May 24, 2002
20. Quiche
In fact, I've been in Paris for two weeks since my vacation in the south, but I stole a week of vacation to use in my last travel log. Since my return, I've mainly been getting back into normal France life, which is surprisingly similar to my Canadian life -- laundry, work, walking, reading, eating. Except it goes without saying that the food is better, even when I make it myself.
One of the things I make myself these days is quiche. It's incredibly simple, looks impressive and is quite tasty. You start with a round pan, and drop in your pastry. The vocabulary for pastry is impressive, starting with pâte brisée (short pastry), pâte feuilletée (puff pastry), and pâte sucrée (sweet short pastry), and heading towards choux pâte, which is used for intricate cream puffs and eclairs. For salé dishes (literally salty, but means "savoury" regardless of salt content) such as the quiche, you use pâte brisée. It comes pre-made at the market, conveniently cut and rolled in oven-safe paper. As with mayonnaise, there are probably purists who insist it must be home-made.
The next quiche step is to mix up some eggs. Are the eggs in Canada the same as eggs in France? Completely comparable, as long as you're comparing free range eggs (brown shell with farm debris clinging to it, and bright yellow yolks). Even the cafeteria hard-boiled eggs have a brilliant orange/yellow yolk. Unlike Canada, the eggs aren't refrigerated in the supermarkets, which seems to suggest that they make it to the market quickly, and don't expect to hang around there very long.
I usually drop in some slices of torn-up ham. Slices of cooked ham are unusually expensive in France, and you purchase them in individually wrapped packages of two or four slices in the supermarket. The recipe is finished with some cheese (mozzarella works well, as does edam, emmental, or even gruyere), and typically some fresh thyme from my potted plant.
The egg is poured into the pastry, which is carefully folded over top of it, and stuck in the toaster oven at 150 degrees Celsius for about forty-five minutes. The result is easier to make than mac and cheese, but you can take pride in it, which only goes to show that real men DO eat scrambled-egg-pie.
But it's not like I didn't do anything cultural this last week. I had the good fortune to meet with Aaron (Canadian) and Jim and Chris (other). They were visiting Paris for a week to celebrate getting their MBAs from MIT, and they had impressively covered all of the major landmarks. Aaron spoke a bit of French from his days on the Quebecois farm, and we compared our pronunciation.
After visiting the Musée de l'Erotisme (seven stories of smut for seven euro, sometimes historical, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes even clever), we stopped for supper at Quick, a French fast food restaurant. This is the first time that I've eaten fast food in France, at least from a chain, but I was easily convinced to break my fast food fast to experience the French equivalent.
The menu was pretty typical, with frites, the typical burgers, chicken burgers, fish burgers, the upcharge for the large fries. I had the Mozza Club Menu, which was fries, a coca (cola of any brand), and a sandwich that was equal parts tomato, mozzarella and mayonnaise between two perfectly round pieces of toast. We marvelled at the attractive girls who were just hanging around the area as tourists (Pigalle is known for the sex shops and cabarets) and at the elderly ladies going to see the racy show at the Moulin Rouge.
In the bar afterwards, we discussed coca (sometimes we call it "pop" in Canada) and food vocabulary (everybody knows how to say "free prize inside" in Canada), John Candy and Dan Ackroyd, CanCon and Brian Adams, how popular football was in Europe and how Zedine compared to Gretzky. Finally, Jim asked why the topic always seemed to turn to Canada. I replied "insecurity". We discovered a better answer later -- in fact, the world turns around Canada, because "we own the North Pole". (If you're fussy about details, or don't want to get into territorial law, you can amend that to "we own the magnetic North Pole." And if you're truly anal retentive, you can add "... for now.")
It was either Oscar Wilde or Bleu LaPeluche who said "Being an expatriate is like being a person who has moved from their country of citizenship to a different country, altogether." You know, in his way, I think he was right.
Make your own quiche and leave mine alone.
Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at May 24, 2002 12:00 PM