Food and eating in France has changed. My two-week mid-September visit followed the Olympics, which drew more than 11 million international visitors to Paris. Perhaps the invasion of hamburgers, cheeseburgers and pizza I saw on that city’s menus is a result of that.
I don’t recall seeing them when I visited in 2019. Thankfully, croissants and crepes, along with the camaraderie of lengthy and leisurely outdoor meals at sidewalk cafes, remain mainstays in France. Patisseries, seemingly on every corner, still fill their windows with elaborate desserts.
My daughter Sascha Nelson and I joined a French pastry cooking class in Paris to learn more about the beautiful desserts we saw everywhere. La Cuisine , run by Chicago native Jane Bertch, conducts classes in English and is as much about French culture as it is about making French dishes. We both devoured Jane’s recent book “The French Ingredient” and her monthly Bonjour From Paris newsletter before our trip.
The school is along the Seine River, in view of tall construction cranes working to restore the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris for its reopening on Dec. 8, following the tragic 2019 fire. One of the first things we learned in the La Cuisine class is that French ingredients are so different from those we get in America that we cannot accurately reproduce many French pastries back home.
Butter in France is much higher in butterfat, and their all-purpose flour is more like our cake flour, for instance. But the desserts w.