Emily in France 🇫🇷 A Ten-Euro Day
Making the most of inexpensive culture
I traveled a lot this summer, which means that now that I’m back in Paris, there’s no small amount of belt-tightening that needs to happen. Luckily, I live in a city that believes that culture is a right, and so when I recently embarked on an adventure to spend just ten euros in a day, I found myself with quite a bit of change leftover.
This particular Sunday began as weekend days often begin in my house: with a quick trip to the bakery for a 1.30 euro baguette tradition, the glue holding many a daily excursion together. We realized long ago after a hanger-fueled search for a lunch as tasty as it was inexpensive that most bakery sandwiches pale in comparison to the ones we can make with the cheese scraps forever taking up about a quarter of the fridge. Combined with all manner of tasty condiments we’ve always got kicking around, from Fallot mustard to Basque cherry jam purchased at a cheese festival in Brie to homemade pickles to leftover roasted veg, there's no shortage of delicious combos we can pull together.
We typically get one baguette and cut it in half, taking turns creating the fillings with what we have on-hand. One typically features cheese; one does not. And while often, we head to the greengrocer next door to the bakery to add some fresh produce to the mix, on this day, we had enough veggies hanging around that nothing more was necessary.
We embarked on a wander in the sunshine, eliding the need for métro tickets. We walked firsst towards the picturesque 19th-century covered passageway Galerie Vivienne, stopping off for some cheesing in front of a cheesemonger’s (no cheese purchased, but photos are free!)
We headed next to the Tuileries Gardens, where the Arc du Carrousel has recently been unveiled after over a year of renovations. It does indeed look more sparkly and new! We found a bench in the gardens to enjoy our picnic lunch with a view before continuing our walk.
We meandered past a pretty roundabout covered in flowers…
…eventually making it to our first free cultural destination, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. It’s one of a handful of free museums in Paris, including the Maison Victor Hugo on Place des Vosges and the Musée Carnavalet, aka the museum of the history of the city of Paris.
While most of the time, only the permanent exhibits are free at this museum in Paris’ 16th arrondissement, we got the opportunity to view a pretty special free show. Ari Marcopoulos, an emblematic cinematographer of the skateboarding world in New York, was invited to select pieces from the MAM’s permanent collection in communication with a new film of his, Brown Bag, edited from recently uncovered footage.
We wandered a bit further along the river to yet another free cultural space, Fluctuart, aka the first floating urban art center in the world.
This barge on the Seine regularly welcomes free art installations; on our visit, David Bicari’s photo project of his trans-Canadian voyage was on display.
On the way back, I passed through another of the gorgeous covered passageways, taking the opportunity to do some window shopping, aka lèche-vitrine – literally “window licking.” It’s the perfect way to “shop” without spending a centime – and without adding more clutter to the apartment, seeing as I recently garbage-picked another bookshelf.
And of course, a beautiful late summer sunset is always free!
Cheese of the Week
When I visited the Ferme de Rothenbrunnen for my BBC article on fermes-auberges, I got the chance to try a few other cheeses produced by cheesemaker Marie, including barikass. Much like Swiss cheese, barikass – which can also be spelled bergkäs, barkas, barkass, or bargkass – is speckled with holes dubbed eyes. For decades, industry pros thought these came from carbon dioxide emitted by the same bacteria responsible for the cheese’s nutty flavor. But recent research shows that the holes might actually come from microscopic bits of hay that get into the milk – and as cheesemaking becomes more and more industrial, these holes may be disappearing. Not so for artisanal barikass, where an elastic structure and a mild, nutty, fruity flavor are time-tested necessities.
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
Disclosure: I was a guest of the property for this meal.
I’ve been noticing a lot of Italian – or Italian-inspired – fine dining spots in Paris these days. There’s Il Carpaccio at Le Royal Monceau and Le George at the George V, each of which boasts a Michelin star. There’s Mori Venice Bar, which Chef Simone Zanoni recently shared is one of his favorites in Paris in a piece I wrote for Fodor’s. There’s Passerini and Piero TT and Tosca and Langosteria. And at L’Assaggio, Chefs Sasha Arandjelovic and Ugo Alciati are putting northern Italian specialties center-stage with a fine dining menu in the Castille hotel just steps from Grands Boulevards. More on the blog.
Where I’m Going
1. To Plaq, to discover the way this bean-to-bar chocolatier is making some of the city's best chocolate.
2. To l'Arpaon, a relatively new wine bar in Montmartre cooking up what looks like some pretty tasty creations.
3. To an event celebrating Christmas in Alsace. (It’s starting…)
What I'm Writing
1. Reachable via ancient mule trails, fermes-auberges are centuries-old farms-turned-inns that serve some of France's most historic cheeses and offer a glimpse at the nation's pastoral past. For BBC Travel.
2. France's cuisine is nothing if not extra, from flambés to fricassés, and boasting more than enough rich sauces to make your cardiologist pass out. But while the French dishes that come to the minds of most are usually the showstoppers, such as crêpes suzette or sole meunière, it turns out French chefs are also blessed with a particular talent for transforming even the humblest of ingredients into something extraordinary. For Mashed.
3. From the archives: A rich and creamy omelette is a test of a young chef’s ability in French kitchens. Yves Camdeborde shares his story behind the illustrious dish, and best practices for making it. For the BBC.
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What I'm Reading
1. Once I start a book, I very rarely give up on it – a tic that mostly just makes me finish a lot of books I don't particularly like. But every once in awhile, this tendency bears fruit, as it did when reading Le banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs. While ostensibly the story of a Parisian anthropologist who moves to a small, rural town in the Deux-Sèvres to do thesis research, the book is really about a town – and a region – and its evolution and devolution over time. It's about what life is like and has been like in this rural bog over the course of centuries, and, thanks to the metaphor of a literal circle of life that sees each death reborn in a new person or creature in the area, the book showcases the interdependency of humans and nature in all of their ugliness and beauty. I found the middle portions more conceptually interesting than engaging, which is part of what made finishing this 423-word tome a bit of a slog. But the pitch-perfection of the narrator who accompanies us at the outset and – to my delight – at the conclusion engages the reader with his anthropological view of an outsider looking in at a part of la France profonde that's unreachable to so many of us city-dwellers. A special nod to the ode to cheese on page 270 – it conquered my heart.
2. This truly exquisite, laugh-out-loud exploration of the problems with French lunch if you’re a writer. From Karen Karbo.
3. This story about pastoralism as it relates to cheese production, which seriously has me considering selling all my stuff and becoming a goatherd. (If only I didn’t have so many books…) from Culture.
A bientôt !