La crème

I was at the Musée de l'Armée in Paris last week when I realized how...good...the blue in the French flag is.

It's a really elegant, inky blue.  I would have described it as a type of Prussian blue, thinking of my oil painting palette.  Well, did you know that Prussian blue is sometimes called Parisian blue?  And did you know that the red and blue in the French Tricolour come from the city of Paris's coat of arms?

Unlike my own country's flag, the French flag gives me aesthetic pleasure.

I love Paris.  You love Paris.  We all love Paris.  Paris is filled with Americans loving Paris (and speaking French badly).  Why are we all here?

Saying "Paris is so beautiful," doesn't capture it.  I think the reason we all love Paris is that when we go there, we experience a level of aesthetic pleasure in nearly everything that simply does not exist in the lives of those of us who come from these young and pragmatic countries.

One of the first things we did in Paris was go to Hugo et Victor.  How funny is it to feel really and truly understood...by a chocolatier?  That is how I felt when I saw that the exquisite painted chocolates we had purchased were packaged in a...book.  (Sigh.)

And I nearly cried when I opened the little moleskin book and there was a title page!  You know that wonderful feeling when you open the cover of a new book that you expect to be really good?  That excitement and anticipation...  Now add chocolate.  Rapture!

I almost cried again when I turned the title page and discovered...melted chocolate.  Oh, man!  But that's what walking all over Paris in July with a box of chocolates in your purse will get you.  (I won't pretend that I didn't eventually lick the chocolate off the box.)

The thing that I also loved about Hugo et Victor was that the packaging wasn't just empty promises.  The chocolate inside was also very, very good.  Even better was the Earl Grey and milk chocolate macaron that E and I attempted to "share" on the sidewalk outside their shop (which looks and feels like a jewelery store).

Think about that for a second...  Milk chocolate is so much more right than dark chocolate, isn't it?  With Earl Grey.  It would be something else completely.  You need something creamy to counterbalance the oily aromatic quality of the bergamot...but only because it's manifest in a filled cookie.  A bar of chocolate would be something else entirely.  Do you see?

Sigh.  I said to E, "I love this so much.  This is the tippy top of the game right here."  It's like the Olympics of chocolate and pastry-making in Paris.

Take, for instance this Paris-Brest from Patisserie des Reves.  (Funnily enough, the Paris-Brest pastry is named for the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, another athletic competition.)

That, my friends, is hazelnut cream inside those two chewy layers of choux pastry dusted in powdered sugar.  You might think that's the whole story.  It's not.  There's a mind-blowing architectural achievement in this goodie.  The hazelnut cream is itself filled with chocolate.  I didn't know that a big fluffy ball of cream was strong enough to hold another chamber filled with chocolate.  Wow.  Wow and wow.

Beautiful, mind-blowing, and delicious.  I was so blissed-out that I forgot to photograph the chocolate part.  So I have to rely on photos from this blog rhapsodizing about the same ;-)

A big thank you to American (and many times James Beard cookbook award-winner) Dorie Greenspan for recommending these places in the recent Bon Appetit Insider's Guide to Paris.  All of her recommendations hit the spot, including this one for bread...

This beautiful hunk is the 250g of Pain des Amis from Du Pain et Des Idées that I quickly engulfed sitting on a bench near the Canal St. Martin, in the heart of hipster Paris.  I was going to say "this bread is all about texture," but it's not true.  The flavors are absolutely an essential to the soul of this bread.  It has a moist, chewy, salty almost malty mie shielded by a dense, crunchy, shell-of-the-earth crust that is heaven if you are a Maillard reaction fan and can't get enough of that brown flavor.  Mm.

But really, I didn't have to metro all across Paris for crunchy browned baked stuff.  Just down the block from where we stayed in Montparnasse, the modest Fournil de Brézin blew our minds with its divine pain chocolate, which had little bits of that crunchy-crusty-browned-ness at its edges and then was like biting into a little tower of buttery butterfly wings filled with a thin layer of bitter chocolate.

I thought I was going to die.  Why does anyone in Paris do anything else?  

Their baguettes too...  I don't think E had ever had bread like this.  He was head-down in the computer when I first brought him a bite and he experienced that amazing...crunch, chew.  It brought him to his senses.  Now, he's addicted.  Crunch-chew.  Now, we squeeze the bread when we come out of bakeries, in excitement, in anticipation...will it go crunch-chew?  Every day, in the morning, this wonderful bread.

How is it that an ordinary neighborhood bakery produces better bread than the whole of Hong Kong, or the whole of SF, (or the whole of NYC?)?  Maybe it's the fact that there's a government body that regulates (!) bread and pastry makers -- called the Confédération Nationale de la Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Française (CNBPF).  Or maybe because there are many excellent schools that teach the fine art, such as Ecole de Boulangerie et Pâtisserie Paris (EBP) or L’Ecole Ferrandi.  Or maybe because there are approximately 33,000 artisan bakers in France.

I could go a long way down this road...there's a whole stream of research about flour...  Perhaps you already know that you need T55 or T65 flour for a proper baguette?  Or that mills such as Grandes Moulins des Paris and Les Moulins d'Antoine supply some of the best flour (please, someone correct me on this)?  Besides knowing your ash and protein content, you need to know when your flour is milled (within six weeks) and...

Puff, puff.

Did we do anything in Paris beside eating bread?

Well, I almost had a panic attack at the Centre Pompidou, which is one of my absolute most favorite places in the world.  There are so many things I wanted to see, and I was grief-stricken I wouldn't see them all (I didn't).  If you don't already know, the Centre Pompidou is a modern and contemporary art museum started by French president Georges Pompidou, opened in 1977.

Yah, that's right.  A French head of state cared enough about art to personally spearhead the creation of a contemporary art museum.  Can you conceive of that ever happening in the US, where most people respond to abstract painting by saying things like "My kid could do that"?  A***s.  ('Scuze my French.)

The Pompidou doesn't just have works by all of the notable modern and contemporary artists.  It has the best works.  For example, this simple piece "Untitled (last light), 1993" by Felix Gonzalez Torres, thought to be a response to Gonzalez Torres's lover's initial diagnosis with AIDS, counting the hours remaining in each day with the person he loved so much.

Brilliantly installed on the wall opposite was a painting by David Reed, whose subject is also (abstractly) light.  This is "#509, 2002 2004."

But wow, the piece that really blew me away was an installation by Albanian artist Anri Sala that took up the entire first floor gallery.  It consisted of several large movie screens set at angles to one another and with a partially sliced off blinder around each one, so when you were sitting head on looking at one screen, you could just see around the corner of another.

The video interlinked video of a woman humming as she walked rapidly, fearfully through the streets of Sarajevo (not wearing red in order to avoid getting shot), with an orchestra playing the same music in Bordeaux, with a man playing drums in Mexico City (or was it Berlin)...  

My sense of what was going on got mixed up because one screen would be playing and everyone would congregate to watch.  Then, around the corner, another would start up, and someone in the crowd would see it and get curious...as they went over to investigate, the other people would be compelled to move too.  Like a flock of birds. 

Then, around the corner, some snare drums started to vibrate and play by themselves...

And then someone would notice the music grinder embedded in the glass leading to the people on the street outside...

I loved this piece because it gave me a visceral sense of global contagion.  It showed you how, just by one's nature as a human being...that we are moved by music, moved by curiosity, moved instinctively by the movements of other people...we could become caught up in a revolution before we even know it. 

If you have a chance to see Anri's Sala's work, go.  He will represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

The other place that I nearly hyperventilated was the aforementioned Musée de l'Armée.  They have a collection of the most exquisitely-crafted armor I have ever seen -- mostly 16th and 17th century, which is when the French royalty was really spending up a storm.

Description does very little.  Just take a look at this workmanship:

There were so many other amazing things and time is running out for me to finish this post.  So I will just give you the shortlist:

At Notre Dame, exquisite gold and silver relics.  Some supposedly contain actual fragments of the cross on which Christ was crucified (if you believe in such things) and of the crown of thorns.  There were also these more modern ceremonial objects, which were stunningly beautiful.

There was also this delicate hand embroidery on a mitre left by a visiting pope...

And this modern stained glass window which I thought was as beautiful as Notre Dame's famous rose windows.

Then there was the pleasure of re-visiting my favorite Cézanne still lifes at the Musée d'Orsay, like Apples and Oranges, 1899,

or Still Life with Onions, 1896-1898.

And there was the lush grass and the colors of the flower compositions at the Luxembourg Gardens.

There was the ugly-handsomeness of the 17th century Richelieu Wing at the Louvre, built by architect Jacques Lemercier.

And the scale of the view over Paris from the Sacré-Cœur (the interior of the dome of the basilica is pretty amazing too!)

And the scale of the Arc de Triomph (and of Napoleon's ego for having erected such a monument to himself).  I brought E here because I thought he might appreciate seeing another captain overkill at work ;-)

And I was surprised to feel touched visiting the grave of Baron Haussmann at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

If you're not familiar, Haussmann was the civic planner who, in the mid-19th century, transformed the narrow, crowded streets of Paris into the broad boulevards we all adore.  Interestingly, this article contends that one reason for the broad streets was to make it easier for the army to deal with civil unrest.

After Père-Lachaise, which was leafy and green and dignified, the Catacombs were a shock (and yet, captivating).  The remains of six million Parisians were relocated from cemeteries all over Paris to abandoned limestone quarries underneath the city.  Eventually someone stacked all those shinbones and skulls into walls, creating one of the world's most macabre tourist attractions...

 

Brrr.  The Catacombs were almost directly under our house!  

Meanwhile our house was hidden behind an ordinary door off a ordinary-looking street.  But when you opened the door, you entered a long open hallway, and then a garden, where there were three large buildings surrounded by flowers and trees.

Up a winding staircase was our flat, with birdsong coming in the windows.  There, in the middle of Paris!

Here's E computing at the table with a bowl of tomatoes and green Provençal figs from the little farmers' market a block away.  In the middle of this big, grand city.  How cool is that!

We did eat out a handful of times...like at Bar de la Croix Rouge where I had a fantastic roast beef sandwich...

Or at Le Comptoir du Relais, where I spotted a new food trend -- tiny crunchy fish eggs in our tomato salad with mint (later, we had fish eggs with burrata at Au Passage).

But mainly we ate in because it was nice at home, and it gave me the opportunity to acquire gorgeous foodstuffs out and about -- like Bordier butter from Breizh Cafe or a brillant Roquefort from Le Grande Epicerie Paris.  (But I also made great finds at the ordinary supermarket, like white fig jam.)

We went many other places and ate many other things.  It's so hard to stop...  

The last thing I want to be sure to remember was the pleasure of window shopping.  Sometimes it was the pleasure of looking at some gorgeous thing I could never buy, like this fantastic pink party dress (one each for my twin nieces)...

And sometimes it was the pleasure of discovering a store devoted to some peculiar thing you would never-ever see in the USA, like this glove shop...

And sometimes it was an outrageous display that stopped me in my tracks (this is tame compared with the Hermes window).

And even though it's not merchandise...sometimes I'd see something through a window that would unexpectedly charm me, like this little dog at Claudine Laurent bakery in Montmartre.

Well anyway, it's a good thing we had to leave after 14 days.  There is no place in the world with a higher concentration of things I adore.  By the end of our stay, I was practically buzzing (and exhausted).  I hope it will fuel me for a long time to come.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, E, for taking me to Paris!