Petit Riz

guest post by Emmanuelle Tang

When I’m at a restaurant, I always carefully scan the menu, my eyes quickly searching for  “brie”, “rocquefort”, “cheddar” and the like. If there’s cheese in one of the dishes, chances are it is the one I’m going to order. I can’t say no to cheese. I guess it’s even my primary source of fat protein.

When I first arrived to Bayreuth, Northern Bavaria, Martin took me to a brewery for dinner. As I studied the menu, I knew what word I was looking for: Käse. And then I saw it. The ultimate dish. There was no need to go further. I put down my menu and started sipping my wheat beer.

“Do you need me to translate anything? Do you know what you’re going to order?” he asked.

“Of course. Käsespätzle.”

It was delicious. A rich flavor of cheese and caramelized onions.

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During the hot Australian summers my mother and I ate strawberries pressed into yogurt. Later, when there was cream in the house, we ate them with a trickle of cream for dessert. On the other side of the world, in France, my grandfather picked strawberries from his garden and sliced them into two bowls. He added yogurt and sugar and placed the bowls in the fridge for after dinner. My grandmother ate her yogurt and strawberries every night until she could no longer eat.

In Japan I learned to make strawberry shortcake. I was fifteen and studying abroad in Tokyo. My host family lived in Nishi-Hachioji, in a big house attached to a temple that rested upon a hill. School started at eight but I had to ride the train an hour and a half with my host sister, so we were pulled from bed at five for a full Japanese breakfast of fish, rice, soup, and pickles every week morning. At school I sat through the language classes and watched students fall down on their desks like flies and sleep while the teacher spoke in a dull voice. My peers were exhausted from after-school school. I sat on my knees for an hour in a “manners” class until my legs were numb. I learned to peel mandarins like flowers. We stored the seeds in the peel petals once we were finished eating. Then there was the cooking class, where we were taught how to make strawberry shortcake.

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guest post by Joanna Ehrenreich / photos by Geoffroy Bablon

When my grandmother passed away, my grandfather went through their house and put things in order. They had retired half way across the country decades earlier from the suburbs of New York to the warm and arid city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He sent a heavy box filled with my grandmother’s collection of cookbooks, straight to my college apartment.

My grandmother, Fran, or Franny when we were younger, didn’t really enjoy cooking when my mother was growing up. It was a daily chore piled on top of many others for her family with three young children. My mother tells me stories of school lunches made from frozen slabs of meatloaf between two frozen pieces of bread, that would defrost in time for school lunch in her book bag. But when my grandmother moved to Santa Fe, she discovered a love of cooking and the creativity it takes to compose a meal. Grandma Fran was always creative, taking beautiful photographs and selling them at crafts fairs, and she had a great eye for picking out art to adorn the walls of her home. Cooking became a creative outlet for her too, in the second half of her life. This is how I remember her, happy in the kitchen, putting together a feast of brown sugar-rubbed brisket and green bean casserole for her surrounding friends and family, showing off new items like the rotisserie chicken roaster she and my grandfather had bought.

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guest post by Sarah Sahel

My friends and I, we like to travel. Modern technology helps us feel closer to each other as we grow further apart. We call sometimes, often write emails, and use our pens rarely. Scattered around the globe, we discover a common language, taught in our mother tongue yet offered in unlimited cultural variations. “I’ve brought some pop tarts with me to Kabul; it helps me feel at home,” writes Laura, a talented journalist friend. “This time, my suitcase is full of ham and galettes de pont aven” (i.e. thin biscuits from Brittany), celebrates my roommate Julien, as he arrives from the airport.

“Expatriate” is an identity we do not easily recognize as ours. We like to think that we have outgrown the concept, we, proud citizens of the world. But the palate holds us back, reminds us of the place that raised us and forged our tastes

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My mother would ask me what I’d like to eat for my birthday parties. Futomaki, I’d say. I wanted to impress my friends with beautiful Japanese cooking and anyway, they were always nagging me for sushi. The first question I’d hear was: do you eat a lot of sushi? No, I’d answer, almost never! Only for special occasions like New Year’s. I received dubious looks. They were skeptical of my poor sushi eating. Birthdays seemed special enough, though.

The truth is futomaki require meticulous preparation, you shouldn’t be rushed when you make them, otherwise they will fall apart and then you find yourself with exploded maki. Eating exploded maki with slippery shiitake mushrooms is difficult even for experienced chopstick users.

Contrary to belief, these aren’t impossible, or even that difficult to make, especially if one follows the steps and is patient. This is not the time to be experimental and throw blobs of rice around your kitchen. Play some Erik Satie and chop your carrot into perfect matchsticks. You are bound to impress your friends.

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We can think of baking as a science: scrape the excess flour from a cup with a knife and measure your teaspoons of vanilla. What is 1/8 of a teaspoon and what is a pinch of salt? I’ve met women who rarely measure, or if they do it is with their eyes, nose, and tongues. I imagine Lulu Peyraud and Elizabeth David to be in that category, throwing bulbs of garlic into soups or telling us that the onions should cook until soft and melted (but we never know how long, do we?). My mother is so precise with cutting and presentation and yet she says she doesn’t like recipes, she’d rather cook from memory, or just see how something tastes. I’m the one carrying a notepad and trailing after her in the kitchen (oil to coat the pan, and more later, and more again; lots of ginger; however many mushrooms you happen to have in the fridge).

I remember watching my cousin Claire this past summer. We were in my aunt’s kitchen and the doors were open as it was a mild day for Brittany. Claire was making a rhubarb tart. She poured flour into a large bowl and added a chunks of salted butter. She placed the bowl on the tiled floor and her daughter mixed the flour and butter with her hands as Claire drizzled cold water onto the dough. For the filling, she found cream in the fridge and three eggs. She added sugar with a spoon, stirred, added more. There was rhubarb from the garden. Later we asked for the recipe and she wrote down an impressionistic version in her signature cursive writing, and though beautiful, it seemed to strip the natural elegance and ease from those initial gestures. I’ve tried to make this tart, but it never tastes as good and I never feel as graceful as Claire.

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guest post by Emmanuelle Tang

My grandfather Pierre and his brother Léon always made it a point not to sell any ‘galettes des rois’ before the Epiphany Eve. They were both bakers in Cherbourg, Normandy, a city lost at the far end of the Cotentin Peninsula and famous for its umbrellas. In fact, they were running a quite successful family business. When I was around 5, while on holidays in Cherbourg, I remember watching an old videotape of the French news with my brother and cousins. We immediately recognized the man with the mustache on TV. It was our grandfather. The television report was explaining that the two brothers had become such successful bakers that they were exporting their baguettes to England. By plane. ‘Baguette planes’.

“And how do you say “pain” in English?” asked the journalist.
“Bread!” answered my grandfather proudly to the camera.

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I arrived in Brittany just before a great storm. Many were left without electricity for Christmas Eve and streets flooded across the coast. My cousins and I walked around Rennes in the evening under rain and a biting wind. At night we started a fire by burning old egg crates in the chimney. We heated galettes that we filled with cheese, ham, and eggs. There was tomato and carrot soup and a slab of salted butter that lasted only until the following morning. The next day we stayed indoors. We mashed the blackened bananas and toasted nuts on the galette pan. We scrounged for baking ingredients, but all the butter was gone, so we made do with nut oil.

That night my grandfather and I drove through thick rain (he finds it delightful, he says: I’m not like the other old people, I’m not afraid of driving in the dark and in the rain) on a pitch-black country road. We sliced the chicken’s heart and liver for a stuffing as we watched the weather reports. The chestnuts were toasted, the ham diced, and the shallots cooked in butter. The chicken cooked for over two hours at low heat, its belly bursting with prunes and chestnuts. My grandfather handed me a box of bruised apples. I sat in the kitchen peeling and cutting around the wormholes while he searched for his homemade apple compote. We spread the golden-red sauce over the piecrust before adding apple slices. I dotted the apples with butter and sprinkled sugar. My aunt arrived just in time for a slice of pie with crème fraîche.

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Before I could walk or crawl my mother carried me on her back while she cooked. I can’t remember this, but I spent hours sleeping against her spine, or watching the burners from above her shoulders. The small kitchen in Paris was our corner of the world, the center of our apartment. Not much has changed today as I sit in the corner of her kitchen, taking notes while she cooks. But I’m restless, so I ask to help. We dice carrots and spring onions, we peel mushrooms, we cook meat on a smoking pan with grated ginger, we quick pickle daikon in plum vinegar, we throw turnips into the miso soup, and we wait for the rice to finish plumping. We always wait for the rice.

Sanaë (SA-NA-E, like “eh”), that’s three syllables. It means rice seedling in Japanese. Written in Japanese it looks like a rice paddy. The first solid food I tasted was brown rice cream. My father milled kilos of rice through a vegetable miller. The smell of rice cooking has a magical effect on my body, it’s a scent I recognize like a creature on a hunt, if I could spray perfume in my kitchen it would be rice scented. The other day I ate a fat daikon radish with miso sauce. The white radish melted on my tongue. I learned it was cooked in the cloudy water from a first rice wash, and then simmered in kombu broth. See, I told you rice is this marvelous thing, and so here is how one makes the perfect bowl of rice.

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guest post by Sarah Souli

Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue

I had been reading about Blue is the Warmest Color for months before I actually saw it in theaters: the lengthy narrative (I had to get up once in the three hours for a drink of water); the infamous lesbian sex scene (no nervous giggles from the über-hip and P.C. crowd at BAM); the epic story of love and heartbreak (can’t we all relate?).  All of that was there, of course, in Abdellatif Kechiche’s exquisite film, but what I found most arresting were the food scenes.

Mr. Kechiche cast his Adèle after seeing Adèle Exarchopoulos eating a sandwich in a café. She is a spectacular eater. I don’t normally like watching people eat–too intimate, too animalistic, too much like sex–but I couldn’t take my eyes off Adèle. Mr. Kechiche trains his camera on her face, absorbing the mess of spaghetti bolognese, oysters, gyros, candy bars, buttered toast and brick à l’oeuf being inhaled into her fleshy mouth.

The spaghetti bolognese is featured prominently, to the point that it becomes a character on its own. The red, beefy noodles are eaten almost every night for dinner at Adèle’s house; they are her father’s specialty. Easy to make and pedestrian: it’s a bit heavy-handed, but spaghetti represents the lower class.  In one scene, Adèle’s parents feed them to their daughter’s bourgeoisie girlfriend, Emma. Later on in the film, Adèle makes a deep bowl for a party full of Emma’s bohemian friends.  Their pretentious pandering on the meaning of art and female sexual pleasure ceases, and the screen fills up with beautiful, thin artists greedily slurping pasta.

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