Before moving to Paris, we sold our house in New Jersey, and I gave away most of my kitchenwares. No more unnecessary objects, I told myself, putting cookbooks detailing how to make rice in fifty-five ways in a box for Good Will. Wedding presents that never made it to the table – the egg steamer, the fish plate, an orange sugar bowl – went into the box as well. I pictured my post-Paris kitchen as holding nothing but my old, beloved Le Cruesets: friendly, large and utilitarian.
Then last week I succumbed to a wild desire for Staub mini-cocottes in a shiny burnt-crimson color. There’s no end to the gorgeous food that can be made in my cocottes. For a dinner party on Friday I used the very best chocolate – after much investigation, my current favorite is Michel Cluizel’s – with generous splashes of Grand Marnier and a box of eggs, to make fierce little chocolate cakes. Under the giddy influence of a Parisian December, I gave each cake a generous dab of crème fraiche thinned with Grand Marnier and topped with a translucent star made from pure spun sugar.
I go to bed thinking about food. The remnants of a fantastic leg of lamb smeared in anchovies and butter turn to a smoky broth, which then becomes fennel soup with spicy sausage. The recipe was borrowed from Gordon Ramsey, but the sausage…we found a stand in a Christmas market selling twenty-three kinds of homemade sausage. I think I used duck sausage, but we brought home so many that I couldn’t keep them apart. I make the soup in a big pot. Then I put a few crispy sausage rounds in each cocotte, pour in some soup and artistically drip spicy oil across the top.
This feels a little like cheating: am I supposed to serve the cocottes only when I cooked in them? I feel sure that the Parisian answer is a resounding yes. The soup looks exquisite in the cocottes; that is its own justification.
I move dreamily from one meal to the next; crème fraiche enters the house in little buckets, disappearing down the gullets of my family, friends and myself. The children used to have pizza every Friday night and clamor to go to the Peppercorn Diner for grilled cheese on white bread. Now they smile at fennel soup and lick the spoon when they’re done.
There is no going home again.
I finally understand the lure of over-indulgence. I discovered it in Paris along with a new-found sense of time, born from being on sabbatical, being free of committees, office hours and classrooms full of students waiting to be quizzed on Hamlet. In the holiday season, we are allowed to think about food as being beautiful rather than just fattening or sustaining or cancer-causing.
Parisians, frankly, seem to have no trouble with this. But Americans do. Throwing a cold pizza in the oven is easy; eating sushi from the grocery store even easier. Popcorn for supper so that one can work straight through the meal? Why not?
I am making only one New Year’s Resolution this year. I want to take my Parisian Christmas with me back to New York City in the fall. My cocottes will remind me that food is meant to be served to others, to be beautiful, to be individual, to be dreamed over. They will remind me that over-indulgence is not a virtue we should keep for the holiday season alone.
Eloisa James is a New York Times bestselling author of historical romance, published by Harper Collins, as well as a Shakespeare professor at Fordham University. You can follow her sabbatical adventures in Paris in 2009-2010 on her Facebook Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/EloisaJamesFans)