There are insanely adventurous diners in this world.

I’m not one of them.

I mean, I’ve eaten sushi, rattlesnake, hippopotamus, turtle, bear, alligator, and armadillo, so I’m not a total dud as a thrillseeker. But I won’t go near any kind of internal organs, suspicious-looking vegetables (sweet potatoes, eggplant, turnips, to name a few), goat, or goat cheese.

When my husband and I first met, he pointed out I ate only white and beige foods, like that was a big deal. Then, when we had kids, he hinted I was a bad vegetable role model for the children. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I’ve reformed and now eat all kinds of formerly dangerous vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, and okra, which I like to loudly compliment myself for.

In spite of all my progress and sacrifice, my husband keeps pushing me, which is why we found ourselves at a restaurant called Mystery Cuisine when we were in Paris. I should have run when I saw the name. I like mystery in my books and my movies; I don’t like it on my plate or palate.

The server/owner kept bringing us weird dishes and telling us how to eat them and how to drink the accompanying wine. (Did I mention this was costing a fortune, even if the euro had taken a nosedive?) Sometimes, he lit dishes on fire. Sometimes, he showed up in a mask.

“I think this is one of those molecular cuisine joints,” I hissed to my husband.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” he said. “I think this is the most incredible meal I’ve ever eaten — ”

“I’ve always hated the idea of molecular cuisine,” I continued.

” — the way they combine the tastes and ingredients is remarkable — ”

” — and I would have been perfectly happy to die without ever eating the stuff.”

The server came back with a slew of new dishes and bossy instructions on how to eat everything. This reminded me that I have real problems with authority. I could have sworn my husband had problems with authority, too, but you couldn’t tell it tonight.

“I refuse to eat anything in a single bite,” I told my husband after the server left. “My mouth’s too small. And I’m so tired of looking at foie gras that I may join PETA soon.”

“The way they’re combining tastes is extraordinary,” he said. “It makes me think of food in an entirely different way.”

He looked almost seraphic. I wanted to strangle him.

“I hate it when people fetishize food,” I said.

“What they’re doing is pure art,” he said.

Art? Oh, brother. I finally said what I’d been thinking the entire billion hours we’d been there: “You know — it’s only food.”

“That’s a sad commentary,” he said.

“Also,” I added, “foam is not food. I’m a little tired of finding foam on every course.”

We ate seafood, we ate sauces, we drank wine, we inhaled foamy mystery dishes, and — did I mention it earlier? — we paid a fortune. The euro might have been down, but it wasn’t subterranean.

We ate, we paid, we flew home, but in many ways, Mystery Cuisine lingers with us. So far, I’ve had to listen to my husband rapturously recount the whole ordeal mouthful by mouthful. He told our friends John and Helen about it at great length. Helen was intrigued; John was not.

“It’s only food,” I said again, and John agreed loudly. (John and I have decided we were either married in a past life or maybe we were the same person. In our past lives, they probably didn’t have molecular cuisine.)

Helen and John. John has good taste.

In fact, my husband ended up writing an over-the-top review on Yelp about how Mystery Cuisine transformed him and made him think differently about dining experiences. He may have also said something about a rich cognitive and theatrical perspective, but I’d nodded off by then.

I almost never write reviews for Yelp — but I’m pretty sure I know what I’d say if I did: Just four little words.

(Copyright 2015 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read about Forgiving Kitty Carlisle Hart

(Blogger’s note: I don’t usually write about or review books. But here’s the story of an excellent memoir I recently finished.)

As a Russian aristocrat, Paul Grabbe grew up in a lost world.

His family lived in palatial residences in St. Petersburg and the Russian countryside. They were waited on by a staff of footmen and cooks, maids and tutors — a life so cosseted his mother never even brushed her own hair till they left the country. His father, a famous Russian general, was an intimate of the last Russian czar Nicholas II.

In 1917, Paul and the rest of his family watched the Russian Revolution begin from their apartment in St. Petersburg. Their world was ending, but they didn’t know it at the time.

The recently released memoir Emigre: 95 Years in the Life of a Russian Count is the story of Paul Grabbe’s remarkable life. It follows him from his early years in Russia through his wanderings in Europe, then the United States.

For years, Paul and his family assume their exile is temporary and the Bolsheviks will lose power. One day, they’ll return to their homeland and their old lives will resume again.

So Paul, young and adventuresome, journeys to Colorado in the 1920s, where he works as a waiter in a TB sanitarium, a gold miner, and a tutor. He goes to California, where he tries to break into the movies as a screenwriter. Instead, he finds work in a plush cemetery, tending the dead and the bereaved. When he becomes unemployed, he’s so broke he almost starves to death.

From job to job, place to place, Paul Grabbe spends his spare time doggedly pursuing knowledge and mastery of the English language. He falls in and out of love. After a while, you kind of give up and fall in love with him yourself — this privileged young man who loses everything, but grows up quickly and learns to make his own way in a harsh new world.

Paul Grabbe died in 1999, leaving behind this manuscript. His daughter, writer Alexandra Grabbe, added photographs and published this vivid memoir early this year. Here, she answers questions about her father and the book he didn’t live to see.

Did your father talk much about his past to you and your family? 

Oh, sure — I can keep a secret. I can hammer my mouth shut for hours, days, weeks, or years, if necessary. I’m tough!

But, you know, some secrets are easier to keep than others.

“I’m pregnant!” our daughter announced at Christmas dinner.

She might as well have lit a pipe bomb. Forget dignity; her father and I went into a loud and deep emotional swoon.

A baby!

Finally!

We’re going to be grandparents before we’re complete geriatric cases!

We can stop hinting about grandkids!

We can tell all our fr —

“Of course, you can’t tell anyone till my second trimester,” our daughter said. “We want to announce it first,” she added, nodding at her husband, Bennett. (If I ever saw a guy bursting with paternal enthusiasm, it’s Bennett. According to our daughter, he’s already itching to buy some kind of special microphone so he can read to the kid in utero.)

But the second trimester! That was weeks and weeks away. I got woozy just thinking about the people I couldn’t tell — my sister, Betsy, Donna, my neighbors, my yoga class, my pilates class, my hairdresser Snodene, passers-by, my dentist, total strangers. I might as well give up my whole social world and become a mime.

I looked at my daughter and son-in-law, who seemed to be very firm about this whole early pregnancy omerta business. Oh, brother. For some reason, they also appeared to view me as being the leakiest vessel at the table. Like my husband and son didn’t go around spilling the beans on all kinds of things practically all the time.

Typical. Women always get the blame. I guess my daughter and Bennett had forgotten how heroically I’d kept the secret when Bennett was about to propose and I’d hardly told anyone for days.

“So — what do you all want to be called?” our daughter asked us.

Our first decision as almost grandparents! My husband looked blank. He said he didn’t know. He’d have to think about it.

“What about you, Mom?” our daughter asked.

“I want to be Coco,” I said.

Well, for some reason, this set off a firestorm of amazement at the table. Coco? Really? Why Coco?

“You sound like you’ve been thinking about this a long time,” my husband said.

“Of course I’ve been thinking about it a long time,” I snapped. “This is about my identity as a grandmother.”

It occurred to me they’d all expected me to pick out some appropriately dowdy, self-sacrificing moniker for this very important transition in my life. Well, forget that. For once in my life, I was going for the zip, the glamour, the glitz.

Prepare yourself, baby. You and Coco have a rendezvous in only a few months.

P.S. Thirty-three years ago, the sonograms of our daughter in utero looked like a Rorschach test for potential felons. My husband and I pretended we could recognize the head, but it looked indistinguishable from the bottom — white blurs against a black background.

These days, the tiniest fetus is ready for Instagram. Our grandchild’s first photo traveled thousands of miles to find us in Finnish Lapland. You could see the head perfectly, along with another long, straight body part that I thought was a leg, but my husband felt sure was a penis.

That stark white image against a black background — the first evidence my own dear child is having a child of her own — moved me in a way I could never really explain. I stared at it as I sat near a fire in a distant land of snow and ice and darkness. He or she looked like a perfect little snowflake, someone I would have recognized anywhere.

(Copyright 2015 by Ruth Pennebaker)

How can you ignore history when you’re living down the street from it? My husband and I were walking down Rue de Varenne, where we’re living for another few days, and noticed a marker.

It commemorated Edith Wharton, who, as it turned out, used to live down the street. Edith Wharton! We only missed her by a few blocks and 77 years. I tried to imagine her coming and going on the narrow sidewalks, then bent over her desk writing masterpieces. I was betting she had the exact same kind of ancient casement windows we do, with beaucoup de charme and zero d’insulation.

We kept going several blocks to the museums at Hotel des Invalides. There, you can see Napoleon’s tomb — so lavish that half the tourists in Paris seemed to be posing for selfies in front of it. Selfies aside, it’s odd to see such reverent treatment of a guy whose name mostly makes the rest of the world think of Trafalgar, Waterloo, and short guys with big ideas.

But then — as has already been noted more than once — the French are diffferent from you and me. We skipped the selfies and moved on.

The adjacent museum about World Wars I and II was subtly overwhelming. My husband and I walked through the exhibits of uniforms and weapons, maps and photos and videos.

Here, we had personal ties. My grandfather, a midwestern farmboy, fought in the first World War. Both our fathers were in Europe in World War II.

Blinded for a month by poison gas, my grandfather came back a harsher, angrier man, my grandmother had always said. He was never the same. Both our fathers –well, who really knew about men of that generation? They rarely talked about the war when we were growing up. Now, at 97, my father-in-law speaks of it often. But he has almost no one left to remember it with.

These were American war stories, though. Going through a European museum about those same wars, you quickly realize how different the perspectives were when warfare rages on your own continent and blood stains your own dirt — when you aren’t protected by a broad ocean.

During the first world war, France suffered more than 1.3 million dead. This number was larger than for any other country, except Russia, with its far bigger population. Then, Hitler came to power and began threatening aggression less than two decades later. No wonder France was so ill-prepared for another war.

How does France explain World War I? World War II? That’s what we’re trying to understand coming here. How different are their stories and histories from our own?

Traveling, I think my husband and I try to be less American and rooted in our own pasts and biases. We try to be more open to others’ perspectives. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes, I never feel more American than when I’m out of the country. Maybe you only think you can take off your own skin.

“Look at this!” my husband hissed from a nearby exhibit. “Look at this!”

He pointed excitedly to a description, translated into English, about the Nazis’ occupation of much of France. Up to that point, the English translations had been well-done and smooth. Here, command of the other language faltered.

“It’s like they forgot how to translate,” he said. “Like it was too upsetting for them to continue.”

Here it is:

We talk about it later, sitting in the museum cafe and drinking coffee. How honest are our own museums? What do they say about slavery, the genocide of the American Indians, the War in Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq? What glaring omissions do foreign visitors find in our historic sites?

That night, we ate at a nearby rstaurant, A La Petite Chaise, which claims to date back to 1680, making it the oldest in the city. Musset, Georges Sand, and Chateaubriand all dined here, according to the back of the menu. Even Colette was once there, admitted to a rowdy writing group of men who published the satirical magazine “Le Crapouillot.”

Colette, it was emphasized, was admitted to the group only in her capacity as a writer –and not as a woman. After missing her at Pere Lachaise Cemetery, how nice to find her nearby in whatever capacity she had to assume.

(Copyright 2015 by Ruth Pennebaker)