the expats

We left Luxembourg almost exactly two years ago, a predawn drive to the airport, then onto Geneva and a week in the Alps. One evening, I noticed that Alex seemed to be in a serious conversation with another boy—in French—dragging their sleds up the hill. I later asked Alex if he understood the boy. "No," he told me, unfazed. "But sometimes, Daddy, when people ask me things in French that I don't understand, I just nod and say 'oui.'" He had learned how to be an expat, just as we were leaving.

But before we moved, I'd started going to cafes downtown—mostly Coffee Lounge, on rue de la Poste—with my computer, after school drop-off. I opened a new word-processing document, and typed THE EXPATS on page 1. I kept typing until I'd finished a novel.

THE EXPATS is, by many people's accounts, an exciting read—it's an espionage thriller. My literary agent found not only an American publisher for it, Crown, but also Faber and Faber in the U.K., and another dozen international publishers (most of Western Europe, plus a few countries elsewhere) as well as a film option. But THE EXPATS is also a book about what it's really like to be an expat, and a parent, and married.

So I'm no longer Cooking in Luxembourg; I'm now http://www.chrispavone.com/. As a way of leaving this blogspot, I want to include a short passage from near the end of the book—edited slightly to remove some spoiler sentences (it is, after all, a thriller)—about leaving, something I've done a lot of in the past few years, always more bitter than sweet . . .

* * *

Luxembourg seemed empty in mid-August. Or empty of expats. Kate’s friends were all on family holidays—the Americans in America, the Europeans in rented seaside cottages in Sweden, or whitewashed villas in the mountains of Spain, or pastels with pools in UmbrKate walked around the old town, the familiar faces of the shopkeepers, the vendors in the Place Guillaume market, the waitresses on their cigarette breaks, the palace guards. All these people whose names she didn’t know, who were part of the texture of her life. She felt like she should say farewell to each and every one of them.

She wished her friends were here, now. She felt the urge to sit in a café with Claire and Cristina and Sophia, have a final round of coffee, a final round of hugs. But it was probably better this way. She hated goodbyes.

Kate returned to the apartment, a ham sandwich in a wax-paper bag, and resumed the task of sorting through the boys’ toys, picking out the discards, the donations, the keepers. They were with Dexter at the pirate-ship playground, for the last time.

It would be easier, Kate knew, the second time around. The hard parts would be less hard, the fun parts more fun. Like with the second kid, Ben: it would be less intimidating, less difficult, less bewildering, with the benefit of the prior experience.

Kate looked out the window at the expansive view, the broad swath of Europe in her sight line, this brief home of hers। Tears welled in her eyes। She felt a heavy weight of despair at the end of this. At the inexorable march of her life forward, toward its inevitable end.

the end is near

The sun came out today, for what feels like the first time in weeks. The last of the golden leaves are still clinging to the trees, but every gust of wind releases fluttering waves of them, dropping to the wet sidewalks, sticking together in slick masses. Last weekend, Alex slipped in one of these, a cartoon spill, and came up damp and hurt and crying.

Christmas is being set up here in Luxembourg: a handful of wooden stalls for the market have been parked in the Place d'Armes--there will be dozens--and a couple of towering trees have been installed, but as yet they're undecorated. School has sent out an email that itemizes all the Christmas and St. Nicholas activities--there are 5 events--in between increasingly frantic missives about the outbreak of H1N1 (aka swine flu) with references to partial and full school closures, and vague allusions to doomsday.

The end seems to be hurtling toward us: the end of the school term and calendar year; hopefully not the end of the world; but definitely the end of this adventure. It's already been a month since we decided to go back to New York, lured by an exciting new job for Madeline (it's just like 18 months ago, in reverse). But it's not exciting, going home. Coming here was exciting. Going home is something else--it's comfortable. It's nice.

What's not nice is moving; moving is tedious. We've met with a relocation company, two movers, a cleaning service, and a painter; we've sent registered letters; started sorting through our possessions, yet again, trying to weed out at least as much as we've added. We've created "for sale" lists (with photos!), and have already collected (and spent!) some cash for our television. We've promised away our beloved stab mixer, which back in New York we will have to refer to by the much more pedestrian "immersion blender." I spent the better part of today hunting through our financial records and filling out forms for rental applications--we need to rent a place to live, in NYC, without being there! No, this isn't exciting.

And the thing of it is: it was just beginning to get fun here. We have friends, and something that resembles a social life. We travel all the time--Paris last weekend, Amsterdam next. We zip around in our big German car, crashing into stationary objects. (Does anyone want to buy a banged-up Audi?) We no longer have to learn how to do everything, except the new thing we need to learn, all of a sudden, how to do: leave.

a recipe: duck breast

One of the things I will miss is that magret du canard here costs about the same as chicken breast. I've always loved duck, and I've recruited Alex as an ally--"I want the duck!" he announces in brasseries--so I've been making a lot of duck breasts. But the other night, rushed, I didn't let the cooked pieces sit long enough before slicing them. Which meant that a lot of the juices escaped into the plate, forming pink pools. "What's this?" Alex asked. I told him that it was mostly blood. He looked at me like I'm crazy. "Blood!?" He looked down at his plate, then up at me. I thought he was about to flip out. "Blood is delicious!" he exclaimed.

A duck breast can be finished so many ways, but my favorites are sweet-tart combos: orange sauce (see my earlier entry); a spice-honey glaze; some reduced balsamic vinegar; or even just a heaping spoonful of well-made preserves. Or, as I made it for the children, finished with nothing at all.

duck breast

salt and pepper

Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Score the fat of the duck breast with a knife in a crosshatch pattern, which will allow it (the fat) to shrink during cooking without shriveling and disfiguring your whole operation; but be careful not to cut into the meat. Then do the normal thing with salt and pepper.

Put the breast in a nonstick pan, skin side down. Raise the heat to medium-high, and let cook for a couple of minutes, at which point there will be a pool of fat in the pan. Carefully--carefully! it's bubbling-hot spattering fat!!--pour this duck fat out of the pan and into something to allow it to cool before you throw it away (or before you strain it and keep it and use it for other things, like smearing on country bread before toasting). Let cook another couple of minutes, and again pour off the fat. Do this until the skin has become a deep caramel color, and crisped up, and looks irresistible.

Now flip the thing, and let the flesh side sear for just a minute. Move the whole shebang into your hot oven, and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, and let sit at least 5 minutes for the juices to settle. Or if you want to see how your children react to a pool of duck blood, just slice and serve and hope for the best.

london

We are astounded--maybe appalled?--to discover that our suite is huge: two bedrooms plus a large sitting room and a big superfluous kitchen and a voluminous hall, at the far end of which are little-boy-size doors that open onto the dumbwaiter, from whence room-service breakfast arrives. This might be the greatest thing the children have ever seen. "This," Alex says, "is our best hotel. Right, Daddy?" A Danish friend in Luxembourg, who's also in London this weekend, suggested we'd enjoy her favored hotel in Sloane Street, and she'd call and get us a good rate, and so here we are, enjoying our huge suite on a good rate.

It is a weekday; Madeline is working. So the boys and I walk around the corner to pristine, elegant Cadogan Square, with its matched-set facades of red brick presiding over the leafy park. We take quiet residential streets and poke down their serene mews to look at their neat little houses, more matched sets. We pass the painfully chic furnishing shops in Walton Street, and the tight clusters of inviting-looking restaurants that span the standard world-capital repertoire: the spare sushi temples, the cozy French cafes, the hyper-modern contemporary Italian trattorias. We emerge onto the broad panorama of Cromwell Road with the Victoria & Albert spread out on the right, and the Natural History Museum in front of the Science Museum on the left. We were at Science yesterday; this morning, the boys and I see the dinosaur fossils and stuffed birds of Natural History, not terribly different from the New York version.

After lunch we take the Tube to Notting Hill Gate, near the northwest corner of Kensington Gardens, to visit the Princess Diana Memorial Playground, which is anchored around a pirate ship, just like the central playground in Luxembourg. It is cool and windy and damp, occasionally drizzling; the cappuccino from the in-park cafe doesn't succeed in warming me up. We return Underground to Oxford Circus, then fight our way down Regent Street to Hamley's. Six stories of toys. Filled with salespeople whose job it is to demonstrate toys. One of them gets down onto the floor with Sam and Alex and an intimidating Star Wars vehicle. He explains that it's his JOB to play with toys ALL DAY. The boys are awed. Alex admits to me that he's afraid such a job would be too hard for him. "Because I'd want to take breaks," he explains, "so I could watch TV."

Then it's pouring. We dodge the damp pedestrian traffic and the terrifying vehicular traffic--too fast, and always coming from the wrong direction--down to Piccadilly Circus, for the subway back to Sloane Square and a huge-suite respite. Then at dusk we set out through the leafy streets of Chelsea. Each block varies the theme of restrained upscalery, modestly proportioned, in contrast to the immodest mansions on the other side of the hotel, in Belgravia. Everything in this city seems to come in matched sets. The Chelsea one looks like an idealized version of middle-class living, requiring upper-class income.

It is lightly drizzling now, maybe misting (do the English have dozens of words for rain, like Eskimos do for snow?) and streetlamps are lit, and half the vehicles seem to be taxis; it looks and feels very London to me. When we come out of Whiteheads Grove onto the semi-commercial Cale Street, I spot what I hope is our restaurant. There's a type of light--warm, glowing, soft--that seeps through the large windows of restaurants that I want to be in, and that's what's coming from the plate glass across the street. An attractive foursome of not-too-well-dressed people is hurrying in, out of the damp, the door held by a smiling hostess. Yes, I see the sign, this is Tom's Kitchen. Yes, I can see already, this is a place I want to be. Subway-tile walls, and tables that are slabs of warm wood, and soft linens, and that amber lighting, and a limitless number of staff who seem to be bringing things to us. And they're all speaking English.

This is my first visit to London. It surprises my friends, especially those from London, that I've never before been here. When I lived in New York (I say that as if it was brief and long ago, don't I? It was 40 years, until last), it didn't seem worth the effort and expense and expenditure of vacation days to cross the Atlantic just to visit another expensive cosmopolitan city where everyone spoke English and rode the subway, and it was cold half the year. I already had that. I wanted French, or a wintertime beach, or whatever--I wanted different.

Now, though? Now, I live different. Now, I want exactly what I didn't want from New York. I want a subway ride from one bustling neighborhood to another. I want crowded streets filled with conversations I can easily eavesdrop. I want chic shops with no communication barriers. I want Chinatown and hail-able taxis and a whiff--just a faint one, please--of street crime. I want the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what to expect, even though I've never seen it before. What I want is a different version of New York.

I love London.

year 2

The maître d' from Bacchus is standing in the rue du Marché aux Herbes, a half-block away, smoking a cigarette. "Bonsoir!" he calls, waving. "Bonsoir!" I yell back, and continue walking Charlie Brown around the palace (which the boys and I finally have the chance to tour; the pic here is from the palace's yard). In the Place Guillaume market, the woman who sells the roast chickens asks if I've had a good summer; she says it's been too quiet in the mornings, too busy at noon. At the coffee store, as the machine grinds the beans, the counter-girl hands me some candies. "Pour les enfants," she explains, even though those children are not with me.

Sam and Alex have started a new school: we were not even on European soil for 48 hours when we dropped them off at their first day at the International School of Luxembourg; they are unfazed. There are familiar faces, of both the child and the grown-up variety, including some who defected from St. George's to ISL. There are also familiar faces at the other places I go: at the supermarkets and bakeries and butchers; on the shopping street of the Grand Rue and in the cafés of our own little rue de l'Eau; at the Just Move centre de fitness and at the Kockelscheuer tennis courts, where I shake the hands of not one or two but four different Swedish tennis coaches. I never imagined that one day I'd have such a broad acquaintance among Luxembourg-resident Swedish tennis coaches.

I need a haircut, and I know I must get to Coiffure Fred by mid-morning, before the appointment-only lunchtime hours. For good ricotta, I walk over to Galli y Galli, in the rue Beaumont, where I'm prepared for my interaction to involve pseudo-talking in French, Italian, and English. The boys learned to ride two-wheelers this summer, and the long, safe, flat bike path that we now need is going to be found in Bertrange, in a completely sign-less park that we'll access by walking through the parking lot of a small apartment building. None of these are things that I knew a year ago.

The car has come down with a minor ailment: the directional signals don't work. I'm never going to be someone who's comfortable at garages--I barely know where to put the gas--and the 100 percent absence of English chez le garagiste isn't exactly an enticement. (Plus, the guy who works the customer-service desk might want to pick up the thread of our previous conversation: how everything in Luxembourg is better than everything in the United States.) But I know roughly how to say what I need to say, and I've done this before. I've done most of it before. Because I live here.

a sub-recipe: sauce orange

It was 1983 or 1984 when I went on a dinner-and-a-movie date that involved duck à l'orange. The movie may have been that year's Woody Allen, or something along the lines of Terms of Endearment; I'm pretty sure we went to the Baronet and Coronet, though it could have been another of the big theaters that used to be clustered on Third Avenue, near Bloomingdale's. The French restaurant was on Lexington. When we left, it was snowing.

I remember this a quarter-century later because roast duck with orange sauce is a special-occasion dish, just as special as going on a date to a French restaurant when you're fifteen. Roasting a duck isn't something I want to do on a Wednesday night; actually, I'm fine with roasting the thing, but what I really don't want is any responsibility for the ensuing Superfund-worthy mess. Making orange sauce, however, is. In the past year, I've bought at least three dozen rotisserie chickens from the Wednesday-and-Saturday market in the Place Guillaume; it's a sort-of home-cooked meal that I don't have to actually cook. Though these chickens are delicious--especially the large poulets fermiers--even a great roast chicken can become boring. Enter orange sauce. For chicken. On a Wednesday night. It takes 5 minutes.

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 shallot, thinly sliced

1 garlic clove, minced

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons cider or sherry vinegar

2 tablespoons orange-flavored liqueur (Cointreau, Grand Marnier, or, in a pinch, triple sec)

1/4 cup orange preserves

1/4 cup orange juice

1/2 cup chicken or veal stock, or 1 tablespoon demi-glace dissolved in 2 tablespoons hot water

Salt and pepper to taste

In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter. Add the shallot, and sauté until golden. Add the garlic and cook another minute. Add the honey, vinegar, liqueur, preserves, juice, and stock. Raise the heat to high, bring to a simmer, and cook until reduced to a thick syrup, which will take a few minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper, remove from the heat, and stir in the remaining butter. Voilà!

I use the sauce thusly: I buy a rotisserie chicken. I preheat the broiler, cut up the chicken, put it in a roasting pan skin-side up, and brush it with the sauce. I broil it until the skin begins to blister and the sauce to burn just a little bit, then I flip it, slather on more sauce, and broil again until just before it burns. Remove it from the oven, brush on more sauce, and serve.

strasbourg

It is 8:30 Saturday night. We have finished our Alsatian dinner at Chez Yvonne, a block away. Alex and his grandfather are doing pretend-karate--"Hi-yah!"--on the cobblestones in the gloaming, in the wide-open place in front of the gothic cathedral. The construction was begun in the 12th century; for more than 100 years, it was the tallest building in the world. We are staying in the aptly named Hotel Cathédral; we visit the also apt Musée de la Cathédral. It is a cathedral-intensive visit. During our circumambulation of the interior, Alex takes me by the hand. "Daddy, come with me, over to this cross. I have some questions about Jesus." Oy.

Strasbourg is stunning, looking and sounding and tasting like France and Germany at the same time. On this street, half-timber houses painted in the deep pigments of the Black Forest; on that square, the severe lines of Parisian hôtels particuliers. There are narrow cobblestone streets and the narrow river Ill with swimming ducklings and a spinning drawbridge and a canal lock. There are outdoor tables everywhere, serving every manner of pork--shoulders and chops, knuckles and feet, cheeks and bellies. The weather is absolutely perfect.

We take a ride in a tourist mini-train, listening through headphones to the English-version, British-accented guide. (Alex, shaking his head in awe: "She knows everything!") Sam, despite his broken arm, climbs to the observation deck halfway up the cathedral, and also climbs the jungle gym at a playground in an isle in the river. We don't accomplish all that much in the way of sightseeing--we never do--in our under-48-hours visit. We seem to be always heading toward, departing from, or in the midst of a meal or snack; it's especially noticeable while traveling just how frequently little boys must be fed. 

Then we are back in the car, listening to the another British-accented voice, the GPS "map lady," directing us from the souterrain parking under the Place Gutenberg in Strasbourg to the souterrain parking under 22, rue de l'Eau, Luxembourg. Bourg to bourg, parking to parking, 2 hours exactly. Another successful weekend abroad.

broken arm!

There were 3 possible expenditure categories for our E.R. visit: (1) parking, subterranean, 2 hours 15 minutes; (2) prescription painkillers, two types, one week's worth of each; and (3) doctor's fees and x-ray costs. And here are the actual expenditures: (1) €2,40 for parking; (2) €1,78 for medicine; and (3) €0 for the healthcare. I was fully aware that we live in a socialized-medicine type of place, but I still didn't see it coming that pocket change for parking would be the biggest expense.

Poor Sam. He fell out of a high climbing apparatus at a playground--a thing that, obviously, is meant to be fallen out of: it's a log suspended horizontally by rope, and it jiggles dangerously when you walk on it. It's Sam-trapment. He fell for it, and fell out of it, landing from 6 feet up on his arm, and then there we were, at the clinique pediatrique of the municipal hospital, an emergency room for children. We didn't fill out any forms. The receptionist took a 30-second Q&A and copied down Sam's social security number--the Luxembourg one, from a nicely laminated card--and sent us to the waiting room. Then a nurse, then a doctor, then the x-ray technician, then back to the doctor, all the while Sam quiet and morose and in a lot of pain, and Alex reminiscing proudly about his one and only hospital visit, back on Long Island, "when I cracked my eye open" (i.e., got a cut near his eye) and "needed surgery" (i.e., a few stitches).

If there's one thing that has filled me with dread about living abroad, it's this situation: my child is hurt, and I'm not understanding what's going on. Luckily, the only person we encountered at the hospital who spoke no English whatsoever was the x-ray technician; she was barking at Sam in Luxembourgeois, but he got the point. Throughout the experience, I had to use a lot more French than was ideal for all parties concerned. But we all muddled through, and I don't feel like I missed anything important.

But the doctors did: the x-rays of his humerus, where the pain was, were all clear, and we were sent away with a sling and painkillers and a return visit in 4 days. At which point we discovered that it's Sam's ulna that's fractured, at the elbow. Not a spot that was x-rayed during the first go-round. Ah well.

Sam is the first in our family to wear a cast; he can't remember anyone at school wearing one. So he's a celebrity, with everyone exclaiming, "Sam! What happened?!" He immediately tired of answering, but I think he likes the asking. He's also exhausted by lugging the heavy cast around, and it hurts his neck, but he's adapted quickly to having the use of only one arm: he can replace magic-marker caps, get his shoes on and off, pull up his pants. And at the playground in Strasbourg this weekend, he started climbing again, a mere two days after his plaster set. We were sort of hoping that the broken arm would teach him a lesson, but it hasn't. Or perhaps it has, but it's a different lesson than we were hoping for.

going dutch

  I was sipping a cappuccino in the kitchen of the split-level house, in a village near the Germany-Luxembourg border. Fifteen children were entertaining themselves at the birthday party in other rooms; I could hear Alex's unrestrained laugh of hilarity from somewhere. Here in the kitchen, a dozen adults were sipping and talking. In Dutch. 

Somehow I've fallen in with a crowd from the Netherlands. When I'm around, they mostly speak English, and with barely any accent, much easier for me to understand than a lot of the native tongue I hear from England, Ireland, and Scotland. And it's from all these Dutch that I came to know about Keukenhof, supposedly the largest flower garden in the world, in Holland. (To clarify: the Netherlands is a country of 12 provinces, 2 of which are South Holland and North Holland, which contain most of the Netherlands cities that people like me have heard of. At some point in childhood, I was led to believe that the Netherlands=Holland, but it's simply not true. The language and the people are both Dutch, which I think I already knew, but the whole thing confused me--in particular, how did Denmark and Danes and Danish fit in? [answer: different place, different people, different language/pastry]--until very recently.) And what better place to go with my mother and her friend Harriet?

It was a long drive north through Belgium, skirting Brussels and Antwerp, then into the Netherlands, past Rotterdam and the Hague, heading toward Amsterdam on a road parallel to the North Sea beaches a few miles away--a lot of famous-but-unknown-to-me places. Windmills and canals everywhere, fields filled with cows and sheep and an immense population of fluffy little lambs, and of course with flowering bulbs--daffodils and hyacinths and tulips, all planted in long, straight rows on the flat-as-a-board earth. A color-block landscape painted by a pointillist.

The traffic was horrific--heading-to-the-Hamptons-Memorial-Day-weekend horrific, albeit without the SUVs. All of Europe seemed to be on Easter break this sunny day, heading to this famous garden at the height of tulip season. Teenagers wearing Day-Glo vests were directing traffic to park in fallow fields, like at an over-capacity-crowd championship game. The cost of the tickets was considerable; the scope of the gardens was impressive; the variety of tulips was staggering. But the boys were relatively unimpressed until we found the garden maze. I was compelled to wend through it ten times while Sam mastered every route and Alex never stopped talking. 

We stayed two nights in Delft, from whence the blue-painted plates. Canals popping up (rather, under) like mad. Nearly every house made of brick, three or four stories high. They started building what they call the New Church in the fourteenth century; the Old Church is of course older. It's a lovely little old city. And, like Gouda a few miles away, I had no idea it was a city; just thought it was a thing in the kitchen.

a recipe: penne with white asparagus and fresh morels

Tulip season is also asparagus season, and asparagus is everywhere here in Luxembourg, especially the big thick stalks of white asparagus. I came across the first batch a few weeks ago at a tidy little primeur near our apartment, and bought a bunch. While the cashier was weighing them, I grabbed a blood orange, and she beamed at me. "Très bon, Monsieur," she said, congratulating me on my fruit. "Pour la sauce!" 

She was correct, for that bunch. But this recipe is something different, a variation on what I used to have at a restaurant in the West Village in the early nineties, now gone. It had a bar on the ground floor and the dining tables downstairs, in a glass-roofed subterranean room in the courtyard. They served the asparagus cut in the same shape as the noodle, and in the same color--both green--and hence a confusing dish. That tickled me then, and it still tickles me now.

1 bunch white asparagus

1 bunch scallions, white and light green parts sliced thin, dark green parts reserved

1 small onion, quartered

1 carrot, quartered

1 herb sachet (I used parsley, thyme, a bay leaf, and a few peppercorns)

Salt

Olive oil

Butter

1 heaping handful fresh morels, cleaned

Freshly ground black pepper

Splash of white wine or vermouth

Penne

Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

The first thing to do is blanch the asparagus and make its stock. So bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil while you trim the asparagus, saving all trimmings: snap off and reserve the thickest part of the stalk, then peel the tough outer skin from the remainder. Cut the peeled stalks and heads into penne-sized pieces, keeping the head pieces separate from the stalk pieces.

When the water comes to a boil, drop in the stalk pieces and cook for a couple minutes, then add the head pieces. Let cook another 2 minutes, then try a piece--it should still be firm, but cooked through to edibility. When done, remove with a slotted spoon to an ice bath, allow to cool, then drain. With the water still aboil, dump in your asparagus trimmings, dark green parts of the scallion, quartered onion, chopped carrot, and herb sachet. Let boil away while you continue with the other steps.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil for the pasta. In a very large saucepan, heat a slick of oil and a tablespoon of butter over medium-high flame. Add the morels, season with salt and pepper, and saute for just a minute; remove with a slotted spoon to a large bowl. Replenish the oil and butter, add the scallion slices, season, saute until golden, then remove to the bowl with the morels. Replenish the oil and butter, add the reserved asparagus, and saute for a minute, until lightly golden, then remove to the bowl. Deglaze the pan with the wine, and empty the pan into the bowl. Don't wash this pan.

Cook the penne until a bit firmer than al dente, then drain, reserving the pasta cooking liquid.

By this point, your asparagus boiling water should have reduced down to a rich stock. Strain it from the medium pot into the big pan, and boil over high heat until reduced to 3/4 cup. Add the firm-ish pasta to this liquid, and finish cooking for another couple of minutes, giving the penne the opportunity to absorb all that asparagus flavor. When they're done, add the reserved asparagus, morels, scallions, and any liquid in that bowl, and stir around for a minute. Add salt and pepper to taste, and then a big handful of grated cheese. If the whole mixture has gotten too thick, mix in a bit of the pasta cooking water. Serve with more cheese on the side, and, in the middle of the table, tulips.

weekend in paris

Explicit content advisory: If you haven't been to Paris recently, or you're not planning on going soon, this will be aggressively uninteresting. 

As a Christmas present, Madeline sent me to Paris, by myself--no children, no cooking, no marching around a European capital in the cold, looking for a playground and a children's menu. So what I did was march around a European capital in the cold, looking for a grown-up's menu and some things to buy for children. Here's what I now have to offer:

A Book to Read if What You're After Is History of Parisian Personages: On the two-hour train ride from Lux, I read Edmund White's The Flâneur, which I was led to believe--by the title and subtitle (A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris) not to mention the jacket copy ("an exhilarating adventure")--would be about the exhilarating adventure of strolling through Paris. Now, I have to admit that I've written my fair share of book-jacket copy, which often involves a certain degree of, um, exaggeration, often consisting of appending effusive modifiers to anywhere they might possibly stick: to nouns, to verbs, to other modifiers, and even (if you're a real pro) to the occasional preposition. You name it, you can also name it better, livelier, lyrical, ground-breaking, downright brilliant. But The Flâneur's jacket is misleading on a whole different level: this book is simply not about what it claims to be about. What it's about is strolling through the history of Paris, which is a different thing. For some people, it might be a very interesting thing--a more interesting thing. But it's not the thing I wanted to read, before I set off on the exhilarating adventure of strolling through Paris.

A Place to Go for Sunday Brunch: Even though the book disappointed me, it did propose an intriguing question: what makes a place a big city? (Intriguing, though perhaps meaningless.) As soon as I got off the TGV in the Gare de l'Est, I realized one of the things a big city means to me: it's a place where everyone takes the subway. It was brutally cold, and windy, and it was noon and I was hungry. So instead of walking a half-hour, I took the Metro a few stops, to get myself to the Marché aux Enfants Rouges, a little covered market in the north Marais. We've now been to not a few European markets, and the territory is pretty familiar: the cheesemonger, the butcher, the fruits and vegetables, repeating themselves like the chain stores on Route 9 in north Jersey. But here in Paris, another big-city difference from the small-city markets: a Japanese stall, with fresh-cut sushi as well as hot dishes, cheap, people huddled at picnic tables inside big flaps of weather-resistant plastic. 

But the Japanese stall was not where I was headed; I was going to l'Estimanet d'Arômes et Cépages, a little eatery in a corner of the market, far from any actual street. (And far from any bathroom: the restaurant's restroom is nothing more than the common facilities for the market.) It's a nice little place, with a laid-back atmosphere that feels more Seattle or East Village than Paris. My food was not extraordinary--a not-rich-enough mushroom soup, and a pig's foot that required a huge effort to get at the edible meat. But I passed this way again 48 hours later, on my way back to the gare, and noticed that it was pleasantly mobbed, and that Sunday brunch here means charcuterie, and that this is what the place is there for, and probably worth going to, because it looked like everybody knew they were in the place to be, for a Sunday brunch of charcuterie.

Charcuterie alone isn't enough for me; there's plenty of good ham in Europe. But at Sunday midday this market was bustling, and the street outside, rue de Bretagne, was fantastic: within the space of 50 yards, there were 3 separate shops--the butcher, the baker, and the maître volailleur ("master poulterer": what a spectacular claim!)--each with lines of dozens of people on the sidewalk. Everyone seemed to be carrying baguettes and cut flowers and two or three lit cigarettes plus a dog's leash, and talking to one another, and there was a catercorner face-off of packed cafés, and various wares to browse or buy, and as much as anyplace I've ever been in Paris, it felt like a little village in the middle of the city. This was a nice place to be.

A Place to Buy Antique Table Linens: Speaking of a little village, the Village St-Paul, just south of the rue de Rivoli at the St-Paul Metro, is another aspect of the big city that I miss, now that I don't live in one: a place where there are distinct neighborhoods for different retail specialties--one quarter for lighting, another for the garment trade, another for Korean restaurants. St-Paul is a pedestrian-only warren of a half-dozen connected courtyards, with perhaps a couple hundred antiques/brocante/crap dealers, a lot of which are open on Sunday, unlike most of the rest of the city. One of them, called Au Petit Bonheur la Chance on rue St-Paul, features stacks and stacks of those worn old off-white table linens that are so perfect, and sets of tins for pantry commodities (Sucre, Sel, etc.), and other stuff that if you're, say, me, you want to hoard.

A Great Place to Have Lunch in St-Germain: If there's anywhere in the world that doesn't need another good place to have lunch, it's got to be St-Germain. But still, you must choose, and a great place is preferable to a good one, and so: Le Comptoir de Relais, on the Carrefour de l'Odéon, just south of the boulevard. The carrefour (literally, "intersection") is a lively little corner, in exactly the center of the part of town where I've found myself practically every day I've ever been in Paris. And the Bar of the Inn (the inn being the hotel next-door) is somewhere close to an ideal lunch spot: agreeable service and a quick turnaround; not-devastating prices for great food (my cochon de lait, poché et roti, sitting on a bed of superb lentils, is one of the great plates of the year); and people-watching par excellence, in the perfect location.

I get there at about 1:30 on Saturday, a sunny and relatively un-freezing day--maybe it's gotten up to 35 degrees. The soldes are on, so the whole city is out, buying stuff, and then apparently walking through this carrefour. The tiny interior of the restaurant is crammed, and there are a good number of people waiting on the sidewalk, but there's one free table on the terrasse, and the harried hostess/waitress gives it to me, after an unclear exchange with other waiting would-be customers. The heaters are going full-blast, like a bank of stage lights suspended over the tables; there are thick fleece blankets for laps, in coordinating colors. A lot of the men in this part of town have refused on principal to wear proper outerwear, and instead they've got three or four layers under sport jackets, and of course scarves, all knotted identically. All the women are wearing hats--real hats, not ski caps or baseball caps. I feel like a leper because I'm not wearing sunglasses. Today, everyone in Paris is pretending it's not winter. Or, rather, pretending that the winterness of winter doesn't bother them. And so we're all sitting out here, in the cold and the struggling sunlight, watching one another watching the passersby, with a glass of wine in front of every single diner.

A Place to Have Dinner: Le Chateaubriand, on Avenue Parmentier in the 11th. No carte at all, just a five-course menu; the only choice you'll get is whether to have dessert or cheese. Some of the food was a little silly: one course was billed as a duo from South America, and it was a small bowl of decent chili and an unspecial ceviche, though I guess both could've been interesting to people from the east side of the Atlantic, who haven't spent the past 15 years getting barraged by ceviches. On the other hand, the meat course was extraordinary: a piece of Iberico pork--I think it was described as "un tranche"--that was cooked rare, and was by far the tenderest, tastiest (and reddest) piece of pork I've ever eaten. The staff were warm, and the room had that lively, chic buzz that is another hallmark of life in the big city, where people are not only waiting for tables at 11:30, but the crowd is still growing.

A Thing to Never, Ever Do: Go to a big department store for the soldes. It's one thing if the ship is actually going down, and you really do need to fight through such desperate crowds to get to a lifeboat; but not for a 40% discount on anything. Unless they start selling apartments.

A Place to Have a Drink, in the Middle of Nowhere: Mama Shelter was my hotel, way the hell out there in the 20th on rue de Bagnolet. I don't recommend staying here, because (a) it's way the hell out there, and (b) I saw no evidence that there's anything charming about the 20th, and it doesn't have any of the basics that make everywhere else in Paris so great, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was in the Bronx, and (c) the darkness of my room was laughable, and the whole aesthetic is much more acceptable to visit than to live in. But if you're having dinner anywhere in the northeast direction of town, and you want an actual mixed drink instead of a glass of wine, this is the place: everybody here is drinking real cocktails, made properly by bartenders who knew what they're doing. And it's physically a great bar, an under-lit rectangle surrounded by barstools, in the middle of a giant room with dozens of tables, very contemporary industrial-chic (something like Lot 22, but laid out better, and more upright). I don't know what the restaurant serves, but it's clearly a destination resto for people who don't live in the 20th. Plus there are taxis to be found outside, what with all the well-heeled people constantly arriving from the better arrondisements. (Yet another tic of the big city: fashionable people heading out to oases of chicness in des bas quartiers.)

A Place to Have Coffee, Heading Toward the Middle of Nowhere: If for some reason you find yourself east of the Bastille, tired and cold and maybe needing to pee, and you're in the vicinity of the Ledru Rollin station, then by all means glance around the intersection for a brasserie that might look a little down-at-the-heels. If it's winter, you'll need to push aside the semi-opaque plastic curtain that shelters the terrasse, where you don't want to sit, because that's not the point, not here. Go inside. Clamber up onto a barstool and order a cafe. Then let your eyes wander around at the walls, the bar, the ceiling . . . all a small Art Nouveau masterpiece, fluid forms carved from wood, surfaces painstakingly painted in now washed-out colors, then neglected for a century, not exactly in disrepair but certainly in need of at least a good cleaning. There's the clatter of spoons on saucers and the rustle of newspapers and the hushed tones of a low-key lover's quarrel in the corner; there's the surge of a small crowd coming in from the subway, familiar Bonjours all around. It's a remarkable little unremarkable little place.

in the alps

"You have to beat the Belgians!" people say, seriously, hostilely, as if a bizarre conflagration has finally turned Belgium into the actual enemy, after so many wars in the crossfire. But it turns out that they're talking about getting on the southbound roads to the Alps before the Belgians arrive from the north. Since all the ski lodging on this continent seems to operate on the same schedule—weekly rentals that begin on Saturday afternoon and end the following Saturday morning (with presumably an explosion of frenetic cleaning in between)—everybody who’s skiing, in all of Europe, is also driving on Saturday. Ergo, you have to beat the Belgians.

Having done so with a wily move of spending the night at a rest area (!; more on this another time), here we are, in a village called Avoriaz in the Haute Savoie, 50 miles east and a long way into the sky from Geneva. The sunshine is brilliant. I am reclined in a canvas sling-back chair, sipping a pression—a tap beer—in the medium size, flatteringly called serieux. It is the last week of February, and this chair sits at an altitude of 5,000 feet; I have shed my jacket, my helmet and goggles, my gloves; I have pushed the sleeves of my thermal shirt up; the beer is cold. But despite all these presumably cooling factors, I am warm, from the sun, the snow’s reflections, the effort of skiing down the slopes. It is a better-feeling warmth than the beach's: a warm shot through with exertion and cold.

Everything about this place is fantastic. Avoriaz was manufactured from scratch in the 1960s in a preposterous location, perched on a plateau atop a massive cliff, towering over other ski resorts of the more normal type—that is, resorts that are actual towns—down in the surrounding valleys and canyons, in a sprawling series of interconnected ski areas called Portes du Soleil (the doors to the sun; indeed). Over the course of the week, we ski the pistes of maybe a half-dozen, hopping over the shoulders of a string of mountains into Switzerland, then back to France. The lift lines are short or nonexistent, the weather is perfect, the scenery is spectacular: these snow-blanketed Alps just go on and on, their summits cragged outcroppings with names like the White Teeth and the Giant's Head (not to mention, 20 miles south, Mont Blanc). The Alps are one of those European things (like Bavarian villages, like Paris) that look exactly as you'd imagine they should; they're caricatures of mountains, the mountains drawn by 5-year-olds. 

To add to the imaginary scenery, there are no cars here: you get around on skis and in ski-lifts, or riding in sleighs, bells ringing, horses galloping through the snow, trailed by their aromas; literally, the taxis you hail are horse-drawn carriages. There are a few dozen buildings, many of them pointy and ten-ish stories tall, all clad in wood and draped snow, creating a jagged wooden skyline that looks like the Alps themselves. There are scores of restaurants. A couple supermarkets. A movie theater, a bowling alley, a skating rink. It is impossible to tell if any lodging is nicer than others, if any restaurant is better; Avoriaz seems completely egalitarian in its combination of luxury and lack thereof. There is no glitz, and there are no dives.

And there’s no one here except tourists and the people catering to them; the community is a wholesale fabrication. Yet it feels real; it's honest about its artifice. It’s a family place—the only people in their twenties seem to be the ski instructors and other staff—and fittingly the center 0f the village is the children's ski school, a football-field size bowl called the Village des Enfants. This is where we deposit Sam and Alex from 9:30 till 4:00 every day, and where, despite what appears to be endless standing around (we spy on them, whenever we can), they really do learn to ski from their abundantly pierced instructor, Vivien. Toward the end of the week, after school, I am skiing down the street beside Sam. He says to me, “Daddy, if you want to go faster”—and this is what Sam always wants—“you do this.” He leans forward, tucks his elbows into his body, rests his palms above his knees, and smiles. He is, as promised, going faster.

a savoyard recipe: croziflettes

I haven’t skied all that much in my life, and I’ve done none of it well. I don’t really know good slopes from bad, and I don’t care. Après-ski, as far as I’m concerned, should begin before noon, then recur regularly throughout the day.

France, of course, is more than welcoming to this ethic. Across from our apartment is a shop that sells 20 types of dried sausages, plus the other things you'd expect to find alongside 20 types of sausages. Almost none of the slope-side eateries are self-serve: you don’t stand around in your ski boots, carrying a tray and slopping chili into a plastic bowl. No. You sit at a cloth-topped table, and the staff who walk by say “Bon appétit.” You have wine or beer, then coffee and dessert. It is civilized.

At lunch in the sun one day, Madeline ordered a tartiflette, a potato-cheese mixture that’s widely available up in Luxembourg. But I was intrigued by the unfamiliar and unexplained croziflette variation. Turns out the potatoes are replaced by tiny squares of pasta—miniature dumplings, really—called crozes, layered (inevitably, one might say) with lardons, onion, and cheese, then baked, and utterly irresistible. I think crozes are probably impossible to find outside the Savoie; I certainly couldn’t find them in Lux. At an Italian specialty shop, I bought a small square pasta called quadrucci, but these lacked the luscious toothsomeness of the crozes. No matter what the pasta, though, this is a delicious plate of oozing richness—another heart-attack-with-every-spoonful (just look at this ingredient list!), as I hope you’ve come to expect from these missives.

Salt
½ pound crozes or any tiny pasta or dumpling that has some body to it
Black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ pound unsmoked lardons, pancetta, guanciale, or even good old ham, diced
1 medium onion, finely chopped
½ wheel Reblochon, rind grated, paste coarsely chopped
¼ pound Comté, Gruyère, or other sharp alpine cheese, grated
2 tablespoons crème fraiche, mascarpone, or heavy cream

Preheat the oven to whatever high temperature suits you. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil, cook your pasta or dumplings till al dente, drain, and season lightly with salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, put a tablespoon of butter and your diced pork in a pan over medium-low heat and cook for 10 minutes, until the pork’s fat has rendered and the meat has firmed up. Add the onion and cook for 10 minutes. Season with pepper, and set aside.

Use the remaining tablespoon of butter to grease a gratin dish that’ll contain the eventual glorious mess. Pour half the pasta into this dish. Spread all the pork-onion mixture over the pasta (it’s going to be hidden between layers, a cholesterol variation on the girl who jumps out of the cake), then top with half the Reblochon and a quarter of the Comté. If you’re using crème fraiche or mascarpone, scatter a few small dollops around; for heavy cream, sprinkles. Pour the rest of the pasta over this layer, and top with the remaining half of the Reblochon and three-quarters of the Comté.

Slide this treasure into the oven. Let cook for 20 minutes, until the moist parts are bubbling and the top of the Comté is beginning to gratinize. Remove from the oven and let cool a few minutes before serving, ideally accompanied by either (a) a lot of crisp fresh vegetables, to be reasonable, or (b) a cold lager and peasant bread, to be Savoyard.

week 19: things i miss about nyc

Being in New York last week--roaming the frigid yet crowded streets, seeing friends and family, stepping in and out of restaurants and cafes, of taxis and subways--heightened my awareness of things I miss about home. Above all is people; if you're reading this, I probably miss you. But even if every one of you moved here, I'd still miss:

• Roast pork buns from a restaurant-bakery on Walker Street at Baxter Street (an intersection that to the untrained eye would appear to be on Canal Street, but, astoundingly, isn't) whose pork buns I've eaten in 4 different decades, but I've never had any idea of the name of the place.
• Doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle at the Odeon. 
• A porchetta sandwich at Il Buco; fresh-from-the-oven bagels; salt-baked soft-shell crabs at New York Noodletown; good sushi pretty much everywhere; fennel-dusted sweetbreads at Babbo; breakfast at Balthazar; the fatty duck at Fatty Crab; a gooey, chewy slice from Ray's on 6th at 11th Street; chow fun from wherever.
  
• Crowds everywhere, all the time.
• The 8 minutes the separates the placement of an order with Excellent Dumpling House and those dumplings' arrival at the door.
  
• The subway; unlimited-ride MetroCards; Sam's impersonation of a conductor, "Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a problem up ahead."
• The West Village in the snow; Duane Park in the spring; the terrifying anarchy of playgrounds with water spraying willy-nilly in the summer; the Central Park Mall in the fall.
  
• Soho House, aka Daddy's Office with the Swimming Pool.
• The DVR; a virtually unlimited supply of syndicated sitcoms; and (I'm surprised to have discovered) the NY1 theme song.
• Walking from TriBeCa through the civic center and then Chinatown and then the Lower East Side all the way to the absurd tennis courts under the Williamsburg Bridge.
  
• The view of the skyline from the Kosciuszko Bridge.
  
• Coffee bars where you can sit for a full day: Think Coffee in the Village; Cafe Cafe in SoHo; Pecan in TriBeCa; Grounded in the West Village.
  
• Rampant casual profanity. (I'm in an Upper West Side hardware store, first thing last Monday morning, to buy a small screwdriver. "Whaddya need it for?" the guy asks me. So I can open the boys' new walkie-talkies, to insert batteries. The guy nods, purses his lips, says "Kids' shit" as a clarification, then shrugs.)
• The spectator and participant sport (if you do it right, it can be a cardio workout) of celebrity-spotting. 
  
• Wallowing in my hypocrisy of loathing Duane Reade yet spending money there every other day.
• Taking the boys on a post-dinner run to the Mr. Softee truck outside Washington Market Park.
• Corner pizzerias (more on this follows).

a recipe: chicken parmesan

There are so many things that are great about corner pizzerias: the comforting reliability that you're never much farther than a block from one, and it's almost guaranteed to be open; the inexpensiveness of everything in the formica-clad shop; the uniformity of the experience; the portability of a slice (especially if you follow the Mike Carner custom of absolutely prohibiting the counterman from reheating it). All in all, bang for buck, it's tough to beat a slice of pizza. 

Or a chicken parmesan hero. I miss chicken parm, whether it's an utterly unwieldy hero from Mariella's on 2nd Avenue, or a heaping paper-plate arrangement with pasta from Maffei's in Chelsea, or even the $25 entree at Patsy's (if someone other than myself is paying). But I haven't come across chicken parm here in Lux. To re-create that true pizzeria delicacy, I believe you have to (1) skimp on the Parmigiano--just a dusting, like an unpredicted snow flurry--because this should really be called Chicken Mozzarella; and (2) make a sweeter tomato sauce than feels natural (I believe that's how the pizzerias get the kids addicted). Of course, if you live in New York City, you'll probably never make chicken parm yourself. Why would you? Me, though, I have to. 

olive oil

1 small onion, minced

tomato paste

1 small can of San Marzano tomatoes

salt and pepper

sugar, possibly

chicken cutlets

salt and pepper

flour

2 eggs, beaten

unseasoned breadcrumbs

grated Parmigano-Reggiano

mozzarella, sliced thin

First, make red sauce: heat a bit of oil in a small pot over medium flame. Add the onion and cook until wilted but not colored, just a few minutes. Stir in a couple tablespoons tomato paste and let cook for 1 minute. Pour in the can of tomatoes, bring to a vigorous simmer, and let cook for a half-hour or so. Taste for salt, which you probably don't need, and pepper, which you do, and sugar: remember, you want a sweeter-than-normal sauce, but don't add more than  a teaspoon, tops; this is not dessert. Add some more tomato paste if you want it more tomato-y. Using a blender, a food processor, or an immersion blender, whiz this till mostly smooth. Return it to a low simmer until ready to use. 

Preheat the oven to 350 (or, frankly, whatever the hell you want) and start to make the chicken, which is roughly the same as making schnitzel. In a large pan, heat a few tablespoons olive oil over medium flame. Season the chicken with salt and pepper. In 3 shallow bowls, put (1) flour, (2) the beaten eggs, and (3) breadcrumbs. Dip each chicken cutlet in the flour, then the egg, and finally the breadcrumbs, shaking off any excess of each coating. Place the coated cutlets in the hot oil, and cook for a couple minutes per side, until lightly golden; the chicken doesn't need to be cooked through, so don't try, or you may end up burning your coating unnecessarily. Replenish the oil as needed, between batches, and wipe out the pan of any fallen-off coating, which will burn if left in there; make sure the new oil you add gets hot before adding new cutlets.

Now, spread a film of tomato sauce on the bottom of a roasting pan that's big enough to hold all your chicken in a single layer, which you'll now arrange in that that single layer. Top with more tomato sauce, spreading some between the cutlets as well, but not utterly smothering them--you want some crispy breaded chicken to remain un-sauced. Sprinkle lightly with Parmigiano, then generously (but, again, not completely) with mozzarella. Slide the pan into the oven, and let cook until the mozzarella begins to bubble and ooze and the chicken is cooked through, about 20 minutes. Let cool for a couple minutes before serving, or, in the style of the pizzeria, serve it immediately with no warning and make everyone burn the roofs of their mouths in unison.

week 18: inauguration day

Yesterday passed without any notice; Martin Luther King is not in the forefront of consciousness here. But Barack Obama is, and today is different. The inauguration is front-page news in Le Soir and Le Monde, the Luremburger Wort and the FrankfurterRundschau; there's a 20-page special section in Le Figaro. (The election itself was also huge news: this photo is from Rome, in November.) The bookstore window down the block features 9 titles by or about the Obamas, including the bizarre merchandising tactic of two different French editions--trade paper and mass-market--of Les Rêves de Mon Père. 

Driving to school this morning, I was listening to Culture Français radio, as I've made a habit recently, to improve my French. CF is part of France's NPR network; this particular channel's focus is the arts, including performances. On Thursday evenings, when I'm driving to my weekly tennis club, they broadcast radio dramas, which are compelling with a surprising immediacy; it's like walking down a public hallway and overhearing an urgently whispered conversation from around a corner. You sort of have to listen.

On Culture Français there's a lot of debating--passionate and strident, but never yelling--about exactly the types of things you'd expect French intellectuals to debate on the radio: the human condition, the amorality of international trade, the fact that certain stars appear to have left the galaxy; ("Pourquoi?" "Ah, et voilà: la question, exactement: Pour. Quoi."). The word philosophie gets thrown around with a frequency matched only by the different forms of crises (la crise economique, la crise de la guerre, and, my personal favorite, la crise morale). It is from this radio station that I've begun to appreciate the crucial role played by the concept of jamais in French ideology; in America, we simply don't go around saying "never" all the time. But in France, it's apparently essential to stress that when something is not done, is not acceptable, is not moral or ethical, it is thusly jamais, jamais, jamais; the syllables are often drawn out as two distinct words, with an exaggerated pause between them: Ja . . . mais. I can feel the finger, transported over the radio waves, being jabbed in my chest. 

This morning, they were discussing Obama. And George W. Bush. Not to mention: (a) George Washington, the père of les Etats-Unis; (b) the only discussion I've encountered of Andrew Jackson since Walter LaFeber's History of Foreign Relations class at Cornell, back in 1987; (c) in a cameo out of left field, Mikhail Gorbachev; and (d) of course, Nicolas Sarkozy; he is always mentioned, regardless of the subject, including those stars that are leaving the galaxy (the French verb is the more voluntary-sounding quitter), though I couldn't decipher how the French president is implicated in that astronomical scandal. The gist of this morning's conversation was that Obama is a true leader in the sense of being a remarkable man, not merely a common man who has been elevated to a position of leadership. The panel were grateful for this sensible shift in American politics, away from the catastrophe of recent years. They jointly lamented the recent American style of common-man leadership.

I'd expected to be touchy about these criticisms; I'd expected that Europeans would blanketly condemn all Americans for our egregious electoral decisions. But in person, I've encountered nothing with which I could take any umbrage; in the media, nothing with which I've disagreed. Mostly what I've encountered is enthusiasm for Obama, occasionally exuberant. In an epicerie in Paris last weekend, I fell into conversation with the proprietor, who was Middle Eastern. He asked me if I was English, and I shook my head. "Je suis americain." This guy then beamed at me, reached out, shook my hand. "Barack Obama," he said, ear-to-ear smile. "Barack Obama!" he reiterated, nodding. When I was halfway out the door, he called to me again, projecting his voice to the crowded sidewalk; people looked up at the shouted name, and smiled. It was as if this guy were thanking me for liberation in 1945. 

And maybe that's what it is, for him; maybe today is a new type of V-Day, and not one merely--or even primarily--for Americans. I've no idea where that shopkeeper is from. But I realized, standing outside his tidy little store in a dicey quarter of Paris, that his mother, his brother, his children might live in a part of the world where the American inauguration has far more critical consequence than in America: perhaps life-or-death consequence. There are no bombs falling in New York or Texas or California that may cease to fall when someone new has settled into the Oval Office. American foreign policy is foreign only in America; in the rest of the world, it's simply American.

an american recipe: smoked ribs

We didn't end up going to the International Dinner last Friday night at St. George's School, because we, like many people, couldn't find a babysitter; it's a problem here. But I was somewhat relieved, because everyone at the dinner had to bring a homemade dish from their homeland. There'd be lots of chicken curries and pastas and I assume kidney pies, or whatever it is that British people eat. But what the hell is American food? Someone admitted she'd be bringing an apple pie, because she couldn't think of anything else; but I don't bake. (Alex, in the unapologetic sexism of little people, asserts that all cooks are men, and all bakers are women; Madeline does all the baking in our household.) 

The only thing I cook that's American, as people in Orient know, is ribs. And I'm not ashamed to admit that two of the primary elements of my ribs are store-bought, and filled with I'm sure an ungodly array of horrific chemicals: jarred barbecue sauce and packaged spice rub. In the distant past, I used to produce home-made barbecue sauce, and mix up my own spice rubs. But I discovered that what I love about barbecue sauce is ketchup, whose ingredients label is depressing, combined with a bunch of other stuff that's not especially uplifting. So why bother? The same goes for the spice rub, which revolves around garlic powder, an ingredient that's otherwise not permitted in my pantry. So I've found packaged products that I like (Bone Suckin' jarred sauce, and some rub in a brown-paper bag that I buy at the Wayside Market in Southold) and I tell myself and anyone else who'll listen that it's the cooking method here that counts: a half-day of wood smoking. 

pork ribs, baby-back or spare, dealer's choice

spice rub

hickory (or applewood, or whatever-wood) chunks or chips, for smoking

barbecue sauce

cider vinegar mixed with water, or a bottle or 2 of beer, for basting

First thing in the morning, prep the ribs. First, use pliers and a dry kitchen towel to remove the thin veil of silvery membrane that covers the bone side of most racks. If what you've got are spare ribs, they probably have a flap of meat on the underside, which you may want to trim off; I happen to like this meat, but apparently some people don't. Now wash the trimmed racks, pat them dry with paper towel, and cover with the rub, evenly coating everywhere and, of course, rubbing it in. Pile the racks in a platter, cover with foil, and let sit in the refrigerator until lunchtime. 

Before you eat lunch, set your wood to soak, submerged in water. I do this in a stockpot, with a plate pushed in to keep the wood submerged. Wood chips need soaking for just 20 minutes or so; the bigger chunks could really use 45 minutes or more. I prefer the chunks, because they smolder for a longer period before they turn to ash, meaning you don't have to replace them as often, and also I can just rest them on the heating element of my grill (the chips, on the other hand, need to be enclosed in something); but chunks seem to be harder to find. 

I use a gas grill. This, as well as my packaged sauce and rub, betrays me to be a rank amateur, which I don't deny. But I still contend that my ribs are good. So anyway, after lunch, place a handful of wood chunks clustered together on the heating element of the grill, under the grate; alternatively, for the chips, use a small disposable baking pan, folded over to enclose the chips, then poked with holes using a sharp knife, to allow the smoke to escape. Set the heat to high, so the wood gets hot enough to start smoking. Then reduce the temperature, keeping the flame only directly under the wood, to maintain smoke; I find that 225 degrees is the lowest temp that will maintain continuous smoke. Place the ribs on the grate away from the flame; the ribs can be piled atop each other and rotated occasionally, but they should not be cooked directly over the flame. From time to time, baste the meat with the vinegar-water mixture or beer, and move them around the grill, so you feel like you're doing something (and, more important, so other people notice you doing something, thus making this appear to be more work than it actually is).

Let this go on for 3 or 4 or even 5 hours; the longer you smoke it, the more smoky and cured the meat will get, eventually tending toward ham. When the wood has burnt away and is no longer smoking, replace it with new soaked wood. Finally, 30 minutes before you want to eat, use a basting brush to cover the ribs in sauce. Let cook for 10 minutes, then apply another coat, and cook for another 10 minutes. Then spend some time to carve the ribs: separate the racks into 3- or 4-rib portions, then run the knife 75 percent through the meat that separates each rib, to make them easier to pull apart; these are not fall-off-the-bone ribs, but are firm, chewy, smoky, and flavorful.