Paris snow, cat in a hat + dreams past and future
I'm still rooting for the geranium and for all those dreams
Bonjour! Bonjour!
Michael and I got to Paris last week, just in time to see snow! I can count on a couple of fingers the number of times I’ve seen snow that sticks for more than a minute in Paris, so this was an event. Also beautiful — it was magical to wake up to snow on the rooftops, snow covering the table on our little balcony and snow capping the one geranium that had courageously poked her pretty pink head out of the leaves. She looked cute in her snowy beret, but I feared for her life.
I remember a moment in Paris in the pre-smartphone days when there was a coating of snow as delicate as fairy dust but you could barely make your way down the street —not for the snow, but for the shopkeepers who came out with their cameras to record the event! Had you scrolled my Instagram account on January 18, you would have seen the modern-day equivalent. One beautiful snow scene after another.
Raclette and Galette des Rois — Tradition x Two
The other night we were invited for dinner at friends and raclette was on the menu. Such fun! And so funny that before I’d left America, I’d seen a few articles about how raclette was trendy … again. Raclette is a type of cheese that melts easily and it’s also the name of the dish, more the ceremony of melting the cheese at the table and eating it with potatoes, charcuterie, bread, vegetables, whatever you’d like. It’s not really like fondue, but it comes from the same Alpine family and, like fondue, there’s special equipment. A raclette machine has a heater for melting the cheese topped with something like a plate/griddle for warming ingredients and, most important, little skillets to hold the cheese (the skillets are just the size of the pieces of cheese) and cute little wooden spatulas for scraping out the cheese. It’s the kind of dinner that lends itself to conversation. As our host said, “Raclette’s a convivial dish”. I was too busy melting and scraping and deciding whether I wanted another boiled potato or more chorizo to take pictures, even though I had plenty of time — without realizing it, we’d “racletted” for two hours, before it was time for dessert: a galette des rois.
Even though a galette des rois is meant to celebrate Epiphany on January 6, the cake, two rounds of puff pastry sandwiching (most traditionally) frangipane, is in Paris patisseries until the end of the month. (To read about the galette and get the recipe, I’ve removed The New York Times paywall to my story for you.) While raclette might be a ceremony, galette is a game, complete with a prize: Every galette has a hidden trinket baked inside it - get the slice with the trinket and you get to wear the crown for the evening.
I’ve had many galettes, but that night I learned something new. If you are a guest and you get the fève, that’s what the trinket is called, you’re supposed to ask the host if she’d like it back so that she can cook something with it. When I asked what one might cook, everyone said another galette, but don’t you think it would be fun to tuck a fève into … well anything. Brownies? Shepherd’s Pie? Birthday cake? Cupcakes? Marshmallows? Fun to learn something new. The winner didn’t take the fève home. He didn’t take the crown either — that prize went to the cat.
The Postcard
Next month marks 25 years that Michael, Joshua and I moved into our first apartment in Saint Germain des Pres and became part-time Parisians. And while I’m always pricked by memory and always just a thought away from all that Paris has meant to me, a picture of a New Year’s Eve party at our Paris apartment made me think of a moment from almost 50 years ago — before Joshua, before cookbookery, before so much that’s so dear to me today. If I had to pin down the instant when our lives took a Gallic turn, it might just be the day I got the postcard.
By the time the postcard came, Michael and I had passports — the first in our families — and we’d had them stamped in London, Amsterdam and Paris during our maiden, and to that date, only trip out of the country. I don’t count the week in Nassau, where I got so sunburned that it took a full year for the “tan” marks to fade. (Did sunscreen even exist then?) We’d liked traveling and hoped to do it again, but we had no plans. Also no money, but that’s another story. And then that postcard — it didn’t propel us to start a new piggy bank or sketch out a next trip. It did something more powerful: It made us dream.
I can’t remember when it arrived. Sometime in the 1970s for sure, when we were in our twenties. And I must have still been in graduate school or just starting work on my (never-finished) dissertation, because the card came from Susan, who’d been in my class. I was a few years out of college when I went back to school and I felt a little old for it, but Susan had me beat by decades. She had a house in the suburbs, two kids and a husband who was an executive at IBM. In those years, people said that IBM stood for “I’ve Been Moved,” and, Susan had been. Just as she was getting her bearings at school, word came that her husband was being sent to Paris and the family was to follow. I didn’t know Susan well. I didn’t know what she really felt about the prospect of moving — again; of pulling her children out of school — again; and resettling them — again. Or of cutting short a commitment she’d made to herself and was finally fulfilling. I don’t know if she felt she had a choice. I don’t know if she was happy or furious. But I did know how I felt: Envious. Oh, to live in Paris!
Susan left our program just as the fall semester began and set to packing up and learning French. The next time I heard from her was sometime in January, when the postcard landed.
On the front was a picture of the Pont Alexandre III, a bridge that always gets full title. I remember once calling it the Pont Alexandre and having a Frenchman add the “trois.” It couldn’t have been for clarity or the need to recall the bridge, because I’m sure there isn’t a Parisian who doesn’t know it — it’s considered the most beautiful of the 37 bridges that cross the Seine. It’s wide, like a boulevard, and majestically decorated with cherubs and nymphs and grand statues covered in gilt that sends sparks of sunlight back to the sky and down to the river. It was built before the Eiffel Tower, but it might have been constructed just to give strollers a good angle on it.
I’m sure I’d seen the Pont Alexandre TROIS when I was in Paris — I must have, because we walked past it on our way to the Eiffel Tower — but it didn’t mean anything to me, and I thought Susan had made an odd choice before I read her message.
In the small white rectangle on the back of the postcard, Susan wrote that for their first New Year’s Eve in Paris, they’d walked to the bridge at midnight, eaten a dozen oysters, tossed the shells into the Seine and toasted all that was and all that was to come with Champagne.
I could imagine it all and I could imagine us there. Champagne on a bridge in Paris. It said everything about a life I didn’t know, but one that I suddenly wanted. With all my heart. And when I looked at Michael, I saw that the little picture Susan had painted touched him, too.
Michael, the man who refused to take French in school because he was sure he’d never go to France — or even meet anyone who spoke French — said, “One day that will be us.”
And he was right.
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Just love everything about this! Thank you for sharing your stories, memories, and photos of Paris in the snow. Happy New Year. xo
Thank you for the pictures of Paris. Today I am just thinking about Paris, even went to a Napa French bistro for lunch. I enjoy your writing. I feel like you are a friend catching me up. Someone asked me today what chef I like lately. Of course I said Dorie Greenspan!