How and Why To Eat a French Cream Puff

Plus: Come write with me in Paris!

Yes, that’s a residency permit.

After nearly a year of living on the edge of competence here in Paris, I have a few tasty bits of wisdom to share about what happens when you leave your American life for another country for a surprising third act. Here’s a partial list of what I’ve learned, some of which might be amusing to those of you who’ve written since the American elections asking how you too can move to France.

For example, I now know all these things:

•How to say “the balloon inside my water heater has exploded,” in French.

•Why getting a comprehensive medical exam in France for your visa is a lot like being in a Broadway musical.

•How to buy a milk frother at a chain appliance store without causing deep offense to the staff.

•How to respond to the oft-asked and very French question: “did that please you” when in restaurants and more complicated situations.

•Why a French tax official might call you to discuss your impots.

•What you’ll learn about your mental health while navigating a five-thousand-vendor Paris flea market.

•Why you’ll get weepy when picking up your French residency card in the company of hundreds of other immigrants in an almost comically gilded Paris police station.

• How to choose the wrong sofa three times and not become so humiliated that you give up and move back to your country of origin.

• Why you might want advice from a French plant psychologist.

• How learning to eat a French cream puff properly will help you understand your place in the universe and the meaning of impermanence.

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This week, let’s explore the last and most delicious item on that list: How learning to eat a French cream puff properly will help you understand your place in the universe and the meaning of impermanence.

French cream puffs, or “choux à la crème” are ephemeral little pastries that are coated on the outside with crunchy sugar pearls and filled with whipped cream. Simultaneously crisp, fluffy, and rich, choux are everything everywhere, all at once. They are a snack and a term of endearment, as in “mon petit chou” or my sweetie, my little cream puff. (Choux are also cabbage, but that’s another story.)

Most importantly, for our discussion, a single chou à la crème’s perfect goodness is fragile; it exists only within a small window and under certain conditions. Wait a few hours too long to eat choux à la crème, and the pastry is soggy; the crunch is gone, and they become another entity entirely. You must eat them the day they’re made or possibly the morning after. No buying in bulk.

Get your choux from an unassuming boulangerie where everything’s baked a few feet from the register, like the place near me where choux à la crème go for 90 centimes each or 4.50 Euros for six. Forget the posh gourmet bakeries where they have choux in a million arrogantly exotic favors, like sage grapefruit. You want the plain choux that sell out by afternoon and are so fresh that you feel connected to their maker— if not your own maker. Maybe stop on the way home, lift one small chou out of the bag, and consider your first bite. It’s not just enough; it’s a feast.

It’s possible I packed up the dog and headed to Paris because of those cream puffs, or maybe the idea that my shelf life is limited, too.

The longer I’m in France, the more I see the contradiction of this eternal, timeless city that embraces the temporal so fiercely. It messes with my American have-anything-and-everything-on-demand-immediately mind. There’s something wild about the seriousness with which people lean over and say you must order the asparagus with bearnaise and salmon roe today because it’s almost out of season, and then you won’t see it again for a year. It’s a kind of reverence, a way of giving the mundane asparagus its beautiful due, to paraphrase John Updike.

(Next week, why getting the French visa medical exam is like being in a Broadway show.)

President Macron said something moving on the subject of impermanence at the reopening of the repaired and resplendent Notre Dame Cathedral last night:

“Our cathedral reminds us that we are the inheritors of a past greater than ourselves and that any day can vanish… We must keep as a treasure, this lesson of fragility, humility and will.”