[My Recipes For Your Home]

When my grandmother gave me her superb edition of L’Art Culinaire Moderne, she also entrusted me with two much-loved little books, which had belonged to her mother before her.

Mes Recettes Pour Votre Ménage and Mes Recettes Pour Votre Dessert (“My recipes for your home” and “My recipes for your dessert”) are two books in a series of three that were written during World War I, and republished several times after that — I have the 9th edition. The third book was called Mes Recettes Pour Votre Cuisine (“My recipes for your cooking”) but I have just two torn pages from that one — the asparagus section if you must know. My grandmother explained that the author was a popular columnist for La Croix du Nord, a catholic newspaper from the North of France. Under the nom de plume Marmiton (kitchen boy), he answered reader’s questions and shared tips and advice — sort of a Dear Abby for the homemaker.

Mes Recettes Pour Votre Ménage begins with a section on canning and preserving food, with recipes for syrups, liqueur and jams. (In passing, I was very surprised to see that one of them calls for agar-agar, to be purchased from your phamacist.) The second section is called Economie Ménagère (home economics), and holds an enchanting miscellany of tips to take proper care of your home and yourself. How to clean silk stockings and lace, how to revive rancid butter, how to prevent and cure chilblain (engelures in French), how to get rid of wasps, ants or toads, how to make purple ink (that’s a good one: mix red ink with blue ink), how to clean bird wings to decorate your hat, how to salvage a wet fur coat: life-saving advice for every ménagère.

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It was Maxence’s birthday last week, and one of the things we did to mark the occasion — in addition to one glorious meal at Les Ambassadeurs — was to invite friends to join us and celebrate at a small cocktail bar that recently opened in our neighborhood, on an improbable little street we’d hardly ever noticed before. Maybe it didn’t even exist.

Moist with a fluffy crumb, this cake has a lovely and deep chocolate flavor, delectably tickled by little specks of toasted coconut.

The bar is trendy yet cosy, with a cushy banquette and plenty of stools to sit on, artwork on the walls (of course no one will settle for just being a bar anymore, they have to be a bar-cum-art gallery) and a long mirror to check your makeup in. And just as importantly, the music is soft enough you don’t need lipreading skills to communicate, and the drinks menu features classics and a few bartender specials, at prices that won’t have you file under Chapter 11.

A grand time was had by all, and around midnight, when we had slowly but surely taken over the place, I whipped out the box of coconut chocolate cake I had brought. I learned on previous occasions that attempting to cut a round cake in thirty slices on some small and sticky corner of a bar whilst holding up your end of an animated conversation, is tricky at best. And contrary to popular belief, the Champagne really doesn’t help. So this time, I baked the cake in a square pan and cut it in small servings just before we left: all I had to do then was pass the box around for everyone to take a piece.

This cake is a variation on the Gâteau au Chocolat Aérien, using less sugar, substituting fromage blanc (or plain yogurt) for some of the butter, and coconut flakes for part of the flour. Moist with a fluffy crumb, it has a lovely and light chocolate flavor, delectably tickled by the little specks of toasted coconut.

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[Dry-Cured Duck Sausage]

We had long wanted to try Le Petit Canard, a small restaurant tucked away in a side street of the 9th arrondissement, just a few blocks from us. I had often walked past it on my way up and down the hill, and it looked cosy and warm, with just a handful of candle-lit tables. As the name implies, the menu focuses on all things duck, and I have a weakness for monomaniac restaurants.

We finally made it there last week with our neighbors and my two oldest girlfriends. For starters, we decided to share a selection of duck charcuterie: smoked magret, duck rillettes (a pâté of shredded meat), two kinds of duck terrines (one with port and green peppercorns, one with chesnuts), and slices of duck saucisson, a dry-cured sausage that’s classically made with just pork meat.

All the products served at this restaurant come from a small farm in Haute-Savoie, a region in the French Alps. This came as something of a quirky suprise, because Haute-Savoie isn’t typically renowned for its duck breeding — the bulk of French duck products comes from the South-West. The owner confirmed that this farm, operated by his brother-in-law in a village called Balaison, is the only such farm in the area, but that the ducks fare very well in the cool mountain air. They enjoy the ski slopes, too.

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[Chocolate Pillow from Lyon]

Like many French kids, I practically learned how to read with bande dessinées, the Belgian/French take on comic books, and a large chunk of my general culture comes directly from them. Although I had too many favorites to name just one, the classic Astérix was certainly among them. It is one of those incredibly multi-layered bande dessinées that you can read at any age, filled as they are with puns, references and witty anachronisms. Some of them may escape you as a child, but they’ll suddenly click when you’re older and all of a sudden you understand why secret agent Acidechloridrix goes by the code name of HCl.

In a 1965 album called Le Tour de Gaule (“Asterix and the Banquet” in the English version), Astérix and Obélix take a trip around Gaul to show Julius Caesar that they are quite free to go as they please despite the palisade that the Romans have just built around their village. And to prove how far they’ve managed to travel, they bring back a food specialty from each of the cities they visit, and share the bounty with the Romans at the end of the story, adding their own local treat: the chestnut — châtaigne is also French slang for a punch in the face.

This was one of my favorite Astérix adventures, and I am determined to retrace his steps one day — tour operators of the world, there’s an idea for you. But once in Lugdunum (i.e. the city of Lyon) I wouldn’t stop at just sausages and quenelles like he did: I would also purchase a sizeable amount of Coussins Lyonnais, as pictured above.

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