Sugar High Friday #4, or how I got my hands on a pain de Gênes

It was a circuitous route that brought me to le pain de Gênes, the sunny yellow French cake rich with butter, eggs, and almond paste,



and I never would have made it without a former New York cabbie and his Citroën.

It all began one day in the mid-1990s, in the parking lot of an Albertsons grocery store in Oklahoma City. My father, the ever-willing food shopper, paused with his grocery bags to