Paris, My Sweet (18 page)

In New York, with my packed social calendar, I had a rock-solid sense of self. Now that I had been on my own in Paris for months, I was increasingly tormented by my age and single status. Everywhere I looked, lovers were cuddling, cooing, and unabashedly making out. I kept hearing a taunting refrain, echoing louder and louder in my head:
Et
moi? Et moi?
I started waking up in the middle of the night, questioning my decisions: why had I left Max in San Francisco all those years ago? Why did I never truly give Eric a chance? I was now wondering—perhaps a little late—about the repercussions. Why
didn't
I have a boyfriend? I couldn't help but feel negative. Adrift. I was a thirty-six-year-old American woman living in France. What the hell was I doing? What did I want? What was I searching for? If my dream was to live in the City of Light and Dark Chocolate, how come I was beginning to spend more and more time fantasizing about New York?

I stopped at the Eric Kayser on rue Montorgueil for a chocolate chip cookie after brunching with Jo. If I was going to be spending quality time with
Mad
Men
and Milo later that night, I reckoned, I might as well have a sweet to go with the show. It was more self-defeating behavior, going straight to my ass, but I didn't care. I needed it.

Chocolate chip cookies have always held a special place for me. But then again, what honorable American doesn't have a special softness for these classic baked goods that were the result of an accident?
An
accident!
Imagine if Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, circa 1930, had never knocked the Nestlé chocolate bar into her industrial mixer, as folklore has her doing? Would someone else eventually have had the brilliant idea of adding rich chocolate chunks to smooth and creamy cookie dough? Or would the chocolate chip cookie never have existed? I shudder to think not.

Interestingly, the tarte tatin, which is almost as iconic to the French as chocolate chip cookies are to Americans, was similarly said to be the result of a merry mistake. Caroline and Stéphanie Tatin were two sisters, coincidentally also running a hotel. After forgetting to place a crust along the bottom of a baking pan, Stephanie tried salvaging the dessert by draping a sheet of dough
over
her caramelized apple filling. Then, by inverting the creation after it had baked in the oven,
voilà
, the lovely and amazing “upside down” tarte tatin was presented to the world. But that's another story…

Growing up, it was a rare treat to bake Toll House chocolate chip cookies from scratch. We were a boxed-mix household. I mean, who had something as exotic as
vanilla
extract
in the cupboard? Homemade cookies were a luxury.

When I lived in San Francisco in my twenties, I decided I deserved to be treated every so often. I started the habit of renting two movies every Tuesday night and baking batches of Toll House ready-made dough. By then, I was accustomed to having vanilla extract on hand, but I was also lazier and more inclined to just get to the good stuff. The movies were dinner, the cookies were dessert, and my appreciation for and devotion to chocolate chip cookies—along with Martin Scorsese and Luc Besson—deepened each week.

By the time I moved to New York in 2001, I had moved beyond Toll House and was nothing short of a chocolate chip cookie snob. I knew there were many forms of magic at play in the making of the perfect chocolate chip cookie. It wasn't just a bowl of flour and sugar and eggs and chocolate chips that, when baked for eight to ten minutes at 350 degrees, created an afternoon snack (or Tuesday night dinner). There was serious technique, arrived at after studious experimentation. Letting the dough rest in the refrigerator anywhere from twelve to thirty-six hours, for example, lets the individual ingredients meld together, resulting in better baking consistency—a hydration tactic relied upon by practically every good baker. The scoop size of the raw dough going into the oven is also important, determining the crisp-to-chewy-to-melty ratio as one nibbles their way from the cookie's firm edge to its gooey, doughy center. Passion, imagination, quality—they're all just as important as they get artfully mixed in with the other ingredients.

While there were no cookie wars in New York the way there were for cupcakes, there were plenty of philosophies about the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Should it be soft or crisp? Fat or flat? Big or small? Austere or experimental? Different tastes and opinions propelled a healthy debate—and a delicious excuse to continuously sample all the specimens. And like everything else in New York, I discovered, the options just kept getting bigger, richer, and more outrageous.

My New York chocolate chip explorations began with City Bakery, which was started in 1990 by Maury Rubin as a modest spot peddling savory food from one six-foot-long table and pastries from another six-foot-long table. Within ten years, Maury had not only catapulted to success, upgrading to a cavernous two-level cafeteria-style space in the Flatiron District, but City Bakery had become a city institution. Maury, a Parisian-trained baker himself, initially focused on tarts,
viennoiserie
, and other French specialties. But soon his American sensibilities muscled their way in. He introduced cookies to the City Bakery menu—lovely, dreamy, crunchy, creamy, soft, and sugary chocolate chip cookies. His saucer-sized beauties have it all: crispy edges, melty middles, and a buttery-gritty texture that's balanced by giant hunks of smooth dark chocolate. They have just a hint of caramel flavor. They're real cookie monsters.

Naturally I was smitten with City Bakery's cookies. But then Julie, who lived on the Upper West Side, introduced me to Levain, a subterranean hole-in-the-wall, and my loyalties were suddenly divided. This sublime little bakery was the result of two ambitious women who were hungry for a big challenge—and an even bigger cookie. Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald were training for the Ironman Triathlon in 1994. As a result of their rigorous swimming, cycling, and running training, the two friends were constantly famished, and the regular-sized cookies they found everywhere just weren't cutting it. So they baked up their own batches. And, after both successfully completed the triathlon, they opened Levain in 1995.

When Julie first took me there, she suggested that we split a cookie. Seriously?
Split
a cookie? What did she take me for, a weight-conscious waif who was intimidated by creamed butter and sugar? But once I saw the six-ounce whoppers being pulled from the oven and cooling on the racks behind the bakery's small counter, I understood. If City Bakery had cookie monsters, Levain's cookies were on steroids.

I consented to go halfsies with Julie, but only if we split
two
cookies. She might be the one with a ballet dancer's body, but I had the more logical mind. I told her to surprise me with her two favorites while I ran outside to snag the bakery's lone bench that was auspiciously being vacated at that moment by a khaki-clad dad and his chocolate-smeared daughter. I wondered which of the four flavors Julie would opt for: chocolate chip with roasted walnuts, dark and decadent chocolate chocolate chip, wholesome oatmeal raisin, or dark chocolate with peanut butter chips. A moment later, Julie came out toting a small but heavy paper bag. I peeked inside, and the revelation couldn't have made me happier: one chocolate chip walnut cookie and one double chocolate chip cookie. “Well done,
mon amie
,” I commended, swallowing in anticipation.

I let her drive. Julie withdrew the chocolate chip cookie with walnuts, doing just as you're supposed to with a cheese platter and starting with the mildest and working your way to the richest flavor. She broke the little mound of cakey, chocolate-studded, slightly undercooked heaven in two and handed me half. “One, two, three!” she commanded. We bit in simultaneously and broke out into big, sexy smiles. Semi-sweet chocolate morsels smeared our teeth. Our eyes rolled in the back of our heads, our feet giddily tapping the sidewalk. “No way!” was all I could say. Julie, eyes closed, couldn't even respond. We were lost in cookie heaven.

And then it happened again. Perfectly happy to have City Bakery and Levain dueling it out for top chocolate chip cookie honors, I was ambushed in my own backyard in 2008. David Chang, who had become the darling of the New York restaurant world, thanks to his Momofuku noodle and ssäm bars in the East Village, opened his third outpost, Momofuku Milk Bar, just around the corner from my apartment. While everyone in the city was clamoring for the restaurants' bowls of brisket ramen and platters of pig butt, his pastry chef, Christina Tosi, was cooking up “crack pie,” an insane and outrageously addictive concoction made largely of white sugar, brown sugar, and powdered sugar, with egg yolks, heavy cream, and lots of butter, all baked in an oat cookie crust. People were going nuts for the stuff, and it was time for me to give this crack pie a shot. But as soon as I walked into the industrial-style bakery, I knew crack could have nothing on the cookies.

Blueberry and cream. Double chocolate. Peanut butter. Corn. (Yes, a
corn
cookie
, and it was delicious). There was a giant compost cookie, chock-full of pretzels, chips, coffee grounds, butterscotch, oats, and chocolate chips. But the real knockout was the cornflake, marshmallow, and chocolate chip cookie. It was sticky, chewy, and crunchy at once, sweet and chocolaty, the ever-important bottom side rimmed in caramelized beauty. I love rice crisps in my chocolate, but who would have thought that cornflakes in my cookies could also cause such rapture?

It was clear. New York offered every conceivable kind of chocolate chip cookie, from the rich to the ridiculous. But I had trouble finding a worthy contender in Paris. Until Eric Kayser.

Eric Kayser's story is a classic French
boulanger
's tale. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Alsatian bakers, he knew from the time he was four years old that he too wanted to spend his life mixing batter and operating ovens. As soon as he was old enough, he started apprenticing with some of the country's best
boulanger
s and then went on to teach at France's national bakery school, l'Institut National de la Boulangerie Pâtisserie (INBP). After helping a number of other bakers launch their own businesses, it was finally time for him to open shop. In 1996, Eric Kayser debuted on rue Monge in the fifth arrondissement.

Kayser has always been, first and foremost, a bread maker, using carefully selected flours—whole wheat, buckwheat, rye, rough flax—and natural leavens that give his loaves, in all their infinite varieties, tender centers, golden crackly crusts, and beautiful complex flavors. But, as Mom, Bob, and I had discovered all those months ago (and I had confirmed on many subsequent visits to his rue Montorgueil
boulangerie
), his
douceurs
are also delicious.

Just as all the great chocolate chip cookie bakers in New York had experimented to come up with their perfect concoction, Kayser and his team of pastry chefs invested years in finessing the consummate cookie. Kayser traveled to the United States, searching for recipes he liked, and then adapting them for the French palette. The flour in France isn't as strong as in the U.S., for example, so that had to be altered. They also fiddled with how long the dough should rest in the refrigerator, fussed with the temperature of the oven, trialed and erred about how long the cookies should bake for, and played with the cookies' size.