Paris in Love (37 page)

As the story goes, my mother—thrown into the deep end and forced to cook or sink—taught herself by working her way right through
The Joy of Cooking
. I never really believed this. It was indisputable that she had mastered oatmeal, pot roast, and a cake she called Never-Fail Cake (the very label suggests the tail end of many a meal). But she spent most of her time cramming my brothers into white shirts for dinner, teaching us how to gently tap a soft-boiled egg perched in a porcelain eggcup, and instructing us in the mysteries of a table set with family silver, which she insisted on using at every meal. In truth, her uncanny ability to ruin a recipe—to give even a Never-Fail Cake a strange metallic taste, for example—cannot be blamed on Irma S. Rombauer. Mom resented giving it time and energy; inside, she felt cooking was someone else’s job. She wasn’t even terribly interested in the way food tasted.

I, too, never got over our lost blue-blooded past; eventually that fascination became the hallmark of Eloisa James. If heroines in my romances are not born fantastically rich, they have become so by the final chapter, and—to a woman—they grow up with maids.

Yet one thing I have learned from living in Paris is that even if I were surrounded by starched aprons, I would never trade the patrician life for the ability to cook. Parisians give kitchen work time. In the last six months, I, too, began giving cooking time and energy; I even read some cookbooks. One week I added cumin to everything from eggs to lamb. Some dishes worked; some didn’t. I added lavender beads to a chocolate cake (not so
good), and vodka to beet soup (very good). I did not spend time learning how to cook applewood-smoked rabbit with truffle oil. I gave time to simple things: risotto, a good broth, comforting soup.

Then we invited over new friends to dinner, including, on one notable night, a banker with an impressively Falstaffian stomach. He is the type of Frenchman who, at least in my imagination, drinks from martini carts and enjoys pigs’ feet with green lentils. I gave him chicken soup.

He asked for seconds.

So … for those of you who might want to dazzle the Frenchmen in your future, here’s my chicken soup recipe:

Lemon Barley Chicken Soup:
The first thing you have to do is make chicken broth. Over here in France, I can’t seem to find acceptable packaged chicken broth, so I make it from scratch; it’s really not tricky. Remove the skin from four or five chicken thighs. Put them in a big pot, along with a cut-up onion, a carrot or two, some celery, salt and pepper, and lots of water. Cook this mélange very, very slowly (bubbles just rising) for a few hours (at least three).

When you’ve got the broth under way, cook the barley: take 1 cup of barley and simmer it slowly in 4 to 5 cups of water. When it’s soft, drain the barley, but reserve any remaining barley water so you can add it to the broth.

When the broth is ready, skim off the froth. Then remove the chicken thighs and when they’re cool enough, strip the meat off the bones, saving it for the soup. Strain the broth and put it to the side.

Now that you’ve got chicken broth, it’s time for the soup itself—the rest is even easier.

Cut up some leeks, if you have them, though an onion works just fine, too. If you’ve got leeks, put some butter in your (now emptied) stockpot over low heat; use olive oil instead if you have onions. While the leeks/onions are softening, finely mince a knob of ginger and 2 or 3 garlic cloves. If you can get some, you can also crush some lemongrass and put it in at this point. I never seem to cook it right (it always stays tough), but it adds great flavor. Dump all that in with the softened leeks/onions. Cook until you can smell it, but take care to avoid browning. Then add the cut-up chicken and the barley, and pour in the broth. Simmer it over low heat for about half an hour. Add salt to taste.

To get a great lemon kick, squeeze 2 lemons and beat the juice well with 2 egg yolks. With the pot removed from the heat source, briskly whisk this mixture into the soup, being careful that the eggs don’t separate and curdle. Then return the pot to the heat and stir vigorously for a bit, until the eggs are cooked.

This soup is excellent for sick people (ginger, hot lemon, and chicken; need I say more?) and a tonic for sad people (total comfort). And it’s even better the next day.

In Bon Marché: a display of gorgeous designer shoes in jewel tones. Above the shoes hang tiny, extremely fluffy tutus, rather as if snowy white dandelion puffs were floating from the sky.

In France, the state provides free child care when schools are closed for holidays. So yesterday Alessandro brought Anna to our local
centre de loisir
—the center for leisure, or day camp. She clung to his hand, and said afterward that she could feel herself turning white from fear. But she came home joyful, having made three new friends. “When I had to speak French, I did,” she told me. “It just burst out of my mouth!”

I was early to pick up Anna at day camp, and so I read all the notices and one plaque mounted outside “in memory of the students of this school deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were Jewish.” Apparently more than three hundred children from the 9th arrondissement were sent to the camps; the sign promised
Ne les oublions jamais
. They will never be forgotten. By the time Anna pranced out, I was tearful, though she didn’t notice. The air was warm and smelled like spring, so we sat down at a sidewalk café for a glass of wine (me) and Orangina (her). Anna put a little clay polar bear, made that day, on the table. “His arms and legs fell off,” she said, carefully arranging the little blobs next to the body, as in a sacramental funeral rite. “His nose, too,” she added, rather dismally.

The berries have fallen from the homeless man’s bushes; perhaps this means spring is coming? Today he had his flap slightly unzipped, and we exchanged polite
Bonjours
. I gave him a coin directly, rather than put it in his bowl, which seemed daringly intimate.
“Ça va?”
I asked. “Everything okay?”
“Oui,”
he said.
“Ça va bien.”
All is well.

I’m working on an academic article about a 1607 play obsessed with silk taffeta, so I am reading cheap pamphlets from the era, trying to track down fashion trends. I came across this in a little book of English “witticisms”: “The owl and the swallow bring in winter and summer, but the nightingale and the cuckoo talk only of the merry time.” We should all be more nightingale-like, perhaps; I can do without the cuckoo.

Anna came home from day camp yesterday with her eyes large and her hands on her hips. “Mama! You shouldn’t be sending me to such a place—the teachers are violent!” Upon further inquiry, it did seem that the teachers were lively—she reported that one had “thrown” a chair. Still, from long experience with Anna’s dramatic renditions, I suspected that the teacher’s chair toppled. “What did the other children think?” I asked. “They didn’t seem to notice,” Anna reported. Her life is all the more interesting for the things she sees, which no one else even notices.

Paris restaurant alert! A new friend took us to a Lebanese restaurant with vinegary, delicious salad, smoky lamb, and glorious,
not too sweet, desserts: gelatin squares colored hot pink and rolled in delicate coconut flakes, baklava that didn’t leave fingers sticky with honey. It’s called Assanabel, and as a bonus, the stores around it sell Chanel, Gaultier, and Sonia Rykiel.