French Crossroads: A Post-Holiday Postcard From Paris
The seasonal spirit in France helps chase away those apocalyptic blues.
Welcome back to the French Crossroads newsletter, which has been derailed these many months for reasons too dull to share here. As I emerge from literary hibernation, I hope these missives will again find their way regularly into your inbox.
I could start by trying to catch you up on France’s apocalyptic 2022. Record heat. Wildfires that strained the nation’s emergency resources. Starting in September, I had to leave our car in the garage for a month because a strike and supply chain issues made it impossible to find gas in the Paris region. Inflation. Holiday transportation strikes. The French coughed up a hairball against Argentina in the World Cup soccer thing that everyone pretended to boycott for about 30 seconds. We were warned against nationwide power cuts in December that never came.
Perhaps the most tragic of all: A nationwide mustard shortage pitted neighbor against neighbor.
Yet, the nation survived, as did our family. Having endured, we embraced the holiday season. Things turn festive around here in November, and in our suburban hamlet of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the Xmas decorations and lights helped lift spirits and set the mood, even if that mood was slightly hallucinatory.
Our holiday shopping quests included a mix of French goodies with attempts to sprinkle in drops of Americana, such as candy canes. Alas, candy canes may appear to be plentiful, but they are inevitably strawberry flavored, which we have classified as a human rights violation in our house. Peppermint apparently being too much for the French palette. The cruelty of this is unspeakable.
Our Christmas eve traditions include a day buzzing around Paris to visit a Christmas marché where we ate German food and then strolled around the Tuileries waiting for the sun to set so we could enjoy the warm glow of the light displays that cover the fancy stores that we can’t afford but can look at with envy and longing.
Christmas dinner consisted of fondue and the obligatory bûche de Noël.
Vacances
We didn’t plan any big holiday trips this year, but we were determined to get out of Dodge after the Christmas frenzy and see some of the surrounding countryside. This included a hike in the western reaches of our department, Yvelines, followed by lunch at Le Bistrot des Tours in Montfort-l'Amaury, a small village with a high concentration of highly-rated restaurants that will merit a return visit for further exploration.
Closer to home, we went to the neighboring town of Marly-le-Roi which boasts a large Domaine that was once home to a mighty chateau and part of the Versailles constellation of big royal playgrounds. Following the revolution, the chateau was abandoned, and back then the locals didn’t have romantic attachments to such things, much less a long-term strategy for the economic benefits of tourism.
Instead of a fantastic architectural monument, they saw basically a pile of rocks that served as raw material to build or repair their own homes and walls. And so bit by bit, stones were hauled away and repurposed until all that remained was a large park. This is not such an uncommon story in France, and it makes it all the more amazing that many of the monuments that exist today were preserved and restored across the centuries rather than turned into bathroom walls.
Foodapalooza
We didn’t consciously try to create a culinary theme for the vacation, but looking back, that seemed to have happened on its own. A birthday celebration included a walk through Le Marais neighborhood in Paris that ended at A Modo Mio for an Italian feast of veal parmesan, pasta carbonara, and bruschetta.
For New Year’s Day, we unpacked the raclette kit for melted cheese, charcuterie, and veggies.
And finally, by pure happenstance, we discovered Schwartz’s, a Jewish deli restaurant next to our dentist’s office. So we treated ourselves to a kosher hotdog, a pastrami sandwich (mostly authentic but with a questionable decision to toast the bread and include a side of bbq sauce), and a Ruben.
Schwartz’s also came with its own slightly off-center cultural twists. In place of the boisterous, welcoming serving staff we’d expected at an American Jewish deli, we were greeted by the clichéd Parisian waitress who looked like she had just been sucking on a lemon. Impatient with our questions, she reluctantly took our order with an amplified sigh.
When the food came, the portions were massive, clearly of the American variety which surely must have been a shock to every French person there. Indeed, my pastrami sandwich was so large that I could not fit it into my mouth. I could only eat one-quarter of this gastronomic monster, which meant that I had to suffer the disdainful look of our server when I sheepishly admitted I could not finish the whole plate (a capital offense in France) and asked for a box to take the rest home as I tried not to die from the shame.
Basically, it was delicious, but a cultural minefield. But we ate (and ate!), and lived to tell the tale.