Addie LaRue + French Bistro Classics
There is a scene early in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
Addie is in Paris. It is sometime in the eighteenth century and she has been cursed for decades now — invisible to everyone she meets, forgotten the moment she leaves a room, unable to leave a mark on the world or on anyone in it. She sits alone at a café table. She orders wine. The waiter brings it and sets it down and looks through her the way everyone looks through her and moves on. And she drinks it alone, in the middle of the city, surrounded by people who do not know she exists.
She has learned, by this point, to find pleasure in small things. The wine is good. The light is right. The street outside is doing what Parisian streets do in the evening — filling and warming and becoming, for a few hours, the most beautiful place in the world. And Addie, who cannot be remembered by anyone, who cannot sign her name or keep a room or hold a conversation past the first few minutes, can still taste the wine. Can still feel the warmth of it. Can still sit in the light.
That is what this pairing is about. Not recipes exactly. Something more fundamental than that. The way food — the act of eating, the ritual of a table, the pleasure of something made with care and consumed slowly — persists when almost everything else has been taken away.
What French bistro cooking understands about impermanence.
The French bistro is one of the oldest and most democratic dining institutions in the world. It exists at the intersection of the humble and the excellent — the kind of place where the tablecloths are paper but the steak frites are perfect, where the wine is the house wine but it is always the right wine, where the menu has not changed in forty years and the reason it has not changed is that it does not need to.
The bistro is built on the understanding that certain pleasures are worth repeating. That a good onion soup, properly made — the long slow caramelisation of the onions, the deep beef broth, the crouton, the gruyère gratiné — is not a lesser experience for being familiar. That the repetition is part of the point. That returning to the same dish, at the same table, in the same light, is a form of continuity that feels like home even when you are far from it.
Addie LaRue lives inside this understanding for three hundred years.
She cannot have continuity in any conventional sense. She cannot return to the same person. She cannot hold a friendship past a single evening or a love past a single night. But she can return to the same café. She can order the same wine. She can eat the same salade niçoise at the same marble-topped table and feel, for the length of that meal, that she is a person with a history — that she has been here before, even if no one remembers it but her.
Food is the one form of memory that doesn't require anyone else to hold it. The taste of a specific dish at a specific moment is yours and only yours, stored in the body rather than in anyone else's recollection. For Addie, who has been stripped of every other form of being remembered, the body's memory of pleasure is the last archive she has.
The meals Addie might have eaten across three hundred years.
This is speculation, which is to say it is the best kind of reading — the kind that asks what the book implies rather than what it states.
1714 — The year of the bargain. Rural France.
Before the curse there is bread. There is always bread in rural eighteenth century France — dark and dense and made from whatever grain the harvest provided, eaten with whatever the farm produced. Addie, on the night she runs from her wedding and makes her bargain with the dark, has probably eaten her last proper meal of her old life at her family's table. Something simple. Something her mother made. Potage — the thick vegetable soup that was the daily meal of rural French peasants for centuries, ladled from a pot that hung permanently over the fire, adding to itself and depleting itself across days and weeks without ever being fully emptied or fully fresh.
She will never taste her mother's potage again. Not because the recipe is lost — but because the hands that made it will not remember her, and the table she sat at will close against her like a door.
Make it now: a slow-cooked vegetable potage with leeks, carrots, turnips, and a good beef bone. The kind of soup that takes all day and asks nothing of you except patience. Eat it at the end of something. Let it taste like before.
Paris, the eighteenth century — Learning to be alone in a crowd.
Paris receives Addie the way Paris receives everyone — indifferently, then completely. She learns the city the way only someone with unlimited time can learn it — every arrondissement, every market, every hour of light. She eats at the earliest versions of what will become the Parisian café — coffee houses and taverns where the food is secondary to the conversation, except that Addie cannot join the conversation so the food becomes primary.
She discovers soupe à l'oignon. The story of French onion soup is a story about transformation — the long patient cooking of something ordinary into something extraordinary. Raw onions, harsh and pungent, become — over forty minutes of slow heat and constant attention — soft and golden and almost sweet, the sugars caramelising into a depth of flavour that bears almost no resemblance to where it started.
Addie is doing the same thing across these decades. The raw grief of the curse — the screaming against it, the desperate attempts to be remembered, the years of genuine despair — is being slowly, through sheer endurance, transformed into something she might not call peace but which functions like it.
Make it now: French onion soup made properly — two pounds of onions, low heat, forty minutes minimum, beef stock, a splash of cognac, a thick crouton, enough gruyère to brown under the grill. It takes longer than you think it should. That is the point.
Paris, the nineteenth century — Learning to want things again.
By the time Paris is becoming the city the world will eventually recognise — the boulevards, the cafés, the particular electric quality of a city that knows it is at the centre of something — Addie has learned something important. That wanting things, even small things, even things you cannot keep, is not the same as suffering. That pleasure taken and gone is still pleasure taken.
She has become a regular at a particular kind of establishment — not yet a bistro in the modern sense but its direct ancestor. She orders duck confit because she has learned that it is always right. Duck confit is one of the oldest preservation techniques in French cooking — the duck legs cured in salt and then slow-cooked and stored in their own fat, preserved for months, pulled out and crisped in a pan when needed. It is food designed to last. Designed to be kept.
The irony is not lost on her.
Make it now: duck confit, ideally made two days before you eat it. Cure the legs in salt and thyme and bay leaf overnight. Cook them low and slow in duck fat for two hours. Let them rest in the fat until you need them. Crisp the skin in a hot pan until it shatters. Serve with lentils du Puy dressed in vinaigrette and a glass of something Burgundian.
Paris, the twentieth century — The century that almost broke her.
Two world wars. Occupation. The particular horror of watching a city she loves bend under something that should not be possible. Addie eats through it the way Parisians eat through it — because eating is resistance, in the quiet dignified French sense, because the bistro that stays open is the bistro that says we are still here, we are still ourselves, you have not taken this from us.
She eats steak frites at a zinc bar in the fourth arrondissement and watches a city come back to itself after the Liberation. The steak is not excellent — the good beef has been scarce for years — but the frites are perfect, because the frites are always perfect, because some things survive everything.
Steak frites is the most democratic dish in the French canon. It asks for good beef and good technique and nothing else. It does not require luxury ingredients or elaborate preparation. It requires attention and heat and the understanding that simplicity done well is not a compromise but an achievement.
Make it now: a bavette steak or onglet, pan-seared in clarified butter over very high heat, rested properly, sliced against the grain. Frites cut thin, fried twice — once at lower heat to cook through, once at high heat to crisp. Salt generously. Eat with a glass of Côtes du Rhône and the conviction that you are participating in something ancient.
New York City, 2013 — The year Henry remembers.
When Addie finally meets Henry — the young man in the bookshop who looks at her and says I remember you — she is in New York but she is still, in some fundamental way, French. Three hundred years of French food and French light and French evenings have settled into her like a second skeleton.
On the night everything changes, she might eat anything. But I think she eats crêpes. Not the elaborate dessert crêpes of tourist Paris but the simple ones — buckwheat galettes, the savoury crêpes of Brittany, filled with ham and egg and gruyère and folded into neat squares and eaten standing at a counter or sitting at a small table in the kind of place that has been making the same thing for fifty years.
The crêpe is the most portable of French foods, the most democratic, the one that needs nothing — no tablecloth, no ceremony, no one to share it with. It is the food of someone who has learned to be self-sufficient in their pleasures. Who has learned that a meal eaten alone is still a meal. That pleasure taken quietly, without witness, is still pleasure.
Make it now: buckwheat crêpes with a filling of good ham, a fried egg, and enough comté to melt properly. Fold them into squares. Eat them simply. Think about what it means to finally be seen.
What food does that memory cannot.
The deepest argument of this pairing is this.
Addie LaRue is a book about the terror of being forgotten. About the human need to leave a mark, to be remembered, to matter to someone beyond the boundaries of a single conversation. It is one of the most profound explorations in recent fiction of what it means to be invisible — to move through the world without leaving a trace.
And yet.
Addie eats. For three hundred years she eats — badly sometimes, gratefully sometimes, alone always, but always with presence and always with the body's particular intelligence about pleasure. And the food remembers nothing and requires nothing and asks only that she show up and taste it.
This is what French bistro cooking, at its deepest level, offers. Not nostalgia exactly — though it contains nostalgia. Not comfort exactly — though it provides comfort. Something more elemental than either. The reminder that the body is here, that the present moment contains pleasure, that a glass of wine and a piece of bread and the right light at the right hour add up to something worth having even when nothing else is certain.
Addie learns this over three hundred years. Most of us are slower students.
But the lesson is available every time you sit down at a table and pay attention to what is in front of you. Every time you eat something slowly and well and let it be enough.
That is what three hundred years of meals teaches. That presence, even without permanence, is its own form of grace.
À table.
The Pairing
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue — V.E. Schwab
My Paris Kitchen — David Lebovitz
The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard — Ollivier Pourriol
Bistro Cooking — Patricia Wells
Mastering the Art of French Cooking — Julia Child
The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry — Kathleen Flinn