Authors: Lonely Planet
I’m not against layering foods in glasses: things like tiramisu and spoonable desserts, custards and
gelées
are beautiful and easier to eat when served in a deep vessel. But the sudden proliferation of cookbooks in France with
nouveau
-style recipes for everything from soup to squid to spaghetti and meatballs meant no dish was off limits from being crammed into a glass. I imagine that if Carême had served Napoleon his wedding cake in a glass, he most likely would have met his fate a bit sooner, at the guillotine.
(One year during this period, I proposed to some French friends that I serve Thanksgiving dinner in a glass, stratifying
layers of mashed potatoes, chestnut stuffing, chopped turkey and gravy in there, then topping it off with a mound of sweet potatoes. I stopped before I got to the part about finishing it with the classic, all-American topping of toasted marshmallows, because it wasn’t obvious to them that I wasn’t serious about putting it all in a
verrine
and they started nodding in agreement.)
I guess I’ve become more French than I thought, since I am proposing the once-again revolutionary idea of using drinking glasses for what they were intended. That is, for drinking. I’ll take my salad back in a bowl, not a spoon. And call me a right-wing lunatic, but I’d like to propose a ban on cumin immigrating across the border from Mexico and North Africa into France.
But lest you think I’m joining the naysayers who say French culinary innovation is dead and there’s no future for
la cuisine française,
I’m not counting the French out quite yet. I’ve lived in Paris for over a decade and have experienced a raw-milk
brie de Meaux
that was so good I was tempted to pass my American passport through a shredder. To my mind, the French have spent centuries perfecting their recipes and classic techniques, and once they figure something out, they should stick with it. Monsieur Ladurée put a dab of butter cream between two meringues and the Parisian macaroon was born; this dainty delight hasn’t changed much in 150 years, and doesn’t need to. I hope La Maison du Chocolat never changes their
Rigoletto noir:
dark chocolates filled with caramelised butter mousse.
Yet this doesn’t mean the classics can’t be updated. New flavours and sensations often delight by surprise. Consider the oval-shaped chocolates made by Jean-Charles Rochoux: they astound when you pop one into your mouth and the impossibly thin chocolate shell dissolves away, leaving you with a mouthful of minty, herbal Chartreuse liquor. Traditional caramels get a thoughtful update from Jacques Genin; his bite-size
pain d’épices
caramels each taste like a full stick of butter was reduced into a
small rectangle, their richness offset by a mix of spices, which include star anise and cinnamon. And thankfully, no cumin.
Although nothing comes easy in France, I think change will happen. (Unless you’re trying to break a €50 note. Good luck with that one.) When I moved to Paris in 2003, I shocked friends by wanting internet access in my apartment in Paris; it was nearly impossible to find service at that time. Now the city is completely wired, free Wi-Fi is available in all the public parks and government buildings, and iPhones and
le
Blackberry have become standard accoutrements along with those pots of mustard on dining tables. And like the shock of taking a bite of a Chartreuse-filled chocolate, Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the least-appealing men in France, surprised us all by marrying Italian model Carla Bruni just a few weeks after his ex-wife split for New York. The French continue to surprise and adapt.
Sure, France is the fastest growing market for McDonald’s in the world, three cheeses disappear each year, and it’s rumoured that some of the three-star restaurants are serving Starbucks because the French brew isn’t up to snuff. (Apparently even snooty Michelin inspectors like their nonfat soy lattes,
non?
) And one might find it a little odd that the two most sought-after reservations in Paris at the moment are at Spring, which is owned by an American chef, and at Frenchie, owned by a French chef who named his restaurant after the nickname he was given during his culinary training – in New York.
But I’m confident that the next generation, the
génération coincée
of young, ‘cornered’ cooks who feel trapped by old culinary conventions, will see the light. Drinking glasses will go back to being used for drinking. You won’t see any Seabiscuit steaks. And marshmallows will be used for what we Americans know they’re supposed to be used for – topping puréed vegetables.
Bien sÛr.
Emily Matchar is a food and travel writer occasionally based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. When she’s not eating her way around the globe as an author for Lonely Planet guidebooks, she writes for magazines like
Men’s Journal, Gourmet
and
BBC History
. She hopes her story will not be taken as a slight against peanut butter, which she actually adores.
Peter and I were young, adults only by technicality. It was summer. We were in love and in Europe.
The Europe trip had been long dreamed of, saved for through summers working in pizzerias and winters working in the campus library, feverishly anticipated with readings and re-readings of Hemingway and Henry Miller (like I said, we were young).
Finally, here we were, the two of us hopping from Paris to Madrid to Barcelona to Naples with nothing but our backpacks, our Eurorail passes and our sense of infinite possibility.
Oh, and a jar of peanut butter. Creamy Jiff, to be precise.
The peanut butter belonged to Peter. Back home in North Carolina, I’d rolled my eyes to see him tuck the economy-sized jar into his backpack alongside the Ziploc baggies of neatly rolled socks and underwear. After a year of nonstop togetherness, I knew well that Peter was a meat and potatoes guy, a veggie-hater whose idea of a salad was iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots. It had never bothered me much before – it was just another quirk to love, like his obsession with card tricks or his undying affection for spaghetti westerns. But we were going to Europe! People went to Europe just to eat the food, right? Why did we need peanut butter?
The peanut butter was only an emergency ration, Peter promised, something to munch on during long train rides or late at night in small town
pensiones
when no other food was available. But soon after we landed at Charles de Gaulle and set out for Basque country, it became clear that it would be much more than that.
I spotted Peter gobbling spoonfuls of peanut butter in a Spanish hostel kitchen as I changed for dinner one night. A few days later, I saw him spreading peanut butter on crackers before heading out for an afternoon at the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
‘Don’t you want to go find a little café or something?’ I said. I was quickly falling in love with the region’s
pintxos,
the Basque answer to tapas – chunks of sea-salty dried cod, smoky marinated peppers, hunks of rough bread with sheep’s cheese and quince paste, all served on tiny plates in sepia-coloured bars full of noisy young men in football jerseys and noisy old men in black berets.
‘Nah, I’m not hungry any more.’
For Peter, the peanut butter was a cheap and expedient way to avoid the hassle of searching for food. Hungry? Eat peanut butter. Problem solved.
But for me, seeking out interesting local foods was turning out to be a joy, a delight that grew deeper with each new city we
visited – wandering Rome’s old Jewish Quarter in pursuit of the neighbourhood’s celebrated artichoke fritters, buying paper cups of fried sardines on the rocky beaches of Riomaggiore in Liguria, tasting spicy
merguez
sausages from Algerian street vendors in Paris.
In Madrid, I tasted my first lentil curry at a Pakistani restaurant in the La Ribera district. The interplay of rich, buttery legumes and the deep perfume of Silk Road spices made my hair stand on end. I’d never had anything like it.
Peter ate rubbery cheese pizza from the kids menu.
In the Loire Valley, I was captivated by the asparagus-shaped chocolates and jewel-bright glacé fruits at an old-fashioned chocolate shop, pointing and asking questions in my awful French.
Peter stood by the doorway, arms folded.
That night we had a fight outside a Lebanese takeaway restaurant. I wanted a kebab, and to chat with the friendly owners about their home country. Peter just wanted to go to sleep.
I turned to him and, without thinking, said, ‘I’m not sure this relationship will last forever.’
I didn’t even realise what I’d said until I saw the look of shock on his face. He told me to take it back. I took it back. We went back to our hotel and curled up in the middle of our sagging mattress. I held him tight as he fell asleep, my face pressed into the back of his neck.
But the canker was already in the rose. It wasn’t that I cared about what Peter put in his stomach, not really. But I’d begun to see that his disinterest in food-related adventure had less to do with picky eating and more to do with other, larger personality traits.
As a deeply reserved person, he worried over the potential awkwardness of interacting with non-English-speaking store clerks and waiters, preferring to buy bread at the supermarket than risk getting stuck making conversation with an excitable
Italian baker. He didn’t like getting lost, so long rambling walks in search of interesting local restaurants were not his idea of a good time. He hated spending money on things he considered unnecessary. By his rules, peanut butter was necessary. Gelato was unnecessary.
Gelato was not unnecessary to me. Gelato was crucial. In Italy that summer, the
gelateria
was the highlight of my afternoons. There were so many flavours to choose from, all piled in creamy mounds as luxurious as the cashmere scarves on display at the boutiques of Rome’s Via Condotti.
I vowed never to have the same gelato twice. One day I’d have a cup of
stracciatella
and
frutti di bosco
berries; the next I’d be eating a double cone of
panna cotta
and
amarena
cherry; another day it would be a triple helping of hazelnut,
fior di latte
or Seville orange.
Peter liked lemon and coconut. In a cup.
Sure, he
might
like other flavours, he admitted. But he
knew
he liked lemon and coconut. Why waste money on ‘might’ when you’ve got a sure bet?
Why indeed?
Until that summer in Europe, Peter was my sure bet. He and I both loved horror movies. We both loved to read. We had the same dark sense of humour. He was the first guy who’d met my parents, who’d taken care of me when I was sick, who’d told me he loved me and really meant it. Even though I thought the idea of ‘soul mate’ was idiotic, I had secretly believed he might be mine.
But I was beginning to see that there were other flavours.
I broke up with Peter the following fall. It was my choice, but I still felt gutted. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. I cried so hard it felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t eat for a week.
But then I could, and I did. In the following years, I ate and travelled so much that eating and travelling and writing about it
became my career. Charred chunks of lamb and hillocks of greasy couscous at the Djemaa el Fna night market in Marrakesh. Roti bread, hand-stretched to the translucency of parchment paper, in the misty Cameron Highlands of peninsular Malaysia. Crunchy stacks of fresh-fried whitebait on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island, grey waves pounding beneath the window. An austere chickpea stew at Gandhi’s ashram in India. Green chilli cheeseburgers at New Mexico roadhouses.
There were other men. I ate tamales and shrimp ceviche in Mexico with an Australian cricketer, then followed him to Cuba to eat greasy
jamón
sandwiches in the twisted streets of Old Havana. I ate spaghetti
all’arrabbiata,
cooked for me by an Italian lover who fussed like a
nonna
over the poor quality of the red chilli flakes. I ate
entrecôte
and
tarte tatin
at a French restaurant in Vientiane, Laos, with an American philosophy professor on Christmas Eve.
It’s been wonderful, all the travelling and eating, all the new places and new people. It’s also been stressful, exhausting, and occasionally terrifying.
I haven’t seen Peter in years. We’ll write occasionally, and even though it’s been so long, it always makes me feel ever so slightly unsettled to see an email from him in my inbox.
I sometimes wonder if people like Peter are happier because they know what they like and have no doubts. Would I be better off sitting at home with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, knowing there’s no place I’d rather be? Or am I lucky to be the way I am, always eager to see what’s around the corner and always willing to believe that the next flavour will be even better than the last?
Naomi Duguid, traveller, writer and photographer, is often described as a culinary anthropologist. She is the co-author (with Jeffrey Alford) of six award-winning books of food and travel:
Flatbreads and Flavors
,
Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through South-East Asia
,
Seductions of Rice
,
HomeBaking
,
Mangoes & Curry Leaves
and
Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Stories from the Other China
. In stories, recipes and photographs, the books explore daily home-cooked foods in their cultural context. Naomi is a contributing editor of
Saveur
magazine, gives photo-talks about food and travel, and conducts immersion food tours in northern Thailand each winter (
www.immersethrough.com
). She also writes a weekly blog (
www.naomiduguid.blogspot.com
). Her next book, celebrating the food cultures of Burma, will be published in 2012.
I’d made a promise to friends not to take risks. It was early March, and I was in the Solu Khumbu, above the village of Namche Bazaar, walking up the valley that leads to Gokyo, one valley west of Everest. I had a sleeping bag in my backpack, but
no tent. I planned to stay each night in one of the villages, actually small hamlets, that looked from the map to be about three hours’ walk apart. It seemed like a great plan, a chance to connect with people and to be out in a heart-stoppingly wonderful landscape. But when fat snowflakes started pouring down in the afternoon, blinding out the view, plastering the hillside, and making the path slippery, I thought of my promise.
So when I came to a branch in the trail, I opted to head downward, instead of on towards the next hamlet a good hour away. The small steep path led down to a rushing stream and a footbridge made of two logs. On the other side was a low stone hut. What a relief!
A Sherpa man in a rough woollen jacket came out to meet me. His wife and daughter were just lighting a fire in the hut that was used as a shelter when the herds moved up to summer pasture in the valley. I was lucky to find anyone there; the family was on a first springtime visit to open it. I asked if I could spend the night. The man gave a wide sweep of his arm and a smile to say, ‘Yes, of course you can shelter here.’ I was shivering with cold and damp (those snowflakes had melted onto me as I walked), but warmed up as I helped sweep the hut and carry in some wood for the fire.
The daughter made tea in the kettle, milky buttery tea, then poured it into three bowls in pale streams. She was shy, and could barely look at me as she handed me a bowl. I sat sipping slowly, breathing in the steam. There was a smell of wet wool from the Sherpas’ clothing, and a whiff of wood smoke and butter from their hair and hands. I felt so grateful, so lucky to have stumbled into this timeless place. I could have been in a stone hut in medieval Europe or Japan … I fell into a kind of stoned, relieved, exhausted trance.
Suddenly, in from the snowy world outside walked five brightly clad men in hiking boots and down jackets, like a mirage of modernity. Their caps were coated with wet snow and their
nylon and Gore-Tex clothing rustled as they moved. They were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. Four of them were Japanese, the fifth a Nepali, and all were mountaineers, part of a large joint Japanese–Nepali expedition to Cho Oyu, the spectacular 8000-metre peak five days’ walk up the valley. When they learned that I was on my own, and planned to sleep in the hut for the night, they were a little appalled: ‘No, no, come and stay with us. We have one woman climber and she is in a two-person tent. You can share with her.’ I protested that we needed to ask her first, but they waved away my objections and insisted that I walk back with them to their camping place.
I put on my backpack and bowed my thanks to the Sherpa family. My gratitude was heartfelt, but seemed lame and inadequate. They’d rescued me so generously with their fire and their tea, but perhaps they were relieved when the climbers took me off with them, for then their responsibility to me was over.
We walked back across the log bridge, the rushing stream below us swollen with the still-falling snow, and made our way to the large level area the mountaineers had chosen for their campsite. The expedition’s long train of laden yaks was still coming slowly down the trail, each animal picking its way carefully on the slippery, snowy ground. The men led me over to a small woman in a puffy red jacket and introduced me to her in careful English, ‘Naomi-san, please meet Emiko-san.’ They explained to her in Japanese that they’d offered me space in her tent. Emiko didn’t seem at all put out; quite the opposite. She told me she was happy to see another woman, as her climbing partner had had to back out of the expedition at the last moment, which was why she found herself alone in a double tent.
The valley was already in shadow. As daylight faded, the snow stopped and it grew very cold. We set up Emiko’s small blue sleeping tent and unrolled our sleeping bags, while the porters set up the cook tent, made fires and lit stoves. When night fell,
Emiko and I joined the climbers, about fifteen in all, for supper, a delicious blend of Nepali and Japanese food: dhal and rice and cooked green vegetables (classic Nepali
dal-baht-sabji
) and Japanese pickles and miso soup. The Nepalis told me they liked working with Japanese climbers because ‘they eat rice, like we do. Much better than Western food!’
After supper Emiko and I joined five or six of the Japanese climbers in one of the larger, four-man tents. We left our boots at the tent door and sat crowded together in our thick jackets by the light of a lantern. They told stories, which one of the climbers translated for me; stories of getting lost in the mountains or happy triumphs in the Japanese Alps, tales of close calls on steep rock walls …
As the stories and laughter continued, one young climber quietly slipped on his boots and crouched his way out of the tent. He returned a minute later with a pot of cold water from the stream. He took a small camp stove from his day pack, lit it, then put the pot on to boil. Out from his day pack came a cloth-wrapped bundle: it was a beautiful porcelain bowl, wrapped in a silk scarf. He placed it carefully on a mat, then pulled out two small wooden boxes. In one was a graceful-looking bamboo whisk. He poured a little brilliantly green powdered tea from the other box into the bowl, then carefully put the tea box away. When the water came to a boil, he poured it into the bowl. The steam was thick in the cold air. He took the whisk from its box, put it into the bowl, and gently rolled it back and forth between his palms, whisking and blending the tea into the water until it foamed up a little, small bubbles forming in the greenness.
In the light of the lantern our faces glowed warmly as we watched, now as intent as the tea-maker, our breaths little puffs of mist. He lifted the bowl and passed it to his neighbour, who took a slow careful sip, then passed it on. The tea was astringent and bitter, a beautiful life-affirming green in the smooth elegant
bowl, hot to the tongue. The bowl travelled around the circle twice, careful sip after careful sip, all of us sitting in a kind of focused appreciative silence. The only sounds were the hissing of the lantern and the steady rush of the stream outside. And then it was finished.
Carefully the tea-maker rinsed out the bowl, wiped it with the silk, wrapped it, and stowed it back in his pack along with the whisk. We headed out into the cold starry night, warmed from the inside, not only by the tea, but even more by the thread of companionship, the shared ritual of a tea ceremony conducted with grace and mindfulness, a momentary oasis of friendship and civilised care in the snowy Himalaya.