One More Lemon Tart for the Road

Fragrant as a Corsican garden, big enough for three, all mine on my last night in Paris

When I was 26 and about to start my first editing job, I went to Paris and bunked in with friends on the rue Saint-Séverin, not far from Hemingway's old digs. I lugged my bag up many flights of stairs to a flat with one big room and a toilet in an open alcove smack-dab against the stove. I needed a bathroom. This wouldn't do. Couldn't they at least hang a curtain?

"All our guests do a double take," said my friend Jane. "But you'd be amazed how quickly you get used to it."

Well, I did want a taste of la vie bohème. In two weeks with Jane and Ian, I heaped my emotional plate. I wandered the teeming aisles of Shakespeare and Company, where Sylvia Beach launched her clubhouse for modernist writers. On rue de Fleurus I imagined myself talking art and ideas with Gertrude Stein and her coterie. I walked in Hemingway's footsteps down rue Cardinal Lemoine, beneath the window where he gazed past the streetscape to the undiscovered land of his literary future. He saw how to reach its heart: "Write the truest sentence you know."

I'm pretty sure it was on rue Cardinal Lemoine that Jane took me shopping for lemon tarts. "Best in Paris," she declared, having made a study of the matter. I don't remember the name of the patisserie, only its midnight-blue sign, lettered in gilt, and window with the celebrated tarts front and center. Those tarts were not created with dieters in mind. One could serve three or four people, but I wanted the entire marvel for myself. I can taste it now—the crumble of buttery pastry meeting the tang of lemon cream, a Corsican garden on the tongue.

A person with a lemon tart fixation can eat quite a few in two weeks. My last day in Paris, I still craved another. Jane and Ian were hosting another couple. Dessert could only be a tray of lemon tarts.

My husband has said more than once, “Rona eats like a bird. A vulture.”

While the chicken cooked, the stove ran out of gas. The bird was faintly bloody, but what the hell? We'd already made a dent in the wine, and the golden surface of the tarts shimmered like a promise. With the last of the wine, we toasted my editing career. Copy editing, to be precise. I'd been hired to mind em dashes for Miss Chatelaine magazine, not to mentor a young Hemingway or Janet Flanner.

We polished off all but one of the lemon tarts. My tablemates groaned happily, rubbing their bellies, not that we were quite done. What's a French dinner without a digestif? As Ian got us started on the cognac, Jane caught me eying the last lemon tart. I read her thoughts: Not even Rona could manage one more of these babies.

Just to be polite, she nudged the tray in my direction. I thought of Toronto's lemon tarts, with jiggly canned filling that set my teeth on edge. This was my last shot at a lemon tart for the ages. Gertrude Stein surely never enjoyed a better one. I pushed the last tart onto my plate. "Just a bite," I said, as if a single bite could hold me.

My husband has said more than once, "Rona eats like a bird. A vulture." In those days it was true. Along with two good knees and feet that did their bidding for miles at a stretch, I had a rare capacity to put away unseemly portions. Amazingly, it didn't make me plump. Just cocky.

Five people, one bathroom, no bathroom door. No concealing the sounds of my gluttonous agony.

Quite a few cognacs into the night, the other guests decided they'd better not return to their hotel. Mattresses ringed the room; the five of us bedded down there like puppies. The rumbling and heaving woke me within hours. I remembered the Alka-Seltzer commercial: grim-looking fellow in pajamas, perched on the edge of his bed, muttering to his wife, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing."

Five people, one bathroom, no bathroom door. No concealing the sounds of my gluttonous agony. In this miserable state, I'd have to make it to the airport and get through my flight to Toronto. At dawn Jane padded out of bed to commiserate. She told me the French had a name for what ailed me. "Crise de foie”—crisis of the liver.

Dionysus watched over me that day. I made it home without incident, ready to mark up copy for Miss Chatelaine. Twenty years passed before I found my way back to Paris, this time with my husband in tow. We hadn't even reached our hotel when I began to enthuse about the finest lemon tarts in all Paris, if not all the world. He had to taste one. I'd make it happen.

I walked up and down the rue Cardinal Lemoine, in search of a midnight-blue storefront with a window full of gleaming tarts. Could it be I had the wrong street? Here, there, all over the Latin Quarter I looked for the tarts of my dreams, but they'd gone the way of the Lost Generation.

All these years after my crise de foie, I no longer regret that second lemon tart. It gave me a story I'll be telling for the rest of my days, although I'm still looking for the right words. How to describe that gustatory explosion of butter and lemon? It's not the patisserie that escapes me. It's one true sentence.

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Hello there, new readers. Welcome back, old friends. I’d like to pour you all a glass of whatever cool drink appeals and a tray of lemon tarts around. Last week, thanks to you, Amazement Seeker passed a milestone: 2,000 subscribers. It’s not the number that has me glowing. It’s the engagement of passionate, purposeful readers. As my newest paid subscriber said in a comment, “I found Amazement Seeker yesterday and have been enjoying essay after essay for hours.”

You don’t have to pay for a place in this writer’s heart. If I were in this for the money, I’d be erecting paywalls. I think of paid subscriptions as just-because gifts that are all the more special for not arriving on Christmas or my birthday. If you have the means to pay and are so moved, I’d be thrilled. But I’ll be here for you either way. I’m a one-woman band and this corner of Substack is my quick-lunch stand.

For another tasty morsel about food (in this case, a culinary challenge), head this way. One day soon, I’ll tell get to a comically bad meal in Italy (tracking it down took grit). But first things first: It’s time for your comments. From lemon tarts to one true sentence to whatever else this latest post inspires, I can’t wait to hear from you.