Be the Thanksgiving You Want to See in the World
On planning my second annual Thanksgiving in Paris. Also: it's soup season and I want recipe recommendations!
Let me start by saying: it’s soup season and I really need your help.
Early last week, the sun packed up its bags, bid Paris adieu, and disappeared behind a blanket of clouds—with no plan to return again until March.
When I’m honest with myself, unlike the ZZ Plant that Ikea keeps foisting upon poorly lit millennial households, I don’t do well in low light environments. Paris winter is tough for me. Temperatures run milder than New York, and there’s no snow, but this comes with a devil’s bargain: no sun.
I’ll likely spend the next few gray months in a thicket of ennui, sporting the chunkiest turtlenecks I can find, and compulsively checking the sunrise and sunset times to confirm that the days are indeed getting longer again. I’m damp, grumpy, and chilly almost all of the time. But at least I’ll be reading a lot! (Reminder that I’m on Goodreads, in case you are too!)
When I’m like this, my only salve is soup. And for whatever reason, Paris (and much of Europe) has many silky veloutés, aka thick and creamy soups that bear a striking resemblance to adult baby food, but very little broth.
Creamy soups can be delicious, especially when there is a topping that I can chew on. Like these few that recently gave me faith!
Cafe Les Deux Gares’ shockingly good velouté de potimarron, huile d’herbes, moules, chapelure (squash soup with herb oil, mussels, and toasted breadcrumbs)
Hearty Swiss barley cream soup dotted with grilled sausage at the top of Uetilberg after a hike near Zurich
Le Daily Syrien’s lentil soup
But I prefer brothy soups—bring me your pozoles, menudos, ramens, phos, sundubu-jjigaes, tom yums, and dashi-based liquid-y soups.
I want soups that feel like a liquid hug on the inside, not ones that can be artfully scraped across a plate.
And if this is what I want in Paris, I may have to cook my own more often.
So I need recipes!
Last week, I made a decent chicken stock, thanks to helpful advice from my old colleague. And as a reference point of what I’ve liked cooking in the past, here are some simple and flavorful soup recipes that are in my rotation:
Hawa Hassan’s Sweet Pea Soup with Coconut and Ginger (thanks, Vanessa!)
Curried Cauliflower Soup (thanks, Joycerine!)
Spicy Kimchi Tofu Stew, aka jjigae
But help me out! Do you have any soup recipes I can lean on? Which ones do you make the most often? No showstoppers necessary—just something to get me through a season where the sky, road, and buildings all blend together.
How I’m Hosting Thanksgiving in Paris
My first holiday season in Paris was the first time I felt a dramatic twinge of homesickness.
It was mostly the realization that I wasn’t going to be home for Thanksgiving—which I usually spend the way that many New Yorkers do, attending several Friendsgivings before and after the day itself, and spending Thanksgiving Day overeating and appreciating pecan pie with family. It feels like the one inviolable week in the New York work calendar where emails and Slack messages grind to a halt, and people send each other wholesome messages. You’re permitted to be bored and earnest, telling friends and family that you appreciate them. Even exes pop out of the woodwork to wish you well!
It’s not a formal holiday in Paris. And that’s perfectly okay—France is more than generous with bank holidays (we’ve had two long weekends in November alone!) and is full of vibrant traditions, especially involving food. But there is something extra sad about letting the holiday slip away without gathering a few people for dinner.
Of the many lessons I’ve learned as an expat, one of the best and most frustrating ones is: when something doesn’t naturally exist for you, you likely have to do it yourself.
Be the change you want to see in your adoptive country lifestyle.
Like making giant salad bowls at lunch, because there is no Sweetgreen or Chopt equivalent here. Or inviting 4+ people who don’t know each other for dinner or drinks on a regular basis, because friend groups aren’t as fluid in Paris. Or continuing to subscribe to my yoga studio’s online portal since none of the surrounding studios offer a similar style.
Or hosting Thanksgiving!
Last year, when I went on a rant much like this one to my wonderful boyfriend (hi, Matthieu!), he suggested what I didn’t have the guts to: why don’t we just host Thanksgiving ourselves?? And invite everyone over??
Because it’s a lot of work? And it might signify reaching a level of adulthood that I’m not quite ready to embrace?
But we did it! And I loved it! As with many attempts to recreate American experiences abroad, there’s always something a little bit adaptive:
Fresh cranberries are very hard to find—but the frozen food store Picard offers frozen cranberries around Thanksgiving time.
Whole turkeys are even harder to find. Matthieu was on turkey duty and went to our local volailler (aka the man who sells poultry) to acquire a turkey that could feed 12 people in our small (but mighty!) living room. That’s how we learned that sourcing whole turkeys is unusual, and mostly caters to the few Americans placing Thanksgiving orders, so you have to be hyper-organized and order them a month or more before. We ended up with a 2 kg turkey breast, rather than a whole bird, which probably fit our small Paris oven better anyway.
Pumpkins as we understand them in the US don’t exist here. There are many beautiful squashes in France, and the closest one to the American pumpkin is potimarron—but it’s a little less sweet and never really used for dessert…unless you’re attempting Thanksgiving in Paris, in which case you also need to locate maple syrup (hard to find) to bring the fresh potimarron purée to life.
There are no collards, and kale is rare; the most common sturdy green is colossal chard (blette).
And so on.
But we made it work!
Hosting is a lot of work, but have you ever been at a Thanksgiving you hate? Hosting, whether it’s attached to a holiday or not, is an opportunity to do things your way—to gather your chosen people and institute your own shared traditions.
Our first Thanksgiving in Paris was perfect—a mix of the community we’ve been steadily building here, of people from the US, France and elsewhere, sharing a slice of tradition that we can literally bring to the table.
I’m still not sure what we’ll make this year—I know, it’s next week!—but here are the slightly off-kilter renditions of Thanksgiving favorites that we made last year:
2 kg turkey breast from our local volailler (that was juicy and not dry!)
Shaved Brussels sprouts salad with brown butter dressing
Mashed potatoes generously provided by a friend
Pumpkin pie and pecan pie a friend brought that were among the best I’ve ever had (thanks, Alex!)
Does anyone have any favorite recipes that they’d recommend without hesitation? Drop ‘em in the comments!
Follow @imperatricewu for the best pho soups in Paris!