Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [134]
—Judith Jones, editor to Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Claudia Roden, Penelope Casas, and Marion Cunningham, among others, and author of The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf, 2007) and The Pleasures of Cooking for One (Knopf, 2009)
Dorie Greenspan
Cookbook author Dorie Greenspan—whose books include Paris Sweets: Great Desserts from the City’s Best Pastry Shops (Broadway, 2002), Baking: From My Home to Yours (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Desserts by Pierre Hermé (Little, Brown, 1998), and Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours (Houghton Mifflin, 2010)—has lived in Paris part-time for over twelve years. She maintains an excellent blog, In the Kitchen and On the Road with Dorie (doriegreenspan.com), which is a worthwhile resource for travelers. Greenspan writes very clearly and passionately and cares deeply about getting the details right.
One memorable post from her is “The Paris Ten: Must-Tastes,” a list of ten iconic foods of Paris, “the tastes a visitor, perhaps a first-timer, shouldn’t miss in the city.” In another post, about Hugues Pouget and the bakery Hugo & Victor (see this page), she writes, “I think I know a little about what makes chefs great. There’s their talent, that’s almost a given; there’s their energy—they’re built with superchargers that aren’t standard equipment among us ordinary mortals; there’s their skill at organization and production (not a glam quality, but a really important one); and there’s their intelligence, a kind of intelligence that includes creativity, but that also includes the ability to express, share, explain that creativity, and, in doing that, inspire and teach others.” Log on and subscribe to Greenspan’s monthly newsletter!
Thanksgiving in Paris
LAURA CHAMARET
CHAMARET WORKS IN book publishing in New York, and I feel fortunate to know her because she’s as crazy for Paris, and France, as I am. But it wasn’t always so: she was smitten with Italy and Spain (she spoke both Italian and Spanish) and had never studied French nor set foot in France. “I never had a care in the world to know anything about France,” she told me, “until the night I went to a bar with my best friend on West Fifty-first Street and I met a French man at the bar, and married him not long after.” Chamaret’s husband, Sébastien, is from a very small town in the département of Mayenne in the Loire Valley next to Normandy, where his family has lived on the same farm for four generations. When he first brought Chamaret there, she related, “It was one of the most foreign cultural experiences of my life. I’m very adaptable—I was born overseas, I’ve lived in a number of different places, and I’m pretty good at adapting to my surroundings—but I’ve never felt so much like a fish out of water. Me, a New York City girl in the middle of nowhere in France where things don’t get done the way they get done here, and Sébastien’s parents don’t speak a word of English. They were so welcoming, so inviting, and just incredibly lovely. Everything we ate was grown or made right there on the farm, from the pâté to the pears and everything in between. The house was simple and clean and it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been redecorated in many, many years—the chairs were the same ones they’d had for fifty years. It was a whole different kind of thing and couldn’t have been further from my life up to that point.”
Laura and Sébastien never had any intention of living in Paris, but on a trip around France to see where they did want to live, they ended up stranded in Paris on September 11, 2001. A good friend offered to stay at his girlfriend’s and gave them his apartment until they could get home, which wasn’t until a week later. “We fell in love with the city,” says Chamaret. “And I’m sure some of that love was due to the situation, our emotions, and how wonderful the Parisians were to us, but we knew we were staying for at least a few years.” And they did. (Though they eventually returned to New York to start a family, they plan to move back to France one day.)
Trips and sojourns in France over the