Do you think that I’d be suited in the world of culinary reviews? I’ve always dreamed of someone being interested in my convoluted film reviews, but maybe I’ll start with Paris café culture as a basis and work my way from there…

It’s just a little café that I want to get my teeth into, a stone’s throw from our place and a remarkable luxury in that it’s open on Sundays and until late at night, when the rest of the 16th sleeps and dreams of clouds with silver, gold and platinum credit card linings (exhausted by a day of frivolous spending and excessive promenading).

It goes by the name of Bo-Zinc, but we affectionately term it the ‘wanker café.’

(Excuse my language, Gran & Granddad, it’s just a new swanky French work I’ve picked up…)

This local café on the corner should be an absolute gem – with an interesting and reasonably innovative menu, affordable drinks, and a cosy and charming décor. In fact, we’ve theorised that this is the end product of when rebel-rebel youths of the 16th break from tradition and attend design school, instead of studying finance.

But… I find it an ordeal whenever I go there. Back in the heady, tobacco-smoke-clouded days of 2007, you could go to the café and watch on as the waiters leant back and smoked ciggies and practised looking like Orlando Bloom. There wasn’t much else to look at, no distraction in the form of a drink, as they weren’t likely to break from their posing to actually serve anyone. Now, in 2008 and strict anti-smoking laws, the new season’s fashion is for them to talk amongst themselves.

G & I were doing out laundry the other night, and wondered if we should stop by for a drink there to kill time. Until we realised that we probably wouldn’t get served before the half hour cycle of the washing machines was over, so we just brought a laptop and a DVD of The Office to convert the laundromat into our own personal lounge room…

Speaking about England, and small points of conversation that lead to absolute incredulity… a French friend announced the other day that he was really hoping to travel to London as soon as he could find some cheap train fares that corresponded with his work schedule.

The conversation flowed smoothly along those ‘Oh yes, and why is that?’ lines until he dropped the bombshell that he wanted to go to try authentic British fish and chips.

Guillaume and I were stopped in our tracks, only breaking our stunned freeze to lift Guillaume’s dropped jaw from the table and clarify that we had heard right.

‘For the fish and chips?’

All answers in affirmative, and an imaginary point is added to Bettina’s tally. The poor fellow wasn’t to have known that the desirability of fish and chips is an ongoing debate between us…

It all started in the kitchen of a dingy London flat and a United Nations congregation unanimously voting on the choice of the evening’s takeaway. We had a Mexican and an Austrian who had all spent time living in Australia, myself, my brother and Guillaume. It wasn’t only a clear winner (four in favour, one abstention) but a gleeful special treat for our Viennese companion visiting for the weekend.

They say it hurts the first time, and I think our enthusiasm for the greasy and excessively battered waif of a fish rubbed salt (and vinegar) in Guillaume’s wounds.

Not only did he not like it, but could see the respect he’d previously held for us evaporating and drifting off with the odours of the stodgy chips. Convinced there was a conspiracy afoot, he searched our faces for any signs that we were going to crack a smile, announce it to be April Fools Day and confess that we’d been pulling his leg.

No such luck. And with this recent shock revelation, I’m sure all the memories came flooding back to him…


Actually, going through my photos from that flat I managed to find a few other “culinary creations”… is it any wonder I now work with children? (I feel like a bit of a hypocrite telling them not to play with their food!) For the record, the “meal” on the right involved a crêpe! I can’t for the life of my remember why…

On airing my croque-monsieur complaints or quote unquote constructive criticism to Guillaume, it seems that a few essential ingredients were missing on my first foray into the world of French toasted cheese sandwiches. Firstly, and most obviously, France – but I was sure that the Swiss equivalent would have been suitable cheesy. Secondly, it seems that my café was a bit tight with their dairy products. I only had one slice of cheese, but as Guillaume describes it, there possibly should have been more:

‘First bread, cheese, ham, cream, cheese, bread, cream, cheese… no, wait, bread, cheese, ham, cheese, bread, cream, cheese… or even bread, cream, cheese, ham, bread, cream, cheese… eh, whatever you do, just top it with cream then cheese and the ham-cheese-cream combo in the middle is up to you…’

Now is it just me (or is there a general consensus) – but with that type of precise culinary directions, is there a market for him to launch his own cookbook? Celebrity chef in the making, I just know it!

It reminds me of a recipe from a Finnish friend for “Fashion Lady Academic Soup” which is complete with all the study and leisure activities in which you need to partake whilst waiting for the soup to cook and in between adding all the necessary ingredients over something like an eight-hour academic day and aperitif hour(s). Here’s to slow food!

Have you ever had a feeling of semi-anticipation about a glorified and/or typical national foodstuff only to find out that you’ve got the same back home under a different name?

Enter stage right the protagonist of this sordid tale, Monsieur Croque a.k.a Mr. Toasted Ham & Cheese Sandwich.

I had high hopes for my first croque-monsieur. This is because this is all we were ever taught to order in my first ever French lessons. We had it explained to us – ham, cheese, bread – but the way our teacher’s eyes glazed over in fond recollection made me think there was really something more to it.

There’s not. Ham, cheese, bread. Not even the most fantastic cheese or bread either (both fields in which France excels). More like primary school lunch plastic cheese and 15p a loaf Tesco bread.

Now I know that she just realised we’d never be anything more than students or budget backpackers…

Anyway, I do appreciate the sense of humour in the name. Not exactly the male version, but I did have a chuckle the first time I heard about the female companion version, the croquet-madame. But what’s the difference?

Well unlike French nouns, this is a little easier to determine gender. The “Madame” has eggs…

Woo-hoo-hoo! Three cheers for us! Or… should I say, three years for us! Guillaume and I are having an anniversary today! Yeah, yeah… boring. There’s not much amusing to say about it, so I’ll leave it at that. But it does get me onto the topic of luuurrrve…


This time two years ago we were overlooking Toulon…

I’ve been musing over this one for a while. I even cut it out and kept it, just because I found it so ludicrous. But, back in November, when I went to Venice, I spent my flight reading the Easyjet magazine from cover to cover. I’ve always been something of a fervent reader, so this comes as little surprise.

But this is the snippet that caught my attention: ‘A recent survey by holiday experts TripAdvisor found that the most romantic getaway for a weekend break was Marseilles, France. Must be all that bouillabaise [sic] being the food of love.’

Marseilles, hey? Fair enough. But bouillabaisse being the food of love? Could it contain oysters, perhaps? But then again, the French don’t regard oysters as an aphrodisiac (unlike ginger. I learnt that cultural difference the embarrassing way, being rapturous over ginger in the kitchen of Guillaume’s mother on our first meeting, all the while she’s wondering what kind of girl her son had found…)

I asked a few Marseillais friends and they confirmed my first suspicions – fish stew ain’t conducive to amour. In fact, after a bowl of bouillabaisse, you’ll only want to go to bed to sleep in off. Such was the mythological reputation of the soup too, apparently in Roman lore, Venus fed the stuff to Vulcan so that she could romp with Mars as her blacksmith husband slept.

The food of other’s love? I don’t think that’s quite the catchiest jingle…

My theory (totally unsupported, and mocked by any French person I’ve so far suggested it to), is of an intentional misspelling of bouillabaisse to emphasise the baise. For while un baiser still means ‘a kiss’, the verb baiser no longer means ‘to kiss’ (try embrasser instead!), but to make love.

Was it supposed to be a play on words for some sort of a boiling-hot screw? Who knows…


… living in Hyères, with the Mediterranean as our backyard!

When the grand dames of Paris are out in full force in their big fur coats with their little fur-coated dogs and designer paper bags of all sizes, one realises that it’s high time for good will and reflection on the year just gone… and as I’ve been in France for just over six months now, I also thought a little reflection was timely (by way of a disclaimer: any arising good will is purely coincidental).

Perhaps “Things I have learned in France” would be an apt title.

Here it goes…

• My life is now all the richer for knowing what a K-way and cagoule are (the first, pronounced “ka-way”, is about as necessary as a 2-Second Tent for any French summer holiday. Basically it’s a rain jacket in a bum bag. Even though I’ve succumbed to other French “must haves”, you’ll never see this little black duck toting a K-way. The second is a faceless balaclava, and is considered tongue-in-cheek as one of the regional specialities of the Savoy).

• I’ve come to the realisation that it’s not just France (or Russia) per se, but bureaucracy that frustrates life the world over. As Guillaume and I often say, if you want to make something close to impossible to achieve – in Britain, illegalise it; in France, bureaucratise it.

• The expression vachement has nothing to do with cows, but is instead slang for ‘amazingly’ or ‘extremely.’

• There is no rush to eat galette des rois on the Epiphany weekend. Oh no, far from it. It’s February, we now have seven fèves, and I don’t see any sign of it abating. I laugh now to think that I was worried that they were all going to go to waste after January 6…

To complete my “research on stressful shopping experiences”, we also tried to do our once-in-six-months mega-shop at a nearby Carrefour hypermarket on the afternoon of December 31st. Just as we started loading up our trolley, an announcement came over the loud speakers: ‘Today we have the special closing time of 6pm. Registers will close in 30 minutes.’ People subsequently went nuts and after ten frantic minutes trying to get everything we needed, Guillaume just headed for the checkout to wait.

I just thought I’d grab a few more items, but I got caught in the grocery gridlock. It was insane. No one was moving anywhere, and no one wanted to give any ground. It was just a stationary mash of bodies and trolleys. There were amazing displays of solidarity though; people were passing their items over the heads of others, including random strangers in the chain, to friends similarly waiting in line with the trolley. The lines went to the end of aisles, and I don’t see how anyone could have got out of there before midnight.

Caught in the crowds, I began visualising that everyone would still be there prior to the stroke of midnight. I envisaged that there would be a huge countdown, and then people would start kissing each other and cracking open warm bottles of champagne and eating whatever happened to be in their aisle for an hors d’oeuvre. We’d all be friends for the coming year, whereas back in 2007 we were just hostile bodies pushed together for two-for-one Christmas chocolates, washing detergent and orange juice.

In fact, every time (well… both times) we’ve been to Carrefour it’s been stressful. The first time was a Saturday morning following payday, and that was the second. Of course we should have gone earlier, but it was much nicer to spend the morning ice-skating!

Our strategy worked well though – I was able to backtrack and dash through an empty aisle, leap over a fire exit barrier, and land our extra items on the conveyor belt just as the cashier was serving Guillaume, who was in turn frazzled from his anxious wait.

As we left, there was an angry man arguing with the shop security. “But you didn’t advertise on the radio that you were closing earlier!” We shook our heads wistfully, that man didn’t realise how lucky he was to be spared the inferno within…

Shortly after Christmas, trying to describe our feast in a telephone call to my parents, I used some throwaway line like ‘we ate like pigs… if only pigs ate their own kind…’

There was a brief moment of contemplative silence as the comment sunk in, both on their end and mine, then I revised it to ‘well, actually, we ate exactly like pigs that happened to have access to oysters and ducks…’

This got me thinking about the significant amount of pork in the French diet, which in turn reminded me of an article I read last year about pork soup in French homeless shelters.

Does anyone else remember this story? Apparently the group SDF (Solidarité des Français or Solidarity of the French), who is associated with the far-right Bloc Identitaire, has been handing out the soupe au cochon dubbed “Identity soup” to homeless people (or Sans Domicile Fixe - also SDF) since 2004. The issue only received extensive media coverage after it was banned in Strasbourg in January 2006. A year later, however, a Paris judge ruled that the organisation could not be accused of discrimination as there wasn’t any evidence that they had refused to serve Jews and Muslims (despite both not being able to eat pork for religious reasons).

Here is an excerpt from The Guardian article of January 3, 2007:

…However, the SDF website leaves no doubt about the group’s intentions. As well as the recipe for pork soup it advises how it should be served - with bread and wine - in a “Gallic atmosphere” with no queues. “The only condition to eat with us: to eat pig,” it reads, concluding: “Attention, cheese, dessert, coffee, clothes, snacks go with the pig soup: no pig soup, no dessert - the only rule of our action: our own before the others”…

They’re still at it, I see, meeting at Montparnasse on a weekly basis during the winter. Reading about it again makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable as it seems that pork soup is the essential ingredient for some sort of deluded Gallic pastoral myth of creation. Of course they can’t write about exclusion, but instead they write about inclusion in such epic nationalistic terms. Such a load of tripe… although according to this blog, it marks a return to medieval rhetoric correlating pork with Christianity.

Who says that history doesn’t repeat itself?

On a happier note – a Chinese stamp that celebrates the Year of the Pig with a sweet-and-sour pork flavoured stamp. Scratch the front or lick the back for a taste!

So while I’m still not in a French class (gimme a break, it’s only a few days into the New Year, I’m working on it!) and feeling denser and dimmer by the day, I’m feeling pressured to share the things I’m actually learning here (and diminishing the need to refer to any other French culture blog… but to any of the authors of other French culture blogs, I can hear you sigh now and observe “Oh, her first Noël in France, that’s cute, I remember mine…”)

Anyway – sorry to get off track, I’ll get back on topic quickly because it involves desserts.

But basically I was only previously aware of Epiphany because I had heard of the Three Kings who came from “Orient-Ah” (or so I’ve sung for years), and their remains are now located in Cologne Cathedral… but that was about it. I never knew why the January 6th commemoration had anything to do with the Magi, but on further reading it seems that this was when they turned up bearing belated birthday gifts. Now this is something I can relate to – maybe I should adopt an Epiphany attitude to all birthdays, and feel comfortable about my tardiness rather than fret about it…

This holiday is celebrated in France with a specific type of cake called galette des rois. But let’s ease into things slowly.

Galette: at any other time of the year, this conjures up images of Brittany. Galettes are salty buckwheat flour crêpes or alternately ‘galettes bretonnes‘ shortbread biscuits, however…

Galette des rois: is what you get if you imagine the Magi went to Bethlehem via Brittany (stocking up on cider perhaps?), got inspired and fused some frankincense and myrrh exoticism with a Celtic staple, and voila! No, this isn’t the case at all, I’m just being silly. This “king’s cake” is puff-pastry and almond paste affair, made memorable by the inclusion of a…

Fève: which is literally a broad bean, but has morphed on this holiday to become a porcelain bean, or porcelain baby Jesus, or porcelain anything really. Can be collected, and can be designer (in Paris, of course dahling!)

Frangipane: a new word in my vocabulary – this is what I was sent to get from the bakery this morning (“but don’t I want a galette des rois?”). Asking for frangipane apparently ensures that the clueless foreigner gets the almond galette rather than the brioche galette. On further research (food, unbelievably, isn’t Guillaume’s strong point), it emerges that frangipane is an almond cream mix of sugar, butter and eggs, added with pastry cream to make it fluffy.

The galette des rois is traditionally divvied up by the youngest going under the table to allocate the slices of cake (so even if the fève is obviously in a piece, it is still fairly distributed). Whoever gets the piece with the fève can choose their king or queen. That person gets the golden cardboard crown that comes with the galette. Aww…

If I was ever to get caught up in the ebb and flow of life, and forget where I was – rest assured I could always turn to the back of a trashy TV guide magazine, see the mail order foie gras advertisements and remember “Ahh, yes… France.”

It was one of those “only in France” moments when I saw that rather than 50 steak knives for £7.99 or latest mobile phone ringtones, the humble French punter can have three blocs de foie gras de canard for only 19,90€. My, my – not only but also! It combines the finest of French traditions; just take a little of the recently revived popular 1960s French game show Intervilles with the ducks, geese and truffles of the Périgord – and have yourself the ultimate night in.

This is not going to be a post about an evening watching a shaky home video of the family matriarchs demonstrating the process of making foie gras to future generations. Instead, I want to talk about raclette.

I’m not sure what I’ve got myself in for, because twice over the weekend it had been revealed in separate company that I’d never before had raclette. Swiss-style fondue (cheese) – yes; but raclette, Bourguignon-style fondue (oil) or Bouillon fondue – no. Well… yes for the latter, but only in China.

Indignation at my lack of raclette turned to a hasty and hearty promise that we’d sample some on my next visit. Twice.

It’s shaping up to be a cheesy January…

The third conversation about raclette offered something more concrete – coincidently it was our meal for the Christmas evening of the 24th. A brief word for the uninitiated – raclette consists of a central heating device and individual toasting trays. Slap a slab of cheese onto the grilling plate, place in under the flame and then choose your munitions. Once the cheese is liquid, slide and slop it over the unsuspecting arrangement of cold meats, steamed potato, sliced mushroom and cherry tomatoes. Imagine a pizza without a base, with the ingredients drowned in a river of salted or herbed cow’s milk cheese.

For the record: there were no serious contenders this year for the family record of 16 slices of cheese…

Merry Christmas!