Food, And Some Proof that Luxury Can Indeed Be Plastic-Wrapped
I’ve found a good selection of “how about that?” when grocery shopping in France. I’d expected the slew of various animal organs/ fois gras/ gorge de porc (that’s throat-of-pig for those sans ready translation), someone had foretold the eminent popularity of vegetable purées and GOOD GOD was I excited for the cheeses. I had in my mind a vision of the French Market impeccably traditional, fresh everything, stacks of various fats, harings chillin out on buckets of ice. That vision wasn’t too far off the mark, yet I didn’t consider the Americanization of the grocery-shopping experience and it is the things inspired by this phenomenon I find the most interesting.
Consider this:
Freezer section. For a good price. LES ESGARGOTS fo’ realz. There goes the image of the terrace in Paris underneath Scorpio, a tablecloth flooding the steep with its satiny blueness and probably two candles while a fork, with a delicately impaled snail and pesto levitates (right, then you know, I hadn’t a particular hand in mind) meeting the teeth halfway, the tines of the fork and her enamel sounding like a toast with a pair of champagne glasses. Goodbye you. Because now I’ve this tin in my freezer and I could very well drop a few in my saucepan, maybe unbox some soup and suck the shells for the meat inside while watching a confused wasp trying to find my open window. Poor thing. There, no there, god… you’re so close.
Then today, in search for an adventure in coffee, and to date underwhelmed with the typical demitasse at the cafés. (Where’s the natural crème???) I found this:
Fine. I purchased this for the label. I do that. But I’m still enjoying its irony since, traditionally, the idea of Turkish coffee is that its a time-consuming, traditional preparation seeped with cultural nuances and special equipment. Like, really, you should be grinding the beans yourself. Good show, robot man, I can skip this step. (And I did. Turns out Turkish coffee is easy to make. I’m on my second cup here and whose to say whether it was the type of honey I used or not BON CAFÉ).
I regret I haven’t a picture for this, but one of the first things I bought was a juice box of white wine. Yes, it had a straw. And the ready-prepared hors-d’œurves never cease to fascinate me. Bacon wrapped dates in vacuum-wrapped plastic. Smoked cuts of goose. And you know those economy-sized bags of frozen mixed vegetables? I found its counterpart of frozen mixed mushrooms. Just mushrooms. IN LOVE with those mushrooms.
Tonight I’ll be attempting a recipe from the following cook-book:
A carrot, orange cumin soup (that’s actually, I believe, mostly butter).
[...] I’ve showed you mon livre de cusine that I purchased at the beginning of the year (last three words optional) by Yves Camdeborde et Isabelle Dreyfus and we started here with une salade des haricots verts (MAYO MIA), un poulet roti à finir with a rather lovely dessert, if I do say so myself, where i actually upped la recette and made the strawberry sauce from scratch. [...]