Obscene hot dogs and soaked sandwiches

 Today, a young American might find Paris fast and street food unremarkable, not least because so much of it is American. Even kebab shops often sell pizza and the “kebabs” – better known as shawarmas in America – are not necessarily exotic to all Americans themselves.

Going into the Seventies, eating on the fly was a different matter. The closest thing to standard French fast food was the jambon-beurre – “ham-butter” – sandwich. If this was (and often remains) tasty, it was largely because of the half baguette which was its basis. The ham typically was sliced so fine, it was nearly transparent; the butter was more a tint than a layer. When a French man later complained to me that the French were abandoning this native standard for American fast food burgers, it seemed no mystery to me why the latter were winning; even a flat fast-food patty has more meat than one typically gets on a French ham sandwich.

The French also had hot dogs, but served in a most disconcerting manner (at least for an American). Half baguettes were stuck on spikes, presumably heated, until they were needed, when they were squirted inside with mustard before the hot dog was inserted into the length of the baguette. Perhaps to a purer (or simply French, which is not at all the same thing) mind, there was nothing suggestive in this process; to me it was jaw-dropping. Had my parents replaced their own confused and abashed attempts to explain human reproduction with a demonstration by a French hot dog vendor, I would have come away far more enlightened. (Neither my mother nor my step-father was in the least asexual, but when it came to explaining the details to their inquisitive kids… I suspect many with less liberal upbringings received far more helpful instruction in this regard.)

One could already buy crepes in the street. But I was warned early on to be sure the vendor was cooking these fresh, rather than grabbing one of the prepared ones off a pile. Not that they couldn’t be satisfying. Those who have never been in France should know that crêpes come in both savory and dessert forms. Sometimes the first are known as sarrasins (a word derived from “Saracen” which in fact means buckwheat). One could easily make a full meal of a ham and cheese (the French like that combination) crêpe followed by one with chocolate and Grand Marnier.

As I recall, the crêpe was mainly street food back then. Most actual crêpe shops – crêperies – were on a street near the Gare Montparnasse, where people from Brittany – home, if not necessarily birthplace, of the first French crêpes – arrived. Today they are everywhere.

My favorite was a sandwich unique to France and, from what I’ve seen in recent years, far less common today: the pan bagnat. If this doesn’t quite sound like French, it is because it comes from the south of French, specifically Nice. Pan is simply the Provençal word for pain (bread); bagnat is close to baigné (bathed or soaked). The sandwich then is one of “bathed bread”, referring here to the copious amounts of olive oil, along with juice from a fresh tomato and some vinegar, used to soak the inside of a small cut bun. The bun itself is of a particular type, slightly fatter than a hamburger bun and nicely crisp on the outside. The filling approximates a salade Niçoise, tuna in greens with capers, along with slices of hard-boiled eggs, black olives, etc. If you look on the Web, you will find various instructions on how to make these at home, but like New York hot dogs and English muffins, these are most satisfying in their commercial form. I was delighted to discover them and often had no more than one of these for lunch. But it would take some effort to find one in Paris today.

Opera with an “Oh”

My first morning in Paris, I headed straight for the American Express. My mother had told me to get my mail there until I settled in. I think my traveler’s cheques were from American Express, though I’m not sure that was required to use their poste restante. At any rate, it was one of the few not-famous places I knew of and I knew she’d have a letter waiting for me. 

This was also the first time I took the Metro. As a native New Yorker, I found it remarkably clean and quiet, but wasn’t bowled over – again, this was Paris and one just expected things to be different. I had a little trouble deciphering the colored lines of the maps and so asked two men, strangely confident in my high school French, where to find the Metro stop: the Opera. Despite the standard horror stories about rude Parisians, they were friendly enough, but didn’t understand what I was looking for. I tried sounding it out slowly until one smiled and said, “Ah, the OH-pera.” My first gleaning that just because a word was spelled (roughly) the same way as in English, didn’t mean it was pronounced that way. Having pointed out the lines to take, he asked me, “You are American?” “Yes!” I said brightly, “how did you know?” He and his friend exchanged amused glances. “Oh,” he said, “One can hear it.” I was taken aback, though not crushed, to discover my French was less than perfect. 

I would later learn that not everyone took such realizations with equanimity. The following year, studying there, I was walking around with my guitar when a man in a white shirt and shorts – not really standard Paris streetwear – came up to me and said, “Voo joo-eh?” Though this was close enough to “Vous jouez?” (“You play?”) for me to understand, I responded in English: “Yes, I do.” He then told me he played flute. “Do you play well?” He looked me hard in the eye: “I’m a SUPERB flautist.” To which I must merely have nodded. Then he asked, “How did you know I was American?” Not to this day being a master of tact, I said, “You have an accent.” (Luckily, I didn’t say, as I might have, “a STRONG accent”.) He raised his eyebrows, less in anger than with pity, as he patiently explained: “Oh no, I speak excellent French!” 

In later years, I would learn to refrain from delivering such revelations, especially back home, where others, over the years, have proved equally confident in their disastrous French. I would find it harder however to hold my tongue with French people who confidently told me how things were in America, briskly dismissing my attempts to correct them. (When I asked one woman how much time she had actually spent there, she said blithely, “Oh, I’ve never been. But my friends have told me all about it.”)

I don’t recall my subsequent visits to American Express that first year, but almost a decade later I had occasion to visit a banker there. Though I was running an office at that point, my look was still on the arty side. While sitting in the waiting room, I found myself between two Texans who were virtual caricatures of their state: solid, florid individuals who as I recall were even wearing ten-gallon hats. They began a conversation. Sitting as I was between them, I tried to join in – only to have them ignore me. Not even make a face like, “Do you hear a noise in here?” They just kept talking like there was not so much as a breeze in the room. 

My encounter with the actual banker was memorable for another reason. His English pronunciation was not only imperfect but overlaid with the American accent he most often heard in his work. The result was a French-Texan English which left me struggling to keep a straight face as we did business. 

About a decade ago, I had occasion to return to American Express only to find it reduced to a pair of teller’s windows. No one seeing those glass panes would imagine the rows of wooden mail cubbies which once so warmly greeted Americans far from home.

Allumettes, escargots and violettes de Toulouse

Being a single mother could not have been easy for any woman in the Fifties. For my mother, whose intellectual brilliance was matched only by her thorough lack of practicality, it was especially difficult. She was not, among other things, very good at looking after two energetic, impetuous little boys.

My mother’s intellect was not free of pretension and so, if she surrounded us with snatches of French, it may be because she wanted us to have some knowledge of our father’s culture; but I can’t discount her simple desire to flaunt her sophisticated European experience, even as we lived in near poverty. Among other things, she hung an enameled metal box labeled Allumettes above the stove, reasonably thinking it out of the reach of two toddlers. But one day when she was either asleep or possibly even out, my brother and I worked out how to climb the stove and reach those lovely wooden matches which lit so easily.

As it happened, she had just bought several bent iron chairs with red vinyl seats. We quickly discovered that a wooden allumette, easily lit, would leave a gratifying trail in the red vinyl and so spent a happy half hour decorating our mother’s new chairs.

Not all her attempts to teach us French turned out so disastrously. I learned early that snails were escargots; I may even have eaten some in garlic butter. Some time after she remarried and we moved to the Upper East Side, she took me down to the Village to a place called Papier Malcé [sic] and I had my first croissant (then a rarity in New York); nothing suggested for decades that I would end up writing a history of that pastry.

While we were still a small family on Jones Street, a visitor brought us candied violets from France. As a little boy, I thought these absolutely wonderful. When I went to study in Paris and bought colorful candies from vending machines on the Metro platforms, I was disappointed to find that the only thing similar was simply a raspberry candy shaped like a raspberry; I decided I’d enhanced my earlier memory. It wasn’t until business took me, years later, to Toulouse that I discovered yes, there were candies made from violet buds; I hadn’t imagined that part of my French-inflected childhood.

My neighbor, the Pont Neuf

 My first hosts in Paris were friends of my family. They lived in a duplex just off the rue Dauphine. I found this perfectly natural – knowing nothing else of the city – as I did their living just steps away from the Pont Neuf. I would only learn later that the husband worked at a bank and was from an old banking family. Certainly, it would be a long time before I saw another duplex in Paris.

The night I arrived – oblivious to the panic I had caused by casually spending a week in London rather than, as it appeared everyone had expected, going right to Paris –, they were having a dinner party. One woman was a marquise; I was quite disappointed to see she was not wearing an ornate satin robe. When people used some of the coarser (but quite common) French words, one person asked if I knew what one meant. “Is it like in Sartre?” I asked. “He is very literary,” someone said. And I was, at least when it came to French. But French is full of traps for lovers of language. As one guest left, the hostess asked him if he would take down the poubelle. As my hostess must have expected, I found this a pretty word, including as it did “belle”; she was quick to explain it meant “trash”.

My hosts were also very patient. I had never seen a cheese plate before, much less the goat’s cheese which became my main point of interest. The idea that goat’s cheese might be expensive never occurred to me; it was in the fridge, I ate it. A lot of it. After I returned to the States, I would spend years trying to find it again (yes, it was once hard to find). On one march on Washington, I bought Norwegian gjetost, thinking that, because it was goat’s cheese, it would be the same; I was dismayed to find something more like a hard creamy chocolate bar. Years later in Boston, a tall blonde friend of mine announced she was finally ready to stay the night. To celebrate this special event, I went to Boston’s one cheese shop where I at last found real French goat’s cheese. My neighbors, a young French couple, were heartily amused to watch me put on my best dark blue sheets and helped me prepare matching blue candles to light the platter of goat’s cheese – only to have my friend call and desist. (When we finally spent our first night together, it was after a hurried meal at the Chinese place on the corner.) I then shared the goat’s cheese with my French neighbors (still dear friends today). Who of course offered heaping helpings of teasing to go with the cheese.

Just beyond the small cul-de-sac where my hosts lived there was a small café at the corner, right by the Seine. I don’t know then what I learned later, that there had once been a tower there where a wicked French queen would spend the night with illicit lovers, only to have them sewn in a sack the next morning and thrown in the Seine. The café and the tower have forever been confused in my mind.

I was seventeen and full of energy. One morning,  having no doubt spent another night wandering the city I was so eager to explore, I sat in one of the round stone benches on the Pont Neuf and watched the Sun come up. I felt as completely in Paris as I could be.

All this seemed perfectly normal to me. Yes, it was magic, but I was in Paris, and it was supposed to be magic. I’m not sure I’ve ever learned otherwise.

Paris in black and gray

My first "memories" of Paris came from a book. As a little boy, I knew I had a father in a distant place called “Paris” in an equally distant place called “France”. From time to time, my younger brother and I would get postcards written in a shaky hand, signed with three X’s which our mother assured us were kisses. Paris itself was a blank. I had been there, but as a very small child, leaving me no memory at all of the city. When I turned six, my father sent me a book of photographs: Paris des rêves, by Izis.

For me, it was perfectly named: “Paris of Dreams”. So it would long prove for a little boy with no other image of his father’s world. The subjects were largely simple: a man fishing by the Seine, a cat in a window, a little boy standing in front of graffiti. The city looked gray to me, full of old stone and dark water, grizzled old men… Even the flower seller, with her parasol and flowers, was in shades of gray. A few of the pictures showed the rain that so often hovers over the city, more sprinkling than soaking it.

I was too young then to appreciate one of the more wonderful features of the book, except for its visual beauty: the handwritten meditations, mainly by well-known writers, facing each image. The writers included Henry Miller, Paul Eluard and Jean Cocteau. My own handwriting has always been awful and so even today I take great delight in the sheer beauty of all these hands, aside from the often poetic texts. 

But above all this book gave me my first image of Paris, an image complemented, but not contradicted, by actual experience and one that has remained with me after years of knowing the actual city. My first Paris, the Paris forever imprinted in my mind, was that of Izis, in black and white; or in my memory, of black and gray.

What I found in Paris

For various reasons in the last few years, I have found myself dipping into what has become a mini-genre: memoirs of living in Paris. For someone who has actually lived in Paris, this is an ambivalent experience, prompting, variously, nostalgia, surprise or disagreement. And of course stirring up similar memories of Paris: that first experience of the city, navigating the new environment, becoming “Parisian” oneself, etc. One response might be to write my own memoir. And I may do that one day. But for now a simpler answer is to capture these memories piecemeal and see how much they resonate with others. An effort I now begin with this blog.