I was having drinks a few months ago in Paris with an American couple who lives there half the year. Their flat was high above Boulevard Saint-Germain in the Odéon neighborhood, and from their tiny balcony, you could see across the city to the Eiffel Tower on one side and the towers of Notre Dame on the other. We were talking about how sometimes it takes an outsider to show city residents things in their own neighborhood.
I had found a bakery with superb baguettes they didn’t know about; they had told a French friend about a place he had passed by for years. So when three American expats told their stories in new books about living in France — out in time for us to brush up on French specialties before the Paris Olympics — I thought we should listen carefully. They’re looking at the culture with an outsider’s eyes wide open.
Perhaps it’s time for us to expand our knowledge of the cuisine beyond the clichés of Croque Monsieur and Coq au Vin , wonderful as they are. Canadian Rosa Jackson arrived in Paris in 1995; 20 years ago she moved to Nice. Jackson has an illustrious CV.
She was a translator at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, worked at Agence France-Presse , wrote restaurant reviews for “ Time Out Paris ,” now runs tours for her company Edible Paris , and teaches hands-on cooking classes in Nice at her school, Les Petits Farcis . Her new book, “Nicoise: Market-Inspired Cooking from France’s Sunniest City” (W. W.
Norton) with its light and a.
