A few years after I had first moved to France, I met a new transplant, and very soon, we started chatting about all of the things that we missed from back home.
While today, my default answer to this question is “Tacos and customer service,” there are a few things I miss from America, including:
- chiles
- 24-hour drugstores
- iced coffee
- kale salads
- half-sour pickles
- sweetcorn on the cob
(As you can see, it’s mostly food.)
Back then, my new friend chimed in with her own: asparagus.
I was confused.
“But we have asparagus in France,” I said; and we do: bright green spears (albeit sold a bit fatter than they are in the U.S.), as well as fat white ones, usually peeled and served with a Hollandaise sauce.
And then I remembered: she had only moved here a few months ago, and it was January.
While France doesn’t eat locally or seasonally as a rule, we do tend more towards seasonal cooking and shopping than America does. You can get apples, oranges, and bananas all year long, for example, but things like strawberries, peaches, apricots, artichokes, or asparagus only turn up when Mother Nature says they should.
It gives me an enormous amount of pleasure to stroll past the market stalls and see what’s new and fresh; it’s like watching the seasons evolve before your eyes.
In early spring, we get asparagus and spring peas, followed by radishes. Soon after, the first strawberries appear, followed by other berries and stone fruits – cherries, apricots, and then peaches. Late-season pêches de vigne come next, followed by grapes and the three plums of early fall: green reine claudes, purple quetches, and yellow mirabelles.
Whenever I have clients this time of year, I try to pick up a few mirabelles for them to try. While they’re certainly plums of some sort, they taste completely different from anything most Americans have ever had before: the bright yellow fruits are no bigger than a cherry and are kissed with red and orange, and their flavor is something else entirely.
Mirabelles somehow have a flavor that dances from coconut to vanilla to lychee to honey. They’re abundantly sweet – almost to the point of being cloying – and they’re at once truly local and evocative of more tropical flavors.
Usually, I eat them plain out of hand, but I had more than I could eat on my own in the fridge this week, so I decided to pair them with an artisanal burrata.
It was a pretty good decision.
Burrata with Mirabelles
2 cups mirabelles, pitted
1 burrata
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus a bit for drizzling
fleur de sel
freshly cracked black pepper
Place the pitted mirabelles in a saucepan with just a touch of water to keep them from caramelizing. Heat them over low heat until they release their juices and cook down a bit, about 20 minutes. Use an immersion blender or blender to blend into a smooth purée, then emulsify in the olive oil.
Pour some of the sauce onto a plate, and top with the burrata. Season with fleur de sel and pepper, and scatter a few fresh mirabelles around it. Serve.