A Woman's Paris ~ Joie de Vivre

By Laurence Haxaire

Barbara Redmond

When I was a child, my parents would go every summer to buy their wine in Sigolsheim, Alsace, France. It was a family trip. Everybody was coming to our vacation house: grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The winemaker, who was a friend of our family, welcomed us in his cellar and was very proud to pour his latest creations. Of course, as a child, I was not allowed to taste. But, to smell, for sure.

While my brother and cousins played soccer in the courtyard, I would sit next to my father and smell every glass. Everybody (even myself) was describing what they were able to recognize in the wine, the feeling they got by tasting, and most importantly, why they liked it or disliked it. It was my introduction to the world of flavor: all about sensations and pleasure.

French Cuisine: developing the senses for smell and taste

My father helped me to develop my nose because he saw that I was interested in it. For example, by pouring different amounts of diluted sugar in glasses he would ask me to organize them by concentration. He would do the same with salt. And, by helping me become aware, all of the time, about odors and taste, in the city, in the forest, in the kitchen, everywhere.

I really discovered the complex world of flavor and perfume when working in Grasse for the industry of natural flavor extraction. Do you know that the strawberry flavor is not the same for a French, an American, or a Japanese? They do not describe it the same way and they will not like the same strawberry flavor. Why? Because, of the differences in culture, environment, and way of life, change their perceptions of the flavor.

We have to learn how to smell and how to taste. We have to be open to discovery. And we have to teach our children what we have learned. But most importantly, our pleasure has to drive us.

Cuisine: teaching our children

What do I mean by “teaching our children?” Put them in contact with flavors. I started my oldest daughter, Jeanne, when she was twelve hours old. She was awake, lying on my chest, and I had a glass of grenadine. When I noticed her eyes following the color in the glass, I put it under her nose. I continued from that day on, everyday, with everything. She is seven years old. And, she has a nose!

As I am writing this, we are hiking in Yellowstone, and I can tell Jeanne’s nostrils are wide open to catch all the new odors the earth brings to us from its depths. There is something about egg and cheese here… With my two daughters, we are always on the lookout for flavors ― flavors we cannot taste because they do not come from edible things, but instead they enrich our perception of taste by giving us new tools to describe it: wood, smoke, plants, metals, soil… Le Nez Du Vin, Edition Jean Lenoir ― is a game for us!

Smell and taste: tell what you feel

I am not afraid to say when I prefer a Malbec from Argentina at eight dollars a bottle to a French one at eighty dollars. Or, a Crémant d’Alsace to a Champagne! It’s okay not to like caviar or foie gras, and instead enjoy a grilled maquerel or a “paté de campagne”… I am always telling my two daughters, “It’s all right if you don’t like it, but, at least try and tell what you feel. Share your sensation.”

When I am going to a wine tasting or talking with my friends who specialize in wine, I appreciate when people are able to describe which flavor or taste they recognize, but I would rather know why they like or don’t like it, if the wine reminds them of something or some time. This is my French way of living flavors!

Quels sont les odeurs que je préfère? Le jasmin en fleur au petit matin; les premières feuilles mortes de l’automne lorsqu’elles n’ont pas encore été mouillées; le chocolat qui fond; l’huile de Melaleuca; le cou de mes filles.

Mes plus grands plaisirs gustatifs? Une figue mûre. De la morue fraîche avec une vraie mayonnaise. Un Riesling pas trop sucré. Du thé vert de Chine.

Mother’s kitchen: she hated to cook

Special guest contributor, Lynn McBride, freelance writer and founder of Southern French Fried, Burgundy, France

My love of cooking was inspired by my mother in an upside down way. She HATED to cook, and opening cans or popping things out of the freezer was her strength. She’s the anti-foodie. As a teen-ager, if I wanted something homemade, I had to learn to make it myself, and that was the beginning of learning to play in the kitchen, with fresh ingredients. I got the cooking gene she lacked―we still joke about it today. And she still hates to cook, as much as I love it.

Lynn McBride is a freelance writer and former home/garden magazine editor from Charleston, South Carolina, now living in France. She writes the weekly blog Southern Fried French about her adventures living and cooking in a chateau in the south of Burgundy.

Choux: DO NOT PEEK!

By Barbara Redmond, A Woman’s Paris®

Choux. Known as cream puffs in our mother’s kitchen. Water, butter, flour, and eggs. It happens too fast to blink. A vigorous stir of a wooden spoon and viola! Flour plops into the boiling butter-water and quickly becomes an over-sized softball in the bottom of the pan.

We are four girls. On command, and in turn, we each beat in our egg. My turn! I’m stirring. Hurry up. Kitchen talk. Girls! Stop! The batter isn’t velvety, mother said.

DO NOT PEEK! were always her parting words as she left us alone in the kitchen―with these puffs. She ignored them. And us. It felt like magic.

The oven timer doesn’t work. Or, so we thought. She appears when the puffs are golden. Mother whisks them from the oven rack. They are perfect. How does she know? A tap. They sound hollow.

Long velvet ribbons bursting from a pastry sac or silky mounds dropped from a spoon. Little puffs―the size of a walnut―were what we liked best. When cooled, she’d cut off their tops with a sharp knife. Using her fingers, she’d pinch any moist center crowding her fillings: the whipped cream, the rich custards, the frozen vanilla ice cream. Frosted with a thin chocolate icing or dusted with confectioners’ sugar―pièce de résistance!

We waited. We giggled. We poked each other behind mother’s back, eager for puffs that took forever to finish.

Now, we call them éclairs, choux, and petits choux. We’ve all grown up. We all bake; as do all of our daughters.

We cook, I once told my daughter.

No, mother, she replied patiently measuring, rolling and waiting for the dough to rise, We bake!

VOCABULARY: French to English translations

Au naturel: Unseasoned
Bois: Wood
Cordon Bleu: Blue ribbon
Cuit au four: Baked
Fumée: Smoke
Goût: Taste
Odeur: Smell
Recette: Recipe
Terre: Soil

BOOK RECOMMENDATION BY A WOMAN’S PARIS®

Food in the Louvre by Yves Pinard. Forward by Paul Bocuse.

French Cuisine: Sensation and Pleasure. Laurence Haxaire received her Master’s Degree in Science and Technology from the Food Industry. She became a journalist and writer specializing in food and flavors after working for the flavor extraction industry inGrasse, the perfume capital of France. Laurence was born in Romans-sur-Isèrre, a bustling town in southeast France famed for its longstanding tradition of shoe-making. She was raised in Lyon, the food capital of Europe, in a family where food was part of a smart education. Her family now lives in Bordeaux, France. Visit: (Website)

Choux: DO NOT PEEK! Barbara Redmond, publisher of A Woman’s Paris® (AWP), is a long-time Francophile who travels to Paris every chance she gets. Her stories about Paris and France have been published in AWP® and republished, with permission, by other blogs and publications. Barbara has presented programs on French fashion and food, and she has also been a guest speaker for students planning their study abroad. She serves as an advisory board member at the University of Minnesota College of Design and is an active student mentor. Barbara has been recognized for excellence in art by international and national organizations and publications. Prints of her fine art paintings are in collections in Europe and North America and are available for purchase.

You may also enjoy A Woman’s Paris® post, Le Cordon Bleu Paris: Another “Sabrina” story, by Karen Cope who writes about her experiences at the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school, where she was a student. She shares with readers the recipes and methods of the famous school as she experienced them through classes: two Basic Pastry classes, Basic Cuisine and Intermediate Pastry. Including a list of cooking schools in Paris.

Cooking schools in Paris founded by women, by Barbara Redmond who writes about extraordinary women who cook: from Anne Willan, Marthe Distel, and Elisabeth Brassart, to “Les trios gourmands,” Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle. Including a directory of cooking schools in Paris.

French Women Chefs: les mères lyonnaise, by French writer Laurence Haxaire who tells the stories of former house cooks of affluent families in Lyon who set up their own businesses after the French revolution in the 19th century. And later, when their reputation reached beyond the edge of Lyon, the most famous of them even welcomed such well-known people as General de Gaulle as a VIP at their table. 

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times… for French Food, by Canadian writer Philippa Campsie who explores the threats to French food traditions. Endangered raw-milk Camembert and French baguettes, and meanwhile, the ados flock to McDo (translation: adolescents eat at France’s many McDonalds outlets). And yet… French chefs seem to be getting more innovative every year and the movement known as “Le Fooding” is winning converts. 

1001 flavours of Paris, by Canadian writer Philippa Campsie who delights in the unending variety of flavours available in Paris, from yogurt to jams to ice creams to spices. She shares her discovery of ginger mustard, violet-scented sugar, and saffron honey.