Baguettes and Brie - The Allure of French Food

One of my favorite things to do is read cookbooks.  I find it intellectually fascinating.  I like cooking too, obviously, but in the chaos of daily life I often find myself falling into a restaurant and take-out rut.  Besides being expensive, this unfortunate habit also causes me to lose out on one of my favorite hobbies in the name of laziness, unhealthy cravings, and a desire to eat a delicious variety of foods.

But delicious foods of varying cuisines aren't limited to the restaurant world - people cook all over the world, and with relatively the same basic tools and ingredients.  Everyone has eggs.  Everyone has meat.  Everyone has produce.  What makes international cuisines different from one another isn't the tools, it's the technique.  And usually, it's the spices.

When I was a junior in college, I studied in Paris for four months.  During this time I lived with a host mother who cooked dinner for me and my other American housemates several times a week.  French food is notoriously wonderful, the height of culinary excellence, and tres fancy.  I was excited to see what my French host mother would cook up for dinner each night.  She rarely disappointed - the meals were delicious and varied widely from one another.  But what was fascinating to me was that I couldn't figure out why the food was so good.  Most of the ingredients that crossed my plate were familiar - and yet they tasted wonderfully different and delicious.  At the time, my own cooking skills were limited.  For example, that same semester I made dinner with my housemate, and somehow produced startlingly high flames while cooking ham in a frying pan.  For obvious reasons, my housemate oversaw the remainder of the meal.

Being therefore a culinary novice, I chalked up the taste difference between French and American cuisine to the food being fresher.  The French people buy fresh bread every day at the local bakery, buy cheese at the cheese store, buy meat from the butcher, and so forth.  These are a people who take their food seriously.  Certainly, bits of processed food have begun to infiltrate French society.  My host mother stocked Chocolate Special K cereal in her cupboard for breakfast, and the TV regularly played ads for sugary snacks (though these came equipped with an official Surgeon General's Warning that advised, "For your health, avoid snacking in between meals".)  But the French take pride in their culinary heritage, and this is reflected in the local restaurants as well as the day to day life of the French people.

It's been 5 years since I studied abroad in Paris, and my cooking skills and intellectual interest in culinary styles and techniques have both increased immensely since then.  So you can imagine my delight when, this Christmas, I unwrapped "The Little Paris Kitchen: 120 Simple but Classic French Recipes" by Rachel Khoo.  This beautiful cookbook provides simple to follow, non-intimidating recipes with full page photos of each dish.   I discovered Rachel Khoo, and this cookbook's existence, through her Cooking Channel TV Show of the same name.  The recipes found in the cookbook are based on those she prepared in a tiny restaurant she operated out of her studio apartment - meaning that the recipes were created and cooked entirely with two gas burners and a miniature oven.  Watching the show, I was fascinated to see the food that a woman of similar age to myself was able to produce from such a small kitchen...and I thought to myself, "Surely I can cook food like the French, too..."  And it turns out that I could!  I'm beginning to discover that a lot of French cooking has to do with the way the food is cooked, not the ingredients being used.  Perhaps culinary excellence in day to day life is not so far off as we Americans often imagine...

I have successfully prepared three recipes from Rachel Khoo's book so far, and I am absolutely loving it.  Each has turned out deliciously, and tasting very much like the food my Parisian host mother prepared for me five years ago.  In future posts, I plan to recount my experiences cooking the various recipes, complete with photos and tales of tribulation encountered en route to culinary victory.  In fact, that was the original intent for this post, but I seem to have gotten caught up in dreams of a land where food is meant to be savored, where the smell of fresh bread wafts through the streets even before the city wakes up, and where a particular sauce and a pinch of nutmeg make all the difference.

So I will leave you here to dream your own culinary dreams.  Check back soon for more French cooking adventures!