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.