Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [137]
Timing the cooking order to make this whole thing possible was a multitasking achievement. The morning of our big event, the turkey was the first thing to go in, at about eight-thirty a.m. It would take at least six to seven hours on the highest setting, better known as number 8 on French ovens, to cook. It’s an everyday challenge figuring out the conversion temperatures when you have the American ones in your head. This time, eight was easy! The sausage and chestnut stuffing was the next to cook, taking about an hour and a half to two hours. The potatoes and haricots verts were done on the stove top, lightening up the oven schedule considerably. You may be asking yourself how so many hours were possible before a Thanksgiving meal but it is not a holiday in France, so we weren’t going to sit down much before seven o’clock in the evening. The tough part was toward the late afternoon. You have to make the popovers last (they deflate, and who wants to eat a cold popover?) and I had three turkey roulades to roast. What I ended up doing was roasting them once everyone had arrived. They baked through the cocktail hour(s) and the beginning of dinner. They were meant to serve as seconds to everyone, so the timing was great. Sure enough, everything worked out. I managed to have centerpieces, flowers, candles, and enough wine to make it complete.
When all was said and done, we sat down with twenty-three of our friends and shared our first real Thanksgiving overseas. Although it’s an American tradition, I tried to incorporate tastes of my new homeland. We feasted on herbs de Provence turkey, sausage and chestnut stuffing, leek and crème fraîche mashed potatoes, haricots verts amandine, and Roquefort popovers. In turn, they were served with true Americana authenticities like cranberry sauce and grandma’s apple pie. Unlike our other typical meals in France, we stuffed ourselves, as is the custom after all. I told stories about the origins of Thanksgiving and realized in the middle of all this that the people at my table represented a multitude of places: France, England, Russia, Sweden, Norway, South Korea, and others. They had gathered together and made the effort to make it special. These were my overseas brothers and sisters. I experienced not only a wonderful Thanksgiving Day so many miles from home in Paris, but the feeling of home and stability that I’d missed.
Salons de Thé
As popular as coffee is in Paris, tea has become very au courant over the last twenty years or so, and there are many more salons de thé than there once were. As Sebastian Beckwith, a cofounder of my favorite tea company, In Pursuit of Tea (inpursuitoftea.com), mentioned to me, “Paris is a city that respects tea. Compared to England, where tea is really comfort food, France elevates tea to a higher level—the French are masters at scenting and flavoring tea, adding flavors and oils and herbs to make their blends. And I like that salons de thé offer a meeting place for Parisians as well as travelers.”
Among the most venerable salons is Mariage Frères, notably its outpost at 30 rue du Bourg-Tibourg in the Marais (+33 01 42 72 28 11 / mariagefreres.com). There are other Mariage Frères outposts and tea counters in Paris—as well as in other French cities, in Germany, and in Japan—but none of them, in my opinion, are as grand and Old World as this