After my initial shock, however, I realized that this was the only way to get the authentic taste of a Parisian baguette. If the bread hasn’t been through the bacterial obstacle course, it won’t have that truly Parisian tang. The loaf must bear traces of deodorant, as if it had been hurriedly transported from boulangerie to café under a waiter’s arm or clutched to his chest. It also has to have other people’s fingermarks on it, because, realistically, before the bread is eaten it will probably have been squeezed by the baker, the shop assistant, at least one waiter or waitress and, if it has been served up and not eaten by one tableload of diners, it will have been re-served to a second table, possibly being tested for size and freshness by a few picky eaters along the way.
In short, we were road-testing these baguettes in real-life conditions rather than giving them a sterile laboratory test. The winning loaf was going to be a worthy champion, fully capable of standing up to anything the city could throw at it.
And in the end, we all survived the bacterial onslaught and chose a winner—number 86, who turned out to be an immigrant from Senegal now working in Montmartre, in a boulangerie called the Grenier à Pain (the bread attic) in the rue des Abbesses. The food professionals approved—they knew him and his work, and were pleased with the choice. Even a foreign novice like myself hadn’t distorted the vote.
Over the next couple of days, I waited anxiously to see whether I would come out in boils or collapse from a gluten overdose (try chewing on more than fifty hunks of baguette in an afternoon and see what it feels like), but nothing happened. And then I realized—the organizers had no doubt chosen me because I’d been in the city long enough for my immune system to have become acclimatized. Anything less than fifteen years and the competition would probably have been fatal.
Visitors to the city should not be worried, though. Exposure to small quantities of café-basket baguette over a short period of time is probably not dangerous, especially if they are consumed with a cleansing glass of wine.
Follow your nose
There are hundreds of guidebooks and websites recommending eating places, but often the best way to make sure of getting a great Parisian food experience is—and apologies for the pun—to trust your gut feeling. Aided, of course by your senses, and a little local knowledge.
It’s also useful to have a few yardsticks by which to judge Parisian eating places, which is what this section is going to be about.
I shall be confining myself to French restaurants—I’m presuming that visitors to the city rarely come here to eat Japanese or Indian food.**** Of course, what we foreigners call a ‘French restaurant’ is just a plain restaurant to Parisians, although they do specify when a restaurant is regional. The most common regional cuisines available in Paris are Corsican, which is peasant food with an almost grudging touch of Mediterranean lightness; Auvergnat, which is a waistline-busting mix of meat, sauce and absurd quantity; and Alsatian, which has nothing to do with eating dogs. Alsatian food—choucroute (sauerkraut) and pork dishes—is common in brasseries, because a brasserie***** is a large café that used to brew its own beer, and Alsace is a big brewing area.
Like most Parisians, when I go out to eat in the evenings, it’s usually to a non-French place. If I eat out at lunchtime, on the other hand, I usually go to a French café. As anyone who has been to Paris will have seen, there is one of these approximately every 10 metres in every shopping street, so it can be difficult to choose. Living in Paris, however, I have the time to indulge in a lot of trial and error.
To test a café, I use my own personal yardstick, based on a dish that I first discovered when I came to work in Paris, and which has now become my lunchtime staple. It is la salade de chèvre chaud, or le chèvre chaud as the locals call it for short. Occasionally it’s hidden behind a name like salade bergère (shepherdess’ salad or, more correctly perhaps, goatherdess’ salad), but a quick scan of any menu’s Salades or Entrées section for the word chèvre will reveal it.
If there is no chèvre chaud, the café immediately goes down in my estimation, because it implies a certain laziness on the chef’s part. There are, you see, several key elements to a successful chèvre chaud that take a lot of skill and judgement to get just right. It’s a challenge, but a worthwhile one.
First, of course, the chef has to choose the goat’s cheese, which comes in a baffling array of varieties. There is the log, with or without a Camembert-style white skin, and varying in diameter from about 3 centimetres to 5. There is the Rocamadour, a small yellowish disc, which is rare in Paris but very tasty. There’s also the chèvre fritter, a pre-prepared breadcrumb-coated pat of cheese that, for me, is an abomination as scandalous as the screw-top wine bottle or the electronic drum machine—it’s just not the real thing. And then there is the Renault Espace of chèvres, the Crottin de Chavignol. Literally, crottin means turd, but this should not put you off, because it neither looks nor tastes like one. It is a 3- or 4-centimetre-high round pat of cheese, shaped rather like a marshmallow, with, ideally, a slightly yellow skin and whiter flesh. It will vary in hardness according
