One of my greatest pleasures and loves of the moment is vegetarian cuisine. ( Yes. I came to the land of delicious delicious meats and I became a vegetarian. ) Once, at the age of 11, I attempted vegetarianism and failed miserably. My stepdad and mother still tease me about this. Now I have the last laugh.
That said, you cannot be a vegetarian in the land of meat if you do not like to cook, it just isn't going to work. When you say you're vegetarian in France, people will ask you if you still eat chicken. When you kindly explain that you don't eat meat at all, they'll ask if you eat fish. If you ask a waiter at a brasserie to hold the ham on that croque madame, you will still inevitably find the slice of ham in your croque madame. Vegetarianism, and furthermore, veganism, is an unknown, strange, and somewhat sacrilegious phenomenon to French culture, thought it is slowly taking root here.
My vegetarianism, let's make one thing clear, has nothing to do with my enjoyment of meat or animal products. I happen to thoroughly like duck, pigeon, and poulet rôti. I love cheese...how can one not love cheese when you live a mere three minute walk around the corner from Nicole Barthélémy? Yogurt here is to die for. I just prefer not to eat meat and a lot of these things from a health standpoint. This might have something to do with my first visit to my general practicioner in Paris.
My GP is a bilingual, squat woman of probably 51 or 52, with friendly blue eyes and a deft manner. Her cabinet, in the fifth near rue Monge on a seemingly medieval street tucked behind cheap tourist restaurants whose offerings are greasy fondue and decent omelettes, sits on the third floor where the floorboards creak. The first time I came to see her for a standard check up, she examined me, weighed me, made me sit down on that annoyingly wrinkly, barely opaque white paper that is universal in doctor's offices, took some notes, and then said to me:
¨You are overweight. You cannot afford to gain more weigh. Watch your red meat, do not eat a lot of cheese or charcuterie.¨
I was mightily taken aback.
¨I am nearly almost entirely vegetarian!¨ I exclaimed, adding that I'm a hard core marathon runner who trains and races. At that point in my stay in France, I'd already lost twenty pounds since my arrival, was the slimmest I'd been in years, and felt so good about my body. But she blew that out of the water faster than a hand grenade thrown into a box of TNT.
Let's get this straight: this 5'4, 135 pound marathon runner is OVER WEIGHT!? Are you KIDDING ME?
I let it go and decided that this was just another cultural imperative of the French. I will never have French body structure; I am not menue like French women are. I have hips, breasts and curves, I am pulpueuse and not straight up and down. And I am fabulous with that so long as I eat well and eat from the earth.
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One of the joys of learning to eat ( for it is a re-éducation ) in France is learning to eat from the earth: eating in tune with the seasons, picking out fresh produce culled from the fields that same day at open air markets around the city. My favorite is the Marché d'Aligré near Ledru Rollin. One of my good friends here, who has subsequently returned back to the States, and who also happened to be vegetarian, introduced me to this market not long ago, and I fell in love.
The Marché d'Aligré isn't like the marché biologique on boulevard Raspail, though you can certainly find all things biologique at the Marché d'Aligre without chopping off an arm and selling your liver to pay for the produce. This is just my kind of heaven on a bright Sunday morning. I stop first at the Arab traitors to buy black beans, bulgur, barely, couscous, lentils. The walls are lined in piles of dried raisins and nuts and rices, spices from all the corners of the globe and if the gentlemen who man the store find you attractive, they will call you Mademoiselle and thank you with warm smiles that invite you to return again soon. Outside the marché hums with the farmers who yell like colporteurs selling newspapers freshly printed but they are not selling stories, but figs and asparagus and cherries, whatever is growing right now. There are small mountains of avocados that will never do California avocados justice but are acceptable substitutes.
Today my treasures are apricots and leeks, ruby red cherry tomatoes that could be threaded into a necklace and eaten for their bright bursts of sugar. I cradle them in my re-usable Carrefour bag and walk the ailes of the Marché, on Safari for the grassy, beautiful melody of basil in the fresh air. I find my herb seller, wearing his usual glasses and his yellow grin and ask him for basil and oregano, but he has no oregano so I happily take just the basil.
This is pure, unadulterated pleasure for me. The women and the men too'ing and fro'ing with their children and their rolling paniers and their wide, searching eyes. Touching, feeling, smelling the eggplants and the mushrooms which lie sleeping in beds together, on top of one another. This is beautiful, eating from the earth, eating so good and so at its finest that it is beyond delicious and in no way do I realize that I am not eating meat. When done right, when done for pleasure, from the terroir to the table, if you know how to cook in the way a vegetarian foodie needs to cook, you do not realize you are missing animals at all. In fact, you wonder why you ate them in the first place. I love that in the absence of dating, I have the time to do this, to cook like this and to fly about the kitchen like a banshee, for me, and for those I love. I love the open air markets of Paris.
Heaven is a place on Sundays, after all, called the Marché d'Aligre.
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