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The Rapture of Spring
In French there is an expression, sabrer le champagne, which means to open a bottle of champagne with a sabre. Before last night, I had never seen this trick performed in person. Sabrer le champagne is easily enough translated into English, but English possesses no equivalent expression to describe this wondrous spectacle, except the ultra-technical term sabrage. The…
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Rapture for Cooking
Jimmie the Barman, who poured the drinks at many of the best-known Lost Generation drinking holes including the Dingo, the Falstaff, and the Trois et As, once observed that it was “remarkable that the leaders and organizers of Montparnasse were largely women.” Poets like Mina Loy, artists like Nina Hamnett, writers like Djuna Barnes, editors…
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Montmartre Is Dead!
“Montmartre is dead!” screamed the headline of a February 1924 obituary in The Living Age, an American weekly review. The famed artists’ redoubt on a hill at the northern border of Paris had succumbed to an influx of American money and values. The penniless French artists and poets who had once gathered round the tables of the Lapin…
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Cream Puffs Through the Ages
Baking is all about the magic of transformation. When it comes to savory food, I tend to subscribe to the Alice Waters school of cooking: keep it simple and let the ingredients shine. I prefer a roast chicken to a wrapped, rolled, stuffed, and sauced chicken roulade. Give me a steamed fresh crab, a cracker…
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Eating Crow
According to Alexandre Dumas, author of the classic adventure novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Christo as well as a lesser-known cookbook, Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, the Roman emperor Heliogabalus once feasted on a pâté made from the tongues of peacocks, nightingales, crows, pheasants, and parrots (paons, rossignols, corneilles, faisans, and perroquets). Yet that didn’t satisfy his appetite for…
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Joie de vivre is the keystone of the French cuisine
Waiting in line to buy apples from Evelyne Nochet’s family orchard Le Nouveau Verger at the Mouton-Duvernet Friday market today, my husband turned a big happy grin towards me and I felt the truth of M. Thérèse Bonney’s epigraph in French Cooking for American Kitchens (1929): “joie de vivre is the keynote of the French cuisine.” I love the frontispiece for…
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Halloween in Paris
Paris may be home to one of the spookiest places I’ve ever been, the bone-filled catacombs, but the city offers little in the way of Halloween fun. Sure, a few of the patisseries have pumpkin-themed treats in the window. But tarte à la citrouille hardly makes up for the absence of trick-or-treating as far as my…
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My generation doesn’t eat supper
The young North American men who flocked to Montparnasse in the 1920s came to drink not to eat. The women were another matter. The men of the “Lost Generation,” as they were famously dubbed by Gertrude Stein, scorned the previous generations of wealthy tourists, like Henry James’s Christopher Newman, who came to improve their “taste” and…
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The American
The very first place in Paris that Christopher Newman, the tourist-hero of Henry James’s 1876-7 novel The American, visits when he arrives is a fine restaurant. Newman is every bit the prototypical American that his name, with its allusion to the famous Genovese explorer and the world he discovered, suggests. The book opens in the…
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There is no Ibérico or serrano, only Jamón
The novel most responsible for the everlasting romanticization of Jazz Age expat culture in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, takes place half in Spain. When the pressures of drinking wine and eating oysters in the cafés of Montparnasse became too much to take, Hemingway, his friends, and the characters he modelled after them, escaped to San…
Historian. Novelist. Greedy Woman. 