Paris seems to be about eating as much as anything. Sure, culture, history, fashion, ideas, government, all those matter. But most of them seem to amplified or explained or resolved … over a slow, leisurely meal.

I am no gourmand.  But I know what I like, and this is what I look forward to eating when I am in Paris. Counting down.

7. Cassoulet. No, it’s not the season for one of the heartiest of French meals. A stew of meats (duck, ham, sausage) with white beans. This is a winter meal, typically, comfort food, but when we had a couple of days of rain and temps under 70 … I went for it.

6. Sharp cheese. Almost any of them. Well, almost any of the 300-plus varieties of French cheese. An entire step in a meal correctly done. Soft, hard, creamy, tart, stinky, goat. Love almost all of them.

5. A croque monsieur. The simple, tasty half-sandwich. Toasted bread covered ham, tomato and a layer of melted cheese. And it won’t set you back a day’s pay.

4. Beouf Bourguignon. Of all the French main dishes, this is my favorite. Beef braised in red wine, with mushrooms and pearl onions, served on thick pasta.

3. Moelleux au chocolat. The great reward at the end of a restaurant meal. Chocolate cake, in the shape of a hockey puck (and haven’t you always wanted to take a bite of a puck?) filled with melted chocolate. Yes. Chocolate within chocolate.

2. Champagne. Not a food, technically, but what says Paris more succinctly than a champagne cork popping? It is possible to get bad champagne here, but much easier to get good or excellent champagne, and it that cork coming out basically says, “The good times begin now.”

1. Baguettes traditional. French bread, and the highest expression of the Western world’s leading dietary staple. Hard on the outside, soft and airy inside, a good baguette is crusty enough to make the roof of your mouth bleed — and is too hard to eat about 12 hours after it comes out of the oven. But nothing is as good among all the world’s basic foods as this is. Since arriving here, I have almost given up chocolate in exchange for the calories of a daily baguette. And wherever else in the world you go, the locals can try but they rarely succeed in replicating the French baguette. Perhaps the secret is, as is widely suggested, that French baguettes are seasoned by a drop of sweat from the local boulanger.