Some would argue that this is a fairly obvious post choice for the post-first-post post (post!), and they'd be right. But sod it, apparently people liked the one about food in Russia - ah, those were the days, when the sheer laugh-a-minute realities of being in Russia basically write your posts for you... (I hear it's a fairly common thing for Russia/France years abroad. Poor arts student etc etc quiet at the back ... of the comments section?) Although in all seriousness I was talking to one of my friends who apparently read my blog and she said I should do one on food because that was funny last time. (> tfw you get cited in a blog post but it's anonymous. No trip codes here, mein Schatz.) I think the message is that the groundbreaking, hyperbolic interlude was just too much for some of my audience. Not you, obviously. You're probably the kind of person that smiles knowingly at my random reference-spewing as the affliction of people who've come of age in an internet gripped in the sweaty paws of bloated, Star Wars-loving 80s manchildren who think that pop culture and shoving random slightly interesting facts into the gaping crevasse of their prefrontal cortex like fucking Pepperidge Farm goldfish is the way to anyone's heart with whatever kind of genitalia. As I was saying, you don't mind using Google when I butcher a kind of well-known author and then put them in the tags in an attempt at being (post!) ironic. You're probably familiar with that little feeling like a wink or a nod when you get a reference (through hard work or chance), that feeling of some kind of a connection with the writer. A connection, however fleeting, that feels real, almost like a physical warmth. Oh yes, you don't have to pretend it's not there - why don't we throw caution to the winds, steal away into the night, rent a room in a decrepit "hostel" that charges by the hour and bitch about superhero adaptations while we both pretend that our opinions aren't just nicked off Reddit- OH FOR THE LOVE OF SATAN, WHY DO YOUS DICKHEADS HAVE TO RUIN EVERYTHING FOR US?
...
Ahem. It's all right, they've gone. I told them there was a semi-ironic guest appearance by Stan Lee in something crushingly pointless and they had a "nerdgasm". It wasn't pretty.
Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, food. In France. In Paris, more precisely. You know what, I'm not going to pretend the food here isn't great. I throw my hands up in despair. I just can't mock French cuisine - you can mock that surly Parisian waiter as much as you like (behind his back, obviously, so you don't get extra bodily fluids in your order), but once the main course arrives you're putty in his hands. It actually is a requirement of French law that they have the menu on display outside any restaurant and offer fixed meals as well, so unless you suddenly decide to upscale on your wine you're probably never going to be surprised by the bill. Admittedly, if you're vegetarian, vegan or like to be particular about your meals you will get a double-nostrilled Gallic huff, but I'm lucky in that after eventually being made to accept that dried pigs ears are a valid thing to be served in a bar my standards are as low as Nicolas Cage's refusal rate on film roles.
It's just all so fucking good. Go to a bistro restaurant, have a modest two-course meal off the menu and it's great, especially with a shot of espresso with a sachet of brown sugar afterwards - ask for "a coffee" and that's what you'll get. In French "café au lait" - milky coffee - is exactly as well-regarded as the translation would suggest. I always feel drawn despite myself to people who like coffee as a culture. I don't mean in terms of a half-roasted-arabica-blend-with-whatever-I've-lost-interest-to-the-point-of-literally-not-being-fucked-to-Google-some-authentic-zzzz, just in terms of having proper coffee being considered a sign of being in a proper place. In our neck of the woods we got screwed from the off because our Dutch contacts got us onto tea instead (as well as that owning-India-and-swathes-of-China thing), so while most of my English friends here have the requisite wall of special tea that threatens to bury you in a crashing, aromatic wave of death every time you open a cupboard to look for pasta, they then usually have a manky jar of instant coffee granules that smell like Bisto on a shelf somewhere. And this is despite the fact that most French flats come with their ace cafetière-samovar thing as a standard! I get the impression that for a French person, regularly consuming instant coffee is somewhere on the level of a hate crime (like being virulently homophobic and then going on a march about it! Seriously, guys, sort it the fuck out). I personally normally go for instant coffee when at home, purely because I'm a student and my Northern blood starts creeping up when I see the price comparisons. Here, however, where they just don't do reductions on anything (the best you get is the French M&S sometimes does a buy-one-get-one-half-price to appease the rosbifs who've wandered in by accident) my impression is that proper coffee is cheaper. Who knows, I might even keep the habit up when I go back - my girlfriend will be delighted, having been trying to convert me for ages, though I refuse to believe you're meant to keep your ground beans in the fridge. I mean, what.
If you don't want to do the bistro thing (it can get old, and it's not as cheap as some options) there's usually something good about - a "traiteur asiatique" (Asian restaurant), which I usually misread as some kind of elaborate social vigilanteism gone wrong if I've not had my morning café noisette, a kebab place, lots of fun stuff round the Quartier latin (which has been a student/broke people (hoho) hangout for as long as anyone can remember), the usual fast-food chains present and correct, but Frenchified: you can order beer in McDonalds (no, I haven't been while I've been here. This is from when I was on my French exchange a couple of years ago and I wanted to get my brother a souvenir Royale With Cheese box, dohohoho), and Dominos do salad. Hold the bloody phone, yes, they do. Like, I'd spent a day busily flopping on the sofabed-thing and realised my potatoes were all looking at me like Shelob in Cirith Ungol, so I looked at the Dominos site and as I was checking out my order I saw that they had "Salade Dominos" as well for a euro. Intrigued, I coughed up the dough (a familiar experience with Dominos amirite) and waited for the pizza to arrive. And you know, it wasn't half bad. A Caesar salad dressing, a little plastic bowl, and an extra napkin. Just what you want after consuming the equivalent of a deflated tyre. Oh wait, the default base is thin here. It's a most perplexing experience that goes against everything you've learnt previously. Travel indeed broadens the mind.
Now part of this is to do with the French government's mostly laudable attempts to encourage people to embrace La Bonne Bouffe (Grand Scran, I'd have said), resorting to legislature when necessary. But we've got that, corpulent lot of good it does us - I think the French themselves genuinely do care. There's a story that I haven't got the heart to fact-check that when Disneyland Paris first opened it did terrible business for a couple of weeks and was going to close; HQ were aghast, as you would be, but then they asked the locals what was wrong and they said that no green-blooded Frenchman would ever frequent a cartoon character-themed amusement park where they couldn't get pissed at the refreshment stands. Yes, apparently Disneyland nearly folded because they didn't serve wine at those little kiosk things. Hush - don't ask aloud. They're French. They'll just treat you to a Gallic "bof" and wander off, because you will never understand if you have to have it explained to you, like jazz or things being naff. (More on which in a later post!.) And I don't know if it's true, either - but as the Puck said on seeing the premiere of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a field, "It never happened; yet it is still true." Either you read that as telling you about the fundamental creepy creeping alcoholism of an entire nation, or that they care about their vittles on a decidedly Mediterranean level. Your call, you desperately sexy polysemite, you.
This is all very well in theory (always the preferred French domain), but for me, in practice, food in France tends to be a bit more getting a (n admittedly delicious and sometimes still warm) baguette and some cheese from a supermarket and maybe some scouring pads because ours is looking like it's been in the wars than sticking up your index finger like you're going to demonstrate something impressive and going "gah-SONNE!". (Protip: Don't do that. Ever. I know you weren't even thinking about it, but all the same, don't.) For me personally being here has meant I've been able to do more fun stuff with cooking, ie. cooking at all, for the most part. While it's true Russian Mistress (she says hi to you all, incidentally) had a kitchen in her halls, it was... well, a halls kitchen, and then a Soviet halls kitchen. Also, I didn't live there (despite what her roommates must have ended up thinking), so I couldn't really do such a lot, since crossing Scary Russian Landlady in her own demesne would have been a bad idea to say the least. Not that I didn't try a couple of things with Russian Mistress. (Oh, grow up.) Here though, there's a tiny hob with a mostly working oven in the flat I'm renting, and my dear friend Non-Scary Non-Russian Landlady (she picked the name) has a full working kitchen because her and her friends won the second-year-living-out-house jackpot pretty hard. You guys, I made pan-seared duck breast and chicken with green onions and cheesecake! (not together) When both I and Non-Scary Non-Russian Landlady recently got the summer flu (chest infection's back, woo, or else the cast of Shrek III have been taking it in turns to bismark my alveoli while I've been coughing in my sleep), she, as a heathen second-generation-hippie, made ginger tea in the pressure cooker pot. Because there is one. The tea burning through my throat gave me strange flashbacks to gagging on badly-rendered CGI appendages, but the point is this kitchen is incredible. The oven extractor fan extracts straight into the next-door toilet, but you can't have everything.
So there you have it: I can't really can't fault French food at all, surprise surprise. Though actually, as it's very hard to make anything sound threatening in French, I dumped a load of "piment de Cayenne" on my tea tonight and only after a couple of mouthfuls (when I could no longer feel my mouth) remembered that this is ground Cayenne pepper. PEP-PER. It's got two aspirated unvoiced bilabial plosives, for God's sake, it literally sounds like the word's sPitting at you or Punching you in the face. And though the French clearly has a P in it as well it's just not the same. Try this - "Attention: pylônes électriques. Danger de mort." If you hear it spoken in French it sounds like a come-on. I dare you to read "Danger de mort" and not imagine Julie Delpy's sekh-see breathy Franch Rs. Bonus points if you're familiar with the slang connotations of "death" in French, hoho.
This post! has gone on for quite long enough now, so I'll take my leave and go back to Three Colours: White or maybe Killing Zoe. (Pandering to the Gen X instead of Gen Y? Sure, I'll take it.) Remember to
While next post!
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| This is a cafetière-samovar. Or cafetière italienne, if you must. I prefer my term. You put water and beans in the bottom, stick it on the hob and wait for the magic... |
