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corey is visiting now. he and i were talking about the french taste in food. we were eating some thin sliced dried cured ham (jambon cru) along with baguette and cheese for a pre-dinner snack. [before making a quiche -- haha, get it out of your system.]

a while ago i'd tried to categorize french food as a love for dairy fat, thinking of the sauces, cheeses, cream-based dishes, and ice cream. but the ham fit into the same taste category, and like prosciutto, is as close to butter as you can make with meat. a common sandwich is ham (really more like raw bacon) and butter. so it's really a love of subtle-flavored fat. that's not a dig: subtle as opposed to thai, which is full of coconut milk fat but heavily spiced.

but all that fat needs a compliment, which it gets in coffee and chocolate. small amounts of strong bitter acids to cut through.

starches take the third spot in the holy trinity. everything is grounded by starch. bread and potatoes are revered here. bread everyone knows about. french fries, mashed, and au gratin get more attention than i'd ever thought to give them. french au gratin potatoes are much different than betty crocker: very light and subtle. lightness shows up unexpectedly in a lot of places in food here. it's easy to make heavy fat, and just as tiring to eat. but make it fly, and you've really got something.

as a thought experiment, i was imagining what all these flavors would look like visually. rivers of tans, both warm and cold, dividing and linking fields of light creamy earthy tones, subtly varied. and the occasional dark brown or red incision. that's basically the palette of our bare apartment, and what i see in lots of old architecture around here. another nail in the coffin of coincidence? spooky.

what is not a coincidence is that the three work not just in inextricable harmony on your tongue, but also in your digestive system. you'll notice fruits and veggies aren't mentioned. since i don't drink coffee, it throws off the recipe. nature doesn't work with nearly the same regularity, if you catch my drift. i've resorted to drinking a cup now and again and riding out the buzz. oof. really no excuse since we have a great farmer's market in town. on the todo list...

i've been holding off on saying this, but the butter here is really good! we got it one of the first days food shopping, thinking no more of it than as a staple. i may have chuckled a little when i read an imprinted seal on the label that announced the brand had won a blue ribbon in some butter competition.

it's only made from one ingredient. all you do is churn it. there are no variables. how can it be so much better than normal butter? they must graze the cattle in poppy fields. i guess when you care so much about bread, it only follows.

so you in portland don't feel so bad, missy's brother jake was visiting us in portand a while back. we went to Thai Kitchen (is that the right name?) on belmont at about 19th. not the one across from belmont computers. he couldn't get over how good the water tasted. i think he secretly wants to move to portland because it has delicious water. it's true though, that restaurant has some of the best water i've tasted. a little lime juice, i think.

condiments here are over the top, but that's a long post for another day. i just want everyone to know that even though you think your butter is good, it isn't. your butter is garbage. i have tasted the one true butter. angels use this butter as soap. homer uses it in his moon waffles. kublai khan in his stately pleasure dome could not decree better butter. and it's reasonably priced.

update!

i did some research, as per jon's suggestion. it should be no surprise that french butter tastes better because it has more fat! ha ha. you can skimp when making it by adding water and other dairy byproducts, which is one explanation of the quality difference. US butter's got to be 80% dairy by law. i doubt there's an upper limit here. i'm sure the feed given to the cows matters a lot (ask breastfeeding babies). this butter boasts of hazelnut, warm milk, and herb aromas. mmm.

no mention of added cultures. the one i have is also pasteurized.

also got reminded of french butter dishes, which keep the butter sealed airtight under water, and so safe from spoiling. my mom's got one, and it solves the problem of hard butter entirely. gotta get one.

did you know that alfredo sauce consists almost entirely of three of the four states of dairy? fresh, churned, and curdled. if you want, you can add a couple extra little things like pepper and salt. frozen is one milk form that gets left out, and it's kind of an iffy form. it's only fresh but colder, and never appears without sugar and flavoring. you can also ferment milk into alcohol, as do the mongols. but it's apparently pretty nasty, so i'm not counting it.

so it's very much like the french word oiseau (bird), which contains all the vowels, minus the iffy one, and a linker-consonant for taste.

we were grocery shopping today, and in the frozen fish aisle (next to the 2' headless fish i scared missy with) was a plastic package containing some odd-shaped pieces. i couldn't translate the french, but often there's german or italian too, from which hints can be gleaned. but instead was the name in some scandinavian-looking language, making me glad i was living in france: pijlinktrisbuisjes.

in villeneuve, just across the rhône river, is the old monastery of chartreuse. right -- as in the liquor. back in the day at capp st. in san francisco, chartreuse became something of an obsession, possibly due to its reputation of being the closest thing to absinthe you could legally get. made from over a hundred different herbs with a complicated recipe only fully known to a few upper-echelon carthusian monks, it was a drink with a story and a punch. also, it is very delicious as a digestive.

[after some research, it seems that even though villeneuve was the main carthusian HQ for a time, it wasn't the site of the distillery.]

miss takes a well-deserved break from walking to enjoy a pastis at a café. we've been here two days in a row at about 3:30. it's been the same waiter each time. we wonder if we're going to become regulars. just in case, i make a note to remember the price of two pastis: 3.80€. it's an anise liquor from Marseille, heavily watered down. very refreshing.

it's a nice square. there is a big old church (ho hum), an artist supply store (maybe i should try sketching again), Pizza Rapido (yet to try), and two doors down is The Koala Bar. we can't go in there because missy used the restroom without buying anything once and got yelled at. it's ok, the place is bright pink with curvy plastic things everywhere and constant europop. if portland's Tube bar is the man, the Koala is the woman. they would have a torrid disaffected relationship.

also is a homeless guy on crutches. he was here yesterday too. he has a game: he stumbles around, overtly disabled, until a pretty girl walks by. then he drops his crutches in her path. one time in ten, she helps him. actually, those aren't bad odds. for a moment i'm jealous.

(i apologize if any java hacker gets the joke caption. some things, no matter how hard we try, are stuck in our brains.)