Good food, good friends, the French way

Published: April 29, 2012

This month, I should be writing about politics, about the 10 candidates who ran for the first round of the French presidential elections on April 22 and about who came out on top. I should be writing about my very first voting experience in France. Instead, I'd like to concentrate on friendship and food, two topics that far outshine politics in my life at this time.

A month ago, my mother, Mary Honicker, a long-time teacher in the Pottsville schools, passed away. Returning to France was not easy. I felt like I was leaving everything behind: our family home, Pottsville, Schuylkill County.

My mother, besides being my mother and irreplaceable in that role, was my anchor to "home." Without her, I felt afloat, deprived of a safe haven, truly on my own in this great big world of ours. Although I am Franco-American, upon opening the door of my Parisian apartment the day I returned, I wasn't feeling very French.

But all that was before my French friends stepped in and began taking care of me. There were phone calls, flowers, notes expressing sympathy. Most of all, there was food, food shared with friends, a pastime the French have raised to the level of art, exactly what my weary soul needed to settle back in here.

My friend Nathalie was the first to invite me to her home and we sat at her dining table, looking out over the zinc rooftops of Paris. In the distance, we could see the tip of the Eiffel Tower and, closer to her top-floor apartment (no elevator, like mine), the two rectangular towers of Notre Dame de Paris.

On the table in front of us, as admirable as the view, lying on a bed of crisp escarole, were some slices of foie gras d'oie - goose liver pate - direct from the Bearn region of southwest France, where Nathalie's father is from. He knows where to get the very best and makes sure his daughter always has a supply in her Paris home. Nathalie toasted some bread and then opened a bottle of Graves, a red wine from Bordeaux. All I had to do was savor the "made-in-heaven" marriage of wine with foie gras spread on a slice of toasted French baguette.

And that was only the first course. Nathalie, with the ease of a French woman raised in a home where the finest culinary traditions are passed down from generation to generation, next got out a frying pan, melted a big pat of butter, and, in a matter of minutes, produced two perfectly pan-fried sole. "Succulent," as the French say. Golden on the outside, with firm white flesh on the inside. And there was no sticking to the frying pan!

I have been to Nathalie's parents' home in Pau, the capital of the Bearn region, and each time I have marvelled at the meals her parents produce. I have been particularly impressed by the desserts, always homemade, be it ice cream or sherbert, the French version of macaroons, made not with coconut, but with sugar and egg whites, or a charlotte with strawberries or raspberries, a very sophisticated form of shortcake.

When I go to Nathalie's Parisian apartment, I prefer to supply the dessert, scouting my neighborhood for the very best bakeries. If Nathalie approves my choice, I know the bakery is good. This time I brought a slice of Black Forest cake and a simple cream puff, topped with candied sugar. She gave both her highest marks, with special praise for the cream puff, a simple pastry very hard to make well.

However, one meal, no matter how delicious, is not enough to soothe a grieving soul. Luckily for me, a week later, my friend Sophie whisked me off to Brittany, where her family has a vacation home by the sea.

Brittany, or "Bretagne" as it is called in French, is the westernmost part of France, jutting far out into the Atlantic. The region is best known for rain, wind, storms at sea, Celtic folklore and mystery. In no way is it a culinary capital, but it is a region where simple, good food abounds. Almost as soon as we arrived, we got busy and dug in.

We began with buckwheat "galettes," the local version of crepes, the thin pancakes the French prefer to the fluffier American kind. In Brittany, entire meals are designed around crepes and it is traditional to begin with one or two buckwheat galettes, filled with meat, cheese or vegetables, before moving on to dessert crepes, made with white flour. Buckwheat, which is not wheat at all and thus gluten-free, produces a dark crepe, with a strong, slightly bitter flavor.

In Brittany, the locals have some favorite fillings for their galettes that take some getting used to. Seated at a table at L'hermine, or "the white weasel," Sophie's family's favorite creperie in the town of Morlaix, I decided to take the plunge into local culture, ordering a galette filled with stewed onions and andouillette. This Breton specialty is a kind of sausage made from rolled pork intestines, smoked, dried and finally simmered in a bouillon flavored with hay.

According to Edouard Herriot, a French politician of the first half of the 20th century, like politics, andouillette should smell a bit like shit. And it does and that's why it is hard to get used to, but, believe me, once you get past the smell, andouillette tastes really good, so good that I tried another galette filled with andouillette sauteed with apple slices and "pommeau," a local alcohol made from fermented apples. It was even better than the first.

I have such a taste for buckwheat that I didn't even try a dessert crepe, but finished up my meal with a galette filled with soft goat's cheese and topped with chestnut honey. I'll take that combination over chocolate or ice cream any day.

In Brittany, there were lots of other good things to eat, crabs and oysters right out of the sea, the local fish soup and sand tarts made with buckwheat, but, most important of all, be it in Paris or Brittany, these past weeks, there have been good friends sharing good food, which has meant the world to me.

As for the elections, President Nicholas Sarkozy and the socialist candidate Francois Hollande won the first round. Second round elections will take place May 6 and next month, I'll be telling readers about the new president of France.

(Honicker can be reached at honicker.republican herald@gmail.com)

Things gained, lost with urban renewal

Published: March 25, 2012


Pottsville and Paris are both full of memories, for me and for all those who knew either of these cities before downtowns began to die, as in the case of Pottsville, or cities lost their heart, which happened in Paris in 1969.

In the 1960s, the first shopping centers appeared near Pottsville, moving stores from downtown to outside the city. In 1969, Paris lost its "belly," the city's central market, located at the city's heart for eight centuries.

Through April 28, Parisians and visitors to Paris have the chance to travel back in time, to visit that market.

Les Halles was a covered marketplace made up of several cast-iron and glass pavilions - marvels of 19th century commercial architecture - and located a few steps from the Seine, the Louvre and Notre Dame de Paris.

Until 1969, the year the market was transferred to the suburbs south of Paris, there may not have been a more busy place in all of France between midnight and noon.

In the span of those 12 hours, six days a week, 30 tons of food were moved into the market and then moved out again to grocery and specialty shops throughout the city.

Les Halles fed Paris, and the market was a true cast-iron stomach overflowing with poultry, seafood, sides of beef, fresh fruits and vegetables. It was also the heart of the city, where more than 5,000 workers saw to it that Parisian were always well fed.

Today, there is no trace of this glorious past. By 1973, all the pavilions had been razed or transferred to other sites. In their place was a giant hole surrounded by a barrier where Parisians came to gawk at the destruction and wonder what would rise in its place.

Studying in Paris at that time, I was one of them, leaning over the barrier, looking down into what looked like a giant strip mine. I remember feeling sad, aware I had missed something important, a slice of the history of Paris, not about kings or those in power, but very much about how ordinary Parisians lived their daily lives.

As is almost always the case for projects of urban renewal, change was necessary at les Halles.

Trucks arriving in the narrow streets around the pavilions between midnight and 2 a.m. often had to wait hours to unload, and when unloading did begin, no matter what the weight, all work was done manually. There was no room for machines or conveyor belts and the heaviest loads were shouldered by "les forts," strongmen, workers certified by the state to transport up to 500 pounds on their backs. Nor was there refrigeration. Sanitary conditions were often deplorable and among the many vendors at les Halles, the butchers were the most impatient to move to more modern and sanitary facilities.

Old-timers recount that on moving day, when the trucks began pulling out to transfer their goods and material to Rungis, the new market to the south, the rats followed, thousands of them scurrying through the city streets, making the move along with those who had long provided the rodents with their "daily bread."

Urban renewal, then, is a good thing. Les Halles, the heart and belly of Paris, was dying of asphyxiation. Rungis, the new market, provided better and safer working conditions and guaranteed safer food to the consumer.

Urban renewal becomes a problem when bad decisions are made about how to replace the old with the new. For the Parisian Halles, this is what happened. Above ground, the former pavilions were replaced by a garden maze and some glass structures that did little more than block the view. Below ground, a shopping mall opened, filled with some of the same shops Schuylkill Countians might find at the Frackville mall or in one of the Reading shopping centers. The hole got filled but, in the process, Paris lost its heart and soul.

Thousands of us are standing in line to catch a glimpse of what was lost, in an exhibit of the photos of Robert Doisneau (1912-94), best known to Americans for his photo "The Kiss," which appeared in Life magazine in 1950. In it, a young couple exchange a passionate kiss right in front of the city hall of Paris, which is exactly where the current photo exhibit is taking place.

On display are 208 of the thousands of photos Doisneau took at les Halles between 1933 and 1973, when the last pavilion was moved. It was hard work because, like the thousands working at the central market, he got up in the middle of the night and worked far past dawn.

Working at night, with little light, Doisneau encountered many technical problems and often had to fight fatigue because during his first years at les Halles, he worked as an industrial photographer for Renault, the French automobile maker, by day.

He had no problems, however, when it came to choosing subjects. He was adopted by the workers, who considered him one of them. Perhaps that is why, when looking at his photos of a butcher next to a bull's head on a butcher's block, a flower-seller surrounded by her bouquets, a woman proudly waving a bunch of parsley or a "fort" carrying a bulky burlap sack as big as him, we feel close to these people, as if we'd met them somewhere before.

Thanks to the photos of Robert Doisneau, les Halles lives on.

Photos also provide me with precious memories of Pottsville and over the years, I've clipped "Schuylkill Memories" from The Republican-Herald. Many of these photos provide proof that, as in the case of les Halles, urban renewal has been good for the city.

For example, it was a good decision to get rid of the steam heating facility of downtown Pottsville, where dangerous fires periodically broke out. In a photo taken in the 1950s, its giant smokestack dominates the city's skyline. In that photo, I also see "the flats" across from the county jail, since replaced by better housing.

But, once again, as in the case of les Halles, with urban renewal much was lost. To end this article, I'd like to list some of the places I miss: Joyce's Restaurant on East Norwegian Street, where Joe Talpash served the best seafood around; the Sugar Bowl on West Market, where my family was often served by the black-haired Arlene; all the women's clothing shops, such as The Feel-Fine, Mister S, The Grace Shop, Pomeroy's and Weiss's Department stores, Raring's, Paramount and Triangle for shoes, Woolworth's, Kresge's, and Green's Five-and-Tens, the Capitol and Hollywood Theatres. And I could go on and on with all the ingredients that make for a great downtown.

The city of Paris has just undertaken the destruction of the shopping center that replaced les Halles, hoping to resurrect the city's heart. A good idea, isn't it?