Paris, My Sweet Read Online Free PDF

the day of the meal, at small neighborhood businesses. Back home, we’d load up a giant grocery cart once a week at a superstore, and then shelve the packaged goods in the pantry until memory or hunger called them forth. Fresh, local, and delicious was not the marketing mantra du jour in Paris. It’s just the way it was.
    Before choosing my apartment, I hadn’t really understood why Michael was so gung ho about the second arrondissement. My previous visits to Paris had given me the impression that it was more commercial and touristy than residential and charming. But I soon discovered that my neighborhood was one of the biggest foodie meccas in the city, anchored by the four-block pedestrian stretch of rue Montorgueil. By my count, it had two cheese shops ( fromageries ), four produce markets ( marchés ), four butchers ( boucheries ), one of which was devoted to chickens ( un rotisserie ), a fish market ( poissonnerie ), four chocolate boutiques ( chocolatiers ), an ice cream shop ( un glacier ), six bakeries ( boulangeries ), four wine stores ( caves au vin ), an Italian specialty shop, and a giant market filled with heaps of spices, dried fruits, nuts, and grains that were sculpted into neat domes and sold by the gram. There was even a store devoted just to olive oils. And all of these were interspersed between no fewer than a dozen cafés, a couple florists ( fleuristes ), and myriad tabacs , where weathered old men bought their Lotto tickets and drank beer with their mutts and neighbors.
    Walking that stretch of food paradise that was my new neighborhood, which I made sure to do at least once a day, made all my senses tingle: produce—towering stacks of purple-flecked artichokes and pyramids of pert, shiny clementines—was displayed like kinetic sculptures, changing shape as the day went on and the inventory decreased. The pungency of ripe, stinky cheeses duked it out with the smell of savory fat drippings falling from chickens that roasted on spits into pans of peeled potatoes below. And even though I hadn’t eaten red meat in over ten years, I still took the time to peer into the charcuteries , marveling at the coils of sausages and terrines of pâtés and how wonderfully they were displayed. The food was treated so respectfully that I had no choice but to genuflect. It was glorious.
    And then there were the pâtisseries and boulangeries . While I had arrived in Paris with the names of only two friends scribbled on a scrap of paper, I had a carefully researched, very thorough two-page spreadsheet of must-try pâtisseries. I got right to work.
    Within weeks, I had explored all the boulangeries and pâtisseries near me and quickly became obsessed with Stohrer’s pain aux raisins . Come to find out, Stohrer wasn’t just the prettiest and most charming bakery on rue Montorgueil, but it also had the most illustrious roots, having been started in 1730 by King Louis XV’s royal pâtissier, Nicolas Stohrer. I’d never been interested in pain aux raisins before, always preferring a rich and melty pain au chocolat , a rectangular croissant hiding two batonettes of chocolate inside, to something with ho-hum raisins. But one morning when I saw Stohrer’s pastry pinwheels, filled generously with crème pâtissière and riddled with raisins looking especially puffy and inviting, I gave it a try. It was still slightly warm. It was sweeter than I expected. I was smitten.
    Inspired, I set off for other boulangeries and pâtisseries in the city. There was Les Petits Mitrons, a cute little pink pâtisserie in Montmartre that specialized in tarts: chocolate-walnut, chocolate-pear, apple-pear, straight-up chocolate, straight-up apple, apricot, peach, rhubarb, fig, fruits-rouges , strawberry-cream, mixed fruit, and on and on. From there, I ventured east to one of the city’s only other hilly quartiers, Belleville, searching for the best croissant in Paris.
    As I