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.

        

 

 

France has caught the covid blues

It’s 6 PM. The sun is still shining and temperatures have risen into the 50’s. I’d love to go outside but instead, I’m standing at my living room window and I’m not the only one. Across the street, in a big apartment building that towers over mine, others stand. Some peek out from behind a curtain; others throw their windows open, lean out, and stare at the street below.

 Why are we all here, as if on cue? What are we looking or waiting for? The answer is “nothing.” It’s curfew time. Since January 16^th, all over France, we are supposed to be in for the night by 6 PM. Yearning draws us to our windows. Traffic is still heavy, mostly busses and taxis; a few lone pedestrians carrying grocery bags hurry through the streets. The night may still belong to lovers but, at least for the moment, it doesn’t belong to anyone who forgot to buy a quart of milk or a pack of cigarettes. And forget about a moonlight stroll.

Last evening, at about 5:45, I heard whistles blowing in Buttes Chaumont Park, a few steps from my Parisian apartment. The guards were emptying it of joggers, strollers, and parents with children running free in the park’s playgrounds. Earlier, outside the local Monoprix, the biggest neighborhood supermarket, late-afternoon shoppers stood outside, waiting in line because the number of shoppers inside was at covid capacity.

In a smaller market in a nearby street, there was a police raid earlier this month. Instead of locking the doors at 6 PM sharp, checkers were still scanning the purchases of shoppers who, in many cases, work till almost curfew time and then have to buy food before returning home for the night. Police sources claim the store, called Franprix, had already been warned. Those waiting in line to check out received a 135 euro fine—that’s about $165 for shopping five minutes beyond curfew time.

We can also receive a fine for not wearing a mask in public. I’m used to mine and put it on before I leave the apartment. I won’t say I like it, but in my present disheveled state—I haven’t had a haircut in months, the more I cover up the better. But not wearing glasses gets to me. Since my return to Paris, I leave them at home when I go out. I no longer drive and I prefer being nearsighted to observing urban life through a heavy layer of steam.

Until January of this year, I experienced the covid pandemic in the country. When I walked in the streets or in the woods, I rarely crossed another person. When I shopped for food, I went to what the French call a “hypermarché,” a supermarket about the size of your average Walmart. Shoppers steered their carts clear of each other. I felt safe and though I wore a mask in the store, I never put one on in the car.

In Paris, even with crowd control, shoppers rub elbows and even breathe down each other’s necks. It has taken some getting used to. And now that the UK variant, highly contagious and perhaps more deadly than previous forms of the virus, is getting the upper hand in the Paris region, I’m never too impatient to go outside.

In all of France, restaurants, cafés, theaters, museums, cinemas, gyms, stadiums, funeral parlors and crematoriums, discothèques, conference centers, circus tents and even outdoor sports facilities remain closed. The official government list is actually much longer. Since January 31^st, shopping centers have been partially closed, with the exception of groceries and supermarkets. 

To tell the truth, after 6 PM, there’s not much to do in France.

To tell the truth, France is not doing so well with the covid pandemic at this time. Each day there are between 20 and 25,000 new cases, as compared to 50 to 60,000 in the US, with a population 5 times greater. There are 27 deaths per 100,000, compared to 24 in the US. At this date, about 3% of France’s population has been vaccinated, and many of those over 75 do not yet have a vaccination date. There are not enough vaccines to go around, a problem the US, with 13% of the population vaccinated, is encountering as well. Both President Biden and President Macron announce that by summer’s end, those who wish to be vaccinated will be, but as the French say, “Wait and see.”

For a little over a year, we have been living with this virus. Everywhere in the world, people’s lives have changed. I know I’m among the lucky ones. First of all, I’ve not caught Covid-19. I’ve been spared its immediate and long-terms symptoms.

Since retiring, I have also escaped the grueling working conditions of teachers in France. Fom nursery school to high school, teachers have been pretty much continuously on the job since last year’s springtime quarantine came to an end. France’s Minister of Education has made a priority of keeping schools open.

University students, however, have been kept out of the classroom and my former colleagues spend their days glued to a computer screen, teaching on-line, correcting on-line, mostly without tech support, often using all their own material. Last fall, when universities were open, the number of covid cases soared. France went into a short-term quarantine in late October. When it ended, universities remained closed. 

Since that time, suicides have been on the rise among the young, and many students now depend on food banks to eat because, with so many sectors of the French economy shut down, they cannot find parttime work. Yes, because of covid, youth is truly being wasted on the young. They can’t even take advantage of it!

Everyone in their own way must yearn for a “return to normal.” Those of us who come to our windows at curfew time would like to step outside after 6 PM. We’d like to take off our masks, sit at a neighborhood café, or, luxury of luxuries, have dinner in a restaurant, simple pleasures too long denied.

Yet “normal” will not be coming back any time soon. It may not come back at all. Our world has changed, and covid is not the only cause. The question then becomes how we ourselves are going to have to change. That’s something I think about each evening at curfew time.

       On a balmy winter weekend, a lucky few escape the city for nearby beaches in Normandy.

 

 

 

             

 

How numbers numb us

Since the pandemic began, family violence is on the rise in France

Days begin and end with numbers and statistics: how many new cases of covid-19, how many new deaths, how many new variants of the virus present on French or US soil?

We’re used to this; it’s our daily bread: sickness and death and numbers that in their enormity tend to sweep under the carpet the reality of suffering and loss. After all, if there are more than 5,000 deaths in one day but no one you know has died, it is easy to ignore the pain. Numbers add up the deaths; they also tend to deaden us.

In France, as in the United States, the corona virus pandemic makes headlines every day. Yet in January, there have been some other numbers and statistics in the news that have brought home an ugly reality to the French: one person in ten admits to being a victim of incest, which comes to 6.7 million French women and men.

Since January 7^th of this year, incest, its numbers, its statistics, and the stories of its victims have been reported relentlessly. On that day, a new book was released; its title, La familia grande, seems at once light-hearted—it brings to mind a Spanish comedy—and ominous—when I first heard it, it made me think of the mafia and omertà, the law of silence imposed on those aware of mafia crimes. In fact, the title is both.

 

La familia grande, by Camille Kouchner, a 45-year-old lawyer and legal scholar, daughter of Bernard Kouchner, co-founder in 1971 of Doctors without Borders, is the story of one big happy family. It is also the story of incest. Camille’s step-father abused her twin brother in the late 1980’s. The step-father, Olivier Duhamel, is a leading specialist of French constitutional law. Until a few weeks ago, he was also a much-consulted media personality and president of the French National Foundation of Political Science. He is professor emeritus at the Paris Institute of Political Science, one of France’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning.  

La familia grande in some ways resembles one of those light-hearted French comedies, the kind that take place in a beautiful country home inhabited by beautiful, luminous people. Outside in June, in the shade of a fragrant linden tree, adults drink wine and banter with brio as beautiful children run and play in the sun. The book is about that kind of family, composed of intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and actors, a highly distilled who’s who of the best and brightest of France. It is also about a family that kept silent about incest.

Many knew or suspected. Many kept quiet for all the reasons people keep quiet when they know wrong has been done. Some beyond the family have felt the repercussions. Elisabeth Guigou, a former minister of justice, resigned on January 13^th from her position as president of an independent commission on incest recently put in place by the French government. She has been close to Olivier Duhamel for years and was close to him when the acts of incest took place. Many at that time, in the small world of Parisian power and influence, suspected and chose to look the other way.

Here I must make clear that Camille Kouchner’s book has not drawn such attention because it takes place among France’s elite. It tells a universal story of the abuse of a child by an adult with the power to humiliate, intimidate and destroy a life. Camille’s clear and powerful account of her step-father’s sexual abuse of her brother (it’s our secret, don’t tell your mother, it would only hurt her) has set off a “me-too” moment in France. Many who have never spoken are speaking out now and showing their faces for the first time. 

 

At about the same time Olivier Duhamel’s abuse of his step-son began, a victim of incest chose to be the first to show her face on prime-time French TV. On a popular talk show, she spoke publicly of her father’s crime. In 1986, upon the publication of her book, Le viol du silence—The rape of silence, Eva Thomas came forward and spoke to a national audience about how her father climbed into her bed and raped her. She spoke before an assembly of “experts.” Viewers could call in with their comments, and here is what some had to say:

In 1986, on prime-time TV, a medical doctor protested, “You’re just trying to stir up trouble in families and destroy our happiness. I myself have daily sex with my 13-year-old daughter.” Another is in love with his step-daughter and the whole family knows and approves. Still another father speaks of the pleasure he takes in caressing his 10-year-old daughter. Should he feel guilty about that?

Eva Thomas’s response is a resounding “oui.” Incest is abuse of power and an act of violence of a parent against a child who cannot say “non.”  

At that point, one of the experts, a well-known and respected gynecologist, interrupted Madam Thomas to “nuance” her point of view. Incest had changed; in most cases it was no longer violent. The parent sought to seduce with tenderness and gentle sexual games. In 1986, in those “enlightened” times, the act could be “romantic,” overflowing with tenderness if the right circumstances were put into place.

It is a crime, period, is the response of Eva Thomas.

While Camille Kouchner’s brother was being abused by his step-father, he tried to tell his sister, but she was too young to understand. To speak of incest, the victim needs someone who can. Such a person is rare, which is why in general silence reigns.

Eva Thomas created a national awakening in 1986, but then the French fell back to sleep. Today the same is happening again as more and more victims come forward to speak of their parents’ crimes. Many witness to lives destroyed.

How difficult for a child to speak a truth that no one wants to hear. How difficult to disrupt and perhaps destroy a family by accusing a parent or close relative of a crime. It is no wonder it takes years to “speak up.” It is no wonder so many victims choose sacrifice.

During the current world-wide pandemic, as families are confined to the home, domestic violence is on the rise. Statistics prove it, and behind every number there is a life.