Emily in France 🇫🇷 On Texture
Is the feel of a food as important as its flavor?
I’ve been working as a culinary journalist since 2011 and as a culinary translator for even longer, since 2009. It means I spend a lot of time thinking about and analyzing pretty much every mouthful, and while thinking about flavors is a matter of course, as I prepare to teach a class on food writing this summer, I find myself realizing just how much I engage texturally with my food.
It’s something I see in the foods I love most: crunchy chopped salads of perfectly diced cucumber or whisper-thin red onion, cabbage, and fennel. I love the stick-to-your-teeth gooeyness of Camembert; I love the soft, melting creaminess of gelato. On occasions when I eat meat, I prefer it to be of the slow-cooked, gelatinous variety: Beef bourguignon will always have more pull, for me, than a steak, and pulled pork is way more enticing to me than a pork chop.
I notice textures even more in foods I can't stand: bananas, for their insistence on being both furry and slimy; rhubarb and celery, for their stringiness; raisins, for having the texture of bugs.
I’ll admit that living in France makes me think even more about texture than I might otherwise – first off, because the textural expectations of foods are so different from what I grew up with. Generally, I find the French are far more willing to chew their food – grass-fed steaks, crisp-crusted baguettes – than Americans, more accustomed to corn-fed beef and softer sandwich bread. Then again, there’s a lot of soft-on-soft food in France: the overcooked green beans you barely need teeth for. I am bored by foods you cannot chew: the velouté soups the French so love or the soft-on-soft contemporary pastries made with so many inserts and gels the actual pastry part – the puff, the chou – seems sacrificed in favor of flair.
But perhaps the reason I spend so much time thinking about texture, these days, comes from the French tendency to put the texture of a food center-stage. Meat here may be described on-menu as fondant (melting) and raw vegetables as croquant (crisp). Translating these sorts of descriptions strikes many Anglophones as odd, as I explored in a story for Atlas Obscura. Even odder are French dish names born of texture. A chocolate moelleux or fondant is a tender chocolate cake; a croustillant might be a crispy pastry parcel filled with something delicious. A croquant is a crunchy cookie beloved in the south of France, and a crémeux is a creamy filling found in many a modern éclair. Can you imagine, in English, having a cake called a “softie” or a cookie called a “crunchie?”
Cheese of the Week
Goat cheese season is in full swing, and to celebrate, I’m spotlighting a new favorite: Délice à la fleur de sel. True to its name, this cheese made at a small family farm in the Deux-Sèvres is seasoned with fleur de sel for a slightly briny salinity.
It’s lovely and nearly dewy when it’s young, but after a few weeks in the fridge, it developed a phenomenal, balanced acidity and funk. I tried it quite a few times as it evolved in my fridge, and I loved it all along the way!
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
Along a vibrant shopping street at the edge of the 15th arrondissement, le Café du Commerce shows that Parisian tradition is alive and well, as flirtatious, black-vested waiters serve classics of French cuisine at tables arranged on three stories of mosaic tiled floors surrounding an airy, impressive atrium. More on the blog.
Where I’m Going
1. To host a tasting of seasonal goat cheese for WICE.
2. To (finally) check out Soces, a seafood-driven spot in Belleville.
3. To Amsterdam!
What I’m Doing
Most of my food tours are geared towards visitors to Paris, but Paris residents can now take full advantage of all the cheesy knowledge I’ve racked up over the years thanks to a new cheese-tasting event I’m hosting in my favorite covered market in Paris!
The first event will be taking place May 21 at 6pm and will feature five phenomenal French cheeses paired with a glass of grower Champagne. Over the course of the 1 1/2-hour tasting, you’ll discover the stories of these iconic cheeses – and hopefully discover some new favorites.
Tickets are available online. We're voluntarily keeping the group small, so book your spot now!
TERRE/MER is a ceramics and culinary retreat I co-host in the Mediterranean seaside town of la Ciotat. This long weekend is governed by creativity and terroir, encompassing a 10-hour ceramics workshop, three locally-sourced meals a day (prepared with love by yours truly), hands-on cooking workshops, a cheese tasting (bien sûr), and more.
We'll be welcoming our next small group September 4-7. Book your spot now!
What I'm Writing
1. Nicknamed "the king of chefs and the chef of kings," Antonin Carême was a trailblazer in more ways than one — as the forthcoming eponymous Apple TV+ series is sure to show. Born just six years before the French Revolution, in 1783, Carême loomed large in his 49 years, inventing the chef's toque (hat), the pastry bag, and the very idea of serving a meal in courses. And that's just the beginning. For Smart Luxury.
2. Head into any pharmacy, and you’ll encounter an alphabet soup of vitamins and minerals. But if you’re not careful about which supplements you incorporate in your diet — and which nutrients you’re pairing in your body — you could be wasting your money. For Organic Authority.
3. From the archives: Parisian viennoiserie offerings are evolving and changing, as quality, choice and a resurgence of regional specialities buck the boulangerie status quo. For France Today.
FAQs
With the goal of bringing you the content you crave, I'm soliciting 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 was totally conquered by Housemates, a queer road trip story that somehow manages to capture the zeitgeist of the aftermath of the first Trump election while also exploring timeless questions regarding identity, purpose, and passion. The double narrator was an intriguing framing device but ultimately felt underused; I wanted to love the nameless first-person narrator more, though I felt I barely got to know her. Instead, I found myself wholly conquered by Bernie and Leah, and I adored the self-aware management of having two main characters, not to mention the resulting introspection regarding what it is to be a part of someone else’s story.
2. This essay on how grounding it can be to fast. In Vittles.
3. This story that has me reconsidering my hatred of pigeons. In the New Yorker.
A bientôt !