THE PARIS LETTER: Thanksgiving is a Difficult Holiday to Explain to Non-Americans

Hello everyone -

The Turkeys are here! Who knew??

For those of you following along, you'll be happy to hear that it's NOT raining this Sunday, though the temperature in Paris has dropped this week and we even got some snow flurries on Friday.They didn't stick around, but it was kind of a magical moment as my friend Emily and I were just passing the Louvre on our bikes when the snow started. Pretty gorgeous, though thankfully we were on our way to get our hair cut and could park the bikes and watch the snow from the salon window.

We managed to have a record 12 people for our expat Thanksgiving dinner, using up all the place settings/silverware/serving plates of not just our household but also many from my neighbors as well. It was our first time cooking Thanksgiving and let me tell you, it is a challenging meal! There were no major mishaps thankfully, and no mental breakdowns, but definitely trying to get hot food out of our tiny kitchen to twelve people made me feel like an ill-prepared line cook... But the party lasted until 2:30 AM, and one really nice thing about it was that everyone talked to everyone else, even though most of the people didn't know each other necessarily - 

Okay, first UPDATES from Last week. Our Tonka Bean discussion prompted a friend with a background in science to respond that it might NOT be such a good idea to infuse vodka with something that also harms your liver. This gave Matt pause, and he spent several hours looking up the scientific literature on Coumarin, the chemical that's present in Tonka Beans. He quickly decided that our vodka was in fact TOXIC, containing enough coumarin to be used as rat poison. Then there was some back and forth about whether rat livers work differently than human livers in terms of processing this chemical, which it seems like they might, but we still decided perhaps it might be better NOT to serve it at Thanksgiving. Though it did make an appearance as a discussion piece for sure - The duck confit, thankfully, was not toxic at all and came out quite well.

So - On to the meat of this letter, the difficulty of explaining the Thanksgiving holiday to non-Americans. As many of you know, Thanksgiving is just another day here in France, people going about their business, shops open, etc. In fact, most of the stores are already decorated for Christmas, with Joyeux Noel signs and whatnot. There's no bridge holiday for the French - they can basically start advertising for Christmas in early November. Also, though turkey (called "dinde" in French) is seen at the butcher shop, I'd never seen it whole - you'll see turkey breast, but not much else. So I assumed it would be impossible to get a whole turkey here - but NO, I was shocked to see the following sign at my local butcher last weekend: "Les Dindes de Thanksgiving sont arrivees!" (the Thanksgiving Turkeys have arrived!) What?! Are there French people secretly celebrating Thanksgiving out there? Can there really be that many American expats in Paris?

But then I learned from our local caviste (wine seller) that turkey is a traditional Christmas meal in France, though served with chestnuts and not cranberry sauce. This was part of a very funny discussion as Emily, Victor, and I tried to buy wine for the meal

"Ah, Thanksgiving." the caviste said, "That's on October 31st, when you have turkey with corn and chutney, right?" I explained that it was actually in November and that yes, we had a kind of cranberry chutney. 'But don't you also stuff the bird with corn?" he asked. I was totally puzzled but just said "Oh, you can stuff it with lots of things, I'm doing a bread stuffing."

He was mock-incensed that we weren't cooking a turkey (we did 2 chickens instead). I told him I had thought we wouldn't be able to get a whole turkey here. "Mais si!" he said, again incensed that I thought France might not have a certain ingredient. He did the same thing with cranberries, which are pronounced (as far as I can tell) "cranberries" with a french accent. I said they didn't have them in France and he said "Yes, of course we do!", though thethe only place I've seen them is in the imported cans of cranberry sauce at Le Grand Epicerie de Paris. BUT I learned a valuable lesson - never imply to a Frenchman that he might not have the same variety of ingredients as the rest of the world. Even if true, he will deny it vehemently.

Another difficulty with explaining the holiday involves its origins and its non-religious context. I feel like "religious" means very different things to Europeans - witness the following exchange with a Swiss-German woman in my French class. She asked why I wouldn't be in class following week, and I said I'd be hosting people for Thanksgiving. She said "Thanksgiving! I know about Thanksgiving - with thethe turkey!' Yes, I said, it's a holiday that many Americans enjoy because its not religious, and just gets to be a time of family and food. "But it IS religious" she said, "Don't you thank god before every meal? And weren't the Pilgrims all religious?" Yes, I said, but its not a specifically Christian holiday. "But it IS" she insisted - and seemed very skeptical that we could have a secular holiday. And that's when my ability to speak French ran out. How could I explain to her that while the people we celebrate this holiday for were religious, the holiday itself doesn't involve churchgoing, or that in America saying Grace before a meal doesn't make a holiday religious?

Well, this woman was a 70 year old Swiss German, so there may not have been much I could do to convince her (How's that for being ethnically judgmental? Well, she WAS very Germanic, though, I promise). But I think for many Western Europeans, much of America seems to have fallen into a Christian fundamentalist cult. Heck, I feel that way sometimes. What I try to say to French people now is that America is a huge and hugely diverse country, and that there are few Americans who would feel comfortable in every part of it. I think being from New York is really saving me here, because they at least know what that city is, but I worry that if I were from anywhere else they would secretly believe that I was here on my Mormon mission and might one day try to convert them ...

I'm going to close by attaching this editorial that Art Buchwald wrote for the Washington Post a few years ago that attempts to explain Thanksgiving - or MerciDonnant - to French people. Enjoy!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112302056.html

Keep your responses coming, I really love getting mail from everyone -

xo Claire

THE PARIS LETTER: Gyms, Tonka Beans, Confit de Canard

Bonjour mes amis!

I hate to say it, but its raining AGAIN this Sunday - that's three in a row, for those of you who are counting. Some of you have expressed dismay at the amount of rain there seems to be here - do not worry, we did actually have a sunny day yesterday, beautiful crisp fall weather that prompted my neighbor, Mr.Attal, to tell me when I met him going down the stairs 'Il faut profiter tout suite, ca va changer" - translation: you better get out there and enjoy this right away, because it ain't gonna last. Yes, it is getting colder, and in general is pretty chilly here compared to New York - although apparently the weather, while damp, won't ever get as bitterly cold or snowy as the East Coast, which is a bonus.

However, the general dampness here prompted me this week to buy a CLOTHES DRYER, a major purchase that the French are usually very skeptical of - they prefer to hang their clothes on drying racks, and for some reason seem to view a dryer as a suspicious and unneccessary luxury - I confronted my friend Marco, who used to live in our apartment, about this when he was over trying to explain all the places I could hang the clothes in our 450sq ft apartment (hang them from the ceiling,toss them over the heaters, etc) so I wouldn't need to buy a dryer. He said "No, no, my mother has a dryer and in fact I find it very convenient - I just figure when I retire, that will be my time to get a dryer." - Well, despite seeming very American-consumerist, I decided my time to get a dryer is NOW, and I could not be more excited to have properly dry jeans in this weather.

I also joined a gym this week, which is kind of a major milestone in gym-averse Paris. The gym I joined, Club Med, IS in fact affiliated with the 80s vacation resort brand, but is sort of like Parisian New York Sports Club - there are 17 of them around thethe city, and with my membership I can go to any of them - which is good, because the locations vary extremely in quality. Often you're stuck in an old building with no ventilation, no windows, low ceilings, maybe underground ... kind of depressing. However, there is one sort of near my house that thankfully feels like a real American gym, a giant room with high ceilings and windows, with lots of cardio and weight training machines - this took me a month to find. Gyms are slowly catching on here, because even though the French famously don't really believe in exercise, they also don't believe in being fat, EVER, and are terrible hypochondriacs - so eventually, the gym thing was gonna catch on, but it's still something French people seem to do in secret and don't talk about much, for most part. Though there were some guys at my gym who were clearly on thethe creatine, there in general wasn't as much of that grunting crazy body building dude that I seem to find all over New York, and I haven't yet seen any exercise-anorectic women (you know the ones, they seem to ALWAYS be at the gym, running on the treadmill, looking emaciated). For the most part, the French gym-goers seem somewhat bemused to be there.

One thing I will mention is that my first time at the gym I was really stunned at how hot all women's bodies were. People had warned me about this - Parisian women are fanatical about looking good, but in a "natural' way. You won't see any plastic surgery, but I was stunned in locker room that basically every woman had a flat stomach AND boobs, which I tend to think of as genetically impossible. It almost ruined my day, until my cousin Hillary (who has lived here for 5 years) helped calm me down by explaining that since gyms ARE so new here, really only thethethe very active people go to them, and they tend to look pretty damn good - all the other body types stay home or do more walking/biking exercise or something. Well, true or not, I am grabbing on to this as a lifeline because let me tell you, these women were INTIMIDATING, and that's coming from New York Equinox gyms, which are pretty hardcore. Maybe I'll start taking the most popular class, which is "Abdo-Fessiers-Cuisses", or "Abs-Butt-Thighs", which they offer about 5 times a day at each location.

There is a sort of 80s overtone to gym, very Richard Simmons aerobics-y, and sometimes complete with the outfits that you didn't know existed any more. My friend Blaire goes to a gym here called (yes) LadyFitness, and she swears she sees legwarmers and thong leotards all times. There's also something called Le Gym Suedoise, which is like a Swedish aerobics class where you do thethe Jane Fonda workout to ABBA....not kidding. Proving once again that the French are both super hip and SUPER out of it.

Okay, so enough GYMS, you guys probably want to hear more about out adventures in food, of which there were several this week. This began with my discovery of Tonka Beans at Lafayette Gourmet, the giant food market that's connected to the Galeries Lafayette department store - think of it as the Bloomingdales of food. Matt had read this article about Tonka beans, which I had never heard of and which are apparently illegal in the US, but which you can buy here and which the French are crazy for. They are made from the seed of a South American fruit, and are little black nuts/beans that smell like a combination of vanilla, cinnamon, and cloves- they're used in a lot of desserts here, and have the aromatic properties of truffles but are sweet instead of savory. Also, apparently, they contain the compound Coumarin, which in large quantities(like 100+ beans) can cause your liver to shut down. Tonka beans are classified as an illegal substance by the FDA, so naturally we had to have some.

We're not sure what we're going to DO with the Tonka Beans, but one idea Matt had, which we did yesterday and which worked SHOCKINGLY well, was to make Tonka Bean infused vodka. We just put 10 or 11 beans in the bottom of a bottle of vodka, and let them soak - and infusion happened very quickly; within 4 hours thethe vodka had turned a golden color and was extremely perfume-y. Matt put it in the freezer last night to slow the infusing, but as promised the beans definitely impart their flavor and aroma VERY quickly.

Thanksgiving is this week, so we've been starting to prep for that, and Matt had the idea that we should make our own version of the very traditionally French dish Confit de Canard, or Duck Confit. We'll be serving this with a roasted chicken or two, because whole turkeys aren't really sold here. Confit de Canard involves slowly cooking a duck in its own fat, and then using that fat to preserve the meat. Once you've preserved it, you can leave it in the fat for up to 3 months, and then pull it out and sear it when you're ready to serve. We discovered that you have to confit the meat at least a week beforehand, so I went out earlier this week in search of duck legs (easy to find) and duck fat, which I wasn't sure where to get. But thankfully, my local butcher had both - and also, upon hearing I would be making duck confit, started a spirited debate amongst staff about what I should do - salt thethe meat, don't salt the meat, how much fat to buy, etc. One guy, upon hearing that Matt had a recipe he wanted to use, said "Alors, si votre mari a une recette, il faut le laisse faire - ne pas perturber" - "Well, if your husband has a recipe, you must let him do it his way, don't bug him about it". How did he know so much about my marriage?

The confit-ing turned out to be super easy, and filled the house with a delicious duck fat smell. Now the legs are lying in the fridge in a congealed mass of their own fat, getting more and more tender, and again, I have to wonder how I"m changing as a person that this looks SUPER DELICIOUS to me...

That's all for this week, I've been loving getting your letters so please keep writing, and I will too - And I promise next week I will try to attach some pictures FINALLY, we've been having some camera issues.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

xo Claire

THE PARIS LETTER: Paris, Rabbits, and Mexican Food

Hi Everyone -

It's ANOTHER rainy Sunday here in Paris (Paris's secret is that it's actually just as rainy as London), and I'm taking a stab at writing another letter, maybe making this a weekly thing since people seemed to respond well to it last week. If for any reason you DON'T want to get these updates, just email me - I know we all get a lot of email.

But anyway, assuming you want to hear more about Life in France, here we go -

It seems like no American can move to France without talking about food. A Lot. And, since most of you know that I am a big cook, I'll probably be no exception. However, I'm sort of an ambivalent French cook - I enjoy a lot about French food, but I also really like cooking food from around the world - Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, North African, Mexican, etc - So part of what I'll be writing about is all the cool food options here, but part of it will also be about my various food frustrations - while France has far better and more readily available ingredients, they just don't have the variety of different cuisines that we're used to having in the US. I need to note that these are fighting words for most Parisians, who will dismiss the idea and tell you that Paris is as diverse as any other city and that French food is the most diverse in the world. Do not argue with them (they will get really pissy about it), but also, don't believe it for a second.

Witness my experience at Mexi & Co, one of Paris's only Mexican restaurants. Now, I know I know, why was I trying to eat Mexican food in Paris, where it was probably going to be bad? Well, I needed to know what I was dealing with in case I ever got a serious burrito craving - and also, I had heard that Mexi and Co was the only place in town to buy staple mexican ingredients I was used to getting in the states - chipotles in a can, tortilla chips, corn tortillas, etc. This was correct - though the products were expensive - but lets discuss the burrito.

Now, here is how the burrito was described on the version of Parisian Yelp: Vous pouvez gouter un "Burrito", une galette avec fromage, haricots rouge, et le guacomole!
This sounds so weird in French, right? It basically translates as "You can taste a "burrito", a crepe (a galette is a savory crepe) with cheese, red beans and guacomole! -
The burrito came in a flour tortilla with a reasonable chicken/rice/beans combo inside, and salsa on the top with creme fraiche, which actually can be like sour cream. It was served with a weird little salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, sort of like French salsa fresca, and guacamole that definitely came from some kind of tube, which is odd because avocados are pretty plentiful in Paris (they are imported largely from Israel and North Africa). But the real killer was the fact that the cheese in the burrito was shredded Emmental, what we know as Swiss cheese. Which destroyed the burrito taste for me - imagine delicious burrito flavors with swiss cheese melted on them. Sigh.

So, I thought - I will make mexican food at home! Which you can KIND OF do - they have black beans, cilantro, harissa that can stand in for chilis a bit - but the cheese turned out to be a problem. French supermarkets DO have an aisle of "ready to use" cheeses, like we have in most American supermarkets - bags of shredded cheese for pizzas, cubes and slices for melting onto sandwiches and burgers. But guess what 99% of that cheese is? Emmental! Yes! Swiss cheese is the only meltable cheese you can get! Or you can get pre-wrapped slices of "Burger Cheese", just like Kraft Singles - but No cheddar, no monterey jack, not even shredded mozzarella. Everything we made with cheese on it ended up tasting like a crepe.

Okay, so I haven't yet abandoned my dreams of Mexican food, but lets say it is a challenge here. But, on the flip side, I just bought a whole rabbit to cook today into a rabbit ragu. Yes, rabbit is a pretty common meat here, and France is the land of excellent butchers, which has been fun since I mostly spent my days in the US browsing the prewrapped meats in the Fairway cold room. Now, within a kilometer of my house there are at least five butchers, two of which are amazing, as well as three Poissonnieres, or fish markets. What this does require, however, is bringing your dictionary to the market, as many of the cuts of meat are different, and all the fish have different names - And there's no way, of course, to ask the fishmonger "Which of these is halibut?" in French because he will not call it halibut anyway and will just look at you in confusion. Also, you have to be ready to have a real conversation with the butcher, which can be intimidating if you don't know the language - I saw an American couple trying to get short ribs at the meat counter the other day and just looking stumped because they didn't know the phrase for "short ribs" in French and couldn't explain in french to the butcher what they needed the meat to be. I did in fact bring my dictionary to the fish market, and discovered that halibut is "Fletan" and cod is "Cabillaud", but everything is also slightly different because it comes from different parts of ocean than what we're used to in thethe US.

Wow, this didn't go where I was expecting it to go! I had this plan that I was going to explain different kinds of markets here, starting with Monoprix, which is thethe supermarket next to my house and which is sort of like a combination of Whole Foods and Kmart - in that it has a fish counter and decent vegetables, but also sells housewares, makeup and clothes (Matt bought two sweaters there when we first arrived) - But I'll save that for another letter. I thought I would close with some "Faux Amis", or French words and phrases that SOUND the same as English words, but mean something totally different - always a fun way to be tripped up here.

Some Faux Amis:

Attention - Doesn't mean "attention" quite, but more like " Watch Out" or "Pay Attention"

Juste - Means right or correct, but not "just" as in "I just did that" - when I first got here I kept saying "J'ai juste demenage ici",which I thought meant "I just moved here" but really means "I rightly and correctly moved here". Whoops.

Actuellement - Doesn't mean actually, means "right now" or "currently"

Avertissement - Not an advertisement, actually a Warning. An ad is a promotion or "publicite"

Finalement - Means more like "In the end" as opposed to "finally".

Rester - Means "to stay" as in "Je suis reste chez moi aujourd'hui", meaning "I stayed at home today", as opposed to I rested or took a nap or something.

Librairie - Bookstore

Raisin - Grape

Robe - Dress

I will sign off here, hope everyone has had a good week - More about food next week as we will be planning for American Thanksgiving in Paris, which Matt and I are hosting this year and will be an Expat Extravaganza. Liz Gately already smuggled cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie filling to me in her suitcase when she visited two weeks ago, so we are ready.

Lots of love, and would love to hear from you and how you are all doing!

xo Claire

THE PARIS LETTER: The First One

Hi guys -

I'm up early-ish on a rainy Sunday here in Paris, and I was thinking about all of you and though I would write a letter to give you a little update on my life here over the last 6 weeks. I've had these ambitions of starting a blog to keep in touch with people, and I sort of got one up and running - but I realized it takes actual skill to do things like embed pictures and format shit, and I haven't figured all that out yet, so in the interim I must rely on the medium I know and understand - email ;) Please don't be disappointed -

So here we are in Paris. It is surprisingly just like living in New York AND totally different at same time. We live in thethe Northwest part of the city, on the border of the 17th & 18th arrondissements. This doesn't really have an equivalent in New York, though I've been trying hard to come up with one...In a lot of ways, I guess, it's like where we lived before, Upper-upper west side, between 100th and 125th street. Because theParis is arranged in a circle, and is just generally smaller in area than New York, EVERYTHING is much closer together, so neighborhood distinctions are both sort of more precise and more meaningless than in New York -

We are sort of right where the 8th, 9th, 17th, and 18th all converge. the 8th and 9th are more part of downtown Paris, and the 17th and 18th are more residential. The 18th is Montmartre, where Sacre Coeur is (and also Le Moulin Rouge), a hilly, very beautiful but also traditional cheap/artsy/seedy area, and the 16th, on the other side of us, is the Parisian Upper East Side, so we're sort of in the middle - half yuppie, half boho, with a fair amount of Maghrebine/working class folks as well. Maghrebine is this French term which means "Arabs from French Colonies", so from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, and there are LOTS of them in Paris. There;s a much stronger Arab/Muslim presence in Paris than you do in New York - they're definitely dominant ethnic group, and in a way it gave me a little perspective on why thethe French government was freaking out about the head scarf issue, because you really see head scarves everywhere- not that I think they should have freaked out, but it's just a different vibe.

So we live on a little Cour, which is like an alley or a dead end street, right off a busy street, Avenue de Clichy. It's kind of great because we have a lot of services very close to us, but our little street is pretty secluded and quiet. We are also half a block from the Metro, which we were at first very excited about, until we discovered that our line, the 13, is the MOST CROWDED SUBWAY LINE in Paris. Several French people, upon hearing what line we were on, exclaimed "Mais le treize, c'est le pire!" (but the 13th, it's the worst!) - terrific. It's like the 6 train kind of - they built it and the area it served expanded, and now they need another line in addition but haven't built one.

Sooo - what we have been doing instead, while the weather is still decent enough, is riding our bikes everywhere - or rather, Matt has been riding his bike and I've been using the Velibs, which is the Parisian public bike system, and to me is the best expression of how socialism can work. Velib is short for "Velo Libre", or "Free Bike". Each metro station has at least one rack of bikes within 100 meters, and you can rent them for 1 Euro a day - you unlock them, ride them to another part of the city, and then relock them at another Velib station. And, there's even a Velib van that goes around the city making sure the bikes are evenly distributed in neighborhoods - since we live on a hill, I am especially appreciative of this. Some mornings its like the Velib elves came in the night and restocked the nearby rack...

Anyway, this is especially fun for me as a New Yorker because 1) you can ride almost anywhere in Paris in under an hour and 2) You do not have to carry a gigantic chain lock or worry about your bike being stolen. The main issue is that a lot of the bikes are beat to shit - they're designed to be heavy duty and unbreakable, but you've still got to be pretty on top of it when you're checking out a bike, to make sure it doesn't have a flat/broken seat/misaligned wheel, etc. But usually it all works and it's AWESOME.

Matt is loving his job at the Pasteur Institute - he started about a month ago, and his lab is very high-powered, which is ironic since he moved from New York (traditionally workaholic) to (traditionally laid back) and is now working longer hours than ever. He is learning to slice live mouse brains and also inject them with a protein that can be controlled by light. I could go into more detail, but that would be a whole nother email. He's getting along really well with Paristhe other folks in the lab, and is able to speak English with most of them. What I am enjoying about Pasteur Institute is its cafeteria, which is also just like an American cafeteria and also very French at thethe same time - Trays and steam tables and all that, but also French food - Matt can often choose between braised rabbit and sole in butter sauce for lunch, and they have a cheese plate and bowls of chopped fresh herbs at the salad bar. Sometimes I'll go and meet him for lunch just for the food...

I'm working on some projects in the US as well as taking French and starting to look for a job. Its slow going, but I'm trying to be patient with myself and with the whole experience. Our furniture just came this week, FINALLY (after 2 months!) and that is making us feel MUCH more at home, though our apartment here is smaller than in the US and so we're trying to figure out where to put all the clothes, books, and papers.

Some other things that I'm enjoying: Going to movies at 10AM - and the general wealth of movie theaters here; not being able to do any errand running on Sundays - at first I thought this would be annoying, but it's actually great because it FORCES you to take time off; super cheap fast internet; kick-ass Moroccan food; chocolate/almond croissants; the boulangerie that does a second bake in the afternoon so you can get warm bread at 5PM; being able to travel anywhere in Europe in under 2 hours; butchers who ask you how you plan to cook the meat you're buying, and give tips; crazy workers strikes (I'm actually enjoying the social activism of it, believe it or not); little kids speaking French (adorable)

Things that they don't have here: chicken broth in a can or box (only bouillon cubes, no idea why), melatonin, chipotles, cheddar cheese, incandescent bulbs over 40 watts, dinner before 8PM, ice cubes/ice cube trays, magnetic stripe credit cards, good IPAs or hoppy beer of ANY kind, shoes in my size (11 womens)- I'm making an ongoing list of things that I may have to stuff in my suitcase and bring back when we're in the US over Xmas.

I'm going to sign off here for now so this doesn't get too long, but I"d love to hear from people just to catch up, so if you've got the time, drop me an email back!

xo CTL