Free Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard Page B

batter to your cake pan; top with the chopped apricots. Bake on the center rack of the oven for 45 minutes, until
     golden brown and slightly risen. A toothpick in the center should come out clean.
    Lift the cake by the parchment paper onto a wire rack to cool. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature. This cake actually
     gets moister with age, so it tastes great the next day. Simply cover the fully cooled cake with aluminum foil; an airtight
     container or plastic bag will make it soggy.
    Yield: Makes one 10-inch cake
    Seasonal tip: Yogurt cake is like a blank canvas. Feel free to experiment. Instead of the apricots, try fresh raspberries
     or chopped pears mixed with a bit of brown sugar. If I’m feeling homesick, I sometimes add a streusel topping as well.

CHAPTER 6
Vocabulary Lessons
    I am trying to improve my French. It is unnerving to live in an apartment full of things I can’t identify. Familiar objects
     have become exotic strangers. As I do the dishes, or make the bed, or put away the shopping from the market, I try to give
     myself little vocabulary tests:
casserole
(pot),
évier
(sink),
poussière
(dust). “Pillow” is killing me. The word in French is
oreiller
(or-RE-ay)—but I can’t keep hold of it. It doesn’t look like a pillow, doesn’t sound like a pillow, and it certainly doesn’t
     bring anything pillowy to mind. The rolled “r” sticks at the back of my throat, to say nothing of all those silent vowels
     waiting like wallflowers for me to ask them to dance. How hard would it be, I wonder, to sleep without one?
    The radio has become my new best friend. I keep it tuned to France Info, a station that repeats the same news report every
     fifteen minutes. What I don’t catch the first time, I catch the second, or the third. I make a point of being home between
     two and two twenty p.m. for a program called
2000 ans d’histoire
. Every day the show explores a different subject—a two-thousand-year history of the pyramids or a two-thousand-year history
     of the sandwich.Inevitably, someone has written a book on the subject. The interview is cut with songs and clips from old movies. Charlton
     Heston has an even sexier voice dubbed in French.
    For the purposes of speaking to actual people, Gwendal and I have divided things roughly into two categories, “Chez la Marquise”
     and “Pas Chez la Marquise.”
    “Chez la Marquise” are the polite things, the things you could say if you were invited to lunch with the Queen of England:
Je vous en prie
(No sir, after
you
).
Tout le plaisir est pour moi
(The pleasure’s all mine).
    “Pas Chez la Marquise” is what Gwendal says when he drops a raw egg on the carpet or stubs his toe:
Putaindebordeldemerde
(@#%$#$!!).
    I try out my phrases, haltingly, in the neighborhood. I wave to the Italian man in the window of the pizzeria, mouthing
bonjour
through the window. I put exact change into the hand of my dry cleaner with a flourish and a
Voilà!
On the rue Saint-Maur, there is a fruit and vegetable stand run by a lovely man from Senegal. He has a cousin in New York
     (doesn’t everyone?). I go almost every day to buy fresh mint, a cardboard basket of raspberries, or a slice of
halva,
the sweet sesame seed paste that he sells by the kilo. “
Bonjour, je prends des framboises, s’il vous plaît.
” Really, I go just to say hello. I don’t even know his name, but for better or worse, he is my first friend in Paris. The
     only person other than Gwendal and my mother who knows if I’m alive from one day to the next.
    While I am trying to piece together a vocabulary that will allow me to buy raspberries without sounding like a mentally challenged
     walrus, Gwendal is expanding his range in English. Although he is used to giving straitlaced scientific papers at international
     conferences, his colloquial English is a mix of spaghetti Westerns, Fred Astaire, and early Beatles lyrics.
    One evening, while I was making dinner, Gwendal decided to scrub down