David Downie - A Taste of Paris: A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food

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To the courageous, life-loving Parisians who know Paris will always be Paris despite demagoguery and terror

Thought is entirely dependent on the stomach nonetheless those with the best stomachs are not the best thinkers.

Voltaire writing to Jean le Rond dAlembert, 1770

A huge merci to my wonderful and talented editor, Charles Spicer, and magnifique agent, Alice Martell, for their viral enthusiasm, skill, and friendship; my wife, Alison Harris, for her research and incisive suggestions; and David Malone, for once again providing a retreat where I was able to do much of the research for this book.

Many thanks to friends Alice Brinton, Catherine Healey, and Mia Monasterli for logistical help; to Andrew Dalby for his wisdom regarding ancient Lutetia; to Jorge Zelaya and Alan Perry, caterers extraordinaire, for explorations of Paris food supply chain; to friends, relatives, and colleagues including Jean Kahn, Russ Schleipmann, Lou and Dan Jordan, Stacy and Marianne Pagos and Keith Haller, Janet Hulstrand, Elatia Harris, Jonell Galloway and Peter White, Adrienne Kimball, the Horne family, the Labadie and Kuhl families, Jamie DeMent and Richard Holcomb, Everett and Shirlene Harris, Paul and Amy Taylor, Jay Smith, Don George, Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanne Biggar of Left Coast Writers, Karen West of Book Passage, Diane Downie and Paul Shelley, Janet and Chapin Day (and Laurie, Evie, Susan, Elaine and Larry), Margo MacTaggert and Chris Oram, Sheila Fischman and Don Winkler, Sandra Gilbert, Adrien Leeds, Charles Trueheart and Grant Rosenberg, who by their generosity have made our book tours and events possible.

Official thanks to the researchers, librarians, and historians at the Bibliothque Mazarine (Patrick Latour, Christophe Vellet, and Florine Levecque), Marie-Laure Deschamps and Sylvie Robin at the Muse Carnavalet, Catherine Brut of DHAAP, Marie-France Nol-Waldteufel and Jrmie Benoit (Le Petit Trianon) at the Chteau de Versailles, Steven Wright of UCL Special Collections, and Jeffrey H. Jackson of Rhodes College, and to April Osborn at St. Martins Press.

Garon, a taste of Paris, sil vous plait!

Imagine a gastronomic romp through Paris weaving the living past into the lively present, the story of the great Parisian conspiracy to enjoy lifethe citys centuries-old passion for food, wine, dining out, and entertaining. Thats what this book is about.

Long ago this love affair with food and wine earned Paris the title of the worlds capital of fine dining. I had a foretaste of the fun as a young man during my first visit to the city in 1976. A decade later in the spring of 1986 I became a full-time conspirator, taking possession of a seventh-floor, cold-water walk-up maids room in the 17th arrondissement near the Arc de Triomphe. As soon as I unpacked I began mapping out Paris gastronomic topographythe markets, stores, restaurants, and cafs that became my second home.

As a lover of edibles, potables, and urban exploration, my goal was to transform my life into an endless treasure hunt through the City of Lights historical layers, from the roughshod days of ancient Gaul and Julius Caesar to the multicultural, molecular present and its superstar chefs. That joyful, sometimes irreverent, unapologetically personal treasure hunt is the object of these pages.

On that first chill day in November over forty years ago I sensed the sublime Parisian conjunction of things contemporary marinated in yesteryear. But I was only eighteen and could not understand how or why the intersection of physical, historical, and cultural ingredients had come together, placing Paris above other great food cities like Rome, Madrid, London, New York, and Shanghai.

My first sit-down lunch in Paris in 1976 was anything but gourmet. I chose a vintage bistro on the lateral heights of Montmartre far from the scrum at Sacr-Coeur, a church that still looks to me like a lumpy white wedding cake topped with scaly octopus-head cupolas. The bistro had a tobacco burnish. It also smelled of wine, stale beer, toasted cheese, and sweat with an overlay of talcum powder and perfume: Parisians at the time seemed allergic to soap and water. An unusual wire rack on the bar displayed hard-boiled eggs. I watched fascinated as grizzled men peeled the eggs and wolfed them while gulping glassfuls of white wine and joking at someones expense, possibly mine.

Alone on the outdoor terrace I studied my foot-long baguette sandwich. It sat on a white saucer on a round table tilted above the drizzly city. Peeking inside I saw ham, cheese, and cornichons. Beyond, through the misty keyhole view, were the tin-covered gabled roofs and distant spires of the city bathing in native sepia. I devoured the atmosphere. The sandwich seemed secondary.

Most of all I remember the eye-stinging mustard, presumably from Dijon. It came in a white porcelain jar with a wooden paddle. The waitress showed me how to apply it not with a spoon to the ham and cheese, but rather on the doughy inside of the bread using the paddle. It was the first of many corrections.

In retrospect the baguette was probably baked from frozen dough and the ham, cheese, mustard, and pickles pulled out of cold cases and off dusty shelves. I didnt know and wouldnt have cared. I was in love.

In the mid-twentieth century when I came of age in enlightened Northern California, even in a gourmet household the zeitgeist was not yet organic, free range, fair trade, locally grown, or homebrewed. Sourcing was limited. The farmers markets and mom-and-pops were gone. For the boomer children of the 1950s and 60s, like me, supermarkets were playgrounds. My mother, a European transplant, adored them.

Paris was different. No matter what they looked like or where they lived Parisians shopped and ate with glee. Unlike me they were thin amid indescribable bounty. If I flipped a franc, it would land on something worth swallowing. Shoehorned between the bistros and cafs, restaurants and brasseries, chocolate shops and wine shops were groceries of the kind we no longer had. The butcher shops were decorated with flocks of farmyard animals and wild game, the real thing but now very dead, staring at passersby from hooks, fur, head, feathers, tusks, and horns trickling. Whole lambs heads roasted along with the chickens in giant rotisseries. You had to love food to gaze at the offerings with rapture as the Parisians did. The displays reminded me of still-life paintings in the Louvre, masterpieces of gore.

I learned to say fishmonger in French and stood mesmerized before the stands where live crabs and lobsters wrestled. Back home the same entertainments were staged at Fishermans Wharf for tourists. Here normal customers bought live sea creatures, dragging them away in caddies with squeaky wheels or slung into premodern string bags. The oysters came in a variety of shapes and sizes, on the half shell or whole. I wondered if each tasted different. What work to cook them, I thought, until I saw diners gulping them raw like the seals gobbling sardines at Fleishhacker Zoo in San Francisco.