Wasteland Wrap-up #53

Thanksgiving in Paris, Hardcore History, the assassination of President Garfield...

Thanksgiving in Paris is… not a thing. I mean, you can get together with friends and family and make an approximation of the holiday, to be sure. But the rest of the country has already gotten well on board with anticipation of Christmas, and finding turkeys, cranberries, etc., is a taxing (but not impossible) affair. Given that they lack any other significant holidays between Halloween and Christmas, I would humbly suggest that the French develop their own harvest/dinner holiday based around a mythical history of their interaction with Native Americans. They could pull it off!

Christmas trees for sale in the middle of a boulevard.

They do, however, celebrate Black Friday, which I find pretty amusing.

We had two Thanksgivings — one at our place, with Cornish game hens (which we have been serving for years, because they are much easier to prepare than an entire turkey and yet are still somewhat novel, and because we find it amusing that they are neither Cornish, nor game, nor hens), and one at the house of some friends (obviously other expats). The child of our friends made adorable place cards for everyone:

I felt honored to get a Pilgrim dog!

For our Thanksgiving, I went in search of cranberry sauce, which is a very difficult ingredient to find here. The first place I looked was the La Grande Épicerie de Paris, at Le Grande Marcé, which I knew has a relatively large section for “North American” foods. I thought people here might be amused by what they carry, and took some quick photographs:

The several different sections of the "Amérique du Nord" section of Le Grande Épicerie

Everything here falls into a few categories: 1. actual things that are familiar to me from American grocery stores, 2. things that I do not consider to be very common staples, 3. things that I have never seen before in my life. And of course many of these things are pretty expensive for what they are — 18€ ($20 USD) is a lot to pay for peanut butter!

My absolutely favorite inclusion is the fact that they imported Bowl & Basket microwave popcorn, which is an in-house brand for Shoprite, the mid-range grocery chain of the northeast USA (similar to a Safeway). Out of all of the brands to import…

You can confirm it for yourself, but cranberry sauce is simply not among their offerings. I ended up going to another place on the other side of town, near the Eiffel Tower, which dubs itself “The Real McCoy,” and specializes in American foods. It had much of the same stock as above, but did have some (European-produced) cranberry sauce. They also had a sign that said that Ocean Spray cranberry sauce was banned for import by European Union regulations (!?) and that we should not ask about it. The sauce they had was passable — not as sweet as typical American stuff, and definitely not as gelatinous as the classic Ocean Spray.

In general I was not super impressed by The Real McCoy, just because a lot of the stuff they had was not, in fact, the real McCoy, but more of the same European facsimiles that Grand Marché had. I understand that they are limited by EU import regulations and who knows what else, but you can’t try to sell me faux Kraft macaroni and cheese and have the audacity to call yourself “the real McCoy.”

Above: a bizarre window display at the Grand Marché, featuring rabbits and dental hygiene. One of my colleagues who has spent a lot of time in France calls the culture “incommensurate” and usually I think this is a bit of an exaggeration but stuff like this makes me wonder… apologies for the camera work.

Lyndon accompanied me on my cranberry odyssey, and seemed to enjoy the hunt. His behavior was so stellar that he received a compliment from a stranger (“Il est très gentil” — “He is very nice”) for how attentively he sat while we waited for a light to change. We took the Metro back home after our long walk and he was très gentil there as well, as always.

Très gentil, indeed.

The new book comes out on December 9th! I have been doing some promotional work, and will be doing some more as we get closer and closer. I did a nice, long interview with the popular history podcaster Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History” about the book:

I’ll be posting more about the book next week, so be forewarned!

Lastly, ICYMI, I managed to get a new Doomsday Machines post up this week, about a short story written by an American astronomer in 1903 about “The End of the World,” which I found interesting:

I came across this story while writing up a blog post on the idea of the “living/survivors envying the dead,” because it contains an example of the trope. I’m hoping to have the “envying the dead” post up next week.