Atelier de Cuisine

On today's menu: 1 French cooking class. Is your seatbelt fastened?

The cooking class was in a young French couple's apartment, in a nearly-silent corner of the 19th arrondissement, not far from the Parc des Buttes Chaumants, where Bruno and I had taken a walk together only a couple of weeks earlier. Our hosts were charming, intelligent, welcoming, and gifted with a very cute baby; the six of us felt at home immediately. The husband, Antoine, is an absolute gourmet, and loves cooking, using all sorts of exotic ingredients and nifty cooking tools, and inventing some very unique dishes; he cooks every day. Every time he revealed another amazing delicacy (such as purple carrots, Japanese radishes, Parisian honey, pepper from Madagascar, orange beets, etc.), he would cite the specialty store where he found it, and mention the address, for later reference. On the coffee table was a titanic Larousse Gastronomic dictionary (Larousse is the French equivalent of Merriam-Webster), and even the baby books in the playpen were about food.

The menu was vegetarian (although I'm the unique vegetarian in EDUCO), and I will relate the dishes in order of consumption. Using a little device called a toc-oeuf we cut the tops off of eggshells, and then drained the white, dropped the shells containing the yokes into boiling water for just a moment, filled the hot shells with a savory mixture of cream, pepper, and nutmeg, added a drop of local honey, and then immediately consumed, hot. I don't know whether the raw yokes were pasteurized or not, but they certainly were good! When we had finished cooking, we mounted to the 4th-story dining room, filled with light, and with a breathtaking view of Paris, especially Montmartre. The most beautiful dish we made that day was a raw, finely-sliced beetroot, sprinkled with sesame oil, hot peppers, and just a bit of Parmesan. The main dish was cooked lentils, filled also with the daikons and the carrots I earlier mentioned: amazingly full of flavor, and done just the right amount! For dessert, we enjoyed homemade savory icecream, which we had flavored with herbs picked from the couple's garden, alongside fried apple slices, which made me think just a little bit of a certain mother's apple crisp. At the end, there was, naturally, coffee. We made everything we ate, but we did not eat everything we made. By the time we left, it was mid-afternoon; Sarah, Adeh and I walked back to the Metro, and I spent the rest of the day trying to get some studying done.

This entry was short, but ASAP, I'm going to try to write up my all-day trip to Versailles. Expect to hear from me again soon!

~JD

"Pour marier ces soldats, Colbert envoya en Nouvelle France de jeunes orphelines pourvues d'une dot, un millier de 1665 a 1673" [To marry off these soldiers in New France, Colbert sent young female orphans, provided with dowries, to New France, a thousand from 1665 to 1674] (Michel Nassiet, La France au XVIIe siecle, p. 46).