Alysa Salzberg's blog

Amid the bustle of the long, tree -lined avenue Gambetta in Paris’s 20th arrondissement is a particularly eye-catching sight. A bakery with an old-fashioned façade and a hand-made doorknob shaped like a…hot air balloon. Even more surprising: the panels on the façade that once probably listed the different types of bread and pastries that were sold here have been replaced by large paintings of one of the most famous events that took place during the 1870–1871 Siege of Paris. On October 7, 1870, dynamic statesman Léon Gambetta, who had proclaimed the new Third French Republic from a window of the Hôtel de Ville just a few weeks before, donned a fur coat and stepped inside the wicker basket of a hot air balloon called L’Armand-Barbès. Along with his fellow politician Eugène Spuller and pilot Alexandre Trichet, Gambetta soon soared above the Place Saint-Pierre, at the foot of Montmartre, a popular site for balloons to take off during the Siege. Most of the balloons that left the besieged c...

  Images of empty shelves where mustard should be, from grocery stores around France ( image source )     Sometimes, war and natural disasters end up influencing everyday life in unexpected ways. During the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris, for instance, shortages of food staples and favorites led to Parisians eating rats, cats, dogs, and zoo animals, pining after cheese, and auctioning off sacks of potatoes.   Nowadays, food shortages are common in Paris again. During the early days of the pandemic, everyone took up baking and it was hard to find flour and sugar. More recently, the war in Ukraine has meant a shortage of vegetable oil, as well as the threat of a pasta shortage.   Normally, these shortages seem to resolve themselves quickly, one way or another, or maybe it’s just that we get used to them. But in recent weeks, a new food shortage has begun that seems like it will rock French cuisine to its very core.   France is running out of mustard.   Mustard...

  The view of Paris from Montmartre is one of the most breathtaking sights in the city -- a sea of slate rooftops and white buildings, scattered with recognizable landmarks, green spaces and other details like islands among its waves.   But how long has it looked like this?   Last weekend, a friend from the US was standing with me at the top of Montmartre. “What was the view like when Van Gogh was here?” he asked. “Was it mostly fields?”   I told him that it wasn’t - Paris has been a fairly large city for centuries and by the 1880’s, when Vincent Van Gogh was living in Montmartre, it was a huge sprawl of buildings, factories, avenues, the Seine, and several large parks. The view of Paris from Montmartre’s heights would at that time have been roughly the same as it is today.   As someone who loves Paris deeply, and has for most of her life, the appearance of the city during my favorite era of its history seems like a given. But I started to wonder what ...