Today is Crepe Day in France as well as in other countries with crepe traditions, such as Belgium and Switzerland. Americans think of it as Groundhog Day. Crepes and groundhogs both mark the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The day’s Catholic name is la Chandeleur in France, in recognition of the candles (chandelles) that are/were brought to the church in remembrance of the day when baby Jesus was first brought to the Temple. Whatever you call it, Feb. 2 is the way the northern hemisphere acknowledges that winter is still here but that we’re all now ready for the countdown to spring.

No, those aren’t crepes in the picture—they’re tourtisseaux, which are traditional Mardi Gras beignets or fritters and so also in the spirit of the season. Tourtisseaux come in different shapes: square, rectangular, diamond-shaped. They’re basically cheap, greasy donuts. They go by other names in other regions, but Vendée and Poitou, the area just south of the westernmost portion of the Loire Valley, call them tourtisseaux.

I took that picture yesterday while in a village in Vendée, a few miles from the coast. Tourtisseaux may have been replaced by crepes in the bakery today, but more likely the bakery has both crepes and tourtisseaux. I’m not sure that the crepes are big sellers though since everyone in Vendée knows how to make a crepe at home but not everyone knows how to make a tourtisseau. Actually, they probably do know (it’s basically the same recipe just fried) but would rather flip a crepe at home than fritter a tourtisseau.

I don’t know what’s in that bakery today because I’m now back in Paris, a town that isn’t big on tourtisseaux and their brother beignets. Parisians prefer more sophisticated sweets. Anyway, there’s better mark-up for the more convivial galette des Rois, the falky pastry tart with a frangipane filling (and a little token or effigy inside), that’s traditionally associated with Epiphany (Jan. 6).

The “growing” season for the galette des Rois traditionally ends by mid-January, but with global warming and the Church’s absence of influence in the pastry industry of late, the season now extends throughout the month of January.

When I returned from Vendée last night I found an envelope in front of my door, which could only mean that my neighbor was planning a party. He’s very nice about warning us neighbors about his parties so that in case we feel like going to sleep before 3am we have time to reserve a room at a hotel for the night. He even includes his phone number just in case we feel like giving it to the police so that they don’t have to drive over.

This time his letter announced “une petite soirée pour fêter la chandeleur,” a little party to celebrate crepe day. I figured that had to be a euphemism for something because I couldn’t understand why someone would have a petite soirée to fete Groundhog Day on a Tuesday and if so why we would need to be warned about it. But I’ve been home all evening and I’ve barely heard a sound, so I imagine that they actually did spend the evening next door flipping crepes.

My friend Didier, whom I was visiting in Vendée, made crepes for his family today. Years ago I asked him for his recipe because before then I was the only person in France who’d never made them. Here it is in French and in English.

Didier’s crêpe recipe

Mélanger :
½ kilo de farine
4 oeufs
1 petite boite de lait concentré non sucré
1 litre de lait frais
Extrait de concentré de vanille
Un peu de huile (2 cuillères à soupe)
1 verre de bière

Laisser reposer 2-3 heures en dehors du frigo. Il est ensuite possible de mettre le mélange au frigo.

Faire les crêpes.

Mix together:
1 lb of flour
4 eggs
1 small can of (unsweetened) evaporated milk
1 quart of whole milk
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 cup of beer

Allow to rest for 2-3 hours out of the refrigerator. Mixture may then be placed in the refrigerator or used immediately.

Make crepes. (Circumflex optional if you don’t have one handy)

An article of mine about Champagne appears as the Jan/Feb cover story in Travelworld Magazine. Click on the image below to see it on the full screen and then flip through the magazine pages as you wish. Cheers!

It’s been unusually cold in Paris, mostly a dry cold though. It’s the damp cold that normally marks the Paris winter so, warmly dressed, it’s nearly a pleasure to be in the cold outside. It’s inside that things get dicey. I returned to Paris a few days ago after six weeks in the U.S. and have since spent a good amount of time winterizing the apartment: hanging curtains, plugging spaces on the edges of doors and windows, buying an electric heater.

The elderly woman downstairs used to heat a lot in winter, I could tell by the warmth of my parquet, but she now goes south for much of the winter. And a guy in his 20s recently moved next door and doesn’t need to turn on his own heat very often since most nights he warms his apartment by having a dozen friends over for a rave party. I’m left to heating my own space. So much for community.

The best place to find community these days is in the cafes and bars of the residential neighborhoods. They’ve been quite crowded, I’ve noticed, these past few days and evenings, smokers swarming by the doorways. Crisis, what crisis?

I love cafes in winter, the way people come in rubbing the cold off their hands. There’s more of a community feel to a café in winter than in summer. In summer everyone wants a piece personal joy, their own proverbial spot in the sun. You tolerate your neighbors at surrounding tables in summer, but other than the usual sexual attraction you’d rather have nothing to do with them. In winter, though, there’s more of a feel that we’re all in this together. On especially cold winter days, as in rain storms in other seasons, the café becomes a kind of genteel bomb shelter. It’ll pass, we think, or we’ll soon go out and confront the elements, but in the meantime un autre, s’il vous plaît.

I just got home from having coffee with a friend and I take back what I said a paragraph ago.

There isn’t much of a sense of community in the café after all. I now think that the difference between the winter café and the summer café is that in winter Parisians have even less of a sense of personal space than they do in summer. Their sweaters, scarves, and coats not only put a damper on the aforementioned sexual attraction but also make people unaware of where their space ends and others’ begin. Add to that the shopping bags now that the annual winter sales period is underway and oh the looks you get when you ask a woman to take her ankle-length duvet coat and H&M bags from an otherwise available chair so that you can sit down! Sometimes the bomb shelter feels less genteel, but once you and your friend have got your space it’s café society as holders of McStarbucks Cards can only dream about, even at McStarbucks in Paris.

Yesterday, after insulating window cracks in the morning, I went out to take photos in my neighborhood along the canal. There were at least a dozen people taking pictures within the same 300-yard stretch of the canal during the same 30-minute grey-day photo shoot, including a couple of guys with long lenses, one with a tripod. The thought that most of those photographers were going to put their pictures on blogs accompanied or not by text about the cold in Paris and the ice on the canal was rather disheartening. It’s one thing to compete for elbow room in a café, it’s quite another to think that we’re all competing for attention on the internet.

Truth be told, the canal is not a highly photogenic place. Oh, it’s a nice place to live, to hang out, to stroll, to café-sit, and, when the weather’s right, to picnic, but its color combination of dark green, grey, beige, brown, and black, with little sky in the frame and an uninspiring mishmash of architecture alongside, make the canal an awkward place to photograph. We all pointed our cameras towards the ice in the hopes that that would be evocative enough.

I stood on a bridge by a guy with a long lens to take the shot above of gull prints in the dusting of snow on the ice. The guy tried not show that he was annoyed by my “copying” him, but when I then followed him over to shoot a view from the side he gave me the same look as the women whose space I invaded in the café today. Why should his blog have better photos than mine just because he’s got a bigger lens?

The canal may not be very photogenic but the Eiffel Tower always is. That explains why one occasionally comes across some stunning photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Problem is, it’s hard to make the Eiffel Tower look like anything but the Eiffel Tower, by which I mean that it rarely evokes any other thought than: That’s the Eiffel Tower, I’ve been there (or I want to be there).

That’s why I love the joy that comes across in Va-nu-pieds’ Eiffel Tower photo that you can see by clicking here. In it he managed to capture the sense of ecstasy at coming upon a distant view of the Iron Lady. I’m honored that gave me first dibs to use on France Revisited’s Photography & Art Blog.

A close look at the shot shows that he must have taken the picture in summer because you can see the sandal tan lines on his foot (unless those are shadows from the beams), but the Eiffel Tower is timeless enough that, unlike in my apartment, a difference of 50 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter.

One more winter photographic note: Not being much of a photographer myself, I do occasionally get lucky, as in this winter homage to Claude Monet that I shot a year ago.