis, while nice sounding in a 1920’s French prostitute kind of way, didn’t taste like either violets or cassis (God damnit I sound effete!).

So then I had my eggs (yeah that’s right, I will save my masculinity through protein talk!). I ordered scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. The smoked salmon came in tiny little orange jewels of flesh and was sweet, salty and just the tiniest bit smoky, so basically just the way I like it. The eggs were a little runny, which was cool because the liquid was almost orangey, indicating to me that they were as fresh as an egg could be.

Brooke’s mom, grandmother and a girl at the table ordered a smoked salmon club that was also really really good. The table then split more macaroons, of which the cinnamon, grape, and raspberry flavored were the best. I finished the meal with fruit and orange flower flavored oolong tea.

It was, without a doubt, the best breakfast I have had in years. I can honestly say that I have come a long way from eating tater tots and granola in the Vassar cafeteria and watching hung over people awkwardly eat breakfast with last nights hook up.

Now if only I could find a damn New York Times to read I would be set brunch wise…

Hey sorry I havent updated in a while. My parents and my friend were in town. Who knew people liked visiting Paris?

There's an article after this and I am writing some new stuff now. Oh its just so hard to be too busy eating and going to museums to blog.

Chanterelle? Shoot cuz I know her...

When one hears of a semester abroad experience involving someone buying some “sweet ass mushrooms”, it is natural to imagine stoned Americans in Amsterdam falling into canals and doing wildly inappropriate things in the Anne Frank house. But actually I am talking about the less fun but more delicious edible mushrooms.

Fabulous mushrooms here are dirt-cheap! The cheapest is chanterelles, which at whole foods (I mention whole foods not as the basis for any rational price but just because Path-mark and the Piggly Wiggly tend not to sell the worlds finest chanterelles) in America sell for about $20-$25 a pound, but here they are 10-15 euros per kilogram! Okay so that means nothing to a lot of you who both hate the metric system, the European union and mushrooms without psilocybin, but that’s about a quarter of the price. Also, you can by fresh porcini, black trumpet and blue mushrooms here for about half the price.

Mushrooms were about the only thing that grew in ex-soviet countries during the communist era that weren’t some how socialized. Of course, when Borya and Vika aren’t drinking straight sterno and watching their democracies disappear, they are happily foraging for mushrooms and selling them to the French and Italians to make into great cuisine and to the British to boil them into a fine snot (anyone reading this who has had breakfast in the dorms of University of Edinburgh will understand how the Scots can take an innocent mushroom and make it look like an alien fetus). So, in a rare bit of news something is truly cheaper here than in the states.

Basically, when I come back from France and hand you a kwanza present that is brown, mushy and smells like the forest, you’ll know what it is…

La Viande Rose!

Mmm, meat.

Meat is good. I am sure that that was the first sentence ever uttered. I guess I respect vegetarians and vegan’s for thinking about where meat comes from and rejecting it; but on the other hand that’s stupid. Really stupid. Meat is literally the most important part of your diet. Animals, including humans, have for billions of years spent countless hours of effort trying to get meat. People love meat; all cultures, even majority vegetarian ones, have meat dishes. When the Greeks offered sacrifices to the God, do you think they burned tofu and kale? No! The offered huge joints of meat! If Marie Antoinette had said “let them eat meat” instead, the French monarchy would still be around.

I have had many varying experiences with meat in France that I feel like writing about. One was delicious. One was a horrifying example of how people like meat so much that they will make the grossest food I have ever tasted. With that in mind, enjoy these two meaty updates.

Aren’t you excited???

J'aime faire du noshing

Florence Finkelsztajn is a god. If it hadn’t gone badly before, I would be seriously tempted to round up the Jewish community (I know, never a good way to start a sentence), take all their gold (again, not helping) and build a giant golden statue to her à la the Ten Commandments.

Florence Finkelsztajn was the creator of the famous Finkelsztajn’s deli in the Marais section of Paris. The Marais is the best section of Paris; it’s a fabulous mix of cool clothing stores, art galleries, gay people, wealthy bobos, 20 something French hipsters, and orthodox Jews (kinda like Brooklyn without the smell). A trip to the Marais however would not be incomplete without getting lunch on the Rue des Rosiers. Like moths to a light bulb (you know what Jewish mother moths always say: No turn out the light bulb, its okay, I’ll sit in the dark like a dawg. I’m on your mother, I don’t need light), hundreds of hungry locals and tourists, both Jew and non-Jew alike, prowl up and down this small cobblestone street seeking out some seriously good food. Of course there is the crowd favorite: L’As du Falafel, which with out a doubt, and with the endorsement of Lenny Kravitz, makes the best falafel in Paris, if not the world. But I am not here to talk about their falafel. I wanna tell you about a sandwich I got at Finkelsztajn’s deli.

First of all, it was 7 euros, which is about $9.88. Too much for a sandwich, I know, but this was worth every centime. It came on a freshly baked egg roll with poppy seeds and cook onions baked in. Inside the sandwich was what makes grown Jews cry. First, a creamy layer of baba ganoush (eggplant caviar), which was just the perfect level of garlic-y. Next was a layer of house cured pastrami that was pepper without being hot, and just salty enough to make you salivate but not beg for a coke. Next was the house made pickle, which is French for corned beef. The meat was bright red, much rarer and less fatty than American roast beef. Finally, the topped this Ashkenazi orgasm off with pickles, roasted red peppers and tomatoes.

Oh my god. SO GOOD. One of the best deli sandwiches I have ever eaten. I love deli food in the states, don’t get me wrong, but if you could taste this sandwich you would consider flying 6,000 to buy a platter of these cold cuts.

And while this was an intensely delicious (and Jewish) experience, some meat experiences in Paris have been intensely horrifying (and sacriligious)...

The horror, the horror

Sausages, along with being hilarious, are a hallmark of European cuisine. Preserving meat was terribly important before refrigerators were invented and the creation of the sausage changed our world. Think how much poorer our society would be without kolbasa, chorizo and slim jims. But not all sausages are good. Some reveal the most disgusting extremes which people are willing to stretch the word food.

Indeed sometimes they can be pure unimaginable grossness. Woe unto the unsuspecting traveler who tries Andouillette sausage.

Now, to appreciate the following story, you have to imagine me with that distant look veterans get when they talk about Da Nang: I was fresh off the airplane from Bordeaux to Paris, at the very beginning of my long and strange journey that would be my semester Paris. I wanted something hearty and filling, so I stepped into a café and ordered “le saucisson Andouillette”, assuming it would be some big golden log of comforting pork products. The thing showed up looking gorgeous, slathered in hot mustard with fries and salad; basically exactly what I wanted. But to my horror the first bite tasted like a mouthful of sewer. Well, maybe not sewer, maybe more like strange pig organs that I, the ignorant American Jew eating pork subconsciously trying to piss off my mother, didn’t know what I was tasting. So I went back for another: worse. Really just like eating piggy sewer. It was like licking Divine’s face, or perhaps the after taste of an hour-long make out session with Britney Spears. Really just nauseatingly awful.

So I tried to avoid strange pork products for a while, until, like a sucker, I bought andouillette again. To be fair, it was a duck product called andouillette and looked like a tasty duck sausage, so I just wasn’t that concerned. However, the second I cut into the sausage a foul smell of uncooked grossness and brimstone emanated out of the meat. I threw the things out and went on wikipedia the next day determined to figure out what andouillette was and why the hell any French person would eat it. That is when I made my shocking and horrifying discovery.

Andouillette is tripe and chitterling sausage. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS??? Tripe is intestines! Sausage is intestines! Worse than that CHITTERLING IS COLON! I WAS EATING INTESTINE STUFFED INTO INTESTINES WITH A DASH OF COLON!!! TWICE!

No wonder it taste like a sewer. I’ve tasted tripe 3 times before, time foolishly assuming I’d like it, and each time finding it beyond revolting. Even writing this makes me ashamed to have and use my intestines. The colon part though was just unacceptable (I could make a really crude joke here at the expense of a certain population at Vassar college, but I think I will let you connect the dots...)

The French clearly like meat so much that they will combine any edible piece of meat with another. Cassoulet is a delicious example of this; andouillette is a horrifying example. I know rustic french cuisine has a certain charm, but this is one of those things like black plague and the comedy of Jerry Lewis that are better left in the past.