Sweet Consolations

 

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.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

  

 

Food! Episode 1: The Daily Syrien

If there’s one thing that has brought us all closer together during the covid pandemic, it’s food!

 

That’s why, for the next few months, I’ve like to concentrate on an obsession shared by both Americans and the French. I am not going to tell you about what I cook or about the lines I stand in to get into a supermarket before curfew time at 7 PM. No, I want to take you taste-travelling through the streets of Paris and around the world.

First stop, for some excellent daily bread, “le Daily Syrien.” Basem Albatin, the chef, arrives early to prepare the dough and wait for it to rise. He and his cuistots, his assistant cooks, will then roll it out and begin making “fatayers,” Syrian-style bread rolls filled with lemony spinach, ground meat subtly flavored with cumin and cinnamon, or Akawi, a mild white cheese, much less salty than feta. At the Daily Syrien, they make their own, and the fatayers are made fresh every day.

I discovered the Daily Syrien about six years ago while wandering through the streets of Paris, one of the best ways to get to know this city. The “flagship” restaurant, which opened its doors in 2010, is located at 55, rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, a busy, multi-ethnic market street in the 10^th district of Paris. At number 72, is Daily Syrien Veggie, whose name says it all.

In Paris, there are a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants, and I’ve tested many of them, but only to the Daily Syrien do I regularly return. A week ago, after all these years, I met Chef Basem, brother of the restaurant’s founder Ahmed Albatin. After a long conversation, I now understand why I keep coming back for more and why the Daily Syrien stands out.

First of all, Basem loves every aspect of his job. Once a week he gets up early and travels to Rungis, the giant wholesale food market to the south of Paris supplying the Paris region and all of France. He visits the butchers and chooses his own meat for his homemade Makanek sausages, tiny spiced beef sausages, with just the slightest and tastiest note of hot pepper. To make his gyro sandwich, instead of using a spit, he braises the chicken or beef he has selected at Rungis, after letting them marinate for three days in a special mix of spices. 

“Daily,” “fresh,” these two words sum up the menu at the Daily Syrien. At the end of the day, Basem and his staff take the leftovers home. Each morning, they start over from scratch. Three times a week, fresh vegetables are delivered to the restaurant door, and the chef inspects them to make sure they’re up to his standards. The parsley for the tabouleh salad is green; the vine-ripened tomatoes, red (I know, Basem proudly showed them to me).

As for the falafel, it is truly just like Mom used to make. Every evening, chickpeas are set aside to soak. Every morning, they are ground, along with spices and other ingredients, to make the mixture for falafel balls. At the Daily Syrien, they are not prepared in advance and then heated in a microwave oven. The mixture is fried before your very eyes, especially for you, and you get the freshest falafel sandwich around.

Back in pre-covid days, at the Daily Syrien, everybody sat down at a long wooden table taking up pretty much all the dining space and ate together, which seems appropriate as we were sitting down to a “home-cooked” meal. Then and now, the restaurant also offers a delicatessen service, a big refrigerator case filled with salads and vegetable dishes, Middle Eastern mezzes such as hummus, stuffed grape leaves, eggplant moussaka, and other lentil and eggplant salads, made fresh every day. There are also a few shelves of Middle Eastern products, tahini sauce, Syrian coffee, pomegranate molasses, a tangy sweetener used in Middle Eastern cuisine.

Basem also offers for sale big jars of turnips pickled in red beet juice. I asked him what they were because to my Pennsylvania eye, they looked a lot like pickled eggs. I explained to him how my mom made those and he was very interested. At Daily Syrien Veggie, he is experimenting with new recipes and has come up with some creations where beet juice plays an important role.

 But, for the moment, Daily Syrien Veggie is closed, and were it not for the delicatessen and takeout service, the Daily Syrien would be too. Today nowhere in France can you sit down to a meal in a restaurant. This has been hard on Basem and his brother Ahmed. Daily Syrien Veggie only opened its doors in autumn 2019, a few months before the first quarantine began on March 17, 2020. Since then, they were open for a few months last summer and hope to reopen soon.

By now readers may have guessed where Basem learned to cook: in his family home, in a part of Syria squeezed between Lebanon, Jordan and the Golan Heights. There he learned to make cheese from milk from the family cow that he milked himself; he also learned to make mouhalabieh, a delicate milk pudding flavored with orange blossom water and sprinkled with pistachio nuts. He learned to pickle turnips and make preserved vegetables in barrels on the family’s terrace, where they also had a rooftop garden for growing all their own produce. He grew up helping to prepare all the dishes he prepares for us today.

The curfew and the successive quarantines have been hard on business at the Daily Syrien, but Basem Albatin works hard and does not despair, a luxury he cannot afford. Since his arrival in France in 2010, he met his wife and has started a family. He and his brother Ahmed are also responsible for their family in Syria. Not only must they keep their business running, they must help those they’ve left behind. Basem told me that by simply stepping outside to shop, Syrians risk their lives. They could all too easily become victims, not of covid, but of their brutal 10-year civil war.

If ever you travel to Paris, I’d highly recommend a stop at the Daily Syrien. If not, I’m hoping taste-travel has brought home some of the flavors of Paris and Syria.