Monday, March 18, 2013

A Porkalicious Seder in Paree

How do you say "oopsy" in French?:
PARIS A Seder in Paris should never be boring. So when Roger Yvon, an upscale butcher, proposed his signature deboned duck decorated with pitted green olives for the Passover dinner, I ordered two.          
Roger knows that my husband, Andy, is Jewish and that we take seriously “the Jewish feast,” as Roger calls it. But when our first guests arrived and I proudly removed the ducks from their aluminum foil, I saw that they had been stuffed with a suspicious ground-meat filling.   
For a second, I considered pretending that everything was fine. Maybe no one would mention the stuffing. Or I could say it was veal. But what if it wasn’t? I sneaked into the bedroom and called Roger.       
“What’s in the stuffing?” I whispered.  
“Pork,” he said.       
“How could you use pork?” I hissed. “I told you it was for the Jewish feast!”  
He had forgotten. My husband does not keep kosher, but I hail from one of the most superstitious strains of Roman Catholicism (the Sicilian), and I worried that knowingly serving pork to Jews on Passover might be some sort of mortal sin. “I’m on my way over,” I told Roger. By the time I got to the butcher shop, he had cut and trussed a lamb gigot...

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