Emily in France 🇫🇷 What is Luxury?
On simple pleasures
I'm an air sign and, as at least one person would say, “as low-maintenance as a potato.” It took me a long time to come to appreciate the sheer aestheticism that is a life in France.
It’s not that I didn't notice how beautiful this country is. I did. It’s just that I didn't appreciate the effort that goes into such beauty: doing one’s lipstick just so, decorating one’s home with fresh-cut flowers.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the thing that clued me into this oh-so-French habit was food.
Hit just about any market in France, and you’ll get a chance to glimpse the sheer artistry with which food is arranged: towers of citrus, jumbles of jewel-toned cherry tomatoes, inviting stacks of skinny courgettes. I often joke with guests on my tours that every chocolate shop, every pastry shop, feels like a jewelry shop – and it does. The way that the French arrange their food for sale is beautiful to look at… even if you're only window shopping (appropriately termed lèche vitrine, in French: licking windows).
Once I'd noticed the artistry put into the displays at the cheesemongers and the fishmongers, the greengrocers and the chocolatiers, however, I soon realized that this attention to detail was everywhere: It was in the omnipresence of florists selling inexpensive bouquets one could imagine picking up “just because.” It’s in the apéros arranged in people’s homes, with ostentation sacrificed in favor of minimalism: a few small bowls with nuts and pretzels; gorgeous stemware that doesn't cost a fortune.
And I, too, have found myself leaning into the omnipresence of little luxuries. A box of macarons will run you 24 euros or more, but I can have just one for two euros and feel like a princess.
An apéro with a view of the Seine might cost 10 euro for a glass of ho-hum wine… but I can pour my own, gleaned from a wine shop at a wholly reasonable 10 euro a bottle, sharing it with friends on a bench overlooking a serendipitously placed tango group and feel like I’m on top of the world.
Cheese of the Week
With goat cheese season in full swing, you're likely to find quite a few chèvres filled or topped with fig jam, whose perfume makes the ideal counterpoint to the fresh, slightly acidic chèvre. It’s a rare nod to the fruit-and-cheese pairing so omnipresent on American “charcuterie” boards; in France, generally speaking, as my colleague Aurélien likes to say, “we call it a cheeseboard because it’s a board with cheese on it.”
But fig-infused goat cheeses are a world apart. Some are molded in the shape of figs; others are topped with a generous glob. I loved this simple, days-old goat topped with a very demure little dollop so that the cheese did most of the talking.
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
Self-styled as a “Franco-Japanese cantine,” the latter word a common reference to a local’s spot, the sort of restaurant where you can stop in and grab a bite and feel like a regular, Mamagoto has been on my list of restaurants to try for quite some time, especially given the boredom that has set in regarding the “thing on a plate” mentality so widespread among small plate spots of its ilk. With dishes that promised to be a bit more travaillés and an intriguing marriage of Japanese and French flavors, I was excited to finally pull up a chair here. More on the blog.
Discover more of my foodie finds via Instagram @emily_in_france and on the blog.
Where I’m Going
To Nantes, for the inaugural Nantes Writers’ Workshop! Follow our adventures on Instagram @emily_in_france, and consider joining us next time!
What I'm Writing
1. It's Miami mango season, and these local chefs are making the most of it. For InsideHook.
2. How to make a classic late-night Barcelona club kid snack at home. For InsideHook.
3. From the archives: Visitors to Paris will quickly notice something different about the small cobbled rue des Rosiers. Unlike the rest of Paris, where cafés and brasseries dot the sidewalks, here, offerings lean more toward challah, pastrami, and falafel. And when it comes to vendors of the latter, there’s a lot of competition. For Paste.
What I'm Saying
“Simple” might be the last word you’d think of to describe French cakes, and yet in contrast to all of those ornate patisseries, French home bakes are indeed surprisingly plain, frugal, and, yes, simple. Here to explore how and why is Aleksandra Crapanzano, a James Beard Award–winning writer and dessert columnist for The Wall Street Journal for over a decade. She’s also the author of a book that gets to the bottom of le cake: Gateau: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes.
What I'm Reading
1. This book did prove different from the others that bear its Insta-friendly cover, many of which, I’ve found in recent years, seem rushed to the finish line of publication. All This Could be Different, on the contrary, was delicately wrought, a profound examination of trauma, found family, and what it means to actually love and be loved.
2. This writer shares her journey to her ancestral homeland and an encounter with a stranger that filled me up with a lovely sense of shared humanity. In Off Assignment.
3. It is in failure that we grow – it's not an uncommon sentiment, but I was particularly taken with how Samin Nosrat described it in this interview with Helen Rosner for the New Yorker.
A bientôt !