“Hello,” I said with a bright smile. “I am M’s mom. She is so thrilled your daughter invited her to the birthday party. She’ll be very happy to join you. Oh, my name is Sylvia.” I rattled this off to the other mother in my nearly fluent French, my hand out, ready to shake.
“Oh, very [...]

As an American woman, I find I have always taken for granted how easily it is to talk about one subject or another with other women. We girls can talk about anything from our innermost feelings to sexual positions with our men without batting an eye. On the other hand, I have read repeatedly from [...]

Every year starting on January 6th, la galette de rois (the cake of the three kings), a cake made of frangipane (almond cream paste) and a buttery crust, is sold in patisseries all over France. These delicious cakes celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, where the three wise men came to see the baby Jesus. [...]

It’s New Year’s Eve and time to pop a cork. And on both sides of the pond, champagne is de rigeur.
But here in France, the home of the real deal (anything else is just sparkling wine), champagne is actually an every day kind of drink. Well perhaps that’s going too far. A drink so elegant [...]

In France, instead of sending Christmas cards, it’s more popular to send New Year’s cards. New Year’s wishes can arrive up to a few weeks after the 1st of the year,  which means that I can take my time writing them, and my family and friends can receive and enjoy them away from all of the [...]

It’s my first Christmas in Paris. Chestnuts are roasting on an open fire…Ok, maybe not an open fire. More like chestnuts roasting on a silver aluminum platter resting over hot coals in a metal garbage can, but who cares? The chestnuts are still warm and roasted. And they are certainly everywhere, especially at the metro [...]

About a week ago I was very surprised when my friends at La Cave des Papilles told me that Hervé Villemade, the wine maker in the Loire, had left me something. It was a shiny new case of Quoi d’Neuf? I’d made the label for Hervé three years ago and he reissued it all over France during the Beaujolais Nouveau wine [...]

I think everyone has that image of how Parisians dress — always just so, heels and lipstick for ladies, crisply ironed shirts for men. And while there are plenty of folks who dress to the nines, come rain or shine, it’s probably more accurate to say not that everyone’s dressed up but that no one’s [...]

Sometime in the postwar years, some commercial genius sitting behind a desk in Lyon came up with a brilliant plan. Take the gamay grapes harvested at the end of the summer, and rather than letting the wine mature according to the traditional methods, bottle it up and sell it quick. No, better than that, call [...]

As H1N1 vaccination programs ramp up around the world, France faces an unusual challenge: there’s plenty of vaccine but French people–and in particular French medical staff–are refusing vaccination.
This is due partly to the specific  fear that the vaccines might not be entirely safe, partly to a generalized distrust of French health officials due to previous scandals, [...]