Have you been to Paris? On Montmartre? In Place de Tertre? OK, then you know what I'm talking about. About the multitude of cafes and terraces, about the crowd of portrait artists standing still and the thousands of tourists circling around them, about the colorful sales that starts around ten in the morning and ends late at night...
I love Paris every moment / Every moment of the year Louis Armstrong sang, but I personally, I love Paris in the spring time , in the morning between 7 and 10. The Paris of lazy mornings, not yet invaded by tourists. Then, and only then, on the terrace of a café in Place de Tertre, biting into the very French croissant and sipping the equally French coffee with milk, I feel close to heaven and completely happy. Price for two hours and 7.5 euros!
In one such Parisian escapade, on a chilly May morning, I learned the French's passion for coffee with milk. It was happening on the terrace of "Chez la Mère Catherine", one of the old and famous Montmartre restaurants, founded in 1729.
" Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die? "The words written by Danton on one of the walls of the dining room can still be read, and the deep biblical-gourmet piety of the revolutionary decapitated by Robespierre is easy to understand if you study the house menu: fried frog legs and rolled in ginger, steak crispy honey-smeared piglet, seafood with mango, crêpes suzette... All sprinkled with a Saint Julien - Chateau la Bridane and seasoned with blue heart chansonettes.
But I don't want to talk about Mother Catherine's kitchen, but about the coffee with milk that is served here for breakfast. Let me tell you her story, as told to me by Marcel, a liberal arts student and morning waiter, talkative and gallant, like all the French I know.
After the introduction of coffee in the Hexagon in the 17th century, the black and exotic drink knew an insidious but fast way to the hearts of the French. Without remaining only the privilege of the aristocracy, the wealthy bourgeoisie, of a certain street or a single neighborhood, the Paris of the next century already has 800 shops, spread mainly on the right bank of the Seine, more lively and dynamic than the left. Slowly, slowly, the pubs were overshadowed by the glory of the cafes...
Quite expensive, however, coffee was not within everyone's reach, not every day. Until, a young flamboyant, Parisian get-beget and with a lot of commercial flair, has the idea to buy from the trendy cafes, the junk that is usually thrown away. Ginette, as the little shopkeeper was known, buys the grounds with a pittance, boils it once more and to change the liquor's dull taste and a bit distant from that of coffee-coffee, adds milk. Olé, olé, olé, café au lait was born ! Placed sometimes on a street corner, sometimes on another, through the peripheral districts of the city, Ginette serves from a can equipped with a faucet and a stove, which keeps it warm, coffee with two sols of milk in clay jugs, to the workers in way to work The sugar is not abundant, but the success is huge! Especially since Ginette "hires" for this business several other amateurs to supplement her income, which she places strategically at all the gates of Paris. "Workers have found more economy, strength, flavor in this food than in any other. Therefore, they drink it in astonishing quantities, saying that it often keeps them up until the evening" noted, in 1788, the playwright Louis Sebastièn Mercier in "Tableau de Paris", and Marcel, interested in the history of Paris and the literature of the 19th century 18th century, he quoted me exactly.
What happened next, I asked Marcel?
No big deal, he told me. The high society ladies, curious as they are, wanted to taste the coffee with milk, or for the sake of accuracy, the milk with coffee! Obviously, they drank it using good, freshly roasted and ground coffee. It is certain that, say the chroniclers of those times, "consumption has tripled in France and you cannot find a market house where you are not offered coffee, you cannot find a shop maid, a cook, a maid or an elegant lady who does not drink coffee with milk in the morning! "
And Ginette?
Marcel shrugs his shoulders and answers me with a smile: Ginette, if she really existed, collected enough money to open a small boutique , after which she got married, had children, maybe gained a little weight, grew old alongside of grandchildren, who knows?
No one. But I say that it is best to save this happy ending for the story told by Marcel, or for any other coffee story you will hear one morning in May, in a cafe in Place de Tertre.
PS Needless to say, the phrase Café au lait! Olé, olé, olé is a tasty game of paronyms, as only the French can invent. Mais, on ne sait jamais, isn't it ?!
M. Vaida