Emily in France 🇫🇷 I've Had an Epiphany
Welcoming in the new year
Happy New Year to you, dear readers, or, as we say in French, bonne année!
You might think I’m running a bit late with my seasonal well wishes, but the truth is, by French standards, I’m early. We have a whole month to wish one another bonne année, something we’ll do piecemeal, as we return to normalcy and re-encounter one another at apéros and lunches. It’s just one way in which we ease ourselves into the warm bath of 2025, rather than jumping in like a New Year’s polar bear plunge.
Yesterday was January 6th, which, until last year, was synonymous with one thing and one thing only: Epiphany, also known as Twelfth Night. The last day of the Christmas season evoked in song was always meant to be the day that the festivities came to a close: You’d take down your Christmas tree (which you only would have put up and trimmed on Christmas Eve, fwiw), and decorations would go back in their boxes for another year.
I love seasonal decorations, and my Christmas collection is particularly dear to me, seeing as so many of my trinkets, from a Polish ceramic tree meant to hold a votive to a red-painted star I recently purchased in Portugal, come from trips I’ve taken with my godmother-aunt over the past near-decade. As a result, I flout tradition and tend to deck the halls right at the beginning of Advent, and I've always found it fairly bittersweet to box them back up and return to normal come January.
But this year, I've decided that the big banner holidays of Halloween and Christmas don't need to be the only ones worthy of decorations.
I celebrate the seasons all year long in my kitchn, from summer tomatoes to spring chèvres, from autumnal pumpkins to wintery baked Mont d’Or. And this year, I asked myself… why shouldn't that seasonality extend to my living room?
This year, in honor of the New Year, I’ve put out beautiful crystals given to me by my dear friend and my sister, representing rebirth and new adventures. I put up some photographs of myself and my oldest friend as five-year-olds, and I displayed a beautiful piece of art made for me by one of my writer friends. My girlfriend filled a vase with fresh red ranunculus, and I’ve set out a new candle to burn brightly through the next few weeks of dark evenings. It’s made it a bit easier to say goodbye.
Of course, France softens the blow significantly by ensuring this is also a season, not for green juices and dry January, but for cake… galette des rois to be specific.
Galette is yet another way that we ring in the New Year slowly, for while galette is theoretically meant to be eaten on Epiphany, you’ll find these frangipane-filled puff pastry creations in bakeries all over France until the end of the month. I’m excited to tell you more about my favorites next week!
Until then, bonne année, friends!
Cheese of the Week
Caerphilly is a British territorial cheese with a truly unique texture: a chalky, crumbly core surrounded by an almost creamy layer encased in a rind with notes of cellar and stone. While it originally hails from Wales, the vast majority of the production was shifted to England at the start of the 20th century. Today, one of the most well-respected producers is actually in Cheddar country, in Somerset, where the Trethowan Brothers’ Gorwydd Caerphilly is known for its buttery texture and lemony freshness juxtaposed with more mushroomy flavors beneath the rind.
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
Mokko may look like a run-of-the-mill neo-bistro, with tiled floors, bare wood tables, and a chalkboard menu. But there’s something so incredibly creative going on in the kitchen here, creativity so out-there that it can prove divisive. But when it lands, it’s pretty extraordinary. More on the blog.
What I'm Writing
1. In Saint-Flour, a town in the Auvergne region of central France, the highest cathedral in Europe perches at 892 meters (nearly 3,000 feet) above sea level. Saint-Pierre sits at the confluence of the dry winds blowing across the surrounding plateaus, making it, surprisingly, the ideal place to age local hams to perfection. For Atlas Obscura.
2. From the archives: It seems no food makes people go quite as gaga as cheese, but there are loads of misconceptions about the category. I busted some of the most popular cheese myths. For Mashed.
3. From the archives: Six tips for the perfect French onion soup, according to pros. For Food52.
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!
This week’s question comes from perhaps the most assiduous reader of this newsletter… my dad.
“Winter/comfort to me is a fondue. Which cheeses do you recommend for this?”
Cheese fondue may have skyrocketed to popularity Stateside in the ‘70s, but it’s a longstanding classic in France, where it’s better known as fondue savoyarde (a moniker which distinguishes it from fondue bourguignonne, the Burgundian dish invented, oddly, in Lausanne, Switzerland whereby bits of meat are cooked in a central pot of hot oil before being dipped in a range of mayo-based sauces. Chocolate fondue is virtually unheard of in France and was ostensibly invented in the '60s by the very same Switzer who invented the meat version, this time in an effort to promote Toblerone.)
Sticklers for tradition will quickly clamor to say that even fondue savoyarde is a bastardization of the original Swiss recipe, which relies, as is apt, on pressed Swiss cheeses like gruyère and vacherin fribourgeois. These mountain cheeses lend loads of nutty, umami flavors to the melted cheese-and-wine concoction into which cubes of dried bread are dipped.
In France, where fondue savoyarde is more common, a trio of local cheeses from the eastern French region may include fruity summer Beaufort, slightly funky washed-rind Abondance, or hole-y Emmental de Savoie. In Franche-Comté, meanwhile, Comté is king, joining Abondance and Emmental or simply simmering in the white wine all on its own.
If you're willing to deviate a touch from tradition, however, there are many cheeses in this category that can make a standout fondue: Swiss Appenzeller, Austrian Bergkäse, American Whitney, or even Italian fontina would be welcome. My only real recommendation would be to choose a younger cheese – one that’s been aged about eight or 12 months. This isn't just because younger cheeses are cheaper. It’s because the older a cheese gets, the more difficulty it has in melting, resulting in a grainy or even oily fondue. If you must add an ultra-flavorful Parmigiano-Reggiano or Sbrinz to the mix, be sure to do so in smaller quantities and to temper the more aged cheese with something young, like a six-month-old Gruyère, to ensure that the resulting goo is as luxurious as a Swiss watch.
What I'm Reading
1. I stumbled upon Brulons Tous Ces Punks pour l'Amour des Elfes at Paris’ premier rail-yard-turned-food-hall Ground Control, and I immediately fell in love with these surreal short stories laced with satire and humor. Many delve into the unique relationship France has with its bureaucracy, whether in providing an origin fable for the ever-increasing number of roundabouts in rural towns or in depicting a government worker whose speeches are so boring they have the power to turn men to stone. Far from a run-of-the-mill book of fairy stories, this collection will nevertheless prove enchanting.
2. This story of the original Basque cheesecake, which I got the chance to sample way before it was cool at la Viña in 2009 – and I have a DVD of the recipe to prove it. In America’s Test Kitchen.
3. This story about one British restaurateur fighting back against the ubiquity of dining out. For The Guardian.
A bientôt !