Emily in France 🇫🇷 Home is Where the Comfort Food Is
What are your home foods?
I'm currently in the U.S. for two weeks of catching up with family, writing, and (of course) eating. But my home foods are probably not what you'd expect.
Culinary nostalgia is endlessly fascinating to me, especially because what connotes a comfort food for one might seem totally foreign to another. To truly comprehend someone's home foods is a multi-layered venture: I may, when interviewing a French person, understand what they mean when they compare something to coquillettes, but that comes from 15 years of accumulating culture générale: I now know that many French people grew up not really eating pasta, save the tiny elbow macaroni that go by the name "little shells" in French; that such pastas were often served plain with butter and cheese or a bit of chopped ham, as a quick-and-easy dinner or even a tummy trouble meal, similar to the chicken noodle soup packets my own mother served on such days.
But I'm not talking about sick meals, or even the food my mother made, not today. Rather, I'm spending time musing on the sorts of things I seek out when in America, for lack of an adequate substitute in France: things like excellent mid-range sushi or Indian food with adequate heat and spice; meals as specific as my favorite ramen (the Super Spicy Miso at MB Ramen in Huntington, New York) or snacks as vague as Literally Any Half-Sour Pickle or a cup of coffee from a diner rendered all the more delicious by the fact that it's bottomless.
And while some of these foods are relegated to home because they simply don't exist elsewhere, still others are foods I might find in Paris these days but still choose not to: Bagels and lox. Pizza by the slice. Szechuan beef. Somehow, without ever really meaning to, I've relegated these and other dishes so wholly to my time spent in America that while I miss them and crave them the moment the plane touches down, I'm not sure they would resonate the same anywhere else.
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Cheese of the Week
For as much as I love American cheeses (including, FWIW, American cheese, which is, to my mind, the only appropriate cheese* for a grilled cheese), I don't actually spend much of my time Stateside consuming them, seeing as my mealtimes tend to be fairly well-occupied by the aforementioned. But this year, my New Year's Eve dinner menu featured two such cheeses, toted across the French border in my post-Christmas carry-on: last week's Rogue River Blue and this Californian stalwart.
Humboldt Fog, made by the cheesemakers at Cypress Grove, is a lactic goat cheese boasting the sour, goaty flavor so many Americans expect of French chèvres, which generally prove themselves far milder and subtler. But this cheese, with the line of ash evoking the eponymous fog over the bay, reminded me of just how wonderful American goat cheeses can be, with their powerful, pleasantly acidic flavor.
*or cheese food, as the case may be.
Comté is France's most-produced cheese for a reason! As they age, the 88-pound wheels of pressed cheese develop beautiful tyrosine crystallization for a total umami-bomb of a tasting experience.
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 was sure that le Chateaubriand, once forever on the lips of foodies in the know, was a prime example of places I had missed out on in its prime, back when my former boss, a foodie and journalist, was singing its praises in 2012. But when Paris by Mouth’s Meg Zimbeck made a recent return and had only lovely things to say, I decided it was high time I finally paid the storied restaurant a visit. More on the blog.
Discover more of my foodie finds via Instagram @emily_in_france and on the blog.
What I'm Writing
1. If you ask culinary journalist Emmanuel Rubin, Epoisses is one of the “great classics” of French cheese – and unfortunately, for him, it’s an endangered species, “at least as it was conceived in its entirety.” More about this delightful stinker in my most recent column for My French Life.
2. Reyna's Hainan burrata took a well-deserved spot on the Times' 25 essential dishes to eat in Paris earlier this month, so it seems like the perfect time to resurface my review of the spot for Paris by Mouth.
Psst... if you want access to my own top 25 in Paris, consider subscribing to my paid newsletter, which comes out every other Thursday! This week, I'm releasing my lunchtime faves.
3. These DC cafés are bringing cocktail-level craftsmanship to coffee. For InsideHook.
What I'm Saying
Many French language learners first encounter the false friend étranger by way of Albert Camus' seminal work, but its translation is rife with complexity. Is étranger best translated as "stranger?" "Outsider?" "Foreigner?" The answer is murky – but Dr. Antonia Wimbush, a researcher working on a project delving into French Caribbean migration in literature, is joining me on this episode of Navigating the French to try to get to the root of it.
What I'm Reading
1. The Cut has been exploring modern etiquette in a new series of articles, and as a native New Yorker, I particularly loved this tip: "The correct number of slices of pizza to order for a group of X people is 2X + X/3. Any fewer is for misers; any more risks catatonia."
2. Harrison Ford is such a vibe (and, FWIW, the only traditional celebrity I've ever fangirled over, though I did lose my sh*t a bit when meeting Alain Ducasse, Jean-Pierre Braun [founder of Reÿs gelato] and Laurent Dubois). But Ford has never resonated with me so much as here: "No. I don’t have a social anxiety disorder. I have an abhorrence of boring situations.” In The Hollywood Reporter.
3. Helen Rosner's treatise on Olive Garden may have displaced A.A. Gill's L'Ami Louis pan as my favorite piece of food writing ever. In Eater.
A bientôt !