Pain and Chocolate

It is amazing what the French do with chocolate, flour, eggs, sugar and various other ingredients. The pastry shelves are worthy of 100 pictures and I was not too embarrassed to take a few. And I don’t even really like pastries that much. But it is astounding what they do both visually and I am sure gastronomically with these little desserts. In Paris I passed a patisserie that had little sweets that looked like miniature hamburgers and a teeny tiny basket of French fries. Why they would want to replicate the look of fast food is beyond me – if there is any culture that eschews fast food – it’s the French. But maybe it’s ok to make your pastires look like fast food. Odd.

In Arles – the day of the bull fight there was a patisserie selling chocolate éclair type things shaped and decorated like the head of a bull. An alive bull by the way cause that is how the French do the bull fight. With living bulls – from beginning until end.




One day we walked through the Marais which is this great funky part of Paris – that once was and I think still is the center of Jewish culture in Paris. We passed a bakery/pastry shop that sold such an incredible milieu of baked goods – my head wanted to explode. In that moment I really really wished that I liked sweets. Why aren’t cooks this devotional about potato chips? OK maybe the British are.

I didn’t have my camera and I tried to commit to memory the many really fantastic looking baked goods – and there were just so many – along side plain old croissants and pain au chocolats that looked like they may very well be the best in the city – or at least the best I had seen in our 4 short days there. You could spend a lifetime trying everything – and I am sure there is a Parisian out there who will or has. In this same shop was a small coffee counter – set to the side. You could pick out your pastry, and then stand at the counter and pay a mere 1.7 euro for an espresso (as opposed to the 3 – 4 euro price we were paying to sit and drink coffee).

I want to spend my days at that coffee counter, sipping espresso, and watch people gawk at that display counter all day!