Mysteries of Paris

Learning to love my Paris apartment & my Haussmann Kitchen

Michelle Richmond
Sep 9, 2018 · 7 min read

When you think of Paris and her mysteries, you probably imagine cobblestone streets and moonlight by the Seine and hidden passages leading to absinthe bars and catacombs. All of that, this city has in abundance. But living in Paris day to day presents its own, less romantic mysteries. Now that I have to cook, clean, and do my laundry here, I’m constantly confounded by the enigmas of domestic life.

Let’s be clear: I’m no Martha Stewart. That said, I’ve been doing my own laundry, cleaning my own house (to some degree), and making anything that can be cooked from a box for about three decades, so I’m not totally hopeless. Also, I only occasionally break the steak knife while putting together Ikea furniture, and I can open the wine bottle under desperate circumstances when the bottle opener cannot be found. Over the years, I have forged a fragile friendship with a middling kind of domesticity.

Then I moved to Paris. In Paris, the kitchen may be many things, but it is definitely not your friend.

The Haussmann Kitchen

We live in a lovely if cozy apartment in a Haussmann building. Cozy means it’s small enough that we cannot escape each other, but Haussmann means we often cannot find each other, either. When we first walked into the apartment, sight unseen, on move-in day, we could’t even find the kitchen. We walked around, following the maze like doorways and hallways, opening and closing tall mirrored doors, opening and closing tall glass doors fitted with heavy drapes, saying, “Holy crap, does this place not come with a kitchen?”

We finally found it, way back past the first bedroom and the living room and the dining room and the second bedroom and the laundry room and the two bathrooms (that do not have toilets) and the two toilets (one of which does not have a sink) and the third bedroom and a hallway full of floor-to-ceiling closets that made me wish I had brought all of my clothes and all of my shoes. There it was — narrow and high-ceilinged and blindingly white — so far from the dining room I imagined the svelte new figure I would acquire on the way to serve my family mac and cheese boeuf bourguignon every night. If this apartment was a Buick Station Wagon, the kitchen would be the way-back.

My son, who was born into a tiny San Francisco house with a small San Francisco kitchen but who later became a product of the Northern California suburbs, asked, “This is the kitchen?”

My husband said, “Is that a stove? Is it plastic?”

I said, “Wait! Let me get my Fitbit!” I wanted to know how many steps it would take to get from he dining room to the kitchen if I didn’t get lost (94), and how many it would take to get from the dining room to the kitchen if I did get lost (219–477).

Of course, the real reason that Hassmann kitchens are located in the way-back is that the elegant French people who once lived in these buildings had the servants do the cooking and schlepp the food from the back of the apartment to the dining room. Having kitchens in Siberia meant that the residents wouldn’t have to hear or smell or even acknowledge the pounding and plucking and marinating and manipulating that went into the preparation of food. Over the decades, the hoi-poloi started moving in, even the American hoi-poloi, and if there’s one thing we sturdy stock of the New World insist upon, it’s cooking our own damn dinner when we’re at home. Some of us do not cook it with much panache, but that doesn’t mean we’re willing to admit defeat and let someone else do it for us.

Granted, my Haussmann kitchen is a gourmet paradise compared to the kitchen we had in our one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment in the nineties. We have a full-sized fridge (not double-wide, like American fridges, but stainless steel nonetheless and as tall as a regular fridge) and some counter space and a double-sink and a dishwasher. It’s not like I’m working with a coal pit and a Bunsen burner. And yet…

The Stove: I can’t remember the last time I cooked on an electric stove. If there are no flames, how do you even know it’s hot? I like to see the flame so I know something is happening, some sort of cooking mechanism has been activated. This stove doesn’t even have coils. It’s just a flat surface that starts to glow and then, a few seconds or half an hour later, depending on the stove’s mood, the butter starts to sizzle or the water starts to boil. You can’t walk away because there’s really no telling when something might commence, so you have to babysit the stove and just hope it eventually starts to give off heat.

You know how, when you’re cooking with wild abandon, water and grease and all sorts of other stuff splashes onto the stove and you clean it up later after dinner, or at least before the in-laws come over a few weeks later? I splashed about in my normal manner my first night using the stove, and when I went to clean it up that night, I discovered that it was un-cleanupable. Apparently, I burned the stove. There’s this huge white ring where the water splashed over, and it appears to be there for good. How can one burn a stove?

The Oven: The oven has about a dozen settings, each one indicated by a tiny picture on a little white knob between the knobs that control the stove. I fished around in the kitchen drawers until I found a manual. There’s a knob on the stove that has a lot of tiny pictures indicating the cooking mode. The manual also has a lot of tiny pictures indicating the cooking mode. There are descriptions in a dozen different languages, including English, of what each mode does. There’s one for cakes and baking, one for things that need to be crisped, one for things that need to cook slowly, one for things that need to cook quickly. One directs the fan from the bottom, another directs the fan from the top, another directs the fan from the universe or something.

Unfortunately, NONE of the pictures in the manual match the pictures on the knob. Every time I put something in the oven, I just close my eyes and Wheel-of-Fortune it and let the knob land where it may. Through much trial and error, I did discover that you can raise the temperature by pushing the MINUS button, and you can lower the temperature by pushing the PLUS button. I don’t think + means minus in French, and I don’t think — means plus in French. No, I’m pretty sure the oven has been sent by the evil underlords to ruin my Jiffy muffins.

Of course, the temperature is in Celsius, so every time I want to cook something I bought at Marks and Spencer (and let’s face it, I buy almost everything at Marks and Spencer, because: English), I have to find my phone and convert Celcius to Fahrenheit. Wiser people than I (such as Mr. Reluctant P) can do this in their heads, but I cannot. Cell service and wi-fi don’t work in our kitchen, so I have to trek to another part of the apartment to look up the conversion and remember it all the way back to the kitchen, which sounds easy if you’re mathy but is complicated by the fact that I always get distracted on the way back to the kitchen, on account of the laundry room (more on that in the next post).

No wonder boulangeries and patisseries are so popular in France. After the fifth time your cinnamon rolls come out gooey on the inside and burned on the outside and the third time Mr. Reluctant P’s famous chocolate chip cookies come out domed and soft instead of flat and crisp, you’re ready to leave it to the professionals. I suspect the bakers are in cahoots with the oven-makers to convince all of us laypersons that we shouldn’t try that at home.

Frigo: It may be my favorite French word: Frigo. It’s not the official word but it’s one everyone understands. Nothing ends with o in French — the French are very into their iques and ents but not o’s — so the very word frigo feels somehow subversive. Our frigo isn’t nearly as big as our one back home but it has a lot of wonderful little compartments with etched pictures of poulets and fromage on them (but not eggs, because the French don’t refrigerate their eggs). It also has a habit of sealing itself shut to recover any time the door is opened. But my favorite thing about our tall, narrow frigo is the “fast freeze” feature. You hold down a button on the door of the freezer for three seconds and these clouds of frozen air come from nowhere and start circulating on the top shelf of the frigo, where you have put your rose or maybe your tiny green bottle of Grolsch (because after weeks of wine you really just need a beer, and the Corona, which is the cheap stuff in California, costs twice as much as the German beer and three times as much as a pretty good bottle of wine). Three minutes later you have an ice cold beer and all is well and you’ve forgotten your troubles with the stove and the oven, and you’re actually looking forward to your hike back to the dining room, through the complicated maze of your Haussmann apartment, the maze that is, after all, growing on you.

Parisian fridges are like Parisian baguettes: there to remind you that the French could probably do everything better than the rest of us if they really wanted to.

The Reluctant Parisian — A California Expat in Paris

Welcome to The Reluctant Parisian, a blog about expat life in Paris with a Silicon Valley spin. I am a novelist by trade, an Alabamian by birth, and a Californian at heart. I'm also a wife and mother. How did we move from Silicon Valley to Paris? Reluctantly. #Paris #ExpatLife

Michelle Richmond

Written by

NYT bestselling author of the THE MARRIAGE PACT. Paris expat. Write with me at http://novelin9.com. My books at http://michellerichmond.com

The Reluctant Parisian — A California Expat in Paris

Welcome to The Reluctant Parisian, a blog about expat life in Paris with a Silicon Valley spin. I am a novelist by trade, an Alabamian by birth, and a Californian at heart. I'm also a wife and mother. How did we move from Silicon Valley to Paris? Reluctantly. #Paris #ExpatLife

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