57. Further meditations upon food

And these may be a little incoherent because it’s been a long, tiring, sunny day and I’ve just drunk a couple of glasses of much-needed rosé, but…

We do eat well here; not only is the fresh produce good (and yesterday we discovered the weekly marché biologique up in the 17^th arrondissement – a little more expensive, but superb), but so are all the other things – the bread, the cheese, the oil, the patisserie, fish, all that. We are very lucky in that we have these lovely things concentrated on the street around the corner, but that quality you find everywhere in Paris. And it makes me realise that one of the things I find most difficult about living in London is not that that quality doesn’t exist – it does, if you know where to look – but that it is confined to those who can pay for it, and consequently belongs pretty well exclusively to the Chelsea- and Kensington-ites. And English society being as stratified as it is, people who live in, say, Morden, therefore are excluded, by price, distance, and a sort of inverse snobbism. I have a great deal of sympathy for Jamie Oliver and his campaign to get people accustomed to eating and demanding good fresh produce. Good food, good ingredients, are such a delight and they should be accessible to everyone.

Incidentally, that accessibility of fabulous produce is also one of the things I love most about Adelaide. I’ve seen markets in quite a few countries now – I do try to check them out wherever I go – and the Adelaide Central Market stands up pretty damn well.

So… food highlights of the past couple of weeks:

• A tarte aux poires, from our regular boulangerie/patisserie – they have mastered the art of desserts that aren’t too heavy, rich, or sweet.
• A pile of fresh vegies from the marché biologique, roasted slowly and served with good olive oil drizzled over the top and fresh basil
• A superb brebis (sheep cheese), pressed in fresh thyme and specially recommended by the fromager, who supports my project to work my way through every cheese he stocks (wasn’t it de Gaulle who asked, ‘how can you govern a country that has four hundred varieties of cheese?’).
• A big dish of enormous fresh blueberries, also from the marché biologique – a stall that was selling only blueberries
• moules – ‘très bien elévées’, I was assured by the fishmonger – literally ‘well brought up’ – cooked in wine with porcini mushrooms
• at lunch today, a lovely fresh salad – just an assortment of leaves – with a thick mustardy dressing, from the Bistro de la Place in the Place de l’Église in Montfort l’Amaury*

This last we shared with Claude (the curator of the Musée Ravel and one of my favourite people in the world), her grandson, his partner and their little baby, just two months old and very beautiful, with his (Indian) mother’s dark skin and big brown eyes. Then we went to the Musée Ravel and spent most of the afternoon playing the piano, which was, as always, a delight. The Erard likes La bonne chanson – Fauré owned and loved Erards himself, and sonorities and colours just flow out of Ravel’s instrument into Fauré’s music. Especially the string 4tet texture of the first song of the cycle – the straight-strung Erard gives a different colour to each voice, so the polyphony comes beautifully to the surface.

* A restaurant Ravel would certainly have visited, since it’s been there since well before his time. In actual fact the square is now officially the Place de la Libération (since 1945 or thereabouts), but none of the Montfortois actually call it that; since it is the Place de l’Église, why call it anything else?

We spent six days last week in London, but of that there is little to say. I am beginning to think that Emily’s London Diary was perhaps not the best title for this page, since I find life most interesting when I am not, in fact, in London. That said, the British Library is a truly wonderful place, and – unlike the Bibliothèque nationale – it is free. Unlike the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale, it is also open and functional, so it wins out there. It is also usefully located right next to Kings Cross St Pancras station, so it is very handy for Paris. On Monday I worked there all day, then met Roy out the front, had a quick dinner and got on the Eurostar. An excellent system.

Roy played a fabulous concert of Fauré chamber music with some Royal Academy colleagues, in an amazing venue – Wilton’s Music Hall, near Wapping, apparently the oldest music hall in the world (it dates from 1850 or thereabouts, was left derelict through much of the 20^th century, and is now in operation again as a theatre and concert venue, and it is very beautiful and extraordinarily atmospheric).

And… that was about it for London, really.

56. Various centuries (a melange)

I like my work. Friday we spent working in a 13^th century (ex-)abbey, which just happens to have a bunch of manuscripts in its library. Sitting in a long, vaulted room, looking out over the gardens and studying original mss was really a very pleasant way to pass the day.

And I’m also getting to study and play such gorgeous music! La bonne chanson est une merveille.

We had dinner last night in a gorgeous tiny restaurant in Montmartre – the oldest still in operation up there (it dates from 1872, which may not seem that old, but Montmartre didn’t really become part of Paris until after 1871), and with all the original decor intact, including walls covered in paintings. Toulouse-Lautrec used to hang out there, but unfortunately he omitted to leave any souvenirs. We wandered past it a week or so ago and decided we had to eat there some night. And it was so much fun. There was a jazz trio… and when you’re the only customers in the restaurant (which we were for the first hour) and it’s so small that your chair you chair touches the saxophonist’s, you can’t ignore them… they were very nice guys (and good musicians too), and when they found out we were musicians we had to have a go on the (clanky) old Pleyel too, and we all applauded each other merrily. I won many points for recognising a Charles Trenet song (‘dis-donc, elle est australienne, elle parle très bien le français et elle connait les chansons de Trenet!’). When other customers arrived – a Taiwanese girl by herself, a couple (she was Hungarian, he was Kenyan) and a bunch of Americans from Seattle, none of whom spoke French – the pianist (and singer, and he was good too) went and chatted to them all, and got them to request songs (the Taiwanese girl wanted ‘La vie en rose’ – ‘It is my favourite! Paris is my dream place!’), and the Kenyan Louis Armstrong.

And I have to quote some samples of the English translations on the menu, because they were just amazing. I don’t know what the Hungarian, Taiwanese and Kenyan customers would have made of the following items:

• ‘steack tartare of beef, prepared, unready, income’
• ‘Confit of duck Skipped apples’
• ‘Mouse of lamb’ [souris d’agneau]
• ‘Salmon grilled, with its jardinière of vegetables, wipes the coriande’
• ‘St Jacques cooked in his vegetables’ [‘Coquilles St Jacques’ are scallops, in case you were wondering]
• and, of course, ‘burnt cream’

To conclude, some useful advice from my current reading material, a history of Elizabethan London:

‘He that wooeth a widow must not carry live eels in his codpiece.’

55. Fraises du bois

I think about food a lot in Paris. Actually, I think about food a lot all the time, because I like it, but I think about it specially a lot in Paris. And most specially on Sundays. This is because we live just off one of the best food shopping streets in town, and on Sunday mornings it’s closed to traffic, so everyone can wander up and down the road and do their food shopping and be sociable.

So this week’s food highlights have included:

• fraises du bois – the tiny ‘wild strawberries’ that are completely different from the big juicy kind
• mushrooms stuffed with chevre, pine nuts, parsley and roast garlic
• a big filet of perch, poached in white wine with mushrooms (we bought some cheap Touraine and couldn’t drink it, so I had to finish it somehow)
• some amazing sweets which a friend brought us from St Jean de Luz: an almond coated in chocolate, and that covered with sirop de frambroise and Armagnac and possibly something else. They are unbelievably gorgeous. I’ve always wanted to go to St Jean de Luz because Ravel was born in the neighbouring village and went back there a lot, and now I have an extra reason to go.
• white peaches, which are in season and are the sweetest, juiciest thing in existence
• a little tartelette aux fraises, which we shared for dessert today – crumbly biscuity base with strawberries and cream on top
• gazpacho, from the fromagerie (logically enough)
• many nice things from the greengrocer’s at the bottom of the street; I spend half the time being immensely cross with the guy who usually ends up serving me, because he makes fun of my accent (next time he does it I’ll say, ‘Et quand vous venez en Australie, je me vais moquer de votre accent aussi…’) – and half the time being delighted with him for the care he takes in choosing my food (‘no, these garlic aren’t good enough, wait, there are some better under the counter, see, isn’t this a beautiful one?’ and he hands it to me to smell, prod, admire…)
• and, this morning, an olive oil tasting at my current favourite shop in the street (well, it comes a close second to the fromagerie, but I’ve had a cold this week so I’ve had to cut back on cheese). I love the olive oil shop. It sells oil from small producers in the south of France, and it’s impossible to go in there and just ask for ‘some oil’ – you have to taste at least five different sorts, with accompanying tasting notes and commentary from the (lovely and very knowledgeable) owners. ‘Now this one has a real aroma of tomato leaves; this is just lightly peppery on the tongue; can you taste the apple at the back of this one…?’ And the thing is, you can. They are so very lovely.

My cold worked the wrong way around this week – normally it begins with a sore throat then moves to the sinuses; this time I suddenly had a terribly runny nose, which cleared up yesterday and I was left with a sore throat instead. And I woke up this morning still feeling rather miserable. But… after I’d sampled a few spoonfuls of olive oil – the peppery ones, that sting the back of the mouth – my sore throat vanished. It really did. Now I feel tired, but an awful lot better than yesterday. So there you are.

The other lovely thing about the rue des Martyrs on a Sunday is just watching everybody – especially the children. I love how stylish Parisian five year olds are – in the nicest way; they just look like five year olds should… lots of gorgeous little flowered dresses and hats. The other day we were delighted by one small person who flew past us down the street on a scooter; all we could see of her was an enormous straw hat tied with a blue ribbon, and a blue dress underneath. Even at five, they’re real parisiennes. Today we were particularly struck by a small girl with a toy elephant – one of those toys that you drag behind you, on wheels, attached to a string – it was a truly beautiful little elephant, all of brightly coloured patches. Also very Parisian chic.

On Thursday night we went to see Szymanowski’s King Roger at the Opera Bastille. This was, without exception, the weirdest opera performance I have ever seen. We knew that it was a pretty strange production, but then it’s a pretty strange opera. Still, we weren’t expecting that half the stage would be taken up by a swimming pool, in which people would randomly wander up and down now and again (sometimes in bathing costume, sometimes not); the best bit was when a whole bunch of the chorus (in bathing costume) ended up sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling their legs; on the line ‘Fires from the abyss, send us your wings’ (I said it was a strange opera) they all kicked their legs like a Grade 1 swimming lesson. But even that was surpassed by the third act when, as King Roger is wandering around the stage trying to achieve some sort of transcendence, the Shepherd (the Dionysus character – we only worked out the next day that’s who he was meant to represent) wandered on; up until this point he had looked like a really dodgy seventies evangelist, but suddenly he had an enormous mouse’s head on. It looked like Mickey Mouse, actually. He was followed onto stage by a bunch of children also wearing Micky Mouse heads and black and white formal outfits; they followed him around for a while in a sort of conga line, then ended up on the side of the stage doing the yoga ‘salute to the sun’.

Oh, and at the end of the first act, the big chorus all suddenly threw a whole lot of little balls up in the air and then wandered off; at the beginning of the second act something lifted on the stage so all the little balls rolled to the front and dropped off somewhere; Roy wondered if this was symbolic (‘what a load of…’)

Anyway, this was a truly authentic Parisian theatrical experience, since at the end the cast was cheered (the singing, I have to add, was stunningly good) but when the director came on half the audience erupted into wild booing (on dit en français ‘c’était hué’); half were standing up and cheering, and the boos and cheers competed with each other merrily for a good while. It was extremely funny.