The Politics of Pleasure

On the Parisian table as a space for creativity, conviviality and cultural resistance – an introduction to The 0fr. Paris Cookbook.

“There was a plate of hors d’oeuvres, including a slice of Jura paté, flavored with wild thyme, and, as the main dish, a succulent stew or an escallop of veal, a salad, and goat’s cheese, plus a small carafe of the onionskin wine and, of course, a demitasse of black French coffee, which tasted like death. It was a civilized, countrified, delicious, inexpensive French meal.”
–Janet Flanner, ‘The Greatest Refreshment’, The New Yorker, March 4, 1972

The world over, right now, millions of us are sitting down together for a meal, and for most of us – lucky enough not to be living in a war zone or suffering through some other catastrophe – this daily necessity is also one of life’s great pleasures. An indulgence, a luxury, but at the same time utterly ordinary, and democratic too. (I like this paradox.) Flavors are something we all understand. Our differences somehow tend to take a back seat over the deliciousness of an oyster, a plate of couscous or pasta or rice, a bowl of pho, a steak-frites, a Greek salad, an egg, a mango. Flavors, ingredients, recipes slip across borders, and through time – universal and eternal. No translation required.

The act of cooking, of serving, of eating and of receiving generates conversation, even wit, sometimes debate or dispute, to go with the dishes. The table is a site of production, where preparing and consuming a meal catalyzes language, relationships, rituals and aesthetic choices – art de la table, art de vivre, savoir-vivre all come into play, not as ornament, but as active ingredients. Together, these elements turn the table into a creative force-field, where food is the medium and culture unfolds in real time.

Bookshops, too, can be a similar kind of space, gathering places of action and interaction, creativity and sharing. Here in Paris, 0fr. is a bookshop of the best kind, where selling books becomes a backdrop to the bookseller as host and mastermind of a community preoccupied with ideas and ‘making’, or just fun. Browse the books – Alex and Marie’s edits and arrangements provide energizing associations of ideas – then wander into the back gallery where you will get caught up in a book launch, a poetry reading, a pop-up, an exhibition opening or a performance.

Often, what follows is a dinner orchestrated by Michaela, Alex’s wife: friends and strangers seated together around the big table at the 0fr. Grand Studio, extending the conversation long into the night, and, if you’re lucky, culminating in a wildly uninhibited karaoke session! 0fr. has created an open space where bookselling and hospitality become a radical form of cultural practice. Because making art and ideas freely accessible, and creating a place where strangers can gather around them, 365/365, is a quietly defiant act. This is a bookshop as a machine that kills fascists, like Woody Guthrie’s guitar.

0fr. stands firmly in a lineage of bookshop as site of encounter, hospitality and experimentation. For generations, the Parisian bookshop has demonstrated how it can be both a refuge and a launchpad – the famous ‘third place’ between home and work, in between the private and the public, where thinking happens aloud, and collectively. I’m thinking of course of Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, but also of Sylvia Whitman, and of the hundreds of indie bookshop owners currently operating in Paris.

At Shakespeare and Company with the wonderful Sylvia Whitman for the launch of The Paris Flea Market

When foreigners arrive in Paris or France, there is often a quiet joy in discovering the importance of meals here, the ritual of it all, the traditions of the table and the counter. Look at the bonedeep satisfaction in Janet Flanner’s description of a lunch taken at her favorite restaurant, on Rue Jacob in Saint-Germain, over a century ago, reproduced here for the book’s epigraph.

In France, meals become a kind of holy clock, regulating daily life, dividing up the day, with discrete moments of potential transcendence. Starting with the croissant – and its always outrageous explosion of crumbs – ideally eaten at the counter of the local café, and which is really just to line the stomach for the onslaught of coffee. This light breakfast means you’re hungry for a proper, hot, sit-down meal at lunch, enjoyed somewhere between noon and 2pm, preferably with wine. (Sunday lunch, which starts later and lasts longer, is in a glorious category of its own.) By mid-afternoon, a hot crêpe or another goûter with the kids may intervene.

Then, around 7pm, it’s time for the marvelous apéro – that moment that gets made up as it goes along – anything from a sneaky afterwork glass thrown back before racing home to cook dinner, to wine and peanuts in lieu of dinner, or an all-out party fueled by cheese and charcuterie platters that trails off into the night. Then of course comes the classic French dinner, that starts anywhere from 8pm: entrée, main, dessert, maybe a little fromage. Wine. Bread. And there’s all sorts of other delicious micromoments or hybrids too – the amuse-bouche, the hors d’oeuvre, the souper, the sandwich, the cocktail dînatoire, café-calva, trou normand, and the digestif (still served in Economy class on Air France!).

In these pages, the community of food-loving friends we invited to contribute a recipe generally express a love of French traditions around food, the abundant quality and variety of ingredients we have the luxury of finding in Paris, the city’s multitude of excellent neighborhood restaurants, cafés, markets, bakeries and groceries. We marvel at the ease here of feeding ourselves and others well. And also the vibrant and living connections between the plate and the farm, the farmers, the land, the seasons.

I love the Paris I see mirrored – and manifested – in this book: a city that is at once deeply rooted and endlessly porous. A melting pot. A terre d’accueil. Paris is a cosmopolitan place where people arrive carrying recipes, memories and rituals from elsewhere, to find themselves at a shared table. What makes Paris truly vital is how its traditions are continually reinterpreted, expanded and enriched, by new generations, and by those arriving from elsewhere. This book continues the preoccupations that have shaped my work since I moved here from Melbourne a couple of decades ago. In books and other business, I like exploring the intersections where self-expression meets culture, history and community. I seek out and champion the people and places that give Paris its special flavor, mapping liberté, égalité, fraternité in its many modern guises. I’m drawn to the slow, the strange, the new, the true and the beautiful, and how these values are in fact zones of resistance.

The 0fr. Paris Cookbook is an invitation to set the table for friends, for strangers, for those who arrive hungry, curious, open, with something to say. To activate the table as a site of connection, creativity and care. In a moment when the world feels rushed and fragmented – overrun with paranoia, propaganda and incomprehension – these recipes remind us of something essential: that joy can be simple, that politics can arrive on a fork, that hospitality can be radical, and that sitting down to eat and drink together matters.

Enjoy:)

Kate van den Boogert

Read more about The 0fr. Paris Cookbook here

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