Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [73]
* Centre des Monuments Nationaux (monuments-nationaux.fr). This government organization offers guided tours of many well-known monuments and gardens in all regions of France.
Before you depart on a walk, remember to bring something to record the names of interesting spots you pass that you may want to return to later. Unless they state otherwise, guides appreciate tips, so if you feel yours was particularly good, give him or her a few extra euros. Guides are also good sources of information and typically enjoy sharing the names of some favorite places (often little visited by tourists). They’re there to answer your questions, so don’t hesitate to query them after your tour.
INTERVIEW
Patricia Wells
Like many other people, when I first picked up The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris by Patricia Wells, I knew I was holding a significant book in my hands, a book positively like no other, one I just knew was going to change my life, the way Paris itself had. Indeed it did, and to this day I count the guide among my favorite books in the world. The Food Lover’s Guide “cracked the code,” as Patricia notes in We’ve Always Had Paris … and Provence: “We made it possible for every American who came to the city to feel comfortable, knowledgeable in ordering that steak rare, daring to sample that warm foie gras, willing to take the Métro out to the twentieth arrondissement to sample Bernard Ganachaud’s crusty sourdough bread, or confident that they knew what to swoon over when they could get a table at Jamin, the new hit restaurant.” And here’s the remarkable thing: even though the guide’s last edition was published in 1999 (Workman), it is still indispensable. Many of the places to eat, purveyors, and shops are still in business today; Patricia’s notes and tips are still accurate; the recipes she provides are still winners (whenever I bake madeleines and financiers I turn to this book); and the French-English culinary glossary at the back of the book is the most extensive you’ll find in any similar book (I made a copy of it years ago and still bring it with me to France).
Photo Credit 13.1
Of course, since she compiled this book, Wells went on to write The Food Lover’s Guide to France (Workman, 1987), which I also still use, and eight cookbooks, including Bistro Cooking (Workman, 1989), Simply French: Patricia Wells Presents the Cuisine of Joël Robuchon (William Morrow, 1991), and The Paris Cookbook (HarperCollins, 2001). She also served as restaurant critic for the French newsweekly L’Express, the only woman and only foreigner ever to have held the post. Additionally, Wells teaches cooking classes both in Paris and at her eighteenth-century home in Provence, Chanteduc. More recently, in 2008, she and her husband, Walter, wrote We’ve Always Had Paris … and Provence: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France (Harper), which I read in two days because I just couldn’t stop reading about their thirty years together in France. It was Walter’s career move from the New York Times to the International Herald Tribune that brought the couple to Paris. He recalls in the book that, with hindsight, the decision to go to Paris was right, but he asks: “Why Paris? What was it about the city that pulled us there and kept us? Well, how high is the sky? It’s not that the answer is elusive, or the answers, because there are millions of them in words and images and none of them are more adequate than grunts and blurs. The ones that are adequate are personal and intense and they have grown and changed over thirty years. I don’t remember now how many of my own answers were obvious in 1980. But both as a new arrival and as a longtime resident, a hundred times a day if not a thousand I found something that brought passing delight.”
Photo Credit 13.2
I missed meeting Patricia and Walter when I was last in Paris, and I look forward to the day when I will (hopefully) meet them. But in the meantime, I caught up with Patricia via e-mail in between cooking classes:
Q: Had you visited Paris before you moved to the city in the first