Bon appetit: How a visit to France reinvigorated my appetite for good food.

French lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who made his name as a gastronome, said, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.”

For the past two years I have been working, going to graduate school and cramming in the occasional on-time—and more often tardy—column for this publication and a few others (to help pay for the aforementioned graduate school). For dinner, it’s been just shy of 700 days, minus winter and spring break, of the meal plan my husband and I call “fend.” It’s the meal of the time-starved scavenger who eats what they can forage from the freezer, the crisper drawer and the cupboards. For him, that means a lot of steamed Brussels sprouts and smoked oysters in a tin with a side of Summit Extra Pale. For me, it’s frozen dinners heated in the microwave at work and eaten in the car on the way to the U, vending machine packages of trail mix and Diet Coke, or cold cereal in a handy dine and go container from Coffman Union. (I would add that you are how you eat as well, and therefore I am exceedingly mobile.)

I have been a frenzied student, my husband the gastronomical equivalent of a widower (though he is an excellent cook and, in fact, prefers to eat odd combinations of protein and vegetables most nights of the week). If Brillat-Savarin had attempted to assess my identity using the edible contents of my home as the basis, he would have shuddered and then assessed some kind of epicurean psychopathy.

It is fitting that the cure for this particular difficult-to-diagnose disease can be found in the restaurants, charcuteries, fromageries, boulangeries and poissoneries of his motherland. Though I’ve long known the French penchant for food in all its forms and have devoured cookbooks, recipes and stories by Robert Courtine, Richard Olney, Jacques Pepin and M.F.K. Fischer that describe in delectable detail a variety of aspects of a food life in France, the reality is far better than theory.

France is the place where it’s said the restaurant was invented. Fittingly enough, some of the early locations were actually ones that served restoratives—rich broths and such for the sick and tired—and attracted people who needed restoring. That’s certainly how it was with me. I landed, a huddled mass yearning for something other than quick-serve meals and deadlines, in the home of the prix-fixe dinner, the two-hour lunch and the three-hour Sunday meal, the café, the salon de thé, the brasserie. While others snapped photos of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, I took photos of meals and ingredients: scallops with vanilla crème sauce, cups of café crème, chocolate brioche, the windows of pastry shops and the farmers market stalls piled high with poireaux, aubergine and carottes. I even went so far as to smuggle a heart-shaped wedge of Neufchatel home with me.

But the most important thing that I brought home was my reconnection to real food. You see, I hadn’t always been a forager of the frozen section. In fact, I fancied myself a down-home gourmand. The most enjoyable way to unwind is to make things and bake things and later to enjoy them. For me, the very best kind of day begins at the St. Paul Farmers Market and ends on the back patio at a table surrounded with friends and laden with thoughtfully prepared items. A platter of fresh vegetables and homemade aioli. Roast chicken with fresh herbs and baby potatoes. Blueberry crisp. This is what I had lost in my hectic trips from the vending machine to the library and back again, and this is what I found again in France. Sunday dinners. Freshly baked bread. Pots of restorative broth plumping up my spirits.

It is said that simple meals sated Brillat-Savarin’s palette as long as they were prepared artistically. I have found my way back to a simple and artistic table just in time to enjoy the bounty of a Minnesota summer, and for that I say, “Merci.”