Emily In France Exclusive 🇫🇷 5 Things to Eat in Paris this Spring

From the desk of an expat.

Apologies for the delay of this week’s newsletter, but there’s something kind of delightful about sending such a seasonal missive on the Ides of March. (I remain, as always, a literary nerd.)

It may not quite be spring, if you wanna get all technical about it, but fool’s spring has certainly arrived, and with it, the first evidence that the real thing isn't far off. Cherry trees are (somewhat worryingly…) already beginning to blossom. Today, I saw fresh-out-of-the-egg ducklings waddling through rain puddles in the French countryside. And yesterday, I glimpsed the season’s very first French gariguettes on rue Mouffetard, one of my favorite market streets in Paris.

Saying goodbye to winter means saying goodbye to some of my favorite French foods, from omnipresent potimarron (kabocha squash), whose resolute creaminess all winter long has now given way to an unpleasant stringiness or mealiness that means I’ve begun to focus on other produce. The apples and oranges I’ve been delighting in all winter will soon fade to make way for the aforementioned berries. And seeing as Mont d’Or can no longer be legally produced, it’s going to disappear soon enough, leaving fromagerie shelves more than ready to bear the wealth of the season’s chèvres.

Want to know the Parisian foods I’m most excited to dig into this spring? Read on.

1. Radis-Beurre

French butter is a marvel all on its own, luscious and lactic and rich, an innate flavor bomb as compared to most American iterations thanks to culturing, a process whereby the cream is inoculated with live cultures that allow it to ferment ever-so-slightly before it's churned. The resulting butter tends to be higher in butterfat than most – somewhere from 82 to a whopping 85 percent fat or more.

Much of the butter in France is unsalted, a holdover from the Gabelle, a salt tax dating to the Middle Ages with such devastating effects on the French poor it has been blamed, at least in part, for the French Revolution. Since Brittany was long exempt from the tax, it has historically been the cradle of an iteration studded with generous flakes of mineral-rich sea salt, notably the Guérande salt the region is so famous for.

While French butter – and salted Brittany butter specifically – is delicious in many forms, one of my favorite ways to enjoy it is with spring radishes, which tend to be sweeter and not quite as spicy as they get in the later part of the season. It’s the ideal apéro pairing, especially as the weather gets nicer and inviting the possibility of sipping pre-dinner drinks in the sunshine.

That said, if you need to be inside to escape the seasonal rain, Martin often offers plates of spring radishes from their own Jardin sur Loire, usually with intriguing dipping sauces (and loads of baguette from the lovely Tout Autour du Pain just up the road.)

2. Seasonal Chèvres Frais