sweetness is
the high point of many afternoons.
The thing I like best about the neighbourhood is unsurprising: it is the bakeries. The bakery windows are a burst of forgiving colour: they are instantly identifiable by the wash of warm yellow
light that emanates from within them, punctuated with vivid points of glossy red and chocolate brown. Often, you can smell them before you see them: the best ones exude a yeasty, buttery promise
that cuts through the ambient grey.
I like how predictable French bakeries are: these ones are just the same as the bakeries I haunted in Normandy and on holidays, they have a clear physical vernacular that everyone recognizes and
respects. Big cakes are displayed in the front window facing the street: glossy glazed strawberry tarts or neatly overlapping apple slices; moussey creations for six or eight with an
impressionistic swirl of colour on top. Inside the glow continues, coming partly from the soft strip lights on the underside of the sloping glass-fronted counter, which draws your eye to a deep
bottom shelf, filled with rows of éclairs and
religieuses
in paper cases, golden brown icing-sugar-dusted
millefeuilles
and individual tarts, perhaps plump, neatly aligned
raspberries or chocolate, dark and thin-crusted with a tiny flake of gold leaf on top. On the upper shelf of the counter are smaller things:
macarons
neat like buttons in a haberdashery
store or
financiers
(little rectangles of almond-heavy sponge) or
canelés
, dark ridged domes, mysterious and as unappealing to look at as shrunken heads.
The counter is usually on a slanting angle from the front door to the till to maximize queuing space, and so as you inch along the Sunday morning queue you can examine the stock, checking
anxiously whether what you have come in for is still available. Baguettes are behind the till in racks or baskets, next to shelves of other bread, round and square loaves, to be put through the
slicer.
We have three bakeries within a couple of hundred yards of us, but the one on our street is a disappointing washout, with scorched baguettes that taste of bleach and a couple of flabby quiches.
A little further away is the Boulangerie du Parc Monceau, which has a Seventies gilt and smoked-glass front window, a pile of old copies of
Le Parisien
in a rack behind the door and a
handful of tables. It is slightly better. The women behind the counter in blue-striped blouses are predictably unfriendly but not actively hostile (unless Theo puts his whole sticky face against
the glass of the counter cabinet, which he sometimes does) and they will warm up a crêpe from the pallid pile near the till and sprinkle it with granulated sugar for us. I often take the boys
in for a quick afternoon break: it is next to a good, busy intersection for Theo to observe cars and Parisian dogs squatting and straining on the pavement. It also has a tricky
priorité
à droite
, which means that we are perfectly placed to observe vicious altercations between motorists, which are numerous. Olivier sometimes comes with us for coffee on weekends and is
particularly tickled by one such incident, where the person in the wrong gets out of their car in fury and shouts:
‘Just because you have right of way, it doesn’t mean you have to TAKE it,
connard
!’
At a safe remove, with a cake, it makes for an entertaining interlude in our afternoons.
Better still is Aux Enfants Gâtés (The Spoiled Children) at the end of our street. Aux Enfants Gâtés is a
pâtisserie
, not a
boulangerie
, so
there is no distracting bread production to worry about and it looks like something from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, somewhere Amélie Poulain would come to buy a beautiful tart for some
lovelorn neighbour. It is dark and ornate and as well as cakes there is a small counter of also dark, oversized chocolates. What I really like there, though, is the
flan
.
Flan
is my thing; it is my cake. I knew I had been accepted into Olivier’s family
the high point of many afternoons.
The thing I like best about the neighbourhood is unsurprising: it is the bakeries. The bakery windows are a burst of forgiving colour: they are instantly identifiable by the wash of warm yellow
light that emanates from within them, punctuated with vivid points of glossy red and chocolate brown. Often, you can smell them before you see them: the best ones exude a yeasty, buttery promise
that cuts through the ambient grey.
I like how predictable French bakeries are: these ones are just the same as the bakeries I haunted in Normandy and on holidays, they have a clear physical vernacular that everyone recognizes and
respects. Big cakes are displayed in the front window facing the street: glossy glazed strawberry tarts or neatly overlapping apple slices; moussey creations for six or eight with an
impressionistic swirl of colour on top. Inside the glow continues, coming partly from the soft strip lights on the underside of the sloping glass-fronted counter, which draws your eye to a deep
bottom shelf, filled with rows of éclairs and
religieuses
in paper cases, golden brown icing-sugar-dusted
millefeuilles
and individual tarts, perhaps plump, neatly aligned
raspberries or chocolate, dark and thin-crusted with a tiny flake of gold leaf on top. On the upper shelf of the counter are smaller things:
macarons
neat like buttons in a haberdashery
store or
financiers
(little rectangles of almond-heavy sponge) or
canelés
, dark ridged domes, mysterious and as unappealing to look at as shrunken heads.
The counter is usually on a slanting angle from the front door to the till to maximize queuing space, and so as you inch along the Sunday morning queue you can examine the stock, checking
anxiously whether what you have come in for is still available. Baguettes are behind the till in racks or baskets, next to shelves of other bread, round and square loaves, to be put through the
slicer.
We have three bakeries within a couple of hundred yards of us, but the one on our street is a disappointing washout, with scorched baguettes that taste of bleach and a couple of flabby quiches.
A little further away is the Boulangerie du Parc Monceau, which has a Seventies gilt and smoked-glass front window, a pile of old copies of
Le Parisien
in a rack behind the door and a
handful of tables. It is slightly better. The women behind the counter in blue-striped blouses are predictably unfriendly but not actively hostile (unless Theo puts his whole sticky face against
the glass of the counter cabinet, which he sometimes does) and they will warm up a crêpe from the pallid pile near the till and sprinkle it with granulated sugar for us. I often take the boys
in for a quick afternoon break: it is next to a good, busy intersection for Theo to observe cars and Parisian dogs squatting and straining on the pavement. It also has a tricky
priorité
à droite
, which means that we are perfectly placed to observe vicious altercations between motorists, which are numerous. Olivier sometimes comes with us for coffee on weekends and is
particularly tickled by one such incident, where the person in the wrong gets out of their car in fury and shouts:
‘Just because you have right of way, it doesn’t mean you have to TAKE it,
connard
!’
At a safe remove, with a cake, it makes for an entertaining interlude in our afternoons.
Better still is Aux Enfants Gâtés (The Spoiled Children) at the end of our street. Aux Enfants Gâtés is a
pâtisserie
, not a
boulangerie
, so
there is no distracting bread production to worry about and it looks like something from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, somewhere Amélie Poulain would come to buy a beautiful tart for some
lovelorn neighbour. It is dark and ornate and as well as cakes there is a small counter of also dark, oversized chocolates. What I really like there, though, is the
flan
.
Flan
is my thing; it is my cake. I knew I had been accepted into Olivier’s family
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