My Life, My Food, My Places

Beer in France? Yes. And everybody thinking that all French were sipping wine all day long! But beer is very popular in Paris and the whole of France. Every bar/café will sell you ‘une pression’ a draft beer, at the right temperature in a clean glass. Mostly you can even choose between several brands, most of them French (of course) but in later years also Belgian beers such as ‘Stella’ and’ Leffe’, two brands of InBev, one of the largest brewers in the world. France has always been a ‘beer country’. A country with two totally different climates and crops; grapes in the south but no wheat, so only a wine production. In the north wheat and more wheat but no grapes so no wine but beer! Following the website of the Brewers Association of France, in 1910 there were 2827 breweries in the country, 1929 concentrated in the north of the country. Note that in 1910 the Alsace region was still annexed by Germany till after WW1. In these numbers of breweries those of the Alsace ...

Our mothers always told us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that we have to be sure we include all food groups or the ‘pyramid’: bread or cereals, fruits, dairy,… But breakfast traditions are different. In Belgium we were used to eat ‘heavy’ breakfasts with bread, butter, eggs, cheese, and ham. The British eat baked beans, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, black pudding, toast and marmalade and in Scandinavia fish is on the breakfast table. But not in Paris! Breakfast in Paris is, like lunch, mostly an ‘outdoor’ activity. Only few families have breakfast together during weekdays as most schools offer breakfast for the kids before classes and the parents have ‘something’ on the way to the office. During my stint in Paris, I usually took my breakfast in the bar/restaurant Le Barbusse in front of our office building. In every neighborhood with offices or workshops there are plenty of those small neighborh...

I grew up with coffee. The first thing in the morning my grandmother did was to put the kettle on the stove to boil water to prepare coffee. This were the days before the electric coffeemaker and the coffee was brewed with a paper filter. Once brewed it was transferred to a big thermos who had his place in the middle of the table. All day long. My memories on that coffee are not that good. In fact you could hardly call it coffee, more hot colored water with a slightly taste that reminds you on coffee. But nobody could convince my grandmother to use or more coffee in her filter or to use less water. Somewhere when I was 10 or 12 years old my father bought a, for those days, very modern thing: an electric percolator and at least we had ‘real’ coffee. But the thermos stayed on the table as my grandmother still brewed ‘her’ coffee with her filter! Coffee in Paris is surely not brewed the way my grandmother did. ‘Le café’, the drink, is an institution, a cultural phenom...