We'll Always Have Paris (15 page)

The rules are a reminder: French patisserie is a serious business, at least as much about skill and display as pleasure or indulgence. If pastry became a weapon of statecraft in the second half
of the sixteenth century under Catherine de Medici (Catherine imported Italian techniques with her Florentine cooks, bringing nougat,
macarons
, frangipane and ices to France) it reached
its apogee in the era of Carême and the
pièce montée
, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

Antonin Carême – foundling, monster of ambition, culinary auto-didact and patisserie ‘architect’ – was not a man to sell his chosen occupation short. ‘There
are five arts,’ he wrote in one of his many distinctly unhelpful works on patisserie, ‘painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, of which the principal branch is
patisserie.’ Anyone wishing to pursue that art form would be well advised not to rely on, for instance,
Le Pâtissier Pittoresque
, which contains instructions for constructing a
forty-four-columned Gothic pavilion out of sugar paste that extend to only eleven lines, with such helpful information as: ‘the decorative details should be pale violet and darker purple. The
bridge should be white.’ The introductory chapter is barely more informative: readers are instructed to go to their druggist and ask for four of a mysterious unit of measurement of
‘
bol d’Armenie
’, a type of clay, and the same quantity of ammonia. Another favourite instruction is to ‘keep the almond paste in a big, oval porcelain dish of the
type used for making poultry and truffle terrines,
façon Nérac
’, the kind of item any well-stocked kitchen should surely have to hand.

Carême started from nothing and built a stellar career on choux pastry and single-minded ambition. Ian Kelly’s lovely biography,
Cooking for Kings
, describes how, when
apprenticed to a pâtissier in the Palais Royal, Carême would spend his free afternoons in the Bibliothèque Nationale studying classical architecture, which he would then
translate into sugar and pastry and marzipan. His creations were edible, but that was not really the point. Rather, they were intended to dazzle and astonish the observer and it was this that
attracted Carême’s later employer and patron, Talleyrand.

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was a career diplomat who floated unscathed through fifty of the bloodiest years of French history right at the heart of power, shifting and
swerving and body-checking his way to the top, and he saw in Carême a man with ambitions and abilities to match his own. For twelve years in Talleyrand’s service and on loan to other
European potentates to oil the wheels of international diplomacy, Carême created patisserie designed to shock and awe. He made a Welsh hermitage and a copy of the Brighton Pavilion for the
Prince Regent, a banquet featuring fifty-six separate desserts for Tsar Alexander, even a Venetian gondola for the birth of Napoleon’s son Franz in 1811 in blue, rose and gold, with meringue
and spun sugar. Patisserie under Carême was not simply something nice to eat: it was a test of your mettle and ambition.

Carême’s influence endured and spread outwards into the regions. At Madame Bovary’s wedding, the three-tiered
pièce montée
(the pâtissier comes all
the way from Yvetot) draws cries of admiration:

‘. . . a temple with porticoes, columns and statues . . . fortifications made of angelica, almonds, raisins and orange segments . . . rocks with lakes of jam and boats made of nutshells .
. . a little cupid on a chocolate swing.’

Even today this kind of patisserie extremism is alive and well in France, although it has by and large retired from international diplomacy: take the case of the ‘Meilleur Ouvrier de
France’ competition. This competition – though it is not really a competition but a pass–fail test with no fixed quota of successful applicants (in theory they could all fail)
– has existed in some form since 1924. It is the preserve of the very finest pâtissiers in the country (and yes, you do have to be French to qualify), who, after preliminary testing
rounds, spend twenty-five hours under exam conditions, producing a series of unimaginably complex and beautiful cakes and confectionery.

The competition only takes place every three years and preparation for it can take half a lifetime. The percentage of the ten to sixteen candidates reaching the final who satisfy the jury is
generally low: only around twenty per cent are accorded the title ‘MOF’ and the right to wear a tricolour collar on their chef’s whites. The rules for the test are a weird
fairyland of spun sugar and fiddled-with egg arcana. A question and answer section at the end of fifteen pages of instructions on the current competition includes such intriguing posers as:

Q: Can you use a brass coil to stick sugar leafwork to the masterwork?

A:
Non
.

Q: Is Isomalt tolerated in the sugar masterwork and if so, what percentage of the total mass is permissible?

A:
Oui
, Isomalt is allowed.

(The question of what percentage is not resolved, maddeningly.)

There are rules upon rules upon rules: the nougatine must weigh 1,500 grammes; the
gâteau de voyage
(what kind of country has a particular kind of cake for travelling? One I wish
to offer my lifelong fealty) must have a dominant chocolate note and weigh between 450 and 500 grammes. Finally:

‘Candidates are reminded that the use of rare materials derived from flora or fauna such as ivory or tortoiseshell or certain rare woods which are subject to Washington treaty rules is
permitted on condition that they are presented alongside the necessary documentation.’

On top of this, three separate teams of judges adjudicate: the first watches the candidates at work in the kitchen but neither sees nor tastes the final product, another tastes blind and a third
panel assesses only the visual aspect of the finished work, which is a table of around twenty pieces of such vastness and complexity that even Carême would have had to accord a grudging nod
of respect.

For an affectionate and lingering look at the MOF competition, you can do no better than
Kings of Pastry
, the US documentary film that records the 2007 event. Over an almost unbearably
tense hour and a half, we watch as three candidates prepare for, then take part in, the final. They are driven men, the strain visible as they refine the composition of their entries over and over
again, folding molten sugar, designing wedding cake fillings, minutely shaping and decorating. The tension ratchets up, minute by minute, as three years or more of preparation come to a head.
Jacquy Pfeiffer, the candidate the film follows most closely, is an anxious, sad-eyed man from Alsace living in San Francisco: his domed wedding dessert is planned out on a whiteboard in minute
detail, with different types of cross-hatching for
genoise
and mousse. Régis Lazard, one of the other candidates, is a veteran of disaster, having dropped his major sugarwork piece
during the previous competition, and he has a haunted look as he retells it.

‘It’s over when that happens,’ he says, unfocused eyes avoiding the camera, his lips narrowed to a thin, grim line. ‘There’s no way back.’

After this fairly heavy foreshadowing, the inevitable does of course happen and someone – thank god, not Lazard this time, but the third chef the filmmakers followed, Philippe Rigollot
– has a devastating sugar catastrophe. He places his vast sculpture of a bride and groom on the worktop just fractionally too heavily and the whole edifice shatters with a sickening, brittle
crash, shards of green and brown and white sugar scattering across the work surface and clattering onto the floor. As the devastation settles, there is a momentary weighty silence in the kitchen; a
collective holding of breath. Then Rigollot walks silently to the window, where he stands for a few seconds, his back to the camera, before walking out, his retreating back hunched with emotion. A
bevy of tricolour-collared MOFs then sweep up with discreet, funereal solemnity.

With encouragement, you will be relieved to hear, Rigollot rallies, making ‘a sort of bird’ out of molten sugar in extremis and at the very end (spoiler alert) he is the only one of
the three featured contestants to win the coveted title. But the most tender, moving scenes of the film are the ones where those gnarled and forbidding gods of patisserie, the MOF jury, rally
around him, hands on his shoulders and waist, whispering words of encouragement as he stands, eyes filling with tears in front of the devastated remains of his work, lamenting all those years of
preparation and hope. At the end, the chairman of the jury, a craggy pâtissier named Philippe Urraca who has been a severe and unsmiling presence throughout, announces the successful
candidates, his voice cracking with tearful emotion.

Kings of Pastry
is a tense watch. Disaster never seems more than a hair’s breadth or a misplaced tweezer away. It is hard not to see imminent catastrophe everywhere. At moments,
though, the concentration in the room, the silent application of the pâtissiers, is so transcendent you can forget they are basically making a heron out of nougat.

‘The Samurai,’ says Urraca in an interview, ‘is a good parallel.’ The Samurai would not misuse Isomalt.

Cake, then, with apologies to Bill Shankly who would not approve at all, is not a matter of life and death: it’s much more important than that.

I derive enormous satisfaction from the French honouring of cake, because cake is just as important to me. When my mother died and everything was messy and terrible and broken, I would
self-medicate with perfect pastel fondant fancies from Bettys, cheap supermarket Swiss rolls and packets of ginger buns from Thomas the Baker. After the funeral, I stood in the corner at the wake
in my smart black top talking to faces from my past (even the semioticist was there!) and intercepted every plate of fruit cake that went past. I am pretty sure Louis is mainly made of cake. Here
in Paris, when I buy a cake I am, briefly, entirely at home.

‘
Je voudrais une part de flan
,’ I say, happily confident, then I add a daring, ‘
pas trop cuit, s’il vous plaît
,’ so that I don’t get
one of the burnt, leathery ones.

My exhaustive survey of the 17th arrondissement’s cakes points to one clear winner: the
délice café
.

My first
délice café
comes from my sister, who brings round a randomly selected box of cakes one evening before she returns to the UK, just as an act of kindness; one of
many: however sad she is, her desire to look after others seems irrepressible. It doesn’t look like much – Carême would not approve, it is just a rectangular layered coffee
buttercream gateau, covered in fondant icing, without any hint of Welsh hermitage – but from the first bite, I am hooked. There is thick, grainy, golden brown fondant, an almost salty coffee
buttercream and moist sponge. It’s not a typical Parisian cake: it has an almost ersatz quality, like a far more delicious Mr Kipling. It’s a fondant fancy in a Hermès headscarf
and I rapidly become obsessed.

The
délice café
comes from Contini, which is not even a bakery. It is a Jewish
parvé
deli (that is, no dairy) round the corner on the Avenue Wagram and I
become a regular there. It’s more of a snack bar than a bakery, selling kosher hot dogs, sandwiches and sushi, and their small selection of cakes feels like something of an afterthought.
It’s not an afterthought for me, though: I check every day to see if there’s a
délice café
(they rarely turn up more than once or twice a week) and on the happy
days I see a row of fat brown rectangles, I feel a disproportionate surge of delight. A day with a
délice
is a good day, even if I am feeling lonely and hopeless and even if I have
been queuing in the Post Office for twenty minutes when the counter just decides to shut. Everything can be made OK with coffee buttercream! It becomes almost superstitious.

My aspirant Frenchness mostly fails when it comes to food. I don’t like cheese (this has been a major issue in Normandy) and my fealty to Picard frozen dinners speaks volumes for my
culinary incompetence. I might like watching the lunatic commitment of French TV cooking shows, the hours deboning quail and shaping quenelles, but no part of me has any interest in doing those
things (or even, mainly, eating those things). But patisserie I can do. I can demonstrate as much single-minded obsession as anyone when it comes to cake and, dammit, I will.

So this is how we live in Paris. Theo goes to Am Stram Gram and Olivier goes to La Défense, Louis plays with Charline and I buy cakes. We all go to the park. Summer
– the smell of warm drains in the empty city, my favourite bakeries closed, clouds of dust rising from the paths of the Parc Monceau – shades into autumn, my sister starts university
and I feel more alone than ever as I watch the
rentrée
play out in the streets around the house: harried parents escorting little kids with huge backpacks to the school gates. Soon
there is the first bite of cold and the leaves start to turn, then to fall, in Monceau.

Nothing has been quite as I imagined it would be. I did not really believe I would have a love affair with Daniel Auteuil, or stalk across the Place Vendôme with a perfect chignon and
patent heels like Catherine Deneuve, but I am not even a micron closer to becoming Kristen Scott Thomas: and I am apparently the anti-
Amélie
to the Parisian populace, spreading
unease and irritation everywhere I go. Nothing dramatic has happened to me along the banks of the Seine, except Theo deciding to stand underneath the showers at Paris-Plage (the artificial beach
installed each summer along the river) until he was soaking and we had to go home early. I haven’t bought a single lipstick (though I do sometimes go and walk around the beautiful, perfumed
aisles of Printemps Beauté, admiring them) and I have hardly been into a clothes shop: I have only bought two Petit Bateau T-shirts since we arrived. I sit in cafés quite often, it is
true, but from the moment I arrive I stress about how and when to ask for the bill (Will the waiter ever come back or will I have to seek him out? Can I just leave the money on the table?).