Emily in France 🇫🇷 What Do You Eat When You're Sick?

Greetings from a world filled with rice soup

I do very few things halfway, including being sick.

If you were wondering why last week’s newsletter never came, it was because I was incubating some sort of awful virus that not only had me bedridden for three days but also left me averse to pretty much every food you can think of: the last of the beautiful black Muscat grapes I had been chilling, the multicolored heirloom carrots I had planned to roast on Halloween. I couldn’t abide the smell of garlic, or cheese, or eggs. The very idea of having coffee was (and remains) anathema.

But I had to eat something.

Being ill brings about the oddest latent food cravings. I haven't eaten oatmeal in years, but suddenly, that was all I wanted. And even with the gale storm winds outside my window, I was craving lemon popsicles. Peanut butter smeared on toast, rice simmered in broth until each grain was so soft it burst. For want of Saltines, I ate Bath Oliver’s biscuits and felt like a very fancy sick person indeed.

I’m on the mend, but I’m curious, reader: What do you eat, when you're feeling like you're rapidly approaching death’s door? What’s the comfort food you crave when you can barely stomach the idea of food at all?

Cheese of the Week

If you're a fan of Dutch cheeses like Edam or Gouda, mimolette is the one for you. Purported to be Charles de Gaulle’s favorite, this sphere of cheese with an almost lunar surface was ostensibly invented at the time of the Franco-Dutch War at the behest of finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who asked Flemish farmers to find a way to make Edam locally and thus keep the French from importing the foreign cheese. They used anatto imported from South America to disguise the copycat, and voilà: mimolette was born. You can find it young and tender, but my favorites are the extra-vieilles, with their shattery texture and bright orange glow.

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.

Where I’m Going

1. To your living room (I hope!) to introduce you to the funky world of French cheese on Thursday 11am EST. (Sign up here!)

2. To le Bistrot de Paris to catch up with a dear friend (and dig into some French comfort food, now that I can stomach it!)

3. To Avignon, to meet up with some of my favorite people in the whole world.

What I’m Doing

1. Signups for the next edition of the Nantes Writers’ Workshop are open! In the meantime, be sure to sign up for our newsletter to keep those creative juices a-flowing.

2. As for TERRE/MER, the cuisine-and-ceramics retreat I run with ceramicist Camille Drozdz, we’re eager to begin planning our next edition – and we need your help! If you’d like to join us, let us know your preferred dates with this quick poll.

What I'm Writing

1. Stop buying French cheese in the United States – try these instead. For InsideHook.

2. This decadent burger recipe calls for blue cheese-stuffed patties and homemade bacon jam. For InsideHook.

3. From the archives: What's the cheesy, bacony way to say hygge in French? Tartiflette, bien sûr. For Food52.

What I'm Reading

1. There are books I love so much I can't put them down... and then there are books I love so much I *force* myself to put them down so that I can prolong the distinct pleasure of reading them. This fraught, beautiful love letter to the narrator's mother was one of the latter. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is an exploration of the complexity of love and relationships: Of how pleasure and pain are so frequently intertwined, of how the family we are born into and the family we choose can coexist. It's a story of a young man coming to know both himself and his mother and overcoming the generations of trauma that afflict him and those around him. It's a love story of a wholly different, wholly gorgeous kind, and anyone who has yet to read it is lucky they still have it before them.

2. This heart-warming story of how one chef looks to make a difference on a global scale through food, which essentially explores the ways in which one needs to consider not just the nutritional needs but which foods bring comfort to those facing the harsh reality of war. In the BBC.

3. The deep dive into chicken fingers I had no idea I wanted or needed. In Taste.

A bientôt !