Paris, My Sweet (3 page)

“Merci à vous,” she replied, the ingrained French
politesse
kicking in. “Bonne soirée.”

Out on the sidewalk, in the damp April air, my smile erupted again. Through the thin
boulangerie
paper, I could feel the warmth of the baguette, making it irresistibly squishy in my hand. It was one of God's gifts to the world, I had decided: French bread, fresh from the oven. There was no way I was waiting until I was back at my tree house to indulge. I tore a piece of the baguette off, trailing crumbs behind me, and crunched into it. The crust resisted for a moment and then the crisp outside revealed the doughy, dense, and spongy inside. How could four little ingredients—flour, water, yeast, and salt—produce something so otherworldly? I stopped on the sidewalk, my eyes rolling in the back of my head as I chewed very, very slowly, savoring the baguette's flavor.

I opened my eyes and a girl smoking outside a bar was staring at me. I had become infatuated with French women, more so than the slim-hipped, effeminate men, developing girl-crushes daily. Their lips were always painted perfectly in magenta or tomato red. Their eyeliner was at once retro and modern, like Brigitte Bardot's. And their hair was always disheveled but perfectly so, as if they'd just had a romp in bed. They were sexy, stylish, and gorgeous. I felt horribly dull with my brown hair and
au
naturel
makeup—both pretty much unchanged since the day I graduated from college. Whenever I was around a particularly
jolie
femme
, I could hear Edith Wharton whispering in my ear, “Compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in kindergarten.”
Touché, Edith
.

The girl outside the bar was in Parisian uniform: slim jeans tucked into short cowboy booties, a leather coat hanging off her thin frame, and an oversized scarf, which, like her hair, was effortlessly yet studiously haphazard. I smiled. I felt a bonding moment between us, her looking at me, me looking at her, just two girls of the world. But she just pulled an impossibly long drag from her cigarette, tossed it in the gutter, and subtly rolled her eyes before disappearing back inside the bar. Paris was cool; apparently, I was not.

In fact, I knew I wasn't. Edith Wharton wasn't the only thing I had been reading. I had been dipping into all the tomes about living in and adjusting to France and I suddenly recalled a small but important gem. That in America, everyone smiles at strangers—your neighbors, the checkout girl, the cop giving you a ticket for doing 45 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone—as a friendly, pacifying gesture. In France, the only people who smile at strangers are mentally retarded.

I found the insight so ridiculous and funny and, if I were any example, apparently true. I laughed out loud and continued down the street with my baguette, looking “touched” for sure.

As American as I appeared with my big, dorky grin on the outside, I was beginning to understand—a deep, in-my-bones understanding—the French appreciation for food.

Nobody at the office deigned to eat lunch at their desks as we had habitually done in New York. Little pockets of colleagues broke off and ceremoniously ate together. A small group of twenty-something-year-old women would have their meals, packed from home, in the office kitchen, while most of the guys went out to local cafés. I tried not to mind not having anyone to lunch with yet, and quickly learned not to “eeeet in zeee streeeeet,” as one of my colleagues caught me doing one day—a true faux pas to the always-proper Parisians. Instead, I took advantage of the break to explore the neighborhood.

Offices cleared out and boutiques were closed from noon until 2:00 p.m., while the sidewalks,
boulangeries
, and bistros came alive. The French got so much pleasure out of shopping for and eating food every day. Mealtime was sacred. Food was celebrated. It wasn't forbidden or an enemy for which the French needed gym memberships, cabbage soup diets, or magic powders and pills (though I did have my suspicions about French women and laxatives).

What's more, there were entire shops devoted to singular foods: stocky, pot-bellied men in wader boots and white lab coats stood outside
poissonneries
, even in the coldest weather, showcasing filets of the catch of the day, while other boutiques offered scores of colorful and alluring tins of foie gras. On Sunday afternoons, so many people stood in line at the
fromageries
,
boulangeries
, and boucheries that I made a game out of counting them. How wonderful that families were stocking up for their big Sunday
repas
, doing all their food shopping the day of the meal, at small neighborhood businesses. Back home, we'd load up a giant grocery cart once a week at a superstore, and then shelve the packaged goods in the pantry until memory or hunger called them forth. Fresh, local, and delicious was not the marketing mantra du jour in Paris. It's just the way it was.

Before choosing my apartment, I hadn't really understood why Michael was so gung ho about the second arrondissement. My previous visits to Paris had given me the impression that it was more commercial and touristy than residential and charming. But I soon discovered that my neighborhood was one of the biggest foodie meccas in the city, anchored by the four-block pedestrian stretch of rue Montorgueil. By my count, it had two cheese shops (
fromageries
), four produce markets (
marchés
), four butchers (
boucheries
), one of which was devoted to chickens (
un
rotisserie
), a fish market (
poissonnerie
), four chocolate boutiques (
chocolatiers
), an ice cream shop (
un
glacier
), six bakeries (
boulangeries
), four wine stores (
caves
au
vin
), an Italian specialty shop, and a giant market filled with heaps of spices, dried fruits, nuts, and grains that were sculpted into neat domes and sold by the gram. There was even a store devoted just to olive oils. And all of these were interspersed between no fewer than a dozen cafés, a couple florists (
fleuristes
), and myriad
tabacs
, where weathered old men bought their Lotto tickets and drank beer with their mutts and neighbors.

Walking that stretch of food paradise that was my new neighborhood, which I made sure to do at least once a day, made all my senses tingle: produce—towering stacks of purple-flecked artichokes and pyramids of pert, shiny clementines—was displayed like kinetic sculptures, changing shape as the day went on and the inventory decreased. The pungency of ripe, stinky cheeses duked it out with the smell of savory fat drippings falling from chickens that roasted on spits into pans of peeled potatoes below. And even though I hadn't eaten red meat in over ten years, I still took the time to peer into the
charcuteries
, marveling at the coils of sausages and terrines of pâtés and how wonderfully they were displayed. The food was treated so respectfully that I had no choice but to genuflect. It was glorious.

And then there were the pâtisseries and
boulangeries
. While I had arrived in Paris with the names of only two friends scribbled on a scrap of paper, I had a carefully researched, very thorough two-page spreadsheet of must-try pâtisseries. I got right to work.

Within weeks, I had explored all the
boulangeries
and pâtisseries near me and quickly became obsessed with Stohrer's
pain
aux
raisins
. Come to find out, Stohrer wasn't just the prettiest and most charming bakery on rue Montorgueil, but it also had the most illustrious roots, having been started in 1730 by King Louis XV's royal pâtissier, Nicolas Stohrer. I'd never been interested in
pain
aux
raisins
before, always preferring a rich and melty
pain
au
chocolat
, a rectangular croissant hiding two
batonettes
of chocolate inside, to something with ho-hum raisins. But one morning when I saw Stohrer's pastry pinwheels, filled generously with
crème pâtissière
and riddled with raisins looking especially puffy and inviting, I gave it a try. It was still slightly warm. It was sweeter than I expected. I was smitten.

Inspired, I set off for other
boulangeries
and pâtisseries in the city. There was Les Petits Mitrons, a cute little pink pâtisserie in Montmartre that specialized in tarts: chocolate-walnut, chocolate-pear, apple-pear, straight-up chocolate, straight-up apple, apricot, peach, rhubarb, fig,
fruits-rouges
, strawberry-cream, mixed fruit, and on and on. From there, I ventured east to one of the city's only other hilly quartiers, Belleville, searching for the best croissant in Paris.

As I pedaled through the working-class neighborhood on my way to La Flute Gana, a
boulangerie
I had read about, I had a happy jolt, suddenly remembering one of my favorite all-time French movies:
The
Triplets
of
Belleville
. The image of those three crazy animated ladies, snapping their fingers, swinging their
derrières
, and singing on stage evoked such unadulterated glee, which was matched once I arrived at the
boulangerie
and bit into my long-anticipated croissant: a gazillion little layers of fine, buttery pastry dough, coiled and baked together in soft-crunchy perfection.

Every weekend, my sweet explorations continued this way. On the chichi shopping stretch of rue Saint-Honoré, I indulged in Jean-Paul Hévin's Choco Passion, a rich nutty and fruity cake with a flaky praline base, dark chocolate ganache, and chocolate mousse whipped with tart passion fruit. In the Marais, a neighborhood alternatively known for its Jewish roots, gay pride, and fantastic shopping, I sampled Pain de Sucre's juicy and herbaceous rhubarb and rosemary tart. I discovered that the wonderful 248-year-old, lost-in-time candy and chocolate shop in the ninth arrondissement, À la Mère de Famille, carried dried pineapple rings, a treat I had been obsessed with for three decades (don't ask; I think it's a texture thing). And I started developing a new weakness for Haribo gummies, available at any old crummy supermarket.

As I cruised by the Jardin du Luxembourg, just beginning to burst in an array of spring greens, with a belly full of matcha-flavored ganache from the nearby Japanese pâtisserie Sadaharu Aoki, I rationalized that pastry hunting was a very good way for me to get to know my new hometown. But as I continued Vélib'ing around town and eating up Parisian sweets, no one could have been more surprised than me to discover that cupcakes were now storming the Bastille.

I think it's safe to say that by 2007 or 2008, cupcakes trumped apple pie as the all-American iconic sweet. And I witnessed their rise to sugary stardom firsthand in New York.

When I moved to the city in 2001, the trend was just taking off. At the time, I was also on the brink. I was almost thirty years old, excited and hopeful for all that might be. After spending my twenties in San Francisco, much of it in a seven-year relationship that ultimately wasn't “the one,” and in an advertising career in which I always felt the desire to write for a glossy magazine tugging at me, I had moved back east to pursue my dreams. I had proven to myself that I could be an advertising copywriter. Now I wanted to be a New York writer, who had a byline in the
Times
and lunched at Union Square Café. The world was my proverbial oyster. But, since I don't like briny delicacies, I considered the world my cupcake instead: sweet and inviting, familiar yet new, indulgent but only modestly so. And just when I thought I had tasted every possibility—yellow cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate with vanilla buttercream, peanut butter cup—a new cupcakery would open, and there would be a whole new inspired menu to bite into.