Running for Your Life: Paris Mood: Quest for the Hot Courgette

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