An Elective Affinity wth Paris: Catherine Down

Anyone who claims that the French are unfriendly has never seen Catherine Down in action. She buzzes around the streets of Paris, bringing every corner to life with tales of its specialty food shops and restaurants and characters behind them. “Let’s get some schwarzbrot from Benjamin… Laurent’s shop is so special because he not only sources but also ages the best cheeses…we should go to the herb man for our goat cheese spread.” Indeed every morsel we share in Paris conjures up a story. And given Catherine’s penchant for talking quickly and my stomach’s infinite expandability when it comes to pastries, this added up to a lot of stories. 

Just as Catherine makes every walk a food tour, the streets of Paris themselves seem to demand that attention be paid to the city’s unreal food. You can’t help but notice the deli cases at Ramella, overflowing in an abundance of beautiful tortes, soft poached eggs in aspic, pâtés, and quiches that physically extend the shop beyond the façade and onto the sidewalk. We took the bait; the clerk smiled grandly, likely recognizing Catherine as much for her frequent patronage as for the enthusiasm with which she orders her roasted veg salad and stuffed peppers.

Butchers too capture public space by planting their rotisseries on the sidewalk, offering culinary street entertainment and a scent that Catherine declares to be, “the smell of Paris.” If you don’t salivate as you walk by the dozens of rotisseries filled with roasting chickens dripping fat on potatoes, life is calling you. Similarly the smell of butter wafts out of corner bakeries and patisseries and onto the streets, never letting you forget to enjoy your daily bread (or croissant, chausson aux pommes, madeleine etc.).

She inhabits the place so naturally that I have to remind myself that this is her adopted city. Before moving to Paris in 2013 she got her masters degree in Food Culture and Communications at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy and at 24 years old she had launched and edited a magazine. Now she is the Assistant Editor of Paris by Mouth, a website about the city’s food and wine. As she puts it, “my whole life is based on the conviviality of food.” In addition to her work on the website, Catherine leads food tours, which she likens to hosting a dinner party four or five times a week.

To my queries of where to find the best baguette, she gave me the addresses of some of her favorites but ultimately she said the best baguette is from the bakery closest to wherever you’re going to eat it. With no preservatives, baguettes go stale about 5-6 hours after they come out of the oven. Croissants are similarly beholden to this temporality. Catherine often times her arrival at one of her favorite bakeries to coincide with the time when the second batch of croissants comes out of the oven. 10:45am on the dot.

The near evanescence of French food comes up again and again in our conversations. When she first arrived in Paris Catherines says she would complain about food going bad so quickly, but now, “I realize that’s something to aspire to. When I think about things I love about Paris, they’re ephemeral.”

Among those fleeting tastes are éclairs, which she suggests should be eaten for breakfast before the pastry cream softens the chou pastry over the course of the day. For the ultimate expression of instant gratification, she directs me to La Maison du Chou where they make one thing and one thing only: choux à la crème (cream puffs). They bake their choux twice a day, filling them to order with a light cream made delightfully tangy with the addition of fromage frais.

On the other side of the Seine, Jacques Genin is wholeheartedly invested in preparing food to be eaten and enjoyed right away. Despite my excessive use of positive superlatives to describe my time in Paris, Catherine is judicious with her approbations. But when it comes to Genin, her effusiveness knows no bounds, “everything he touches really does turn to gold.” After tasting his Paris Brest, lemon basil tart, and vanilla millefeuille, I would have to agree.

His pastries are not available to take away and one cannot even visually enjoy them as they do not sit in cases waiting to be consumed but rather are made to order. The millefeuille arrives at our table after being assembled in a workshop upstairs and carried down to the tea salon via a spiral staircase in the middle of the shop. This descent is the literal expression of a transcendental experience, a reminder that this is more than just food. Yes, the crispness of the puff pastry layered on the soft, just piped buttons of pastry cream means that with the application of your fork, the tower shatters—Catherine assures that me that “there is no elegant way to eat this”—and you taste the most marvelous contrast in flavors and textures. But even more than that, the entire ceremony around the preparation of the millefeuille makes you acutely aware of the moment and its intangibility.

Perhaps that’s why meals in Paris are so much more than calorie consumption. There would be no place in Paris for Soylent, a slurry of the 35 nutrients required for survival, intended to respond to what its founder sees as, “a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.” That’s a false dichotomy in the Paris that Catherine showed me, where people were embracing the summer weather by spending more time outside, to a large extent commensally. And sociality isn’t even limited to one's dining partners. Whether people are gossiping over espressos and cigarettes with a view of six streets converging at Café Le Progrès or sharing falafel with a side of smashed cauliflower overlooking the kitchen at Miznon or licking cones of Berthillion caramel ice cream at the tip of Île Saint-Louis while overlooking the Seine, they are engaged with the world around them.

One evening we sat in her living room and consumed a mound of perfectly ripe cherries and apricots (this in spite of the fact that Catherine is allergic to raw fruit because at this time of year “they’re worth an itchy throat”) while she recalled one of the many occasions on which she realized that economics among the shopkeepers of Paris is not governed by profit alone. Earlier that week Catherine bought a cherry tart from her neighborhood bakery and finding it to be quite good she returned the next day for another. The shopkeeper, incredulous at her request, responded with, “encore (another)?!” At expense of selling more pastries, she would rather express concern for the wellbeing of or more cynically, judge the eating choices of her customers.

Our breakfast of kouign aman, a caramelized pastry from Brittany (and surely the reason butter exists), had me convinced that the rest of the day could only go downhill from there but Catherine knows better: for her each day in Paris promises adventure and mango caramels that “will you ruin you for all other caramels.” After all, it is in Paris that Catherine has found people who are equally zealous about what they’re doing with their lives.

Over steak frites bathing in the most glorious green sauce, Catherine bemoans the fact that so many women are in relationships with men, “who are simply not worthy of the air these women breath.” While she can imagine a time in the future when she might want to be taken care of, right now the thought of compromising on where to live and what jobs to take is mind boggling. “My two top priorities in life right now are cheese and vacation so, where else would I go?” Indeed, why settle for anything less than Paris?