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.

Domo aragato Mr. De Gaulle

I really like doing this blog. It gives me a good excuse to do things that would otherwise make me look like some weird effete glutton. So, with this excuse in mind, I have just completed a deep and complex study of a new area of the French culinary world: French sushi.

I came to France wanting to taste common American ethnic foods and how they were adapted to the French palate. Now, I guess I imagined a sushi experience in France to go something like this: I would walk into a local sushi joint, where everything on the inside, like most stuff in Paris, would be sort of weird and glowing post modern boxes. Then I would stand there for twenty minutes, trying to get the attention of one of the waitresses, who would be too busy testing John Galliano or appeasing the Germans to notice I was there. Finally, she would notice me, but her icy Medusa like stare would turn me to stone. I would never get to plunk down 140 euros to taste raw duck liver, horse meat, frogs legs or what ever else the French choose to eat because the rest of society shuns. This would then all be placed, not on top of sushi rice, but perhaps on top of The Stranger by Camus.

Well it wasn’t quite like that. First of all, apparently all sushi restaurants around the world are required to have dark wood interiors, cheap bamboo and overly laminated menus (no doubt an imperial decree). In three different places I ordered the same sort of nigiri/maki mixed sushi plate, which ranged from 12 euors to 18 euros, about what you’d pay in America. They gave me about pieces of typical salmon, tuna, white fish and a california roll and all of these sushi joints.

So how does it compare to American sushi. Sorry Sarko, but your sushi is just not as good. There isn’t as much fish per piece of rice and they don’t make interesting rolls. I know that this is hardly scientific, and that you may be saying that there is good sushi in Paris, I just haven’t found it. And while I am sure somewhere there is good sushi, these were places I just fell into off the street. But in America a random sushi place (hell, even the world famous Sushi Village in Poughkeepsie, New York, which is about as authentic and Hillary Clinton’s southern accent,) is going to have the kind of sushi I like: loads of raw fish, varied and tasty rolls, and that orange-carrot-ginger salad dressing that I would eat with a spoon were it socially acceptable.

This isn’t too say French sushi is bad. They use fresh mayonnaise on their California roll, which was surprisingly sweet and delicious, and they usually served a pickle cabbage salad first which is better than it might sound. But basically I have to give this one to America.

U.S.A! U.S.A!

Restaurant review: Cafe du Marche

Like an Italian sports car, Belgian chocolate or Swedish death metal played by people surgically altered to look like a 300 year old evil wood demon, some countries just do things better than other countries. The French have lunch. Follow me here for a second: What do people want for lunch? A salad? A sandwich? I mean, steak frites in my opinion is the best lunch money can buy and they are all frencher than an accordian made of baguettes. Americans may consider French food suitable for a special dinner, but without being fully conscience of it, we adore a good French lunch. There are thousands of restaurants across the United States that exist to give people the fantasy that they are having a leisurely hours long Parisian lunch.

So, being on a giant vacation, I was obliged on this beautiful sunny 82 degree afternoon to have a two hour long lunch at a lovely spot next to the École Militaire in the 7th arrondisement. We ate at a restaurant recommended by the TimeOut guide called Café du Marché (38, Rue Cler, Paris, 75007). The menu was a simple dozen dishes (5 salads, 7 entrées) and two specials written on a blackboard. The place was pretty crowded even at 2 pm, so I knew it was gonna be good.

The waitress was very busy, so we quickly ordered a salmon salad, a market salad and the roasted chicken. The salmon salad came with a Russian dressing that had a surprising and pleasant kick of horseradish. The market salad was a mix of French ham, silky terrine of foie gras, shredded carrots, yummy tomatoes, tabouleh, saurkraut and greens. The saurkraut was very lightly dressed in some French mayo and was perfect with the foie gras (further confirming my belief that cabbage is the cool new vegetable). The roasted chicken was pleasant but nothing special; however it came with fantastic mashed potatoes with a very herby hotel butter. The mashed potatoes were a beautiful almost saffron yellow and had a perfect balance of sweetness from the roasted potatoes, butter, and what tasted like some chicken broth. Finally, I was awakened from my food come by a café noisette (my new favorite drink- an espresso with a little milk).

Basically, I think the French look down on everybody or secretly consider them barbarians because, hey, if you lived and ate this well, wouldn’t you think everyone else was living wrong?

Yes Ralph? My cat's breath smells like cat food

So one the of the things that I wasn’t expecting to write about on this blog was cat food, which, unless I go broke or nuts, I will hopefully never have to really worry about from an eating stand point. However I noticed something really funny about French cat food.

I am living with a very sweet black and white cat named Gram, who, like all cats, only truly acts like he loves you when he wants dinner. Being a sucker, I went and got him some food. People feed their cats the same things that they are comfortable eating: my cats eat a lot of turkey, chicken, beef and fish flavored cat food because, well, those are the cat versions of the meat my family tends to eat. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I grabbed the closest can of cat food: it was rabbit flavored! The French love rabbit (they sell a lot of it in the supermarket at Monoprix, the French Target) so I guess their cats do to.

Should I be surprised when the cat demands cat sized Gauloise cigarettes and ignore when it dry humps someone in a public park like the French seem to enjoy?

Fig me, baby

Europe is a little place: apartments are small, cars are so tiny that I feel emasculated as an American man just by looking at them and elevators are as roomy as the average coffin.

So when I went to a Parisian bodega (here they are called the chic-er “épicerie” and the fourteen year olds buying cheap cigarettes and cheaper beer in them aren’t breaking the law), I was shocked to find nearly baseball-sized figs! Look at that thing! I mean I thought everything was bigger in Texas, but apparently that only applies to beef, hats and hair.

Not only are these figs huge, but they are damn good! The flesh is purple skin in thin and slimy and never hard, and the inside is bursting with sweet crimson figgy goodness and hundreds of those seeds that are so satisfying to crunch. It’s really like the perfect snack. I mean, I have been pushing for years for American movie theaters to serve cured pork products and fruit (for 75 cents extra you can get an extra large movie themed “Harry Pancett-er and the Sorcerer’s Stone Fruit Compote”!), but now I think with these huge amazing figs it has officially transformed from my hair (hare?) brained scheme into a marketable reality.

Overwhelmingly pretty, just like me

Okay so I haven't updated my blog in a while because I am in Paris. Wow. Seriously I walk around and think "am I on vacation or am I hear to learn"

Of course the answer is that I am on vacation. Paris is so gorgeous and you would be shocked by just how good looking alot of the people are on the subway. The people on SEPTA look, shall we say, some what less glamorous. Although I think I met a girl on the R5 named Glamorous once...

Anyway I am living with a lovely woman named Gisele and her two sons Virgile (18) and Leopold (16) in Vincennes, which is not technically in Paris but is just right out side. I am right on the high speed metro line so I am like 20 minutes from the heart of the city.

God its gorgeous here. I wish I had wi-fi (which the french adorably called "wee-fee") but I should be getting it soon.

A la prochaine!