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…

 

Parisian book corners

I’ve left Marseille for the summer and am now back at UCSD, but I still have some pictures/adventures as yet un-written, so I figured I’d post some final few entries from the sunny southern California beaches. (Just pretend they’re from the sunny southern French beaches.) (Actually, a more apt parallel is a screen-lit southern California cogsci lab masquerading as a screen-lit southern French cogsci lab.) Goodbye to everyone in Marseille… but maybe I’ll be back?! I’d certainly love to see you all again.

In early September, I went up to Paris for the AMLaP conference. I stayed an extra day to breathe in the Parisian scent, and took the opportunity to go up to La Porte de Clignancourt, an area in a northern quarter of Paris which is an enormous combination of 12 differently-themed flea markets. It’s quite the experience, really, wandering around the streets and seeing the rapid shifts in types of goods for sale – from sports clothes to shoes to antiques to furniture to enormous, ugly picture frames to boxes of utter junk. While wandering around, I came across a book store of the best kind – one tiny room, stuffed to exploding with books shoved onto shelves completely haphazardly, so anything interesting you might come across would be the result of pure luck and digging. It’s like a treasure hunt.

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I found a hardcover, gold-embossed, three-volume set of The Three Musketeers (in French, bien sur), but didn’t have enough cash with me to buy them, so I ran out to the nearest ATM. On my way back, however, it started to pour, so I hung out in the bookstore for a while, waiting for it to stop raining. While standing around, I started talking to the owner of the shop (after he offered me a coffee – “don’t worry, it’s free!” – from the coffee machine he’d stuck on the table in the middle of some relatively-well stacked books.) For once, it was me who got to spring the “Where are you from?” question, because his French, while excellent, was obviously accented. Turned out he’d emigrated from Lebanon in 1953, and had come to Paris to go to school at the Sorbonne and study psychology. Hey you, he called to one of his assistants, hand me that white book over there. (Which one? the assistant rather pointedly asked, given the rather large number of books, including white ones, scattered about. The one on top of the third stack, the owner replied.) The owner hands me the book, which is a child development book written by Piaget. You heard of him? he asked. Of course, I replied. (Piaget was one of the most influential forerunners of developmental psychology.)

Turns out the bookstore owner was taking classes with Piaget at the Sorbonne. Now that’s epic. This is like meeting someone who’s taken a class from Chomsky, or Descartes, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

After university, he said, he’d moved to Kuwait to start a grain import business, because there’s nothing there but “oil – just oil and sun.” And no income tax.

No wonder his bookstore was so darn awesome.

La Police Nationale

Saturday I got to wear an official, funny French Police Nationale hat.

My friend Clarice (from UCSD) is here to visit for a few days, so we went on a big walking tour/shopping trip around Marseille. On our way down Canebière towards the port, we kept running into increasingly large numbers of policemen clustered in little groups, decked out in full riot gear and looking (at least as far as a French policeman can) intensely fierce and ready for trouble. What was interesting was that there didn’t seem to be anyone to protect against, as the streets were full to bursting, but only with the hordes of tourists who’d descended for one last Provençal hurrah before the end of the season. Being the inquisitive type, I asked a group what was happening that necessitated such a show of force. The policeman standing at the edge of the cadre informed me they were there for a manifestation (likely the most widely-practiced communal activity in France, second only to [though often co-occuring with] the strike). Apparently the G7 finance ministers were meeting in Marseille and a big protest was planned. What would they be protesting? I asked. “Capitalism,” my new police pal said, downright derisively. “Finance. The markets. The world. Everything.” (Clearly he’d chosen his side in this battle well.)

As per usual, I got asked where I was from¹, and this launched a whole discussion between me and 3 or 4 of the nearby policemen, all of whom were obviously bored with all this standing around waiting for the protest to show up.

After the protest passed by, we wandered around the market some more, and then started off back home. On the street perpendicular to my own, we encountered our friendly policemen again, who accused us of following them around. (Not true!) We went to my apartment, laughing about their ridiculous hats the entire way back. (Seriously, how much fear can be inspired in the masses by people wearing the kind of hats you folded out of a sheet of newspaper back in 2nd grade?)

As luck would have it, on our way back out (this time to buy cheeeeeese!), we ran into them once more. We decided this was a sign, and so went over to ask to try on their hats. They very enthusiastically agreed, and also offered up their official anti-riot helmets and shield.

Et voila the photographic evidence:

After the hat photo-op, two of them then proceeded to rip off various official police badges and give them to us. That was a bit strange, admittedly. The bottom one will be going on my office door, though.

As per usual, we got invited out for a drink, which we politely declined, given that, among other obvious reasons, we already were going to a birthday party that night. Turned out to be a good choice, as this party turned into an all-night secret Marseillaise clubbing adventure and then a walk home timed to see the sun rise….
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1. The one upside of my intense accent is that it certainly facilitates unexpected social interactions. Maybe I should start affecting an accent in English in San Diego? Just think who I’ll meet!

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!