At the end of the first summer season I worked in Monte Carlo, I went to Nice with some friends to celebrate with dinner. We ordered enormous plateaux de fruits de mer—large platters of mostly raw shellfish. These were accompanied by thin slices of gray-looking bread served with butter. I took a bite of the bread, and then another, and then I identified the familiar taste—rye bread! The rye bread I knew back home was Jewish rye, while the French rye bread was less cr