FREE MACAROON DAY

Remember Free Cone Day? That day in early summer which we, the American people, look forward to every year. That magical moment when we are granted a Ben & Jerry's ice cream cone (or, you know, twelve of them) for free. Kids skip school, full-grown and supposedly responsible adults leave work early, traffic is backed up, and general mayhem ensues all because of free ice cream. But they don't have Free Cone Day in France--instead they have Free Macaroon Day.

Every March 20th Pierre Herme, the man who has been called the Picasso of Pastries (among other amusing and usually aliterative names), welcomes you to his boutiques and offers you three macaroons of your choice in return for a small donation, usually of about a euro, which goes towards funding research for rare illnesses. Basically if you can find any problem whatsoever with Free Macaroon Day, you are a horrible person. Eating pastires to help sick children? That's something I could do a lot more frequently than once a year.

Pierre Herme's macaroons are not superior to those of LaDuree, the better known and more traditional provider of French macaroons; they're simply very different. First of all, macaroons in France are not what Americans generally think of as macaroons. They're neither crunchy nor exclusively coconut-flavored. Instead they're a magical concoction, largely butter, with a texture like nothing else in the world, encased in a thin and only slightly hard shell. Macaroons from LaDuree come in flavors like chocolate, coffee, pistachio, rose, raspberry, caramel etc. But macaroons from Pierre Herme are exotic patchworks of flavor that you absolutely have to eat with your eyes closed and one of those embarrassing facial expressions that makes you look as though you've just seen the light of god or something.

My first macaroon contained avocado cream, banana compote and a delicate inner piece of chocolate. It was golden-yellow and coated in subtly sparkling golden dust that got all over my fingertips and lips. It was delicious, not just the flavor but the texture. Pierre Herme macaroons are generally a lot softer than LaDuree's. The next macaroon was an absurdly rich mix of vanilla, fig, and foie gras. Yes, as in liver. This is one of the pastries that normally costs 8 euro (along with the chocolate and foie gras, which I tried a bite of and didn't like as much as mine). That one was fascinating, but I wouldn't necessarily buy a box of just that flavor. One was enough for me. My third one was eglantine, raspberry and lychee cream, and it was delicately fruity with the fresh rose taste I love (and will miss in the US). The creaminess was indescribably perfect; I actually would buy a box of those.

Being fans of the macaroon in general (and being gross fat Americans), we all shared bites of our orders with each other. Other flavors tried included vanilla and olive oil (it had minute pieces of olive in the shell); chestnut and green tea; jasmine; white truffle and hazel nut (very distinctly mushroom-tasting); apricot, pistachio and parline; salty caramel; something involving passion fruit, and a few others that are blurring together in my mind to make a hazy macaroon dream.

All in all it was a great day, the only down-side being that I won't be in Paris next March 20th to get more free macaroons, and I certainly can't go around buying pastries that cost more than my life. But I did keep the menu we received while standing in line (a much more orderly, quiet line than one sees at your average Free Cone Day), so I suppose I can just read it over whistfully whwnever I'm in the mood for something sweet. Which, with me, is always. Damnit.

In less tasty news, yesterday was spent at the flea markets of Clignancourt, where you can find cheap clothes, shoes, scarves, jewelry, and basically everything else you don't need but would still buy very inexpensively just because it's there. That night was a spring roll dinner party at the apartment my friend Ellen and her boyfriend are renting for the week. Thursday night my momma was in Paris so we went to dinner in the Marais and had those huge crepes from the stand on Blvd. Montparnasse that inevitably get all over your face but are so delicious that you don't care. I know more fun things have happened, but I guess none of them spoke to me like Free Macaroon Day did. Now what does that tell us about my personality? I think it tells us I was meant to be a Parisian.