It is on Rue
de Bretagne, a few meters from the taste prize of a Paris Sunday, brunch at Le
Marche des Enfants Rouges, that we find
in a vegetable market where all the fruit and greens are gently placed with
organ softness into light-weight brown bags, their corn corners spun to close
them, the 2015 Courgette. In Brooklyn, they are but zucchini, but here, on Rue
de Bretagne, the flesh of the courgette beneath the grape-green skin promise
like the touch of a breast of a jeune fille, forbidden of course, but if the
forbidden doesn’t arise on a trip to Paris then what is the point.
Three years ago
we’d come to Paris, to Le Haut Marais, when there was no memory of courgettes,
because while we were staying in a fine-enough apartment, the owners of the
place were in Brooklyn, for two decades or more we’ve been exchanging homes in
order to travel in comfort and not break the bank paying for hotels, but that
trip in June 2012, we locked into an arrangement in which the couple arrived at
our Brooklyn brownstone and went straight into our bedroom, shut the door,
turned down the blinds and left us wondering what was next, maybe a Minotaur
into the cave that they had immediately constructed in our own house, so with
that image in my mind of that trip, I frankly don’t remember much about that
time beyond the purchase of slip-on shoes
so pointy that they reminded me of a bully on the playground of Dufferin Public
School in Owen Sound, John Adams, by name, who’d threaten boys like me that if
we didn’t get out of his way or laugh at his lame jokes that he would flick his
boots at us. Now, finally, fifty years later, I was ready for John Adams. He’d
flick his boots at me; I’d flick mine at him.
Despite the
Minotaur threat, we came back to Paris. Last month. There are other places like
this, perhaps, but in Paris for those of us who love it, the sensual basics don’t
seem to change. The politics, yes. The racial imbalances, yes. It was in June
2011 that we’d stayed in a small apartment in the Marais near Le Marche des
Enfants Rouges. Four years later, and we’re back in the vegetable market, MM
seizes on the courgettes and has the attendant pick them out, one, two, three,
four and a fist of spring onions that I gather into my backpack for the long subway
ride back to our Levallois apartment, plenty of places nearby to get courgettes
but we feel we have the hot ones, and yes, it is now my turn at the cooking wheel,
I slice off a perfect courgette oval, dozens of them and I am cooking without
olive oil, with a stranger vegetal substance that I found in a
plastic tub in the fridge that counts for butter and keeps heart disease at
bay, an obvious obstacle to anything much happening in the pan, but these courgettes
hold up, keep their form. I wheel the gas fire up and down with the burner knob,
a strange jazz that seems to work, simmering in the other pot is a whole cooked
chicken, where shreds of the spring onion go, the balance in the flat pan without a handle, and there is no way of knowing until all of this is brought to the
table, the courgette sliced too thin, only now do I realize that I’d pressured
my perfect courgette, which tasted of chicken skin and schmaltz and spring
onion darkened in an overheated pot, a meal that filled our stomachs but left
me aching for more. That kept me on my quest for my 2015 Courgette.
Next: Running for Your Life: Marseilles
Mood
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