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France: Paris: Notes on Gaston Wijnen's "Discovering Paris Bistros"

This page is part of an ongoing effort to make and share online some notes on food writer Gaston Wijnen's useful restaurant guide, Discovering Paris Bistros. (US ISBN-10: 0940793849: ISBN-13: 978-0940793842: UK ISBN 1-872803-008)

The book is now sixteen years old, but its take on the great bistros of Paris remains a cheerful and useful one. With this in mind, we are starting to go through its entries and make notes on which Paris restaurants Wijnen described are still in existence, and to provide contact information and (where possible) web addresses or email contact addresses for them.

Later we'll add a Google map to this page so that restaurants' locations and status will be available in graphic form as well.

Click on "read more" for more information.

France: Pets de Soeur / Pets de Nonne (Nun's Farts)

The proper name for these little fried pastries or fritters is beignets soufflès. But the slightly rude and goofy nickname seems to have been around for at least the past two centuries, possibly longer -- and no one now knows for sure where it came from. The great cookbook writer Richard Olney points out in Simple French Food that in cookbooks published before the nineteenth century, these are called pets de putain -- referring to the emissions of a very different female profession: one at the other end of the celibacy continuum, so to speak.

There is also a potential joke in this version of the recipe at the expense of the Breton side of the country: see the giant "Breton's fart" variation further down the recipe, which produces something like the giant pancake sometimes known as "Dutch baby".

Click on "Read more" for the recipe.

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