Is That a Baguette in Your Cupholder?
The Frenchest thing I ever did see, PSG mania, a viral Algerian hazelnut spread, Paris recs for summer
June in Paris! There is nothing like it. Right now it’s carnivals, concerts, end-of-the-year-spectacles, birthdays, lunches, launches, matches, luminous mornings and long-ass nights that will never cease to amaze and move me as long as I live above the 40-degree latitude line. The song of the (incipient) summer is Tous ensemble on chantera—the unofficial and surprisingly emo anthem of PSG, written by ultras on their return to the Parc des Princes after a hooliganism ban, and proving that, to bang, a tune doesn’t necessarily have to scan.
Readers of this newsletter will recall its longstanding interest in nominative determinism. We would like to congratulate Désiré Doué on the rare double whammy, while imploring the orthographically challenged editors of the Athletic to stop fucking calling him Desire Doue.1 (Although, come to think of it, that works too.)
Ousmane Dembélé, who now has his own boulevard in Paris, deserves the Ballon d’Or and then another award for wearing sunglasses better than any man on the planet. (Great hats, too, as Emilia Petrarca recently pointed out.) Fan d’Or goes to Jimmy, of Paris, who went out on Saturday night and immediately got the game’s score tattooed on his knuckles.
Now I want to tell you about a story I published in this week’s New Yorker, chronicling the sweet and sticky saga of El Mordjene, an Algerian hazelnut spread. It went viral last summer and was banned by the E.U. at the height of its success, giving rise to allegations of a nefarious plot by Nutella. I *really* got into this story. It isn’t really about hazelnut spreads. As I write, it’s about nostalgia, memory, injustice, nationalism, globalization, decolonization, protectionism, racism, identity, immigration, invasion—the same things that all arguments are about nowadays, transposed to the realm of spreadable snacks. You can read it here. (And then, if you want, you can read about la Maison Jean Trogneux, Brigitte Macron’s family chocolaterie, which, rather Balzacianly, just opened its first boutique in the capital after a hundred and fifty-three years in Amiens.)
O.K., the Frenchest thing ever. People say that a lot on the internet, but here it really is. Every once in awhile we talk about trading in our car, a Citroën beater which is single-handedly keeping the word “jalopy” alive. We’ll never do it, but nonetheless we talk about it sometimes. I dream of a Volvo. My husband, pitching the new Renault 5 E-Tech Electric, passed me the phone to look at a picture. It was electric yellow. “Hideous,” I said. “No.” The kids chimed in: “It’s got backseat windows that actually go down!” (That is not a feature of the Citroën.) My husband took the phone back. Swiped. I could tell he was about to sortir un argument imbattable. “Regarde, y’a une huche à pain.”
Did you know that, since “pint” isn’t a metric measurement, French bars can basically give you whatever they want if you order a pint? The fearless crusaders at Balance Ta Pinte are on it, avenging the scourge of the fluted glass. That carcinogenic cadmium is “une bombe sanitaire” for French public health and that you need to watch out for what’s in your cereal, pasta, and bread? I mostly stay away from “Americans in Paris” content on Instagram—too close to home—but this sketch about the insidious effects of Franglish really made me laugh. (“It is fatiguing”—me, admonishing our son the other day for speaking Franglish.) I’m not getting near 👋💥👋 LA GIFLE 👋💥👋, but I did love this Quotidien bit: Peut-être qu’elle a juste besoin de tenir une rampe, merde! Below the paywall we’ll be discussing expositions to see, books to read, restaurants to try, and an interesting little summer bag. Yes, I’m Franglishing again.
