Staple Chase

Stumbling over the barriers in my search for French pantry ingredients

All the delicious French seasonal food, exotic produce, heavenly cheese and delightful wine were bound to expand my culinary experience. Still, I was blindsided by how much the country derailed my eating habits.

It’s one thing to indulge in paté, duck confit and rich pastries while on vacation, but that’s just not sustainable for your average Tuesday. What seemed supportable to me was continuing my solid, if somewhat boring, repertoire. Breakfast used to be scrambled egg whites - from a convenient pourable carton - with leftover vegetables, a slice of Don’s homemade multi-grain bread and maybe a link of turkey sausage. Lunch could be a salad with canned tuna, a wrap, maybe a turkey burger. There were infinite choices for dinner, among them: pasta with a store-bought spaghetti sauce that tasted like Grandmom’s, turkey meatloaf, homemade soup, or an adapted breaded chicken breast recipe my mom dubbed, “Chicken Your Way.”

For special occasions, we bowed to traditional dishes: turkey and my mom’s stuffing on Thanksgiving, fried smelts and spaghetti with tuna fish on Christmas Eve, pastina when you are sick, sad, or really tired.

My menus were informed by family recipes, rituals, habits, preferences, and a couple decades of Weight Watchers. When nothing in the fridge looked good, I could take a dive into our freezer chest. I didn’t have to think much about what to make because I had memorized the script long ago. Now, however, every hour not spent thinking about my laundry goes into figuring out what to make for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This task is buoyed by having easy access to fresh, tasty, beautiful ingredients. It’s challenged by no longer having access to the staples I stocked in my Philly kitchen.

Here in France I cannot find ground turkey, prepared chicken broth, bone-in chicken breasts, cranberry sauce or smelts. And the French don’t sell egg whites in a carton, only in their original packaging.

I floundered quite a bit with this the first year. I knew that if I didn’t get a grip, I’d end up sounding like another insufferable transplant bitching about the lack of Oscar Mayer Wieners and Marmite. I had to commit – fully – to living like a French cook, which meant living without homemade turkey meatballs.

I began the process of food assimilation by seeking French substitutes for what I used to get at the ShopRite. I had some success, but mostly it felt like watching an American movie dubbed into French – close, but not quite there. I eventually got comfortable ditching the egg-white omelets for fromage frais and granola, but it remained a challenge to find store-bought spaghetti gravy good enough to pass as homemade, the way Classico’s Four Cheese Tomato Sauce worked for my grandmother. (Don’t you dare tell a soul about that. I wasn’t supposed to let on!)

Eventually I gave up searching for the facsimiles. I let my dreams of College Inn Chicken Broth die a slow, painful death.

I had to go all-in with the French. I started with leeks.

You see as many leeks as baguettes poking out of shopping baskets here, but I just couldn’t figure out what they were doing with all of them. Was there a world beyond leek and potato soup? My friend Judith came to the rescue with a couple recipes that feature the leek as a legit side dish. It felt like receiving the healing touch from a tent revival preacher. Leeks are amazing. Who knew?

My success with them helped me gain enough confidence to explore the humongous canned fish aisle. That led to a luscious pasta dish with sardines and anchovies. I experimented with roasting the pumpkin-like potimarron, toyed with an array of apple varieties I’d never heard of, fell in love with the pink oignons de Roscoff, and became a complete snob about butter and salt. And bread.

The huge canned fish aisle

This was all solid foundational work, but I didn’t just want to get by while living in the world-renowned center of haute cuisine. I needed to thrive.

It was time to take on the tart.

I bought a tart pan and a cookbook, Tartes Faciles (Easy Tarts). I have a philosophical objection to making any form of bread or pastry here in baked-goods paradise, so I skipped that part and bought pâte à tarte feuilletée (puff pastry) at the grocery store. I shifted my attention to fillings. I quickly realized I should have focused a bit more on the shell because, in spite of all the episodes of The Great British Baking Show I have under my apron belt, I forgot about blind baking to keep the crust from puffing up too high. Don convinced me to wash all our loose change and use it to weigh the crust down during a partial bake. It worked just fine, but I eventually got tired of washing my change and bought ceramic pastry balls at the fancy cookware shop.

So far I have perfected a roasted tomato tart with goat cheese and a tarte forestière with a mixture of exotic mushroom varieties. Then last week I tried a carrot tart. It was a flop. The carrots were terribly undercooked and the fromage frais filling oozed into the pastry, transforming it into what Paul Hollywood calls “stodgy.”

The good tomato tart

Aside from the work and hope I had invested in this particular tart, my ego had somehow become entangled in it, as well. Granted, one stodgy tart can’t wipe out decades of being a decent cook. Somehow, though, this tart took on a deeper meaning – a significance that grew way beyond the circumference of the tart pan. That tends to happen when you are a grown-ass adult feeling like a child learning to tie your shoes, only these shoes are made in a foreign country and have unfamiliar laces that don’t tie the way all other shoes tie. At the risk of taking the shoe metaphor just a bit too far, this tart was my Clown Shoes.

It’s funny now, but I wasn’t laughing when the carrot tart collapsed onto our plates. In fact, I cried big, fat tears of defeat, right there at the dining room table.

I was tempted to leave the crying part out of this and just end with one of those, I May Have Stodged Up A Tart But I Learned a Valuable Life Lesson moments. That would be dishonest. Not only would it deny the reality that - even as I’m “living the dream” - I sometimes struggle to feel at home here. It would also gloss over the only valuable lesson I did learn: cook those carrot slices twice as long as the recipe suggests