Emily in France 🇫🇷 Forget Veganuary – Let's Talk About Butter
A month of pastry and frangipane
In French, something that makes you take notice is said to “mark” you, and I still recall a marquant article in a women’s magazine I was paging through in the waiting room of a French doctor’s office years ago, detailing a recommended “menu après-soirée” – an eating plan for the day after a big party. It began with a breakfast of yogurt, muesli, and fruit, continued with a lunch of silky vegetable velouté with a green salad followed by goat cheese and then fruit compote, and finished with fish, vegetables, and more fruit and yogurt for dessert, all accompanied, bien sûr, by baguette (whole wheat, for better digestion – a French obsession). This was at least 15 years ago, and as compared to the concurrent American approach to righting the “wrongs” of being “bad” at a party or event – to “cleanse,” to “detox,” or even to do a “juice fast,” it struck me with its totally humane attitude to moderation and balance.
Such, I've since come to realize, is the French approach to the days following excess of the post-holiday season. Christmas here is far more about the table than the presents, resulting in a day or two of positively stuffing oneself full of Champagne and foie gras, of escargots and bûche de Noël. But rather than flog themselves, wear hair shirts, and embark on a month of eating only kale and avoiding fats of all kinds, the French take a beat and then dust themselves off and embark on a month, not of restriction, but of even more cake. Specifically galette.
While French galette des rois technically shares a name with New Orleans’ king cake, the two couldn’t be more different. The French version is synonymous with Epiphany – January 6th – while the Louisiana iteration comes around at Mardi Gras (when the French are busy eating crêpes). The Louisiana version is brightly colored, while the French version is a reassuringly burnished beige. And while Southern France does have a brioche-like king cake studded with dried fruit and angelica known as a “brioche des rois,” for the most part, the French dessert of reference in January is made with puff pastry and frangipane.
Just a few years ago, the traditions governing galette des rois were, for the most part, all about conviviality. Once the liver crises following the Christmas eating frenzy had abated, friends would gather around a galette purchased from the local bakery. It might be reheated for a few minutes in the oven, until the pastry became crisp once more, and then everyone would take their places around the table, except for the youngest member of the party, who would crawl beneath it.
But wait, there’s more.
The galette would be sliced by the host, and before serving each piece, they would ask, “Who’s this one for?” The under-the-table party would call out the answer, and once everyone had been served, the cadet would be invited to return to their seat, enjoy a glass of sparkling cider, and dig in… carefully. For embedded in each slice would be a fève, a porcelain figurine that replaced the actual fava bean for which the fève is named in the Middle Ages. The person who found the fève would be named the king (or queen) of the day, sporting a festive paper crown… and responsible for buying the next galette of the season.
Today, however, the galette tradition has taken on a new élan. Not only has there been a rise in fabophiles obsessed with collecting as many rare fèves as possible, as I reported for Atlas Obscura, but the galettes themselves have become far more varied, resulting in a trend of seeking out as many different ones as you possibly can in a given season, and this not necessarily with the old conviviality, seeing as many bakeries sell individual galettes or parts, aka slices.
(I myself tried ten different ones in January 2022.)
(Even for this lover of all things marzipan-adjacent, that was a lot of galette.)
I've been far more moderate in my galette tasting since then, but there are still a few in Paris I’m excited to try this year. I’m enticed by the Iranian pistachio galette from Tartelettes, made with house-made puff pastry and pistachio frangipane and topped with pistachio praline and crushed pistachios, and I’d definitely love to give Jeffrey Cagnes' hazelnut praline galette a try, with its inverted puff-croissant dough hybrid sure to be particularly rich and buttery. And Mamiche's classic frangipane galette is always a favorite, with super-buttery pastry and ultra-dense filling.
Three buttery pastries in a month seems like a totally balanced way to begin 2025… right?
Cheese of the Week
Dutch gouda is one of a handful of foreign cheeses you're likely to find in a Parisian fromagerie, but this one came directly from Holland. A pressed and uncooked cheese, gouda technically belongs to the same family as cheddar, but it stands out in that the curds are systematically washed to remove excess lactose, which, perhaps counter-intuitively, contributes to its sweeter flavor. If the lactose had remained on the curds, aging would transform it into lactic acid. Removing this excess sugar ensures that very little acid is formed, resulting in a sweet, buttery cheese that becomes nuttier and slightly tangier with time. It also develops loads of umami-rich tyrosine and/or calcium lactase crystals, which add a crunchy burst of flavor to every bite.
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
Le rade, aka the divey corner café, is getting a revival in Paris, of late, and there’s perhaps nowhere more quintessentially Parisian to eat deliciously for a pittance, especially at lunch, than Le Mansart. More on the blog.
What I'm Writing
1. Rue du Nil may be tiny, but this diminutive cobbled street is paradise for any food lover. Dominated by the locavore Terroirs d’Avenir shops and Michelin-starred Chef Grégory Marchand’s Frenchie restaurants, the street is above all forever animated by the scent of roasting cacao, emerging in enticing plumes from Plaq, Paris’ pioneer in bean-to-bar chocolaterie. For Bonjour Paris.
2. The FDA finally released an update to their definition of “healthy” for the first time since the ‘90s. Here’s what consumers should know. For Organic Authority.
3. From the archives: The history behind France's King Cake – and its hidden trinket. For Food52.
What I’m Doing
If your New Year’s resolutions include setting aside more time for your writing, I’m excited to announce that the Nantes Writers’ Workshop is coming back for the third time this June, from the 16th to the 20th.
The week-long workshop encompasses a two-pronged approach to sparking your creativity and honing your craft. Spend mornings with me generating new material with guided prompts inspired by the city of Nantes, and spend afternoons ensconced in an Iowa-style workshop with co-founder Anna Polonyi, an Iowa alum and professional creative writing instructor.
Applications are now open – we’d love to welcome you!
FAQs
With the goal of bringing you the content you crave, I've solicited your help. What questions can I answer for you? Drop them into the newsletter chat, and I’ll answer as many as I can!
What I'm Reading
1. I haven't encountered too many successful Covid narratives, but Sarah Moss's natural proclivity for slow-burn stories poor in plot and rich in hyper-specific characterization means I'm unsurprised hers is one of them. The Fell’s multi-POV structure plunges the reader back in the once-familiar anxiety of the indoor/outdoor divide and the walls we were forced to erect between those who once would have been companions and community members. More than the plot itself, the emotions, fears, and insights scattered on the pages of this compact novel made its reading an addictive pleasure.
2. This introspective essay about how a hike on the Dingle peninsula led one writer to consider some of life's bigger questions. In Afar.
3. This story about the organized criminals at the heart of cheese heists, which would make me gleefully inspired to write a cheese thriller if not for the soul-crushing real-world repercussions of this theft. In the BBC.
A bientôt !