Anthrow Circus

Tag: cuisine

Le Gigot: A Meal That Brings People Together

A VIDEO REPORT BY BILL DIEM

The leg of lamb, or “gigot” in French, is slowly disappearing from French tables. Fewer lambs are being raised in the country, and the stronger taste of the meat is less appealing to young people. And yet, because of its traditional role as a special meal, this dish still has the power to bring people together around the table. Lamb is associated with the Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas and the Islamic holiday of Eid ul-Adha, and the gigot is the choice cut.
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French Cooking School Teaches Those in Need

STORY BY BILL DIEM

Accounts of people “lifting themselves up by their bootstraps” have been around for more than a century, since the phrase took on its current meaning. Critics say that hard work is not enough, but true stories of success from unlikely starts abound.

Thierry Marx, French chef of the year in 2006, is one of those stories. He was a poor student from a bad neighborhood. His grades weren’t good enough to get into hotel school, and he dropped out of a school for building trades. “I was furious…,” he told The Figaro, a French newspaper. “I messed around, got into fights. I ran away, I escaped to Paris … Champigny-sur-Marne, the city where I lived, was a ghost town, a wasteland.”

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Teurgoule: Rice Pudding the Norman Way

A VIDEO REPORT BY BILL DIEM

This happens when I have been alone too long—the words start to leak out of everything and they will not stop. I cannot look around, I cannot take a single step, without it becoming prose, and it is not welcome. It thrusts me into a place where language imposes this acute separation between me and everything else—leaks its ink out of the bark, the pavement, the sky, flowing directly from itself to me in the form of a stream of words, and it will not let me rest.

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Gratin Dauphinois

Bon Appétit: Discover France’s Gratin Dauphinois

A VIDEO REPORT BY BILL DIEM

In a Culture Keeper first, at least in recent memory, we bring you a recipe! In a video report narrated in French (never fear, non-French speaker, we’ve included some English text for you), Bill Diem takes us from the market to the kitchen to a dinner table surrounded by friends ready to enjoy the evening’s star dish. Along the way he sheds some light on the history of this representative of France’s reputed culinary traditions.

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