THE PARIS LETTER: Butchers, Movie Theaters, and Residency Cards

Hello from my Parisian sickbed -

Yes its the dreaded winter head cold time - really more irritating than anything else. I came down with it a couple of days ago and I keep thinking I'm in better shape than I am - bleah. However, lots of fun stuff to talk about this week - butchers, movie theaters, and the joys of the Parisian prefecture de police!

1. LONG CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BUTCHER -

My local butcher during the holidays

This is what my friends have decided my book about my life in Paris should be called - and indeed, a lot of my food adventures here have become about finding, buying and cooking different cuts of meat, and having long hilarious conversation with French butchers, where we try to explain to each other what parts and cuts of the animal we are talking about. I've learned a lot about anatomy, and the words for various parts of the body in both French and English. I've also found myself doing research online about the differences between French and American butchering and cuts of meat. Things I didn't set out to learn, but which I think will actually set me in good stead for years to come.

As I've probably explained before, the French butcher a cow very differently than we do in US, and cows are also raised differently here. I'll learn more about this I'm sure, but in general beef here tends to be more flavorful but less fatty than in thethe US. Seems like an oxymoron, BUT you'll probably understand - the French cow is usually better braised, while we like to have juicy thick steaks to throw on the grill. Also as a gross generalization, French cuts tend to be smaller and more specific, while we divide the cow up into bigger sections and cut bigger pieces of meat from them.

Anyone who wants to get into this more can use this very informative web post "Les Steaks" as a jumping off point - It will also help you order a steak here:
http://www.hertzmann.com/articles/2006/steak/

So this week, we had a big dinner party planned for Friday night, and I was trying to find a good recipe that could be cooked largely ahead of time but still serve 8 people. I've also recently developed a deep obsession with Suzanne Goin's cookbook SUNDAY SUPPERS AT LUCQUES (thanks Matt and Anne Richards for that - except, maybe, no thanks - this cookbook is in danger of taking over my life). Anyway, she has a great recipe in the cookbook for brisket with horseradish sauce and salsa verde, which can all be cooked a day ahead.

Brisket, right? Good plan - I'd eaten it before, seemed tasty and hard to totally screw up. I'd never cooked it, though. In fact, I didn't even know where brisket came from on the animal. So I did this research first - turns out, for all of you brisket novices, that its a big cut from the chest of the cow; and, traditionally a Jewish meat because of this, since kosher law prohibits eating the hindquarters of an animal. Interesting, huh?

Holiday geese with heads!

However, at your typical French butcher shop, you will not find brisket. I went to my two trusty local butchers both accustomed to me blathering on in French about some cut of meat we have in America that they don't have here. The closest thing they have here is something called "Poitrine de Boeuf", which does literally mean Beef Chest - but this is a little like beef bacon, very fatty, but also a thin cut occasionally with a bone in it. Not what I was looking for. So I searched through the meat case and had another long conversation with the butcher, where he looked totally puzzled and asked if I could bring him a photo of the cut of meat so he could figure out what it was. Then he asked how I was going to cook it, etc, and we eventually landed on something called Basse-Cote de Boeuf, which means "Below Rib Roast" - which I thought would closer to the chest but is actually BEEF NECK, the big muscle between the cow head and the ribs.

Well, I thought, here goes - we'll see what happens with this giant piece of BEEF NECK. It basically looks like a roast, and the butcher cut me a 3 kilo piece of it (6.5lbs). However, I guess people don't cook a lot of giant pieces of beef neck, because as I was leaving, one of the people in line behind me stopped and asked "Madame, qu'est ce que vous faites avec ca?" (Ma'am, what are you planning to do with that?) with a slightly scared look on his face.

You'll be happy to know that the beef neck came out delicious, rubbed in lots of garlic and braised in beer and stock for five hours. And it tasted .... a lot like brisket! Success! It's all emboldened me to try out even more new cuts of meat, frustrating the people in line behind me at the butcher shop as I try to puzzle out the french translation - maybe this next time I WILL bring pictures.

2. LES RECIPISSES

Matt and I are deep in the process of getting our French Residency cards, a multilayered bureaucratic process that has broken even the strongest of expat wills. It's not that it's so hard necessarily, it's just that in a country like France, there is always an exact process to be followed that is never that well explained - or rather, it might be explained in French on an obscure website somewhere, but it certainly doesn't feel like anyone is helping you through the process.

Thankfully, we do have some help, in the form of the Pasteur Institute, who have made process as painless as possible - however, we've also gotten accustomed to carrying a dossier of important papers around with us to every official appointment just in case. This dossier includes: our birth certificates, both originals and translated officially into French, ditto our marriage certificate, our visa request paperwork, Matt's contract with Pasteur, his pay stub, an electricity bill, our official banking information, and our passports, several passport photos, as well as a few other official letters from Matt's boss for good measure. Somehow, just having prepared this folder seems to make things go more smoothly. theThe French love official docs and thick folders of paperwork.

Anyway, so this week we were called to the Prefecture de Police to pick up our Récipissés - this is apparently the last step before we get our official residency cards; we just have to have our official state medical exam and chest x-ray now (to make sure we don't have TB you know). Prefecture is on Ile de la Cite, Thethe island in the middle of the Seine that was the original colony of Paris in Roman times. THe section that deals specifically with foreign visas is in a beautiful old building that feels extremely Parisian and like you're about to go to a royal ball - except once you get through the metal detector, you're let out into a big courtyard that directs immigrants to different stairways based on where they are immigrating from. "Africain/Maghrebine" gets its own staircase, no surprise there, and the US and Asia share an entry, interestingly.

We made it through our meeting and got our récipissés, which now means that I can officially WORK here, it says so right on my card! Very exciting. And then when you exit the immigrant courtyard, you're standing right in front of Notre Dame - not a bad way to welcome in your official French residency.

THE MOVIE THEATERS OF PARIS, Part One

I will close today on another one of my favorite topics, the awesome movie theaters of Paris. I made a New Year's resolution to try to see three or four movies a week, and I'm helped out in this by the enormous awesomeness of Parisian theaters - they routinely have 9:30 and 11:30AM showings of movies on weekday mornings, and, what's more - quite often these screenings are full! Last Monday I went to an 11:15 screening of this year's Cannes Palme D'Or winner, UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES, and the screening room was packed. Granted, this was the one showing of the film in Paris that week, but even the fact that it got ONE screening was pleasantly surprising to me.

The programming for theaters here is VERY different in than in the US, even in theaters that are big commercial houses. You know how sometimes you go out and feel like you can't find anything in the theaters but TRON or whatever else Hollywood is trying to shove down your throat that week? Well, here there are definitely films like that, but rather than being on 3 or even 4 screens in one movie theater, they are on two screens maximum - For example, down the street from us at the enormous Pathe Wepler, we've got 2 screens for The Green Hornet and 2 screens for Arrietty, a Japanese cartoon for kids. Then there's a screen each for Megamind, Chronicles of Narnia, Season of the Witch, Rapunzel and Hereafter, all American imports - BUT also four screens for French movies that will never make it to the US but are big here. So there's more diversity in terms of what you'll see at a lot of US multiplexes - and then there's also a greater prevalence of art houses that will show a dedicated program in the evening, but then during the day they'll show a variety of international films in maybe one or two screenings a week.

The result is that in the last two weeks I've seen THE GREEN ZONE, ANOTHER YEAR, crazy Thai UNCLE BOONMEE film mentioned above, INSIDE JOB, and thethe Quebecois film J'AI TUE MA MERE by new directorial wunderind Xavier Dolan, all at at 11:30 or so in the morning, and each for about 6 Euros or less. So far I'm batting 1000 in terms of film quality, though I feel like this can't last - but I recommend all of these movies to you, and maybe will start giving some quick descriptions/reviews in my next letter -

BUT I must sign off now - this ended up being much longer than I expected, so apologies to those of you who were hoping to actually DO something with your Sunday - Hope that you all have great weeks, and keep the updates coming!

xo Claire