Chemin d’Arles / Via Tolosana to Santiago de Compostela

Near the Adagio Aparthotel in Aix-en-Provence there is a road called Route de Galice.  Galice?  Galicia?  Was this a pilgrim road connecting to the Camino de Santiago?  It isn’t a far-fetched idea since we ran across markings for the Camino in Switzerland.  It turns out that indeed there was a pilgrim route from Arles through Toulouse and over the Pyrenees that connected with the Camino Aragonés that runs through Jaca in Spain and connects with the Camino Frances at Puente la Reina.  And the significance of Arles was that it was also a starting point for the pilgrim route to Rome.

The road from Arles to Rome, the Via Aurelia, goes through Aix on its way to Genoa, Lucca, Siena and Rome and the Italian section was built by the Roman consul Gaius Aurelius Cotta in 241 BC.  In 13 BC the road was extended to Arles, a significant Roman town, by the Emperor Augustus.  Recently a hiking route has been mapped out (Grandes Randonnee GR653-A) to trace it but it goes up into the Maritime Alps rather than through Nice and the coastal cities.  I can’t imagine the Romans building a road through the mountains when they could go along the coast line.  But maybe the new route is to appeal to hikers and avoid the cities and towns.  One hiking blog mentioned that on parts of the trail he didn’t see a single person, and this was in August, the height of the tourist season, but maybe they were avoiding the heat.

If you want to explore the route more closely, Les Amis des Chemins de Compostelle et de Rome offer an interactive map.  Their website is in French but with Google Translate…. We will let you know if we run across any scallop shells.

Waiting 13 Months isn’t so long…

 I’ve been worrying that waiting 13 months until we go to Provence is awfully long.  Then I reviewed my blog posts and realized that we waited 17 month to go on our Sicily trip.  We switched our OAT September 2020 reservations for Machu Picchu to November 2021 reservations for Sicily in June of 2020, the height of COVID.  So that was 17 months of preparation and I made use of every minute of it.  13 months will allow me to do almost as much for Provence!

Already I’ve read the Provence and Cote d’Azur/Nice chapters in Daddy’s copy of Waverley Root’s The Food of France.  Granted it was published in 1966, almost 60 years ago, but it should give me a good idea of what food was traditional.  However, Waverley is not always the best informed:  he didn’t know what a loquat was.  But then he came from New England, not California, and this was before Alice Waters.  He doesn’t have much to say about Aix-en-Provence but he does have nice things to say about Nice, probably because it is on the coast and heavily influenced by Italy.

Now I’ll get back to reading M.F.K. Fisher’s Two Towns in Provence: Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town, which covers Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.  My copy is a Kindle book and I have an inborn resistance to reading it online.  Not that I don’t read loads of things online but a book I like to touch and hold in my hands.  You can’t thumb through an online book like you do the print edition, looking for things to skip and checking how many pages are left to read in a chapter…  My edition was published in 1978 although the first edition is from 1964 so again we are looking at an Aix and a Marseille from 50 years ago.  At the time, Aix had a population of 50,000, now it has 150,000.  And Marseille, the Considerable Town, is undoubtedly « considerably » larger now with more than 800 thousand.  However, compared to cities in China, that’s hardly a drop in the bucket, is it?

Yes, I’m looking at more recently published books too.  I just picked up Rosa Jackson’s Niçoise, Market-Inspired Cooking from France’s Sunniest City. Who’s Rosa Jackson you say?  She doesn’t sound French at all, or even Italian!  However, she’s been running a cooking school, Les Petits Farcis, in Nice for over 20 years and the recipes look  authentic to me.  I’ll have to try the socca and the pissaladière.  Afterall, I have 13 more months to go!

Mont Sainte Victoire

Mont Saint Victoire is the mountain near Aix-en-Provence that Paul Cézanne painted over and over.  Sort of like Mount San Cayetano in Fillmore that we photograph over and over.  When you see a mountain looming up before you every day of your life, it becomes a fixture.  San Cayetano is taller at 4212 feet compared to Sainte Victoire at 3317 feet.

Cézanne was born and died in Aix-en-Provence and spent most of his life there.  Emile Zola did convince him to move to Paris for a while but he eventually returned to the south.  You can visit his studio in Aix although currently it is closed until spring of 2025 for renovations.  Hopefully it will be open by April of 2026.

There is also his family home, a mansion (afterall his father was a banker), that you can visit on a guided tour but apparently it is closed for renovations as well.  Perhaps because it is still winter?  Another reason to wait until spring to visit Europe.

If you want to see more paintings of Sainte Victoire by Cézanne, here’s a collection of them for you.

Aix-en-Provence to Toulon by Bus

One of the free weekends we have in Aix we should go to Toulon.  I’ve been looking up the options and it doesn’t seem too hard.  There’s a #59 bus that runs from the Aix main bus station (Gare Routière), which is a 12 minute walk from the Aparthotel Adagio, directly to the Toulon Gare Routière.  It takes about an hour and a half and there are about 11 buses a day, beginning at 6:15 in the morning according to the schedule on the Zou! Website.  Zou! Is the regional bus system for the Region Sud and their website gives you the language option of French, English or Italian.

Back to France

 On Monday we bit the bullet and signed up for Road Scholar’s Living and Learning in Provence, which is 6 weeks in Aix-en-Provence but not until April of NEXT year (2026)!  I had been floating the idea around and nobody seemed to have any objections and it was good we signed up Monday morning.  Fernando looked at the Road Scholar web page that afternoon and the April-May dates were SOLD OUT so apparently we got the last spot!  Otherwise we would have had to settle for February-March or October-November.  After going to Sicily in late November I’ve decided against the darker months, especially if one is out in the countryside.  Give me long days, even if the temperature is a bit warmer, although we will see if May in Provence changes my mind.  May in Northern Spain was lovely.

We’ll feel like students again!

Naturally I’ve been practicing my French these last two days and what better way than to watch YouTube videos while I’m recumbent biking.  At first I was scouring YouTube for any videos on Aix but the ones in English are by visitors and what can you really know about a town if you only visit for a day or two?  And of course the things they show you are pretty much the same.  The best I found was filmed 6 years ago by Dennis Callan, who apparently leads tours of France and you’ll see his tour group from Honolulu in this video:  https://youtu.be/Iu1f6S_Mek4?si=wX7Av5MCxUsrLpGY

Unfortunately there aren’t any couples like Les Frenchies who are covering the food scene in Provence in English so I decided to try my luck in French but YouTube by default brings up the English results so you have to train it to search in French.  My latest find has been Les Carnets de Julie, which is a production of France.tv and, although the video on Provence is 8 years old, it gave me an opportunity to practice listening to French.  I understood a few words here and there…

No, Mr. Littman did a very good job teaching me; something I learned early on in college and graduate school.  But listening to and understanding a native French speaker is something entirely different from reading French.  It’s those liaisons.  I tried slowing down the playback speed on YouTube to 75% but that made it worse.  Fortunately the Provence video by Julie didn’t have captions so I wasn’t distracted from listening.  She has a video from 2 months ago on Noel in Nice which has captions in English, French or Spanish.  Fortunately one can turn them off because what I need now is to listen to French, not read it.

Books about Paris

 I need to start keeping track of books I’ve read because I requested a bunch from the library but I have a feeling I already read some of them for the 2022 Christmas trip with Juan, Mandy and Louise.  Especially the ones by John Baxter, an Australian who has been living in Paris since 1989.  I know I have read two of his books on Great Parisian Neighborhoods:  Montmartre - Paris’s Village of Art and Sin, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, but have I read Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light or A Year in Paris:  Season by Season in the City of Light?  After a while these books all merge together but in the end, I figure that I will end up with a sense of Paris.  I could, of course, start putting the books in Good Reads, but often I don’t finish a book…. 

I am also spending a lot of time browsing through Let’s Eat Paris and Paris in a Basket: Markets - the Food and the People, a book that Penny sent me ages ago.  Several years ago I purchased Let’s Eat France which is an even more monumental book.  Or maybe it’s just that they’ve made the print smaller in Let’s Eat Paris so that they could shrink the size of the book, like Culinaria did with their paperback versions.  You truly need a magnifying glass to read them!

Of course that’s not all I’m doing to prepare for our trip.  OnYouTube I’ve been concentrating on Les Frenchies (I got behind while I was preparing for the London trip) and a new one by a French man, Paris Top Tips.  I’ve been watching Les Frenchies for a long time and can always find them but I can’t seem to remember the name Paris Top Tips.  Soon enough I’ll get back to watching some YouTube in French, like C’est Meilleur quand c’est bon and La Cuisine des Monasteres.  If they speak too fast, I can always slow down the playback to 75%.  Captions generally aren’t a lot of help since they have as much trouble catching the words as I have.

Should I try Duolingo?  I got off on the wrong foot with them when I tried to create an account and discovered someone else was logging in using my email address.  You would think that Duolingo would verify that.  So I changed the password on them and then requested that Duolingo delete the account. I don’t think I’ve been back since… 

Back to Paris

 In April, we’re going to Paris with Camila and the boys (Peter and Silas) because SAS had cheap fares from Boston to Paris and because it coincides with the boys’ spring break (more or less) and because we have to test the French Immersion program at the Milton public schools.  We’re all very excited.  Fortunately we’ll be staying in an AirBnB because last time we did a trip together to San Francisco, we stayed at the Hotel Caza by Fisherman’s Wharf and it’s very hard to spend a lot of time together when you can only sit and vegetate together in the Hotel lobby (which was pretty good but not very private).

The first AirBnB in Paris that we reserved was north of Montmartre in the 18th Arrondissement.  The boys loved its quirkiness and it looked nice and clean but the first floor living room windows were previously a storefront so one wonders how private that would be.  There was a bedroom on the mezzanine which would have been great for the boys but the second bedroom was in the basement via a spiral staircase with a second living room with a sofabed.  The one toilet was also in the basement although there were showers on both the mezzanine and in the basement.  And Rue Hermel is a bit remote from the center (49 minutes walking and 37 minutes by metro to the Louvre) although there were two metro lines we could have taken to downtown.  We survived fine when we stayed at an AirBnB in the 17th with Juan, Mandy and Louise.  That one was 56 minutes walking to the Louvre, although only 24 minutes by metro.

After a lot of thought and more perusing, Camila came across an AirBnB in the 10th Arrondissement that has two bedrooms with two double beds plus a sofabed in the living room.  It only has one toilet but at least everything is on the same floor.  Although it is not as artsy as the Rue Hermel AirBnB, it is closer to downtown (28 minutes walking and 17 minutes by metro to the Louvre) and the neighborhood has more stores and restaurants.  It will be noisier because it is on the second floor on a busy street:  Rue du Faubourg San Martin.  As the name (Faubourg) indicates, it is outside the medieval city walls, beyond the arch of Porte San Martin which was built by Louis XIV in 1674, to replace the one build by Charles V in the 1300s (just fyi).

I, of course, am delighted by the fact that there is a covered market, le Marché couvert San Martin, just a 3 minute walk from the AirBnB (5 minutes for us).  Next door to that is a Franprix supermarket where I am assuming we can have a machine squeeze our own orange juice for us each morning, like we had in the Batignolles.  On Thursday or Sunday I’m hoping we can revisit the Marché Bastille so I can pick up yet another hat.  Penny and I went there on a Thursday in 2011 and were enchanted by all the produce we couldn’t buy and we both picked up cute little wool hats.  When we went for Christmas in 2022 with Juan, Mandy and Louise, I picked up a little cashmere hat, along with a couple of pillow covers.  Maybe if we go on Thursday (we arrive on a Wednesday) we can pick up some produce and cheese as well.  It’s a 32 minute walk from the AirBnB but only 16 minutes by metro.  Although I see that there is yet another market in between: Le Marché des Enfants Rouges, which we haven’t been to and that is open every day except Monday.  Hmmm.  Do you think we could hit both?  Does the AirBnB have a shopping cart?

Preparing for Sunday Roast in London

 We'll be going to London at the beginning of January and our first day there will be Sunday, so of course we'll need a Sunday roast.  We arrive early that morning (6:30 am) so have plenty of time to get ready.  Unfortunately Juan, Mandy and Louise don't land until 11 but we're hoping we can get to the Sunday Roast by 3 so the restaurant doesn't run out of lamb, like it did when we were there with Penny in 2018.  Americans think of Sunday dinner but in England it is Sunday lunch, and TimeOut says it is "An elemental meal, one that Londoners take incredibly seriously".

Whippet Inn Garden Space

Juan had made reservations at Blacklock but they notified him recently that they weren't doing Sunday Roast on New Year's Eve (probably preparing for a big bash instead...).  Now we're doing Sunday Roast at at a pub more local to the Kensal Rise AirBnB:  The Whippet Inn.  It offers "modern seasonal food, complimented by an excellent range of local and continental craft beer" (good!  I'll be able to get a Belgian ale) and it has a heated, all-weather garden space.  Below is their sample roasts menu:

R O A S T S

All our roasts are served with roast potatoes, glazed carrots, seasonal greens, a Yorkshire pudding & gravy.
Full Whippet Roast – trio of beef, pork, chicken with pork stuffing 23.5
Slow Roasted Lamb Shoulder (serves 2) 52

Roast Hampshire rolled pork belly, apple sauce 17.5

Roast Hereford rump of beef, horseradish 20

Roast chicken, pork stuffing Pumpkin & Chestnut 18.5
Pumpkin & Chestnut Wellington (v / vg on request) 17.5

Their dessert menu includes panna cotta, sticky toffee pudding and mango sorbet.  What's not to like!

In the meantime I'm perusing TimeOut London's article on The best Sunday roasts in London to find a spot for our second Sunday in London and to know what to look for that is typically British.  So far I have discovered that most Sunday Roasts are in pubs.  Pubs typically don't open till noon so they have all morning to prepare, in other words don't try to find an English Breakfast at a pub...  However, the Whippet Inn does have a Saturday Brunch (11-4) with a Full English (sausage, eggs, bacon, baked beans, mushroom, roasted tomato, hash browns, black pudding) and a Full vegetarian (sausage, eggs, spinach, baked beans, mushroom, roasted tomato, hash browns).  But I digress.

I also see that Honey-Glazed Carrots and Cauliflower Cheese are standard vegetable sides on pub menus and that these days there's almost always a vegetarian option.  In fact there is one pub that is completely vegan:  The Black Heart.  And yes, they do a Sunday Roast.

So many pubs and so many Sunday Roasts to choose from!

What happens in 50 years

I should never leave posts in draft mode but publish them, come what may.

Here's one from September, writing about the places we lived in Bogotá.  By now we have been there and back but were only able to search out the Carrera 38 #24-59 address between the Universidad Nacional and Centro Nariño.

(September posting)

Today I finally hauled out my old letters from Colombia to Susan, Fernando and Mother and Daddy (which they so considerately took the effort of saving for me) so that I could identify where we lived in Medellin and Bogota in the 1970s.  And here are those 3 addresses:

Calle 30A #81-137, Medellin

Calle 1 #71d-52, Bogota

Carrera 38 #24-59, Bogota

The only address that is problematic is the Carrera 38 address in Bogota because it looks like they changed number of the cross-street.  I should mention here that the address systems in Bogota and Medellin are supremely logical:  the house number consists of the cross street number followed by the house number.  So the address at Carrera 38 shows you that the cross street is Calle 24.  Calles run east-west, carreras run north-south.  In the street view of that Calle, a lot of the houses have two address plaques, evidently the old and the new.  And of course, the panaderia and the carniceria that were there in the 70s aren’t there now.

The neighborhood that has changed the most is the one in Medellin:  it is no longer residential but appears purely commercial with a huge mall across the street:  Centro Comercial Los Molinos.  When we lived there it had the feeling of a small town but now it is definitely part of an urban metropolis, with Harry’s Pizza in the same block.

San Francisco

 My blogs have really been suffering ever since I traded in my MacBook Air for a MacBook Pro and then spilt rum and coke on it.  The MacBook Pro was supposedly fixed by Apple but when Apple started storing everything on the iCloud, they must have stored the startup disc there to since from then on, the laptop wouldn't start up.  I have an iPad but, without the keyboard. it is not the same, not as handy at the breakfast table because I have to peck instead of typing.  Hence ever since 2019 there's been a dearth of blog posts.  My next iPad is going to have a smart keyboard even if it costs me $300.

That's an introduction to this post on San Francisco, where we're going next, this time with Camila and the boys instead of Penny, who is completely tied up these days with her grandson Kairo and, I imagine, enjoying every minute of it.  When we last went to San Francisco with Penny after Juliana's wedding in June of 2018, we stayed at an AirBnB in the Outer Sunset, which was a nice place but so far out that we couldn't go back to the room to take a postprandial nap.  The AirBnB on Green Street on Russian Hill that we stayed at in 2014 was ideal, a really perfect location next to the Cable Car line.  Unfortunately it hasn't been on the AirBnB market for years, which is why we ended up in the Outer Sunset the last time.  This time it looks like we'll be doing a Fisherman's Wharf hotel, which, although not ideal, will let us easily take the bus or cable car downtown and is also pretty close to Susan and Rich's apartment.  Alas, we won't be able to cook although we still will be hitting the Ferry Building's Farmers' Market:  we can always pick up fruit and bread, things for snacks.

There's a Trader Joe's and a Safeway a few blocks away from these Fisherman's Wharf hotels so we can make ourselves sandwiches for dinner along with cherub tomatoes and mini-cucumbers.  Or we can stop at one of the Italian delicatessens and pick up a capicola and cheese, although I bet it won't have French fries and coleslaw on it, much less a fried egg.  Or we could take the boys to In-N-Out Burger at Fisherman's Wharf, if the line isn't too long, or maybe we go there for a late breakfast when it opens at 10:30.  I love how they say their buns use "old-fashioned, slow-rising sponge dough" and their "American cheese is the real thing".  We need to go there just to see if they are any different from Burger King.

We won't be wanting for dessert:   there's a Ben and Jerry's in the neighborhood as well as Italian gelato and pastry down Columbus near Washington Square:  Lush Gelato and Stella Pastry.  Or we can walk down Stockton to Little Swan Bakery Café and pick up some Asian sweet buns and bubble tea.  In 2014 there was a good bakery/pastry shop on Columbus near Green Street that I mentioned in a post as La Boulange.  It was owned by Pascal Rigo a Frenchman who also created the chain of La Boulangerie.  For those of you interested, here is a little history from SF Gate:

"La Boulangerie de San Francisco was founded by Pascal Rigo, the restaurateur who sold his popular La Boulange Bakery to Starbucks in 2012 for $100 million. Starbucks ended up closing all of its La Boulange cafes by the end of 2015, so Rigo reopened six of his locations under a new name: La Boulangerie de San Francisco."

 Darn that Starbucks!!  Now the closest La Boulangerie location is at Pine Street and Fillmore west of Van Ness.  What's the matter with San Francisco?  They got rid of a great gelato place too that we visited on one of our trips but I can't remember the name.

Practicing French

 Yes, that's right, I've been practicing my French, reviving high school French from 56 years ago, not that I was ever able to speak it or understand "Fast Spoken French".   At least now they have a term for it and admit that the French drop a lot of vowels, consonants and whole syllables.  Sort of like what operatic Italian does to normal (well, as can be) Italian.  Geraldine has several YouTube videos to get you prepared for what you won't understand once you get off the plane at CDG.

In preparation I have gone beyond the lessons of Comme une Francaise and have plunged into the 100% French of KTO Television Catholique.  No, I am not listening to masses but watching La Cuisine des Monasteres in which François Lespés goes from monastery to monastery in France, filming monks and nuns preparing fairly simple but nourishing dishes.  The dishes remind me of the vegetarian food we had on the Road Scholar retreat at the Buddhist center in Santa Cruz, where cooks really do have to use their imagination.  

And yes, most of the dishes in the monasteries are vegetarian except for the pork they slip in there sometimes, most often in the form of andouillette (pig's colon filled with pig intestines -- and some herbs, spices and wine, of course).  Don't be fooled when they call it Andouille de Vire or Andouille de Guémené and start thinking it's a regular sausage filled with ground meat.  The nuns and monks slice it quite thinly and it is quite pretty with its concentric circles.  But Will will discourage you from eating it.

The monks and nuns like their milk, butter and eggs which is understandable in monasteries that raise their own cows and hens or in places like Normandy or Brittany where they traditionally use a lot of dairy products.  But sometimes they go overboard, as in this Tourte Normande which lines a pie plate with a circle of puff pastry, then covers it with creme fraiche, then a layer of onions sautéed in butter, followed by a layer of thinly sliced apples sautéed in butter, then a layer of the andouillette.  Top that with several thick slices of Pont l'Eveque cheese and sprinkle on a persillade (parsley and lemon), beat an egg with some cream and pour that on top.  Then cover the tourte with a second round of puff pastry, brush it with an egg yolk and cook it for 45 minutes.

The monk follows the Tourte Normande with a Teurgoule which is a rice pudding using 200 grams each of sugar and rice, 2 liters of milk and that bakes for 4 hours.  It comes out looking like the Basque Burnt Cheesecake but I bet it tastes good.

I bet this is why the French women stay so thin.

Finally I just want to mention the Macédoine Polanaise  that a Polish nun serves with her pierogies.  Pretty much a  Russian salad.  Usually I think of Macedonia as a mixture of cut-up fruit but a macédoine des legumes is one of  vegetables in France.  Yes, all bound together with mayonnaise, the French sauce par excellence and Camila's favorite.

Books on Paris

 Yes, I got a bunch of Paris guide books out of the library but quickly came to the conclusion that I don't really care for guide books.  They are so boring because they never cover what I want to know or what I might like to see and they really don't provide a whole lot more than a description and an address.

So I took out some deeper books about Paris.  At the moment I am reading The Streets of Paris: A guide to the City of Light following in the footsteps of famous Parisians throughout history.  And I'm learning a lot of history I didn't know, so that's a really good thing, even if I can't remember what I read when I get to Paris.  Now I know that Henri IV was a Protestant from Navarre and that Louis IX was horrid if you were a Jew or Muslim, but a saint if you were the Catholic church.  I learned that Marie Curie was from Poland where she couldn't attend higher education and so came to Paris, that Simone Weil was a philosopher that I'd never heard of, and that Voltaire was probably a bastard.  The author of The Streets of Paris, Susan Cahill, also wrote Hidden Gardens of Paris which Juan is currently reading to find all the playgrounds for Louise.  Will the slides be too cold to slide down?

I've already completed The Only Street in Paris:  Life on the Rue des Martyrs, written by Elaine Sciolino, a former New York Times bureau chief in Paris.  That's also worth reading to give you a flavor of life in Paris and the individuals  who own the shops along this street that runs up to Montmartre.  You'll find out what happens when the fishmonger closes up shop, who's been running the transvestite club at the top of Rue des Martyrs for decades, who owns the bookshops and what a friperie is.  Each individual is unique with their own little quirks.  Naturally you also learn about whom the Rue des Martyres was named after, what Saint Denis carried up the hill (or was it down?), and where St. Ignatius de Loyola started his little band of Jesuits.  There's a story behind each location, something missing in typical guide books, which makes the book much more readable.

Coming up are two books by Eric Hazan:  The Invention of Paris:  A History in Footsteps; and A Walk Through Paris: A Radical Exploration.  Hopefully I'll get around to reading them and reviewing them!

Christmas in Paris 2022

 Yes, we did get to Sicily but the Coronavirus made sure that we spent much of our time commuting on the bus.  However, now we have reservations to go to Paris in December and we have to get ourselves prepared.

First, we'll need to bring flashlights because when we arrive on the 23rd, the sun only rises at 8:42 am and then it quickly sets at 4:57 pm.  Of course the advantage to that is the Christmas lights can shine that much longer.  Although I guess that's not much different from Pittsburgh with sunrise at 7:40 am and sunset at 4:57 pm, same as Paris.  And Boston is 7:11 am and 4:15 pm.  So it's the mornings when we'll want to rush out for our croissants that it will be darker.

I've been looking at Paris Discovery Guide's Christmas in Paris to make sure we don't miss anything special.  Of course we'll have to hit all the Marchés de Noël and do it quickly because we might only have 2 days: December 23rd and 24th, although they say some stay open until early January.  The market at the Tuileries is supposed to be the biggest and liveliest with carnival rides including a giant ferris wheel, in addition to an Artisan Village and lots of food such as mulled wine, roasted chestnuts, sausages, raclette, waffles and crepes.

They say the Christmas season is not the off-season, except for early December, and can get very crowded.  We only hope that the crowds are all French.  The Discovery Guide says that the most picturesque Christmas market is the Marché de Noel Notre Dame, which is open through December 26th.

Devour Tours (specializing in food naturally) lists their 6 best Christmas markets including

Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower has 60 stalls and an ice rink.  It also stays open into January.

Abbesses in Montmarte near the Sacré Coeur.  A small market but there's a carousel (remember in Amelie?).  Again open till January.

Village de Noël at La Défense which the Paris Insider's Guide says is the largest with over 350 stalls and adds:  "If you've never been to La Défense the market gives you a reason to go, especially in the evening when the towering buildings are illuminated. Plan to spend several hours — the variety and diversity of products sold is mind boggling."  It is open until the end of December.

I've never been to La Défense so I guess that means we WILL have to go:  "Getting there is easy, it's the last stop on Metro Line 1, under the Grande Arche."

Some of the markets in the Paris Insider's Guide run only for a short time so we will miss them.  They mention the Marché de Noël des Fééries d'Auteuil in the 16th Arrondissement which has "traditional Christmas figures from Provence called santons."  Unfortunately it will run from December 3-11 so we will miss it.  But maybe we can find santons elsewhere.

These lists will give us a start and if the Christmas Markets in Paris are anything like the ones here, we'll have our fill of them after two.

What about Sicily??

 I haven't posted anything on Sicily for 6 months??!!

Lucia making pasta con il tenerumi

And so many things have happened since February!  I've watched loads and loads of YouTube videos of the Pasta Grannies and In Taverna con Lucia on my iPad, because I've been spending 30 to 60 minutes a day on the recumbent bike exercising my knee.  I don't think I've mentioned Lucia before.  She's a very energetic Sicilian cook that videos herself making lots of dishes, many of them typically Sicilian.  Sort of like a Sicilian Maangchi:  lighthearted, funny and unassuming.  Naturally she speaks very rapid Italian but I can slow the playback speed to 75% and that helps a lot.  I also use the automatically generated closed captions but they can be pretty poor sometimes.  

One of her latest videos was on using the Italian Cucuzza squash, a very long summer squash with velvety leaves and white flowers that open up at night.  I grew it once many years ago but couldn't find a way to use it.  Lucia chops up the leaves, peels the squash and cooks it with tomatoes and onions and serves it with pasta.  

I've also subscribed to the La Cucina Italiana newsletter so every single day I get an email from them linking to 5 or 6 recipes or articles on Italian cuisine.  Ashamedly I've been reading their English version instead of the Italian one.  I remember picking up copies of the Italian magazine at the swap shop in the married student housing in Albany (that's CA not NY) in the 1970s.  I carried them around with me for years and finally gave them away a few years ago (along with the Spanish Encyclopedia Salvat), keeping only one copy for nostalgia's sake.

A few days ago La Cucina Italiana's email linked to an article on Sicilian food with links to additional Sicilian recipes.  And they don't just have recipes but articles on the regions:

• Agrigento, Sicily in Two Days
• Sicilian Cuisine: East Versus West (Catania vs Palermo)
• The Bounty of Sicily's Sicani Mountains
• Harvesting the World's Best Capers on Sicily's Island of Salina
• Retro Meets Baroque: Where and What to Eat in Southeast Sicily (Ragusa)

Of course, it is all about the food.  So what's my next step?  To sign up for the Italian version of the newsletter!

Starch, Starch and More Starch

 No, this isn't about the 3 starches that come with Colombian meals (like potatoes, platano and rice) but about the refined starches that a lot of Asian recipes call for.

A week or so ago I made Maangchi's Sweet and Crunchy Tofu, which calls for Potato Starch to dust (dredge) the tofu with.  She says it makes it much more crispy than corn starch but that corn starch will do if you don't have the potato kind.  I didn't have potato starch and we don't have any Korean supermarkets nearby so I had to make do with corn starch.  However, this past weekend we went to Columbus where I bought the potato starch to complete my pantry.  If I had just checked Amazon, I could have had it with one-day free shipping!

Then yesterday I was reading Carolyn Phillips' At the Chinese Table, a memoir about her life in Taiwan in the 70s and 80s, and her first recipe is Taiwanese Fried Pork Chops.  Does she use potato starch?  No, she uses Sweet Potato Starch and she says that it is preferable to any other type of starch.  There are also two kinds of sweet potato starch, a fine and a coarse, and you need both...  So add those to my Strip District shopping list (we haven't been there since before the Pandemic).  China Sichuan Food says that sweet potato starch is more stable after cooking so it doesn't dissolve as much in water.  But not so good as a thickener.

And then of course there is tapioca starch or almidon de yuca that they mix with cheese in Colombia to make pan de yuca and pan de bono.  We also have that on hand in the deep freeze.

And what about Mochiko?  Sweet Rice Flour that looks almost like rice starch.  The one you use for making mochi.  Does that count?  Should we have that on hand?

Mt. Etna

This is a photo from a 2011 eruption

Last Tuesday, February 16th, Mt. Etna erupted in a strombolian explosion, which is one with relatively mild blasts (like the nearby Stromboli volcano off the north coast of Sicily).  On the 18th it erupted again in the southeast crater.  Go-Etna, an organization that offers excursions of Mt. Etna, describes the eruptions.  Perhaps Overseas Adventure Travel will revisit its decision to relocate our stay in eastern Sicily from Catania to Zafferana Etnea on the southeastern flank of the volcano.  The village of Pedara that was struck by the volcanic stones ejected is only 10 kilometers south of Zafferana and Zafferana was the epicenter of a recent (2/11/21) earthquake of magnitude 3, preceding the eruptions.  So which is worse?  The volcano or COVID 19?  As you might guess, I am rooting for a return to our accommodations in Catania.

The Ongoing Sicilian Food Saga

Usually I can find cookbooks in our local library system but there were two books about Sicilian cooking that I had to order as used books:  Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti (an American who married a Sicilian and moved there in 1962) and Sicilian Food & Wine: The Cognoscente's Guide by Francesca Lombardo and Jacqueline Alio (two Sicilian women who claim to present "the most genuine, candid, unabashed side of Sicilian cuisine. Nothing nouvelle, just the very real thing.").  

Sicilian Food & Wine talks about the food (which I like) without recipes but Pomp and Sustenance also includes recipes.  I'm never sure which kind of cookbook author I prefer:  the native who grew up with the food, or the foreigner who is able to identify which dishes are unique to the region.  A healthy mix of both kinds of cookbooks is probably best.  I must admit that so far I prefer Pomp and Sustenance mainly because it includes the history of the dish and Lord knows Sicily has plenty of history!  It also includes drawings and photos and Sicilian Food & Wine is stark by contrast.  It would have been nice if I could have obtained the Italian version of the latter so at least it would give me some practice reading Italian.

In the meantime I am trying to practice my Italian with YouTube videos.  There's a British subscription called Pasta Grannies that films various older cooks (not all women) cooking special local dishes in Italy.  They offer 17 videos in their Sicily playlist and the advantage to these videos is that most are only 3 to 6 minutes long so you don't have to suffer through any very long preparations.  Today I watched Anna's fish couscous from Sicily (with wonderful tiles in the kitchen) and Nicola's Sicilian pizza called sfincione di Bagheria.   

This is so much easier than reading a cookbook and they do all the work!  Too bad we can't eat the end product.  And sometimes you might not want to eat the end product: next I'm watching Rosetta making pasta with sardines for Father's day!  I swear I will try it when we are in Sicily since it is pretty much the national dish.  The fennel should help.  Or I could opt for pasta con le sarde a mare: pasta with sardines at sea.

By Train from Palermo to Mt. Etna

 [February 28, 2021:  The BBC Great Continental Railway Journey of Sicily on YouTube has been removed and so while I search for a replacement, here is the short clip on Michael Portillo's visit to Gangi and its Mafioso history directly from the BBC.]

In this BBC Great Continental Railway Journey, Michael Portillo takes the Sicilian railway from Palermo, to Agrigento, to Siracusa and finally up to Mt. Etna.  He uses Bradshaw's Guidebook dated 1936 and so Mussolini and Fascism are highlights in this episode.  Michael will never be lost in the crowd because his clothes are so vibrant, garish in fact.  Not at all British. so it must be his Spanish heritage, although he doesn't mention the Spanish influence in Sicily at all, merely the "Bourbon".

1930 Photo

In Palermo, besides going to the Ballaro street market where he eats pasta con le sarde and actually finds it quite good, he pays a visit to the monumental post office on Via Roma next to the main train station.  It is called the Palazzo delle Poste which I don't believe I have read about.  Very very interesting as it was built under Mussolini and has gigantic Greek columns but also a futuristic interior which is quite beautiful, especially the conference room and the stairway.  

Mussolini tried to make everything efficient so he would probably be disappointed that the post office is the epitome of inefficiency, according to Off the Beaten Track in Palermo.  He also wanted the trains to run on time but that was only in Northern Italy.  Sicily was neglected, except for the Mafia, which Mussolini wanted to eradicate.  To illustrate that, Michael takes a side trip to Gangi, a previous Mafia stronghold in the interior of the island that Mussolini surrounded and kidnapped the women and children so that the mafiosi eventually surrendered.  Now Gangi is considered one of the most beautiful villages in Italy.  Perhaps you have heard of the nearby restaurant Tenuta Gangivecchio or looked at one of their cookbooks, La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio.

Michael also visits the Greek temples of Agrigento and talks about Luigi Pirandello, the playwright born in Agrigento and what his relationship was to Mussolini and fascism.  

Then he visits Siracusa, a very interesting historic city which rivaled Athens in the Greek world.  Too bad we are only going to spend a morning there on our trip to Sicily.  Since Siracusa is on the coast, Michael takes a boat ride where he eats arancini (cone-shaped there as opposed to round like oranges in Palermo) and cannoli.  But it is the little pear-shaped tomatoes that caught my eye.  Such a pure deep lipstick red!

In keeping with the Mussolini theme, Michael visits the Monumento ai Caduti in Africa, commemorating the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935-6, another monument that you don't hear about too much in tour books.  It was created in 1938 by Romano Romanelli and was destined for Addis Ababa but was later (1952) erected in Siracusa which was the jumping off point for the invasion.  Although fascistic and imperialistic, it is a very imposing work of art.

Finally, Michael winds up on Mt. Etna, that famous volcano of Sicily.  Michael takes the cable car to the top of Mt. Etna but what is more interesting I think, is the Circumetnea, a railway established in 1895 that makes almost a complete circle around the volcano.  In 1937 they introduced La Littorina, a futuristic Fiat motor coach that they still use in the summer for special rides.  The website, Unusual Places, has an article about it with many photos.

So you can see that this rail journey covers places we haven't seen in other videos about Sicily and it is interesting to learn about the fascist period of the 1936 Bradshaw Guide.

More Sicilian Body Parts

Today in an article in Saveur by the National Italian Tourist Board -- Finding the Real Dolce Vita: A Delicious Adventure Into Palermo’s Secret Dessert Scene -- I learned of another Sicilian dessert that I had not heard of before (how could that be? I asked).  It is Fedde del Cancelliere or Chancellor's Buttocks, which have been updated with a shell shape instead of a derriere.  They are made of pistachio paste or marzipan shells filled with blancmange and apricot jam.  We'll have to be on the lookout for them!

The Fedde led me to an article on Santa Lucia's feast day where they mentioned another pastry named after a body part, le Palle del Nonno (grandfather's testicles -- and wouldn't you know it, testicles is feminine...).  These are supposed to be ricotta and chocolate beignets.  That also sounds good but I don't know if I would ask a restaurant if they had any.

Oh, those Islands around the Tyrrehnian Sea

 

It is only natural that when one studies Sicily, one drifts northward and runs into those two other large islands: Sardinia and Corsica.  And one can't but notice how very similar Sardinia and Corsica are to each other, apart from one being French and the other Italian, but also in comparison to Sicily to the south.  Apparently Corsica became part of France in 1768 when Genoa sold it to France, long before Garibaldi could liberate it and join it to Italy.  Unfortunately Corsica had declared itself a Republic in 1755 but France crushed the republic in 1769.  So that is why they speak French in Corsica, although Italian is a regional language.

Both Corsica and Sardinia are islands that look inward towards the mountains rather than out towards the sea, purportedly due to the frequent invasions by the Barbary Pirates (but undoubtedly also by other Europeans).  Thus their cuisine centers on sheep and cheese rather than seafood.  On the other hand, the invaders of Sicily occupied the island, which was larger and contained fertile land as well as mountains and much of the livelihood remained centered on the sea, although in Sicily there is a rivalry between the developers of the land (farmers and pastoralists) and the fishermen (the hunters and gatherers of the sea).  Because of this and because the multiple invaders brought their own cuisine and foodstuffs, the Sicilian cuisine is more varied than that of Sardinia and Corsica.

There's a recently published book on Sardinian cuisine: Bitter Honey, Recipes and Stories from the Island of Sardinia written by a former London chef who moved to Sardinia a few years ago, Letitia Clark.  Many of the recipes are traditional (such as the handmade pasta, malloreddus) but she injects her own spin on things and does include some seafood as now it is more common, especially with the tourists.  And the photographs are lovely.  However, I would have liked it if she had put the food glossary at the front of the book and had expounded a bit more on fregola and pani carasau.  But maybe the English are more familiar with such ingredients than we are here in the United States.  And of course, one needs a video to see how to fill and shape the pasta called culurgioni, a ravioli filled with potatoes, cheese, egg and mint.  Thank goodness for YouTube!

Many years ago (2007), I was intrigued by another Sardinian cookbook, Sweet Myrtle & Bitter Honey: The Mediterranean Flavors of Sardinia by Efisio Farris.  That's where I first learned about their bitter honey, botarga (the preserved mullet roe), and malloreddus.

But it's always nice to SEE the food and its preparation and that's where, like Sebastian, I could spend my life watching YouTube.  Rick Stein in the BBC's Mediterranean Escapes, visits both Corsica and Sardinia before he continues on to Sicily.  In fact he spends relatively little time in Sicily before he moves on to Puglia.

• Culinary Wonders of Corsica & Sardinia
• Authentic Tastes of Sardinia & Sicily

And if you like Rick Stein, you'll be happy to know there's a Rick Stein's India.  Oh those Brits!