Emily in France 🇫🇷 Bonne Année!
Bonne année !
Forgive me the lateness of this New Year's missive, but I stand by my choice to roll it out slowly four days into 2023 – and for more than one reason.
First off, in France, New Year's isn't so much of a day as it is a season. Indeed, for the entire month of January (and never before), you'll hear people wishing one another Bonne année. For just this month, it stands in as the greeting of choice, supplanting bonjour for anyone you haven't yet seen in the year.
I am not one for resolutions, really, instead opting to focus on a word, a guiding principle, to lead me through the year. In the past, I've chosen "feel" or "focus." This year, I'm cultivating stillness.
As long-time readers of this newsletter know, I've been spending a lot of the post-confinement period aboard planes, trains, and automobiles. (I even got my driver's license!) And while part of me felt as though I was making up for lost time, another part of me thinks this was just my FOMO pushed up to 11. While 2022 granted me some incredible experiences, it also left me feeling a bit unrooted and kind of exhausted. (So much so that I abandoned a whole bottle of Calvados on one of the aforementioned trains.)
Worst of all, it made it almost impossible for me to actually sit with my own thoughts. And what a few years ago would have felt like a boon now feels like I'm robbing myself of access to my own inner life.
2023 will still offer me some amazing travel experiences; I'm not gonna lie. There will be another edition of TERRE/MER in March (more on that later!) plus jaunts to the UK, Spain, and more. But rather than trying to see and do everything, I hope that 2023 is a year filled with slower, deeper connections and quite a bit of time in my head – whether I'm in Paris or onboard a train somewhere new. And I sincerely hope to continue to have many of you along for the ride!
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Cheese of the Week
Cheeses infused with flavors from pesto to sun-dried tomato to asparagus often leave me skeptical at best, but this cow's milk tomme hailing from the southern Doubs is a standout. It's speckled with green aniseeds for a lightly vegetal character that's truly surprising.
L'Écume de Wimereux is a silky, double-cream cheese made by just one producer – a pair of brothers – in the North of France.
To discover more of my favorite cheeses, be sure to follow me on Instagram @emily_in_france, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and tune into the Terroir Podcast, where Caroline Conner and I delve into France's cheese, wine, and more one region at a time.
What I'm Eating
I'm rarely tempted by new spots when I return to New York, hell-bent as I am on returning to faves I haven't visited in months. That said, in the days leading up to Christmas, my dad planned an outing to a new-to-us staple of Corona, Queens. Park Side is the epitome of a red sauce joint, with a frankly unparalleled veal parm. (And the bacon-dotted bread you get in the free bread basket definitely contributed to one of my favorite Christmas traditions: Sitting on the couch and complaining about having eaten too much).
We skipped dessert and instead piled into the car to fetch a variety of Christmas cookies, including the fig-studded ones from Circo's in Bushwick I was apparently ogling with such intensity the head baker himself handed me one fresh off the tray.
Discover more of my foodie finds via Instagram @emily_in_france and on the blog.
Where I'm Going
1. To the American Library, to stock up on new reads. Any amazing discoveries I should check out?
2. To Affinité in the 5th – can't wait to scope out this lunchtime prix fixe.
3. To Sain Boulangerie and Tapisserie, to begin the great tradition of eating as many king cakes as I can get my hands on. Which galettes are on your short list this year?
Image care of Camille Drozdz
What I'm Writing
1. The history behind France's king cake and its hidden trinket. (Hint: It has nothing to do with Mardi Gras (or babies). In Food52.
2. Here's why more DC restaurants are embracing a prix-fixe menu. For InsideHook.
3. Miami's exotic fruit guy talks phallic avocados and the $500 lychee-like langsat. For InsideHook.
What I'm Reading
1. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Odessa Moshfegh managed to write a book about someone doing nothing and make it phenomenally captivating. I did not like the ending, but take that with a grain of salt: I never like endings.
2. This story about the multiple possible roles of food in novels, which includes, among other things, an ode to the superiority of shell beans as a literary symbol and the line "a joke about what a food writer writing a novel would write,” which made me very, very, very nervous. In the New Yorker.
3. Menu translation has long been fascinating to me – I even delved into the topic for Atlas Obscura a few years ago. This very close examination of what does and does not constitute a dumpling brushes up against this idea, as well as the idea of categorization in general. (Fun fact: Did you know that dumplings are usually called raviolis in French?) In the Syllabus Project.
A bientôt !