Eating in France

This just in from a friend traveling in Paris:

We take our dinner at a sidewalk cafe where we try wild boar
stew (which has a few stray boar bristles in it), a beef burgundy,
and Pear Belle Helene. Everything is a gustatory epiphany, especially
the Pear Belle Helene: a perfect poached pear, vanilla ice cream, and
a chocolate sauce. It sounds simple to make when I describe it like
that, but it is a magic pear from trees grown in an ancient grove of
long-dead kings and poached in the dew of roses, an ice cream from
the snows of Mont Blanc and cows lulled by lutes of virgin
shepherdesses, a chocolate sauce made from cocoa beans gathered by
silent monks who only make chocolate sauce once a decade. In other
words, it can't be reproduced in my apartment kitchen. I savor every
bite knowing I'll not be eating like this in Seattle or maybe ever
again in my life. Our dinner, by the way, costs about $25 for both of
us, including a nice bottle of wine. It's a miracle the French get
anything done.

Chez Gladines
30 rue de Cinq-Diamants
Paris, France
(13th arrondissment)

Nice. Tres nice.

On these ruthlessly cold and wet February Chicago days I break out the food diary that my wife and I kept while we spent two weeks eating our way through France a couple years ago. <Sigh.> I still haven't lost the weight from the Franco fling, nor the lingering scent in my head of the perfect cheese sandwich found in Paris, not far from the Sorbonne. A long, thin baguette still warm from the oven, fresh butter on both sides, thin slices of sweet, crunchy cucumber attached to the butter, and inbetween slices of Emmental in enough quantity to make you want more. <Sigh.>

Excuse me while I finish my Diet Cherry Coke, my granola bar, and curse the width of the Atlantic Ocean.

My sister in law still has the postcard we sent from L'Esperance in Vezelay in 1998, describing each course of a 12-course lunch (yes, lunch) which is still probably the meal of my life.

At the time, the idea of minutely documenting each step of a meal seemed unusual enough to be quite noteworthy....