Paris

[Traditional French Cooking Class]

Show-and-tell: this is the gear I bought for the cooking class I am taking this year! It’s part of the Cours Municipaux pour Adultes, a learning program sponsored by the Mairie de Paris (the mayor’s office), and mine is a weekly three-hour class to learn about traditional French cuisine. All classes offered in this program (although the quality of teaching no doubt varies) are a real bargain, since they are financed in great part by local taxes — for once I am more than happy to pay them — but they are reserved exclusively to Parisians (who have paid the aforementioned taxes, it’s only fair) and the odds of getting in are akin to winning the lottery. Word has gotten around, they get a lot of applications, but naturally there is a limited number of seats for each class, so it’s first come first serve.

I first learned about this cooking class sometime over the summer, and in the morning of September 1, the day the enrollment began, I walked over to the Mairie, picked up an application (plus a few for my neighbors) and within the hour had sent it off, with a good luck kiss. The kiss thing seems to have worked, because I soon received a notice to come to the school at a certain date and time, and after a somewhat nerve-wracking test (multiple-choice questions? for a cooking class? what has the world come to?) only 18 or the 42 candidates (out of some 500 applications) were enrolled. Including — big sigh of relief — yours truly.

The classes started two weeks ago, and so far so good! What will we be learning? The basics of traditional French cuisine — Potage Conti, Pintade Grand-Mère, Steak au poivre, Carottes Vichy, Tarte aux Poires Bourdaloue, Paris-Brest (yay!) — you will no doubt hear about some of these as the class progresses. This is in perfect complementarity with my recent acquisition of L’Art Culinaire Moderne and I am delighted for the chance to learn more about this side of French cuisine I don’t know so much about. Looking at the scheduled weekly menus, I got irrationally excited by the thought of making Oeufs Pochés Toupinelle — don’t ask.

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Having heard many great things about Parisian-Japanese pastry chef Sadaharu Aoki, I was very eager to taste his edible creations for myself. I had often admired them at the Lafayette Gourmet store (okay, now I make it sound like I spend my life there when really I don’t, I go home to sleep and shower), but since I don’t usually buy pastries unless there is a good occasion — or at least deserving friends who will be happy to share them with me — I had so far limited myself to pure eye-candy enjoyment.

Sadaharu Aoki was trained in the art of pâtisserie in both Japan and France, so his work offers interesting Ginza-meets-Saint-Germain twists, slipping Japanese ingredients into typically French confections, and applying the Japanese sense of detail and intricacy to his presentation and packaging. His line includes pastries and entremets, cookies and cakes, chocolate confections and macarons — all of them strikingly beautiful and perfect, but never to the point of losing their appetizing power over the innocent, unsuspecting onlooker.

He has two boutiques in Paris, a corner at the Lafayette Gourmet store, and a handful of restaurants and salons de thé in Paris (all listed on his website) feature his pastries on their menu.

The perfect excuse to sample some of them recently presented itself, on an afternoon when I knew Maxence and I would be dining with our neighbors. I selected four (always a heartbreak — what of the others? will they be hurt and forever traumatized? must go back and make it up to them.) that we shared later that night after an excellent roasted chicken dinner:

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It may have become apparent by now just how much I love sandwiches, and it is always cause for elation to discover a new source for superior sandwich indulgence.

Bellota-Bellota is a store in the 7th that specializes in fine food products from Spain and also operates as an upscale tapas bar. A string of such venues opened a few years ago when the Paris food scene realized with a start that gastronomy did not stop at the Pyrenées — all things Iberian have been riding that trendy wave ever since. The company behind Bellota-Bellota, called Byzance, has a few locations in and around Paris, including a corner inside Lafayette Gourmet, the food area of the Galeries Lafayette department store.

I was there just the other day, it was lunchtime, I was hungry, and their bocadillos (bocadillo simply means “sandwich” in Spanish) looked like the perfect option. A glance at the little menu confirmed the intuition, describing the bocadillo with the following:

“Un pain au naturel farine biologique, cuit au feu de bois comme autrefois. De fines tranches de palette de Pata Negra. L’écrasée de tomates maison à l’huile d’olive Arbequina, fabriquée en Catalogne. Quelques pétales de manchego au lait cru des brebis manchega. Un trait d’huile d’olive.”

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[A Sandwich for Dessert]

“Un Sandwich pour le Dessert” is a project I worked on for Fraîch’Attitude, a Parisian gallery that specializes in Eat Art. Eat Art is an offshoot of ephemeral art that uses food as its primary material: some of the exhibitions are actually edible and are meant to disappear into the visitors’ stomachs, to be recreated the next day.

The gallery just opened a new exhibition yesterday around the theme Picnic, and a couple of months ago I was asked to submit something (“anything! you decide!”) for the exhibition’s catalog, which also serves as a cahier de style — a reflection of current trends and inspirations.

I decided to create visual recipes for four simple dessert sandwiches, easy to make and easy to pack, for a colorful picnic on a nearby patch of grass or on the floorboards of your living-room. (Click on the names to view the recipe.)

– Le Club-sandwich Framboise et Crème de Gianduja: sandwich bread + gianduioso (or nutella) + raspberries = raspberry and gianduioso club-sandwich.

– Le Sandwich Petit Beurre à la Fraise: strawberries + petit suisse + butter cookies = strawberry cookie sandwich.

– Le Petit Pain Amandes et Mirabelles: plums cooked with a little sugar + toasted almonds + a mini loaf of bread = plum and almond mini-bread.

– La Brioche Figue et Citron: lemon curd + a pretty brioche + figs = fig and lemon brioche.