Emily in France 🇫🇷 It's My Birthday – I'll Eat Cheese if I Want To!
Happy Birthday to Me!
I'm off to Naples tomorrow, so you won't be getting a newsletter from me next week, but do feel free to follow along on Instagram as I attempt to eat my weight in pizza.
Cheese of the Week
Of all of the French cheese families, washed rind ones are perhaps the most divisive. With an aroma somewhere between week-old-gym-bag and public-toilet, they're tough to love – and yet I do. My very first memorable French cheese experience, after all, was witnessing my father ask for some of all the stinkers on a gilded cheese cart in Paris; ten-year-old me happily gobbled up each and every one. Fifteen years later, I'm still thrilled to be digging into cheeses like this Livarot, which hails from Normandy and sports the nickname "The Colonel" due to the five strips of grass on the exterior – once used to keep the relatively tall cheese straight – resembling the five stripes on a military uniform. With a grainy rind and a barnyardy aroma, it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I love it.
To discover more of my favorite cheeses, be sure to follow me on Instagram @emily_in_france and tune into the Terroir Podcast, where Caroline Conner and I delve into France's cheese, wine, and more one region at a time.
Where I'm Going
To Naples, to eat my weight in pizza, hike to the top of Vesuvius, and eat more pizza afterwards.
What I'm Eating
If I could go back to before The Great Let’s Not Talk About It, the restaurant I would have most wanted to visit would probably have been Astier. A Paris institution since the 50s, this 11th arrondissement establishment has long been known, not for its moderately contemporary approaches to classic bistro fare, but rather for the consequential cheese course that overshadowed them. The cheese course has grown more demure, but I'd argue that it actually gives Astier even more room to shine. More on the blog.
Discover more of my foodie finds via Instagram @emily_in_france.
What I'm Writing
1. Chicago's ban on foie gras is long gone – but the controversy isn't. Here's what the Chicago dining scene looks like fifteen years after it said no – and then yes – to gavage, for InsideHook.
2. One Puerto Rican chef took to D.C.'s streets with a traditional pig roast last month; here's how you can do the same at home, for InsideHook.
3. From the archives: If you're coming to Paris this summer, don't get stuck eating at tourist traps. Here are the places worth eating at near all the spots you're likely to be visiting, for Fodor's.
What I'm Reading
1. We all know that feeling of finding, in fiction, an inapt (or inept) representation of something we know deeply, whether it's knitting or the geography of Little Italy or brain surgery. There's something almost embarrassing about it, as though we've walked in on the author in a state of half-undress. And that's exactly what Valerie Stivers identified in this piece on Virgina Woolf's approach to – and possible mishandling of – the central meal of To the Lighthouse in the Paris Review.
2. French cuisine is, in many ways, an echo or museum of itself. This piece offers a very thorough exploration of how and why that came to be, in the Guardian.
3. What if Ginny Hogan time-travelled back to Jane Austen's day to school Elizabeth Bennett on ghosting? In the New Yorker.
A bientôt !