Honest Food Tales – Tim

Peaches and Cream in Paris

Ah Paris! What an amazing city. Vibrant and diverse with a seemingly endless offering of culture, art, history and food.  We have been lucky enough to visit Paris a few times now, even meeting up with family to endlessly walk the arrondissements until we collapsed from exhaustion.

Fanning a pile of charcoal

One hot and sticky summer day, while descending the stairs of Montmartre, we came upon two curious Indian fellows who were vigorously fanning a pile of charcoal that was in a metal can sitting in a shopping cart.

Intrigued, I stopped and watched until they noticed me with a smile.  I asked them what they were up to and they said they were trying to light up their grill so they could sell fresh cooked corn.  While one informed me, very politely and in a thick Indian accent, how hard it was to afford to live in Paris, the other quickly tried to preheat the grill so he could sell me a delicious juicy cob of corn, al fresco on the streets of Paris.

Grilled cob of Parisian corn

My interest peeked, I decided to jump in and help, grabbing a piece of cardboard and fanning the fire for my new friends.
“Voila!” they said “How many?”  I looked around to a bunch of shaking heads so it looked like I was on my own.
1€ for a freshly grilled cob of Parisian street corn was the going rate and I thought, wow, good deal.  Ready to cook, they took a part from another shopping cart and placed it over the bucket of coals to act as the grill, pretty smart.  We could see where they were storing the un-shucked corn behind the bucket.  One of them reached over and slid a freshly shucked, straight from the field, sweet ear of corn over the fire.
Wait a minute, I stopped, that’s not a fresh piece of corn!  In fact it already had grill marks on it and looked kind of scary.
Way too far past the point of no return in this street side transaction, I kept up a veil of enthusiasm for my snack.  He told me as he poked it around over the quickly dying coals that they cooked the corn earlier and just reheated it for fast service.  What he really meant was they had cooked the corn earlier that month (or maybe found it in a restaurants garbage) and appeared to reheat it for a fast get away.

Not so appealing

Waving goodbye to our hard working smooth talking Punjabi friends with my, now not so appealing, hunk of corn in my hand, we howled with laughter at another “cook not mad” experience.
Half way down the block, with the laughing fit over, it was the moment of truth.  I just had to try it in case its dumpster diving appearance was a cover up for a juicy ear of peaches and cream.
Biting down with confidence it was immediately apparent that any signs of moisture had left the yellow kernels long ago.  It was like biting into a cob of carpet and I instantly regretted the size of the bite I had embarked upon, ejecting most of it into the gutter.
My brother in law thought it couldn’t be that bad so I gladly off loaded it to him and yes it was that bad.  In fact, it was so bad that when we offered it to a hungry looking homeless man who grunted for our help from his seat on the pavement, he became enraged, appearing to know just how bad it was after many others had tried to unload an ear with a bite out of it to him.
So we launched it into the bin on the corner and headed to the nearest boulangerie to erase the flavour of Parisian street corn with a fresh chocolate croissant.
Paris is truly a city of contrasts.