How to buy the perfect French bread

As a final post, as I’ve long since left Marseille and am firmly re-ensconced (at least for the rest of this academic year) in San Diego, I figured I’d sign off with a post of a more practical nature. So here’s my take on how to find the perfect French bread – from an American former novice but current pro. It’s an art, you see.

Step 1: Find your favorite bakery.

This is accomplished by sampling the baguettes offered by as many different bakeries as feasibly possible, ideally more than once.  The hallowed designation of “favorite” is to be bestowed as a function of three distinct dimensions:

1. Proximity
2. Consistency
3. Deliciousness

Proximity to the location where you’ll be consuming said baguettes (normally, one’s place of residence, though work is a possibility as well) is extremely important for two reasons. First, baguettes start getting stale and lose their inner sanctum of squishiness surrounded by that perfectly crusty shell the moment they leave the oven. Any superfluous time added between oven exit and mouth entrance simply downgrades baguette quality. Second, a fresh, hot baguette swaddled in its paper sheath – when you can feel its fleshy, soft heart beating in your hand while walking home – becomes an incredible temptation to just bite its head off while walking down the street. This is frowned upon by the oh-so-chic French. Reducing the amount of time you have to carry the doughy mass of desire will, of course, lead to a higher percentage of baguettes transported intact to their final eating place.

Consistency is essential as well. Patronizing a bakery with wild fluctuations in baguette quality can arguably be a worse experience than being supplied by a constantly mediocre one. In the latter case, you may have lower expectations but at least know not to get your hopes up. In the former, however, previously-experienced good baguettes set the bar high, and when the current specimen turns out flat and uninspired, it can ruin the delightful, breathless anticipation of a bready, cheesey day at the park.

And of course, deliciousness speaks for itself.

Step 2: Discover your perfect level of crustiness.

Everyone likes their baguettes cooked to different levels of done-ness, and knowing exactly where your palatte stands is an empirical question. My personal favorite is the equivalent of medium-rare: cooked enough so there’s a nice crust, but still soft and able to be squashed a bit. This is manifest by a very light tan color. Obviously, darker crust = more cooked = crunchier.

Yes, this is me holding a baguette out my apartment window. No, I did not subsequently drop it seven stories into the street below.

Step 3: Develop an eye for perfection.

Knowing what you want is important, but being able to spot it from the far side of a bakery counter is essential. Bakeries here generally keep their precious goods in big wooden crates, with the baguettes all standing on one end, stacked in front of each other. You’ll have about 5 seconds between the time when you get to the front of the line (and thus have an unobstructed view of the offerings) and when the baker grabs a baguette and wraps it up for you. It’s up to you to size up the baguette he’s about to grab and tell him to take a different one if that one looks too cooked or not cooked enough or otherwise not to your liking. This rapid-fire visual perception, alas, only comes with practice, grasshopper.

How to bake French bread: STEP 1: Wake up. STEP 2: Walk to your local bakery. STEP 3: Give them between 60 and 80 centimes. STEP 4: Voilà!

 

And with that… till next time in Marseille.  We’ll see if there will be a next time…

 

Conference excursion – to the Calanques!

The past week the lab I’m working at here in Marseille hosted ECEM (European Conference on Eye Movements), a four and a half day extravaganza of conferring and going on amazing outings in Provence. Way back in June when I’d first arrived, I volunteered my English-speaking services and so this week ended up working at the registration desk and various other coordinating jobs from about 10 am until the end of the evening’s entertainment, which – at the absolute earliest – finished 11 hours later.

Perks, however, were abundant, as compensation for hours of cognitively-demanding language-switching in the sun. There was an event every night and, being French, these guys sure knew how to throw parties. Sunday night we had an aperatif (read: heavy hors d’oeuvres and copious quantities of wine) after the opening address. Monday night was a wine tasting and buffet on the grounds of a chateau and vineyard in Trets, a village in the countryside 45 minutes outside of Marseille. Tuesday was another aperatif/barbecue at school.

Wednesday, though, was the most exciting day, when talks broke early for excursions; I was one of two tour guides for a 3 hour boat trip around the Calanques. The conference had hired a private boat which took us out from Vieux Port and through the gorges between the sheer Calanque cliffs on either side. After shepherding the conference attendees down to the Port and onto the boat, Kim and I got invited up to the upper level where the captain was, so we could do the tourist narration of the trip. We were given a book of awkwardly-translated paragraphs about the surrounding Calanques, and as we went past a particular area, the driver (boater?) would give us an involved explanation of what we were passing and we’d translate however much we felt like into the mike for everyone to hear. The view from the upper deck was fantastic – it was a semi-enclosed cabin with a tiny outdoor deck on either side, affording excellent views, unobstructed by the conference goers in steerage down below.

On the way back as we were approaching the harbor, the boat guys put on some rock/techno/dance music in the cabin, and I got them to put a mike up to the speaker to pipe it through the whole boat and everyone danced along. They even let me drive the boat (which had a legit pirate ship-type steering wheel) for a good chunk of the way back home. (Though only after asking if I had a driver’s [of a car] license.) The trip was really amazing; being out on the sea, surrounded by gorgeous scenery, with the sun overhead (as it so often is here in Provence) and the wind whooshing past and just boats and cliffs and water all around.

Wednesday night, immediately after the excursions, was the gala dinner, held atop Marseille’s Fort St. Nicholas, overlooking the harbor, in the starlight. Lots of wine (until it ran out), limited vegetarian food, and after a couple of hours, a DJ and a very inviting dance floor, which led to some rather epic dancing by a bunch of very enthusiastic scientists. Definitely the best conference I’ve ever attended in terms of events (sample size thus far: 2).

A sampling of pictures below (click on them to make them bigger), and (most of) the rest of the pictures I took on the official ECEM photo website:
https://picasaweb.google.com/117260803759574680086/CalanquesBoatTrip

New Friends

One of the things I love about Marseille is that everyone will talk to me. This is not true in Paris, San Diego, Providence, Boston, or any of the parts of the greater New York metro area with which I am familiar. And I don’t mean talking in terms of responding to a question or grudgingly giving directions. I mean completely willing to drop everything and start an involved conversation. Of course, I can only speak from my own perspective – that of  a young, female French speaker with enough of an accent to be clearly foreign (and thus, apparently, interesting). Even so, it’s amazing who will start to talk to me, and what they’ll start to talk about. Security guards at the library strike up a conversation about smuggling in chocolates during (and after) the 4-second check of my bag at the entrance. Patrons at an outdoor book market discuss World War II, or how Prometheus was a great guy and thus anyone male is just like him. (As a side note, I’m pretty sure that the guy trying to talk to me about the war was aphasic. He wasn’t so good at forming complete sentences, and he’d say pierre (stone) about three times per phrase, obviously as a placeholder for something else. And he would laugh in an exceptionally hearty but put-upon manner whenever he seemed unable to find the right word.)

Today, as I was walking home, a garbage truck pulled up alongside me, emptying the bins along the street. Marseille has these giant, cubic recycling receptacles with tiny holes at the top to put in your goods, but no visible openable cover to allow the contents to be dumped into the truck. (Note: there’s one bin for glass, and one for everything else – I’ve chosen to interpret this as testament to the vast quantity of wine the French drink, such that they produce so much more glass recycling than anything else.) Tonight, I was watching the truck as it went by, hoping to see how they got the bins open. One of the garbage men saw me standing and staring on the side of the road, and asked me what was up. I asked him the question about the bin door (turns out it’s on the bottom: they use a crane to haul the bin into the air over the truck and then open the door to dump the recycling in) and he answered during the 30 seconds it took the other garbage man to pick up the trash at the spot where we were. Time to go, right? ‘Course not. Completely unconcerned about the fact that the other back-of-the-truck-hanger was already hanging and the driver was getting ready to move again, as well as the fact that several cars were sitting behind the garbage truck, honking their horns profusely because they couldn’t pass on the exactly-one-car-wide street, my new friend proceeds to strike up a chat and ask me what country I’m from, and then what part of the country, and is still talking to me as he tries to climb onto the tiny perch where the other hanger is already positioned and the truck drives off down the street.

This behavior is extremely typical, and was actually something that I came to miss when I moved to San Diego after a year of such overt and forthright friendliness. Lines get held up in bakeries because the person behind the counter is deeply involved in recounting or hearing the story of what went on during vacation when everyone was away. Waiters don’t bring the bill, or the machine to run your credit card, or bread, or the menus, because they’ve begun an animated discussion with the newest patrons who’ve wandered in. Coffee-drinkers sitting in the seats along the street at outdoor cafés ask passers-by how they’re doing and whether they’d like to join them. It’s just incredible, especially in a country so stereotypically anti-social, to be bombarded with such outgoingness and everyone wanting to be my friend. Makes me feel so damn popular!

Marseille lunchtime

Marseille is a city which, inexplicably, does not do siestas. It’s certainly Mediterranean and it certainly gets warm and sleepy around midday in the summer, but there seems to be no sanctioned recourse. Starting at noon, people descend upon the bakeries and cafés en masse to provide for their lunches. This swell lasts for an hour or so, during which time there seems to be no one in the entire place not delicately ripping into a baguette. By about one, however, a blanket has been dropped over the city and everything is muted. The streets, while not empty, have large swaths of person-free sidewalk in a city center normally full of elbowing and ambling pedestrians. Many stores of a certain type close for two or three hours and those that don’t proudly tout this fact: “ouvert sans interruption”. The sun gets louder (though maybe it’s just a contrast effect arising from the quieter people). It’s the perfect environment to eat your lunch in the shade of the university courtyard, unroll your hammock, and drowse off for an afternoon nap.

But returning to the inexplicable, I don’t know of a single siesta-taking Marseille resident. I know people who go home for lunch, but then come back to the lab far to quickly to have effectively napped. I know, far too well, people who have sleepily tried to muddle through the mid-afternoon mush in an article-reading, experiment-designing, and data-analyzing haze only to be faced with the societal pressure to not sleep at one’s desk. It is so incredibly beautiful here in the evenings and at night – the air has a crisp, lavender [color, not flower] feel to it, and everyone on the the streets is full of happiness and energy. I’d so much rather be active and awake and outside at midnight than at noon.

Academia – noted for being one of the most temporally flexible disciplines – ought to implement a sanctioned nap culture. (Fellow UCSD grads – help me spread the desire!) But especially in a place like this, where the ceramic-tiled rooftops, slanting in no uniform direction, exude a soporific monotony while baking in the sun – here, there are truly times when there would be nothing better in all the world than to be not (consciously) experiencing Marseille for a little while, and just close my eyes and sleep.

All in a day’s walk

As mentioned before, the male Marseillaise population is a relatively sketchy lot: they see nothing strange in asking out any old girl they pass on the street. The attempts towards me of this tried-and-not-so-true dating technique had largely abated over the past couple of months, so I was rather hopeful that I’d simply figured out the proper way of broadcasting, “No, I don’t want to go out with you… REALLY, I’m not going to have juste une petite café avec toi, so don’t even bother wasting your time!” in French body language. In the past week, however, the offers have started rolling in again, so I guess the great French romantics were simply in hibernation for the winter months.

And today, while walking home from work on a beautiful and sunny evening, this guy passed by me a couple of times on the street. As we were waiting at a traffic light, he sidles up next to me and says in this very definitive voice, like he’s finally made a major decision:  “Vous êtes belle…”

I look at him a bit awkwardly and say “merci” and continue walking down the street. Of course (as they do), he walks along next to me. I studiously look at the sky, or the storefronts we’re passing, or my shoes; I think rather clearly broadcasting that this interaction is not going to go any further.

After a couple of minutes, he says it again: “Vous êtes belle.” Boy, am I flattered to hear that! I can hardly contain my excitement. Or my eyerolls.

Another few minutes pass, still walking down the street. Then he says, “Comment vous vous appelez?” This guy is clearly a stellar conversationalist. “Isabel,” I reply.

He thinks for a while. I can nearly see the wheels turning in his head; he’s clearly detected my accent even in the two words I’ve said and is trying to plan an intelligent next move. He offers, “Vous êtes espagnole?”

“Non,” I say, with a bit of a smirk, as I borrowed the name Isabel from a friend of mine here who’s actually Columbian.
“Française?”
“Non.”
“Algérie?” (Really? Do I look Algerian to you?)
“Non.”

Now I’ve stumped him. My suitor, it seems, is not such a cosmopolitan guy. But however minute his horizons might be, a quitter he is not, so he tries again from the pool of countries he’s apparently heard of.

“Espagnole?”

Still no, pal. “Il y a des autres pays du monde, vous savez,” I tell him. (Ya know, there are other countries in the world.)

“Ah oui?” he asks, seeming genuinely surprised.

[facepalm]

The rest of our conversation, as we continued to walk down the street towards my ultimate destination of the supermarket, couldn’t even be called one-sided. He’d say one, completely unintelligible word, repeat it five times until I could understand what he was trying to say (“Travail?”) (“Maison?”) (“Marseille?”) (“Numéro?”) and then think for several more minutes while I contentedly walked along, thinking this silent conversation was among the most awkward events I’ve ever participated in in my life. When we finally reached the supermarket, I assured him several times I neither wanted to get a coffee, nor go to a disco club, nor give him my number, so he bid me adieu. (Hah. If only this breed were that classy. It was actually “Ciao”.)

I just wonder… how successful can these guys really ever be? There are thousands of these types in the city, all asking random women out. Does anyone ever say yes? What part of the culture here teaches boys that they might actually be successful in love (or even in sex) by literally choosing, at random, someone to invite out for coffee? It’s simply unfathomable the thought processes going on in these guys’ heads, and how they think this is at all a rational policy. Right?