Essays

Yup, yet another food-related meme, for which I was tagged by both Pascale and Jacqueline. This one has you indulge in the reminiscence of five childhood food memories. Here are mine!

Les Nounours à la Guimauve
When we had a little pocket money my sister and I would drop by the boulangerie around the corner from school to buy candy. The display case was visible through the window so we would stand there for a little while trying to decide what to get, for once inside, the boulangère, paper bag in hand and an eye on the growing line of more worthy customers, had little patience for hesitant children. Malabars bi-goût (huge pink chewing-gums that made the coolest bubbles, the bi-goût variety having two flavors), chewy ribbons coated with acidulated sugar (red was my color of choice), edible necklaces, and my all-time favorite: the chocolate-covered marshmallow teddy bear, from which I would bite the head off first — quick painless death for the teddy bear. Maxence and I still buy them occasionally, whipping them out in the late hours of a party and watching everyone’s eyes open wide with childish gourmandise.

Le Poulet Rôti du Dimanche
For lunch on Sundays, my mother would often make her perfect roasted chicken, with sauteed potatoes and green beans. The chicken made plenty of juice, and the much-anticipated treat at the end of the meal was to soak it all up with pieces of fresh baguette. At some point though, my parents decided this wasn’t the healthiest thing you could feed your kids or yourself and we stopped doing it, but I still remember how we all gathered around the baking dish in the sun-drenched dining-room (it’s always sunny in my memory), expertly maneuvering our forks to get the wonderful caramelized bits and salty juices on the thin crunchy baguette.

Les Sandwiches au Nutella
My favorite breakfast for years on end was a Nutella sandwich. Two square slices of white bread would be toasted, one would be spread with the world’s most popular chocolate-hazelnut paste, the crusts would be sliced off and the whole thing cut in two rectangular halves. I loved it and can still feel the thick sensation of velvety chocolate sticking to the roof of your mouth while you chewed on the warm crunchy bread. It wasn’t very big really, but I had a small appetite and often couldn’t finish it. And instead of throwing it out, I had a habit of taking it back to my (very messy) room “for later”. The leftovers were promptly forgotten in the back of a shelf or inside my little desk, quietly getting stale until my mother discovered them days later.

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Oh gifts, gifts, gifts! Is there anything sweeter in life than having your friends go out and find something just for you, something that they think you will like and enjoy, something that will surprise and delight you? And when you do and it does, when the idea is fabulous and the gift exactly to your taste, when it is something that you really wanted or something you would have wanted had you known it existed, when it is custom-made for you and even better than what you would have chosen for yourself, you are entitled to feeling lucky and grateful and loved and happy — yes, simultaneously.

For my 26th birthday I was literally showered with joy-inducing perfect gifts, and I thought I would share with you the ones that are food and cooking related:

– My friend and cooking heroine Louisa went to Le Potager du Roi in Versailles, where Louis XIV’s vegetable gardens are kept intact and operational. From the boutique she got me the picture-perfect zucchini flower that you see above, as well as eight little white peaches, delicious and juicy: in Chinese culture, as she explained to me, peaches symbolize a long life and the number eight good fortune…

– My parents bought me a superb enameled cast-iron cocotte by Staub. We picked it out together last week in Alsace, as we were driving by Turckheim where the Staub headquarters are, complete with a huge factory outlet in which my mother and I spent an unreasonable amount of time. I chose a beautiful grey oval 6-quart cocotte, which unfortunately still lives in my parents’ house in the Vosges as we speak, for it was much too heavy to be lugged on the train home with me. Just a couple more weeks and they’ll bring it back and we will never be apart again I promise.

– My friend and ex-coworker Sophie got me three kinds of Fleurs de sucre — lavender, rose and blueberry. Fleurs de sucre are crystallized flower petals or berries, beautifully packaged up in tall glass tubes. They can be used to bejewel a dessert, or you can sprinkle some to decorate a table, serve them with tea or coffee, or drop them in a glass of champagne. Can’t wait to try them!

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Fraises des bois du jardin

High up on my life list is to one day have a garden, a vegetable patch and an orchard.

In the meantime, I have to settle for windowsills and tiny balconies on which Maxence, who is The Official Gardener around here, plants and pampers a lush jungle, making the absolute most of every square inch of space and railing. I have little patience for that sort of thing, but I am certainly grateful for his efforts and happy to enjoy the benefits — green, green, green through every window, flowers and herbs and, most recently, fruit.

I insisted, because when you buy a plant or a little bag of seeds, what you really buy is the dream, the possibility of it growing and blossoming and making you proud.

Last spring on the Quai de la Mégisserie where gardening and pet stores abound, I was the one who insisted we buy a small pot of fraises des bois, those teeny strawberries that grow mostly in the wild and which the observant little girl (if properly trained by her mother) can spot and feast on in the mountain underbrush.

To be truthful, I didn’t think ours would ever bear fruit. Not because I doubted Maxence’s skills, but simply because I couldn’t imagine it actually happening. Still I insisted, because when you buy a plant or a little bag of seeds, what you really buy is the dream, the possibility of it growing and blossoming and making you proud.

Despite my doubts, the plant we bought developed into a healthy-looking little shrub on our bathroom windowsill; delicate flowers soon started to bloom.

And do you know how this works? When the petals fall from strawberry flowers, their heart keeps swelling and then droop under the weight of their elongated shape. It takes them just a few more days to blush and blush until bright red, at which point Maxence harvests them and comes to share the minuscule bounty with me — usually one or two strawberries at a time, each of them softly sweet, uniquely acidulated and astonishingly flavorful for a thing so tiny.

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As my trusted friend the Webster tells us, a meme is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”. In the blogosphere, a meme can be a questionnaire about a particular theme — your tastes in music or books, 100 things about you, etc. — that you reply to on your blog and pass along. Nicky started such a meme just a few weeks ago called the cook next door, giving us all a chance to talk about the hows and the whys behind our food obsessions. The added bonus (made possible by her and Oliver’s impressive web design skills) is that she follows the meme’s progression, thus mapping out our ever-growing food blog neighborhood.

What is your first memory of baking/cooking on your own?
I believe my first cooking adventure was mastering the art of the microwaved oeuf cocotte when I was nine. The first thing I baked on my own was the Gâteau au Chocolat de Csaba when I was about twelve, a classic family recipe given to us by a friend who’s originally from Hungary. My rendition was somewhat undercooked in the center and my friends would only eat the outer rims. In retrospect, I like to think it was a molten chocolate cake and I was simply a misunderstood visionary. Ahem.

Who had the most influence on your cooking?
In order of appearance: 1- my mother, 2- the Internet. My mother is a superb cook and baker, and the countless hours I spent with her in the kitchen — watching, helping, licking the bowls — have undoubtedly laid the foundations for my own cooking. The rest of what I know has been gleaned not so much in books or cooking magazines, but rather on websites, forums and of course, blogs.

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