The Frankencookies and artisanal Whoppers of Paris

by David Benjamin

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
—Charles de Gaulle

PARIS—The latest trend in French comestibles, started by a baker with too much time on his hands, is the “crookie,” an otherwise traditional croissant grafted with chocolate-chip cookie dough and then baked into a conjoined confection bereft of the gooey sweetness of its cookie forebear and the buttery lightness of France’s most cherished pastry. I saw a stack of these afterbirths in the window at Eric Kayser, one of Paris’ most respected boulangeries.
This display of demi-pain/half Toll House stomach bombs recalled childhood nightmares triggered by David Hedison staggering out of the disintegrator-integrator machine in The Fly. Tagline: “She Had To Kill the Thing Her Husband Had Become!”
It also epitomizes the historic love/hate tension in eating habits between France and the U.S.A. Everyone in both countries tends to concede the culinary superiority of France, which has “cuisine.” America just has food, a lot of it “fast.”
Which is a point of contention that has led to actual violence. A few years ago, police had to quell an anti-McDonald’s mob of villagers and farmers in rural France. The protesters saw the raising of the Golden Arches on their turf as yet another intrusion of American cultural hegemony into their sacred terroir. I was on their side. Why defile, with a fried meat patty on a Wonderbun, a civilization that has turned the baking of a baguette into a sort of eucharist?
But they were losing this culture war, and so was I. The Latin Quarter of Paris is peppered with McDonald’ses, Burger Kings, KFC and French facsimiles like Quikburger. Students have been flocking to Yankee fast food for decades, because it’s cheap, swift, handy and cunningly attuned to the adolescent palate.
Recently, the cheap, classic, crusty-edged steel-griddle American luncheonette burger has evolved in France alarmingly into a gourmet lunch for admen, attorneys and suburban ladies who browse at Galeries Lafayette. On every avenue. I see springing up table-cloth parlors, with bud vases and starched napkins, whose signage declares their hamburgers “artisanal.”
Artisanal? Like pottery and totem poles?
These are not your roll-back-the-wrapper and take-a-bite Wendyburgers. They arrive at table ten inches tall and layered like wedding cakes. A double Whopper would blush ketchup-red in their presence. Within the stack are medium-rare (a point) patties of Charolais, two, three—more!—interspersed with a selection of France’s 246 cheeses. Gruyére, crottin de chevre, morbier, tomme de brebis, rocamadour… and more! A bed of pissenlit, a crown of laitue rouge, a smear of bearnaise, a hint of Heinz 57 and piquant dabs of Dijon, a slab of heirloom tomato, a Tunisian sweet onion sliced paper-thin, a frisson of pulverized aubergine and—wait!—Alice, there’s ham in here!
There are few sights quite as troubling to an American sensibility as to behold a Frenchwoman at dejeuner, dressed to kill and addressing an overloaded cheeseburger, presented on a china plate in a bed of frites, with a knife and fork. She could not pick up this thing even if she had been trained to do so in, say, Chicago. It would disintegrate helter-skelter and messy as hell, half of it in her lap and the best parts gobbled off the floor by the ever-lurking kitchen dog.
While the French disdain American cuisine while gobbling it up, Americans arrive in France with the notion that shouting at waiters in English is an incantation that will somehow turn a serving of blanquette de veau into meat loaf and home fries at Denny’s. They come to France hungry and recoil at French food.
There is, for example, the omelette, which is properly prepared, as far as I’ve been able to tell, only in France. It can be done elsewhere. It’s a simple dish. I once saw Stanley Tucci do it in a movie. But no one quite does it like it’s done in France, because—I think—of a cultural resistance that’s visceral and prohibitive.
“Don’t tell me how some goddamn Frenchie fries an egg. I’ll do it my way.”
I was in a restaurant on the rue de Rivoli, an area heavily trod by tourists. An American woman was busy belaboring a waiter, at about ninety decibels (the level at which English turns to French). She wanted eggs, but had come around—after about ten minutes—to the realization that options like over-easy, scrambled and sunny-side-up were unavailable. She had to accept an omelette, or go eggless.
I digress here to explain the proper omelette. One beats three eggs together to a sunflower-gold consistency and pours the fluid—without milk, for God’s sake!—into an already warm buttered skillet over medium heat. After the heated skillet has barely toughened the skin of the incipient omelette, one can sprinkle in a handful of diced ham or an ounce or two of grated cheese (emmental or gruyére). The eggs should be just beginning to brown on the pan side as the surface begins to congeal. Now, with a deft and gentle movement, fold the circle of egg into a half-moon. Some chefs flip the omelette once before removing it from the skillet. Others simply wait ’til the still-viscous lips of the omelette have bonded tenuously. Quickly, remove it from the heat. Lay it lovingly on the plate. Beneath, it will be an uneven brown. On top, it will evoke a canary’s breast. You know the omelette is perfect by pressing gently with a spatula, oozing a yolky drool from its edge.
That’s it. There it is. Any short-order cook in a back-street tabac can do this.
In France. Apparently, nowhere else.
Back to the American woman shouting at the waiter.
“I don’t want it raw,” she insists.
The waiter, who impresses me—from a safe distance—as polite and patient, is puzzled. The word is unfamiliar. He tries it out, timidly. The woman escalates.
“Raw, raw! RAW! I don’t want it RAW!”
She’s trying to say she wants it overcooked, brown all over and dried up. But the waiter is trapped in a vocabulary mystery. The closest he can come to comprehension is “Roi,” which means “king.”
I can tell. He doesn’t think she’s ordering a king. And if she is, which king? France has had dozens of them, not one remotely edible.
“I don’t want it raw! I don’t want it to run all over the goddamn plate!”
The waiter, softly, to himself, repeats. “… run all over the goddamn plate…”
I can see. He knows the English words but can’t make the connection. What does running have to do with an omelette? Horses run. Cars run. Joggers run. But eggs?
Somehow, after several exchanges, the woman stumbles across the phrase, “well done.” This ends everyone’s torture. Instantly, the waiter regains his composure and congeniality. “Oh, madame. Yes, of course.” Graciously, but reluctantly, he promises to ruin three perfectly good, gently cultivated French eggs brought fresh this morning from the sacred terroir. And he escapes.
The woman, unconsoled, turns to a companion, and calls the waiter a “rude asshole.” She adds, “They’re all like that.”
I recall another woman. We called her Mrs. Spratt. A vegetarian in a bistro whose famous specialties were boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin, she recoiled from the waiter when he warned her that her dish of haricots verts (green beans) had been heated in the oven and was “trés chaud.”
As Mrs. Spratt stretched a hand toward the scalding dish, she snarled to her husband, “I wish that man would stop speaking to me in a language I don’t understand.”
Do I remember her fingers actually smoking? Probably not.