As I might have mentioned in an earlier post, Pillsbury Vanilla Frosting was the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll of my adolescence. Never having smoked a cigarette, dropped acid or overturned a golf cart, my feeble attempt at teenage rebellion was to study for my pre-calculus finals hopped up on icing mainlined with a plastic spoon.When I need a fix I go to Thanksgiving. This shop in the Marais sells outrageously priced American imports to homesick ex-pats. An 8oz. package of Philadelphia cream cheese is $6. (Apologies for the lack of original photography below, but the shots I found on paris.unlike seemed to frame the Fruitloops much better than mine.)
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When you enter Thanksgiving, there’s always greeting in French and English, along with rows of familiar boxes. I'm like Audrey Hepburn in Tiffany's, running my hands along the shelves of Poptarts and Raspberry Fluff. I stop to read the ingredients - something I never do in the States - drinking in the comforting, possibly carcinogenic, polysyllabic beauty of it all.
Strangely enough, I’ve never bought a can of icing in Paris. It would be like eating Pho in Minsk – ne’er the twain shall meet. There are too many wonderful things to eat in Paris to get stuck in my childhood obsession with partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
That being said, I do occasionally indulge in cupcake porn – the oogling of icing online. Surely this picture of a “frosting shot” (God Bless America) should come with a rating of some kind. Thank you to Cupcakes Takes the Cake for, well...being, and to The Girl Who Ate Everything for the oh so delectable photo.It’s always odd to wake up on the morning of an important American holiday in Paris – and find it’s just business as usual. G. goes to work, and there’s radio silence on my email from New York. So a girl has time to think. For me, 2009 has been a year full of things to be thankful for. I have a happy, healthy baby boy, a husband I love more every day, a family who cheers me on in my crazy life projects, friends who challenge and comfort me, and a professional project that makes me pinch myself. I’m also thankful for being in Paris – because it’s Paris that taught me how to appreciate all this. Raised as a type-A control freak American, it was my reflex – and I fight it still – to quickly abandon all pleasures, all accomplishments in favor of the road ahead – the next item on my interminable to-do list. Paris has taught me how to take a moment. Even if it’s not a day off here, I now know how to pause and be grateful for what I have. It’s only when I moved to Paris that I truly learned how to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Happy Holiday Everyone!
Nostalgia -- and distance -- makes everything taste better. M. found me an overpriced jar of Branston pickle, a taste for which I developed in Dublin. Goes with Dubliner cheese. I'm the only one who will touch the vinegary stuff.
ReplyDelete(I must admit that after a couple years I even thought beans for breakfast was a good idea! Thank goodness that's a taste that hasn't followed me back to the States.)