A French Family Thanksgiving

Friends of ours who are French, but who lived for many years in the United States, invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday night. Here's how the cross-cultural menu went.

We started with cucumbers topped with creme fraiche, followed by pate de campagne:


After this the turkey came out, accompanied by chestnut stuffing, mashed potatoes and roasted sweet potatoes (not casseroled, and certainly not with marshmallows, something I don't believe the French even have a word for):


Here's how the whole meal looked, with the turkey already carved (it was served buffet-style because this family has just moved to a new apartment and hasn't yet furnished it, not because it's a particularly French tradition):


There was, of course, bread:


And three types of wine:


Dessert was a pumpkin tart, made with canned pumpkin that an American cousin smuggled over in her suitcase. (You can actually get fresh pumpkins here if you look hard enough, but it's enough of a pain to turn them into pie that even most American cooks prefer to use canned.) Served with champagne.



How was it? Excellent. The turkey in particular was remarkable, smaller but much more flavorful than American turkeys. I think the French treat their turkeys the same way they treat their chickens: with reverence for the breed and a free-range upbringing.

One more difference from the American version of Thanksgiving: we didn't start eating till around 9:30 p.m. It was a workday, after all, and the French never sit down to dinner till well after 8 anyway. By the time we got done, close to 1 a.m., the Metro had closed for the night.

Beginning to Look a Lot Like ... part 2

With no Thanksgiving to intervene, businesses here have been gradually slipping into Christmas mode. So far the decorations are similar to those in America: lots of red and green, evergreens and poinsettias. But no Santa Claus at all, and (so far) nothing overtly religious.

And then there's Open Cafe, marching to their own drummer ...

The Bagels of my Childhood

Continuing my investigation into the European roots of the bagel, I trekked over to East London, where one block of Brick Lane contains the city's few remaining "beigel" bakeries.

This part of London was an immigrant neighborhood, like the Lower East Side of Manhattan, not an area populated by native English Jews. (Now it is a mixture of Bangladeshi immigrants and gentrifiers.) Here the bagels resemble the New York bagels of my childhood: small and very dense and chewy, not like the pretzel-style ones you find in Paris or Krakow or the modern, crusty/sweet New York kind.

They serve the bagels with smoked salmon or with "salt beef," which has the flavor of corned beef but the texture of pastrami. But I also saw a woman order one with nothing but mayonnaise on it. No doubt this comes from the same culinary tradition that created the "chip butty," a sandwich of french fries on buttered bread.

Cream cheese, as far as I can tell, is a wholly American concept.

What a mixed-up world we live in ...

So I went to London this past weekend, went to maybe half a dozen gay pubs and clubs over two nights, and found English beer on sale at exactly one of them.

Kronenbourg, a French beer, was on sale at almost every one.

I have yet to visit a gay bar in France that sells Kronenbourg. Here, they carry mostly Heineken.

Sometimes world trade just doesn't make sense.

Other notes from London:

I hadn't been there in 12 years and was astonished at the changes. And not in a good way. It hardly feels British anymore, and not just because of the beer. The people on the streets, the shops and restaurants, the products for sale, are all sort of generically cosmopolitan/urban. In fact, it felt a lot like New York except for three things: the damp, cutting chill; the architecture, which includes a lot of new construction as in New York but is still generally lower-rise and lower-density; and the joy the English still take in the artful use of their own language.

Paris, for all the changes here over the last decade, still feels distinctly different from New York.

Londoners do still have their IRA-induced paranoia about public trash cans, which are insanely difficult to find in a lot of places. They still queue, for everything except alcoholic drinks. They still have the Thames, and have actually done a nice job with a riverfront walk, which does however resemble New York's Hudson River Park in places. The river seems narrower than it used to, but that may just be my memory playing tricks on me. It still is wider than the Seine.

And of course, they still use pounds sterling, rather than the euro. Though the current financial turmoil may make it more difficult for that to continue. And maybe it's just me, but the new design for pound notes makes them look somehow less impressive than they used to, more like a secondary currency like the Danish krone. How the mighty have fallen.

Cafes: A Dying Breed?

In light of my rave about cafes last month, I thought I'd point you to this article. It seems cafes are dying out across France, a victim of changing eating habits, a decline in leisure time and a recent ban on indoor smoking.

I have no doubt that the article's conclusions are largely true, especially outside Paris and in non-touristed areas. There are still plenty in the areas I spend time in, but those are areas that get an exceptional amount of foot traffic from French and foreign tourists and businesspeople.

Then again, there are still glaciers in Switzerland and Patagonia, too, for the moment.

Le Beaujolais Nouveau est Arrive!

I'm told it isn't what it used to be, but there's still a bit of manufactured hype here about Beaujolais Nouveau, which "arrived" last night. A number of restaurants near my office (which is not in a touristy area) were having special dinners, with decorations vaguely in a harvesty theme -- it struck me as, in a way, a French equivalent to Thanksgiving.

The wine (which interestingly is called "Beaujolais Primeur" more often than "Beaujolais Nouveau") represents a bit of a profit center to the restaurants -- the one we went to was charging 4 euros a glass, which is a bit more than they charge for most of the better-quality wines they serve.

For Beaujolais Nouveau, it wasn't bad, but it's still basically alcoholic grape juice.

And with that, I'm off to London for the weekend, without my laptop, so blogging will resume Monday.

Scallops in the Raw (or Not)

Here's something you won't see in North American food stores:


This is what scallops look like when they're still in the shell.

Why they're not sold this way in the United States I'm not certain, but possibly it's because they're not caught locally (any shellfish still in the shell needs to remain alive until it's sold), or possibly because shucking them before sale allows them to be adulterated and watered down.

Scallops here are much tastier than most of the ones you find in New York. But I've only had them in restaurants -- shucking raw, live ones isn't something I'm quite ready to try yet ...