As Genna watched the family walk off, the idea for her Eiffel Tower dish popped into her head. She’d pair it with steak haché et frites—fried hamburger and french fries, the lowliest dish on any Parisian bistro menu, always reserved for the menu enfant, the children’s menu.
The summer when she’d traveled around France for six weeks with Drew and the kids, eight-year-old Michael had eaten steak haché et frites almost every day. One beef patty, grilled and crispy, accompanied by a mound of light, hot, salty, and crunchy french fries—the best fries in the world. Steak haché et frites was as basic as cooking got in France.
The Eiffel Tower, arguably the most important tourist site in Paris, should be paired with the all-time favorite of parents traveling with children and desperate to get something nutritious into their stomachs.
Genna took out her notebook and began to write.
If you’re traveling in Paris with young children, the Eiffel Tower will be high on your list of must-sees. The size and shape of the soaring tower, its elegance undimmed in well over a century, captivates even young children. And the ride up the elevators to the troisième étage—the third level—has the power to excite children brought up on video games and Disney theme parks.
Just remember that the end result of the ride is a view, which for most children is as appealing as broccoli. Minimize your time at the viewing platforms and head instead for the souvenir stands at the first and second levels. Here, you’ll find plush Eiffel Towers sporting tiny red berets and Eiffel Tower–shaped earrings, backpacks, and paperweights along with T-shirts, caps, puzzles, mugs, and even underwear emblazoned with images of the Eiffel Tower. What child can resist? To keep the peace, consider allocating a small portion of your budget to letting them buy one item.
Steak haché et frites shows up on every children’s menu in every bistro in France. Cooked in the French bistro way, the humble hamburger patty is slightly charred, meaty, and melty. For the real bistro flavor, pair this dish with homemade mayonnaise or a grainy béarnaise sauce.
Good start! Genna snapped the notebook closed, shoved it into her daypack, and stood up for a stretch, then strolled around the viewing platform encircling the second level. On the trip with the kids, she’d taken them up to the very tippy-top. Even now, she shuddered as she remembered the terrible vertigo that had gripped her when the tiny elevator shot skyward from the second level and hurtled toward the impossibly slender apex of the tower.
The rooftops of Paris had blurred into a gray mass with only the solid black monolith of the modern Montparnasse Tower to the south keeping pace with the elevator’s skyward momentum. At the top, she’d glued her back to the wall, too frightened even to go to the barred edge of the viewing platform. That evening, she’d needed a good half liter of wine to recover.
Genna descended the two levels to the ground and walked a few blocks east to find one of the bistros on her list. At 1:00 p.m., the place was crowded. Unsmiling servers weaved and twisted their slim bodies around earnest businesspeople as intent on their food as on their conversations. She ordered a carafe of house white, a thick slice of quiche Lorraine, and a tossed salad from the reassuringly traditional menu. For dessert, she indulged in a single boule of mango ice cream sprinkled with toasted coconut.
After lunch, she walked back to the apartment and prepared steak haché et frites for dinner (it was wonderful!). Then, feeling pleasantly full, she took a walk along the Seine, this time to the east as far as the Île de la Cité. At an open area near Notre-Dame Cathedral, inline skaters swept with dizzying speed around a series of plastic pylons. Genna spent an entertaining half hour watching them and thinking about her son. He’d have been right at home with the skaters, speed being one of his favorite things.
She remembered Drew complaining with a mixture of pride and exasperation about Michael’s fearlessness when at the age of six he’d ridden his bike at breakneck speed down one of the steepest hills in West Vancouver. Drew was not a daredevil himself—far from it. Many times, Genna had taken Michael’s side in clashes with Drew, not because she wasn’t worried about her son (she was), but because she admired his confidence. Drew liked to play it safe and Michael did not.
On the other hand, Genna knew Michael would never be capable of doing what his father had done.
Genna walked slowly home, dodging the swarms of young people in the tiny streets leading from Boulevard Saint-Michel. This part of the Left Bank was her favorite—a bit seedier than the posher area around Rue Bonaparte, the smells of cheap gyros and hot dogs heavy in the air. She missed Michael and Becky. Well, of course she did. But she couldn’t regret for a minute coming to Paris.
With her first week behind her, a workable daily routine was becoming set—sightseeing in the morning, lunch at a bistro, writing and cooking in the afternoon, and then sampling the results for dinner before enjoying a walk in the evening air.
That night, she snuggled her head into the pillow and drifted to sleep, the very picture of contented womanhood. She could not let thoughts of Drew and their life together get in the way of what she’d come to Paris to accomplish.
Chapter Three
Lemon Macarons
Tart, smooth, buttercup yellow—sunshine on a plate
Gris. That was the only word for it, and it was the perfect word. Gray in English, gris in French. Both versions captured in a single syllable the flat hopelessness of a day when no sun penetrated the monochrome.
On a gris day, everything in Paris was gray—the buildings, the pavement, the Seine, the faces of the people hurrying to work while dreaming of holidays in Provence. Notre-Dame’s towers viewed from the small window on the landing outside Genna’s fifth-floor apartment resembled two dead, gray pillars piercing a flat, gray sky.
On this her eighth day in Paris, Genna had planned to visit Sainte-Chapelle, but since a sunny day was essential to exposing the true glories of the chapel’s stained glass windows, she adjusted her master list. Sainte-Chapelle swapped places with the Musée National du Moyen Âge—the National Museum of the Middle Ages, known also as the Cluny Museum.
She’d happily spend the morning prowling past exhibits of old stone and religious relics and have lunch at a bistro near the museum.
As she dressed for the weather in an oversize knit shirt, a rain jacket, and her sensible navy blue travel skirt with its hidden pockets to thwart les voleurs, thieves, Genna wondered what recipe to pair with a museum that specialized in the Middle Ages. As historical eras went, the medieval period was her favorite. She loved thinking about the thousands of artisans who had thrived during the period, many helping to build the great cathedrals of Europe.
Her visit to Notre-Dame Cathedral the day before had been a great success, yielding two recipes for Eat Like a Parisian: Notre-Dame Lemon Sole and Rose Window Strawberry Tart.
A visit to Notre-Dame Cathedral takes you into the heart and soul of France. Emerging from a recent cleaning, the cream-colored stone glows in the spring sunshine, much as it did when it was first built a millennium ago.
The cathedral sits on an island in the middle of the Seine, until modern times the principal artery for commerce. For centuries, fish from the river nourished the well-fed clerics who kept the great cathedral running.
From soul to sole, this recipe for grilled lemon sole swims in a light cream sauce made tart by thin slices of melted lemon. Serve with a fluffy rice pilaf studded with pistachio nuts for a heavenly experience.