Steve's Weird Food for France: Steak Tartare

Steak Tartare. I know this would not be "out there" for a lot of people*, but it's definitely weird for me. I mean come on! Raw hamburger on a plate?

What can I say about steak tartare? My first forkful made me think, "Hey, this is quite tasty". Unfortunately, that thought was followed in approximately 0.00000001 seconds with the thought, "THIS IS RAW BEEF!" which kind of spoiled the moment. Mine was served with some decent fried potatoes, a green salad, and some baguette. I think it's often served with toast, for spreading.

And it was a lot - a mound the size of a softball. Too much for me to finish.

What did it taste like? It's chilled, and mostly you just taste the seasoning. I'm pretty sure there was some kind of vinegar-like thing in there, and some onion, and I believe it's usually prepared with Worcestershire Sauce. It was savoury and tasty, and the texture was like coarse, moist, stringy paté. I just couldn't separate the taste from the idea. Also, it is disquieting to get raw hamburger stuck between one's teeth.

I believe I can go to my grave without having steak tartare again.


* And by "a lot of people" I mean "the Paris Hashers with whom I discussed the 'Steve's Weird Food' project". One of their suggestions was Tête de Veau. But this came from a guy whose cafeteria at work serves frog's legs so he's clearly on a whole other Weird Food Level.

Ah, Paris!

Paris caught me unawares - I really hadn’t planned to get here quite yet. My intentions on leaving Belgium were to proceed to Arras, France and thence to the memorial at Vimy. But it turns out that touring the sights of Vimy and being sans auto are two largely incompatible states. After some fruitless research into tour companies, and a pleasant but unhelpful chat with a woman at the memorial, I just decided to chuck the whole thing and head straight for Paris, on the TGV no less.*

My current hostel is adequate – well situated mere steps from the Seine, near the western end of Île. St-Louis. The room is well-equipped with sink and shower en suite, and the breakfast is very French – a chunk of baguette, a small brioche, butter, jam, and coffee or tea. On my first night I happened on a comfy Scottish pub with free wifi and Guinness on tap, so I abandoned my plan to find a bistro and eat something with lots of duck liver and and butter and cream. Instead, I had the burger-and-beer special and camped out with the computer and finished (finally) the post on Ypres. A cop-out, I know, but sometimes you just need a pint of Guinness, even at a heart-stopping €6.90/pint.

I wandered over to Île-de-la-Cité after dinner, where there is a church you may have heard of.

Notre Dame

It was a beautifully warm night, so I sat in front of the cathedral and glanced through my LP France, and watched the fire-flinging buskers, and enjoyed the moment. When I got back to the hostel it was nearing midnight, but only one of the four bunks in my room was occupied. Midnight is not an outrageously late time to arrive, but I was careful to move about as quietly and politely as possible. Still, the woman sleeping in the bunk opposite radiated such a perfectly Gallic sense of contempt at my audacity that it fairly rolled off her in waves. I almost wanted to applaud. She repeated her quiet snorts of disgust as each of the last two occupants of the room arrived. Well really, who did we think we were anyways?

Being in Paris is nice. It’s comfortable in a city where the language is not a complete mystery. My French is pretty good, though paradoxically I speak it much more readily than I understand it. This is frustrating because I can make myself understood in almost any situation, but comprehending the response is often beyond me. Everyone in France should just bloody well SLOW DOWN when they talk. Apparently my tongue may be at least partly French, but my ears are stubbornly English.

Also, being around all these sophisticated French women makes me feel like a grubby under-dressed oaf, but happily this can often be rectified by finding an overweight tourist in flowered shorts and flip-flops to stand next to.

I’ve decided to spend about a week here, and I’m getting my museum/sight-seeing chops back, which is good. Yesterday I visited the Musée D’Orsay, did some wandering there on my own, and had a guided tour. It’s really big, but not so outrageously over-the-top big as the Hermitage (or the Louvre, on the schedule for Friday). I’ve decided that if I can locate one or two pieces that really move me in these places, then I feel I’ve done well**. Here is my moving moment from the Musée D’Orsay:

Monet’s “Londres, le Parlement – Trouée de soleil dans le brouillard" (The genuine article is really much nicer - all pale purple and hazy.)

Maybe I was feeling a bit wistful about being alone in Paris on a rainy day. Maybe I missed the familiarity of London.*** Whatever it was, I stood and stared at that painting and got a bit choked up.

The other most excellent discovery at the Musée D’Orsay was an enormous cut-away model of the 19th century Paris Opera House, the Palais Garnier. It was huge, and showed all the backstage mechanics of the fly system, and what looked like a system of moving scenery on stage as well. It was accompanied by a display of two sets of maquettes for 19th century operas that were delightful. I’ve kind of been avoiding theatres and such, feeling like that might be a bit of a busman’s holiday, but that was clearly a mistake. As soon as I saw that model theatre and those set renderings it was like I was home. I thought to myself, “I know this. I live this. I AM this.” I wanted to turn to the person next to me and say, “Look! This is a rendering for the 3rd Act of “Moses”, when he parts the Red Sea! Look at the painting – you can see where the designer gridded out the paper before he started to paint. I know all about this!”

Model of the Palais Garnier

In fact, it made me decide to have a look at the theatre itself, so I went for a guided tour of the public spaces of the building the next day. We got to go into the auditorium, and I itched to get on stage and have a look around. They were in the middle of fitting up a show, a very modern design with lots of gigantic mirrored legs and straw strewn all over the floor. The orchestra pit was down, and the piano was being tuned, and guys were pushing big lumps of scenery on and off stage, and people were wandering around wearing headsets and it was all just great. Then again, maybe it was only great because it was all not my problem. It’s entirely possible that they were days behind schedule and hundreds of thousands of euros over budget and that the straw on the floor was the result of the total and spectacular failure of some bit of machinery up in the fly tower****. No matter, it was just nice to see.

The stage of the Palais Garnier

I also had a reasonable 10k run all the way along the left bank from Île. St-Louis to the Eiffel Tower. That wasn’t my original aim, but as I ran along I started to see the tower in the distance and it just seemed ridiculous not to stop for a photo op. After that, it was a nice return trip along the right bank, past the Tuileries and the Louvre, and thence to the hostel and a shower and a beer.

Seen on the run. And yes, I do appreciate that this was not your average 10k.

And that’s been my first few days in Paris. Pas mal.

* The TGV (Tres Grand Vitesse) train was not at all exciting. In fact, it felt decidedly down-at-heal, and much less space-shuttle-like than I’d expected.

** I like to wander around and think about what piece I would take home with me if the management of the Musée were to approach and say something like, “Madame, you are clearly not an average tourist, as evidenced by the fact that you have lingered for more than 4.2 seconds in front of this painting. Thank you also for not simply approaching, reading the tag, taking a digital photo of yourself with the painting, and then moving on to repeat this process with each piece in the room. Please, it would give us great pleasure to present you with a small memento of your visit. Perhaps this Monet? Mais non, we insist.”

*** On my very first day in London, on the very first tube ride from Heathrow to the hostel, I saw a “Rhymes on the Road” advert in the tube car I was riding in, and it has stuck with me ever since:

Go where we may, rest where we will,

Eternal London haunts us still.

**** Technical Director to Stage Manager: “Yeah, ummm… about the Big Straw Drop… What would happen if you didn’t have that until next Thursday? Uh huh. Yes. I see. Of course. No no no, absolutely we’ll put a crew of 17 on overnight to get it fixed. No no, it’s no problem at all.” Heh. Sometimes I don’t miss work at all. Hey Adam, how’s it going?

Cuberdons – Steve’s Weird Food for Belgium

Steve: I know when you mentioned it you were mostly thinking about things that still had their eyeballs and toenails and such, but life can’t be all offal, so here’s what I came up with for Belgium:

Cuberdons

These are an odd sort of candy – it’s hard to tell the scale here, but they’re about an inch tall, and dark purple. I asked one of the guys who worked at the hostel in Bruges about them and he wasn’t really able to describe them at all. I could tell he thought they were really good though, since the best he could come up with was “If you see them, eat them!”

The outsides are a thick crust of sort of leathery sugar, and the insides are a goopy mess of vaguely berry-flavoured syrupy sugar. As you might suspect, they are not exactly tart. They’re not unpleasant, but given that one could expend one’s non-essential Belgian calories on chocolate, I’m a bit at a loss as to why they even exist. I’ve still got one or two left, which tells you how underwhelming they really are. Maybe I should mail them back to the guy in the hostel in Bruges.

Pick of Pics - Tyne Cot

This gentleman was on my tour with his grandson. He's standing at the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. Heartbreakingly, despite it's massive scale, the Menin Gate is not big enough to list all the names of the missing, so another 34,000 are listed here.

Ypres

It’s really hard to know what to write about Ypres. It’s like the enormity of the thing, the place, the history… it’s beyond words. Again and again my expectations were challenged. Again and again the sheer lunacy of the thing and the unfathomable tragedy of the results were driven home. All I can really do is tell you about it, so here goes.

I started at the Menin Gate for the 8:00 pm Last Post Ceremony, armed with warnings from several people that I should take tissues. I had excellent instructions from Andre, my host at the B&B Hortensia (“Walk along the ramparts to the Gate.. get there by 7:30… go down the stairs here… try to stand here… the buglers will be here… ”). Right from the start it wasn’t what I was expecting. The Menin Gate is big. I don’t know what I was picturing, but it wasn’t that.*

The Menin Gate

The walls of the "Monument to the Missing" are inscribed with the names of almost 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers of the Great War whose bodies were never recovered and so could not be properly buried and marked. Every wall is covered with names, organized by country and regiment. Naturally I looked for the Canadians, and I didn’t have to look hard.

The Princess Patricia’s, one batallion now based at CFB Shilo, Manitoba

Just before 8:00pm they stopped the traffic going through the gate, and by this time there was quite a crowd gathered, probably a few hundred people. Most looked like tourists, but there was a fair number of uniformed people too, some obviously veterans.

Some of the crowd

And then the buglers arrived – four of them, which is three more than I was expecting. I suppose this makes sense though - with just one set of lips, there’s always the chance of a wrong note or a slip-up. After one warm-up note, they launched into the Last Post and again I was surprised. It wasn’t slow and plaintive, it was loud and fast and almost defiant and the acoustics under all that stone made the notes reverberate. The whole thing was more stirring than mournful.

The buglers

After that, a single soldier stepped into the centre of the opening and recited this verse from "For the Fallen" by Laurence Binyon.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

And then a series of wreaths were laid. Some by uniformed soldiers who must have been on active duty, and some by grey-haired veterans with medals and memories, and one by a group of spotty English public school teenagers. And then it was over for that day, but would be repeated the next day and the day after. They do it every night**. The whole thing was quick, but poignant, and a good warm-up for the next day.

For Thursday I’d booked a spot with Salient*** tours to see some of the famous WWI sights around Ypres. The tour was a small one – only 8 of us in a mini-van with a guide. We started at Hill 62 – at a memorial to the battle where Canadians fought to defend Ypres from April to August of 1916. Not a well-known battle, but once again I was face-to-face with the Canadian presence. Like almost all memorials, there was a little weather-proof enclosure that housed the Visitor’s Book. I signed it, little realizing how many more there were to come.

The Memorial - everywhere I went that day had those little crosses and lots of Canadian flags.

After Hill 62 it was a very short ride to the Trench Museum, which I think was only a re-creation, but still chilling. There was a long series of trenches zig-zagging through a pleasant treed area called Sanctuary Wood, though back in the day the trees had been blasted to nothingness and the soil churned into a deadly soup of mud and blood and barbed wire – nothing like the quiet place I walked through. The thing that really hit home was seeing the shell holes that still marked the landscape. I walked through the trenches but it was impossible to imagine what it would be like to launch over the top into a rain of machine-gun fire, and end up, if you were really lucky, diving for one of those shell-holes into 6 inches of water and a few precious moments of cover.

The trenches

And the shell-holes

The “In Flanders Fields Museum” I visited later that day had a room with a big sign outside it warning people that the exhibit inside might be shocking, since it was meant to simulate something of what it was like to be in the trenches. It was a complete joke. A large, dark-ish room with two rear-projections screens showing black and white images, and some music and voice-overs, and the occasional flashing light. Ridiculous. It seems to me that in order to even remotely approximate the experience in the trenches you’d need dress everyone in wet wool and heavy leather boots, shove them face-first into 3 feet of mud, and leave then there for 2 weeks. Oh, and shoot at them at lot, of course.

And then it was cemeteries – Essex Farm first. It’s a small plot of land, but is the last resting place for 1,200 Commonwealth soldiers. That was another shock – such a small space of land, but so many dead. Essex Farm is especially significant because it’s at the sight of a former dressing station where Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields”. The guide pointed out a spot near the main road where McCrae apparently sat on the back of an ambulance and penned his famous poem. If you grew up in Canada you probably know them by heart, but hearing them read out loud on the very spot where they were first set down is a very different experience than hearing them at a Remembrance Day ceremony in a school gym in Saskatoon.

One set of five or six markers at Essex Farm were crammed tightly together, and our guide explained that this wasn’t for lack of space. It was probably because the men there had served together and were killed in the same battle – probably even by the same shell. Their remains couldn't be separated so they’re buried like they died – together. God.

Then it was a German cemetery – Langemark. Very different in style to the Commonwealth war graves. Much darker and more Teutonic somehow. Rather than standing stones, there were flat markers on the ground, each with around 15 names on it, making Langemark the final resting place of about 44,000, which includes 25,000 in a crypt at the same site. Again, the numbers were hard to fathom.

At each of our stops the guide unrolled a large map of the area around Ypres and pointed out an important hill or town or road. Different trench lines were marked in different colours, and you could clearly see the bulge in the lines around Ypres. It looked like a huge area until I saw the scale of the map – 3 inches to the mile. It was TINY. I could have run across the whole map in about an hour and a half. And how many thousands died there? So many that they’re still discovering bodies all over the area - 12 to 15 every year. And unexploded ordnance is unearthered regularly. Farmers dig it up and stack it by the side of the road and crews come and pick up.

Pile of shells awaiting disposal – the pointy ones leaning up against the post still have their nose-cones, so they’re probably still live.

After Langemark we made our way to another important Canadian memorial. It was a short drive. In fact, they were all short drives. The scale was heart-breakingly small. Here’s where we went next:

The Brooding Soldier (the Saint Julien Memorial) . Commemorating the Canadian defense against the first gas attack on the Western Front. Brilliantly designed by Frederick Chapman Clemesha and surprising to encounter in real life.

Finally, it was Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world, and our last stop. 12,000 graves, but again, it seemed small. Maybe it’s just my in-born Canadian sense of scale, or maybe I’ve seen too many perspective shots of “crosses, row on row”****, but the area covered by Tyne Cot was just smaller than I was expecting. The immensity and awfulness of the whole thing made me feel like there should be ranks of white markers stretching beyond the horizon, but in fact it only took a minute or two to walk from one end to the other. It seemed too small for the enormity of the events.

Tyne Cot

As with my post about my black cab tour through west Belfast, I’m struggling with finding something to say about this experience. There’s nothing I can add here that hasn’t been said before, or that isn’t wholly inadequate to express the tragedy and stupidity of what happened in this place. It was horrible and mostly stupid and way too many people died.

Let’s just not do that again.

* This points out one of the things that’s been bothering me about this trip lately. There’s so much to see, and so much history behind it all that I feel like a complete moron most of the time. It’s like I’m bouncing off the surface of things with only the barest glimpse of what’s really underneath. For Ypres I feel like I should have read at least 1,000 pages of WWI history before being allowed to leave the train station and enter the town. And it’s the same everywhere I go. It’s depressing.

** From Wikipedia: "Except for the occupation by the Germans in World War II when the daily ceremony was conducted at Brookwood Military Cemetery, in Surrey, England, this ceremony has been carried on uninterrupted since 2 July 1928. On the very evening that Polish forces liberated Ypres in the Second War, the ceremony was resumed at the Menin Gate despite the fact that heavy fighting was still taking place in other parts of the town."

*** It turns out that “salient” has a military meaning here – it’s not the adjectival "having a quality that thrusts itself into attention" meaning I'm familiar with. In military parlance a salient is a military position that projects into the position of the enemy – one where the defending force is behind the front line but because of the bulge, is surrounded on three sides. Ypres was just such a position for the Allies in WWI. It’s also in a depression in the landscape, so not only were the Allies almost completely surrounded, they were surrounded by German guns on high ground, which helped contribute to the slaughterhouse effect.

**** Another surprise – the graves aren’t marked with crosses. They’re plain white markers, as you can see - decorated with regimental badges for the UK soldiers, a rising sun for Australians, a springbok for South Africans and a maple leaf for Canadians. During the war when these cemeteries were started the graves were marked with simple wooden crosses, but the Commonwealth War Graves Commission replaced them all with permanent stone markers, and maintains cemeteries and monuments from the two World Wars all over the world.