For the living, death affects us most when we lose the ones we love. It is not easy to mourn those we have never known. In mid-April, France reached the sad milestone of 100,000 deaths from covid-19. In the face of this reality, can a nation come together to mourn and remember its dead?
Last month, I announced a series of articles about food and now I appear to be backsliding, returning to “that subject” again, yet food and mourning are inseparable. During my childhood in Pottsville, when there was a death in the neighborhood, we showed up at the family’s door with food, a casserole, a homemade pie, a cake, prepared with loving care, watered perhaps with tears, speaking a language more gentle, more profound, than anything we could put into words.
As an adult in France, I have tried to keep this practice alive. I’m someone who loves words, and I pride myself on using language with precision, yet when it comes to death, I still believe there’s nothing like food for the living.
For more than a year, communities around the world have been confronting the covid pandemic with the tools, material, psychological and spiritual, at their disposal. Now we must confront more than 3 million deaths. In the United States, the faces of those who have died from covid, with tributes to their lives, have been made available to a wide public on news sites and in other media. Smiling faces, young, old, and in-between, remind us that no two lives are alike.
France has followed a different route and it has not been good for the country. The covid-19 pandemic has been reduced to an affair of statistics, announced daily on the national news and on government and other on-line sites. How many dead, how many newly infected, how many in intensive care, with the capacity of IC units expressed in terms of percentages.
National goals are also presented in numbers and statistics: bring down the number of beds occupied in IC, reduce the number of new contaminations, roll out a larger number of vaccines. The number of new deaths is also tallied daily, but we rarely see the faces of those who have died unless they belong to the famous.
This month marked the one-year anniversary of a covid death, that of Christophe, a beloved French popstar. His face turned up again in the news, other celebrities remembered him, and his songs were played on radio and TV. This is an exception. Most covid deaths in France remain unsung.
French friends will argue that the French are a people who do not want their private lives displayed in public. They’ll suggest that Americans may carry things too far, publishing daily the faces and stories of ordinary people who have died of covid. Yet the French way makes me sad.
That’s why I seek consolation where I can. First of all, at a time when the French are letting down their guard even as the number of cases continues to rise, I find consolation in continuing to protect myself. I wear a mask, as required, when I leave my home. I try my best to keep a safe distance in stores, not always easy in a city like Paris. I keep in close touch with friends, enjoying outdoor walks and phone calls. I cultivate patience because the pandemic’s end is nowhere in sight.
And I try to make the most of life’s small pleasures, seeking sweet consolation where it can be found: in one of the oldest and best pastry shops in Paris, Vieille France, “Old France Pastry Shop,” a mere 10-minute walk from my home! For chasing away sadness and celebrating life, there’s nothing like some excellent pastry shared with a friend.
As for Vieille France, I have been seeking its sweet consolations for nearly 20 years. Founded in 1837, this pastry shop has been in the hands of the same family for generations and Olivier Hermabessière, pastry chef and co-owner of the shop with his wife Sylvie, uses the recipes of his grandfather to create classic French pastries such as the Saint-Honoré, named after the patron saint of bakers and a very chic street in Paris. The cake is made with choux pastry, light little “cabbage-balls” that can be filled with cream and then topped with medallions of caramelized sugar. Making a good Saint-Honoré requires the culinary skill that has gone into making French cuisine part of UNESCO’s cultural heritage of humanity.
At Vieille France, the Saint-Honoré is always good, as are other classics such as a chocolate or coffee éclair and what Americans call a “Napoleon;” the French, a “mille-feuille.” It got its French name because of its puff pastry so thin, so light, that 1,000 layers (mille-feuille) form one light, crispy and delicious biscuit. Take two biscuits, add a thick layer of delicate vanilla custard and voilà, you have a mille-feuille. Vieille France has one of the best in Paris.
I also like to go to Vieille France so I can be served by Sylvie Hermabessière, who makes every customer feel welcome. Though for a few years I deserted her shop for the French countryside, I feel she remembers me.
Yesterday, I shared my cakes with Thierry, my downstairs neighbor and friend. He’s an optimist, glad to be alive and able to find good in each day. Outside, he wears his mask and rather than travel by metro, rides his bike from one end of Paris to the other to go to work. For our late-afternoon snack, I deliberately offered him the classics from Vieille France, the Saint-Honoré and the mille-feuille. I prefer chocolate pastries; Thierry prefers fruit chiffons. Upon finishing our cakes, we both agreed that though these were not our personal favorites, we were entirely satisfied.
As of this date, the French, still in partial lockdown, under a 7 PM curfew, are biting at the bit to get back outside, back to the terraces of cafés, back to their gym and to the movies, back to discotheques where they can dance the night away. They want life to return to the way it used to be, but that way may be gone forever.
Now is the time to be glad to be alive and for all of us who can, to think of all the sweet consolations that accompany us each day, and few things are better than delicious pastries shared with friends.
