A major plus for an American living in Western Europe is the proliferation of small, farmers’ style markets. While there are a few communities with such markets on the Western edge of the Atlantic, it’s not standard.
In France, the covered market has also become less standard over time, with the convenience of parking and packaging in what are known as “hypermarkets”. For the working scientist in the city, it can be very attractive to order all heavy things online to be delivered during a programmed two-hour window directly to your door.
However, nothing beats the local Market.
It’s possible to spend one’s Sunday morning revising a manuscript, look up at noon and realize you have nothing to feed your family at lunch, and dash down the street to the covered market.
The next time this happens to me, I will bring my own camera. It’s pittoresque à souhait – the seventeenth-century footpaths one can take perpendicular to the market road, the early twentieth-century meulières along the way, none of which are alas mine, and hedges and roadworks galore.
I was able to score the last one of these (resisting the particularly well-done, crunchy fried potatoes):
in favor of a couple of these:
and enough of these:
followed by decidedly non-pasteurized:
(only the one on the right, Abondance)
and, thanks to the wine-making family connections of my former student, some of this (actually it was from Domaine Maurice Gavignet, which I’d recommend):
And these to finish 1.
I was going to actually wax poetic about the perfectly gorgeous and abundant orb-weaving spiders I met on the road, and their marvelous works of industry, and how they each seem to have a favorite leg to hook each segment of their web onto the support threads. But I’m afraid if I put up photos, that will put you off your appetite.
The French would never forgive me.
1 Thanks to all the photographers for making their photos available with the CC license.
aww.. that looks poeitively yummy!! I agree, the French market with cheese (is there any better – apart from some creamy Swedish and proper British cheddar?) and then the wine :)
aww.. that looks poeitively yummy!! I agree, the French market with cheese (is there any better – apart from some creamy Swedish and proper British cheddar?) and then the wine :)I would love to have that for a Sunday lunch. alas, here I endulge in tonnes of fresh spinach, grape fruits and some hard to come by goat cheese whenI want to be more like French ^^
Comments are weird lately. the same thing happened to someone else on an earlier post.
Fresh spinach is great. It’s just a hassle to wash. I hope to have a garden again someday soon, then I’ll grow my own.
When I lived in Amsterdam I lived round the corner from the Albert Kuypmarkt, where I did a lot of grocery shopping on a Saturday. The one drawback is how long it takes to purchases the same amount of stuff. If I didn’t have three gloriously lazy hours to spare, I’d zip into the nearby Albert Heijn supermarket and do the weekly shop in 15 minutes.
One of the veg stall guys soon learned who I was and started stocking pastinaken (parsnips) just for me, because the Dutch just didn’t know what they were. Not something the AH would ever do!
Ah, unpasteurized cheese. I once worked with a French postdoc who was remarkably rude about the quality of cheeses in North America.
Of course, the day of your post was Thanksgiving in this country (note to Americans: we have it earlier than you do, to avoid snow, the Grey Cup, and American Thanksgiving. So many people in these parts would be either eating, or recovering from, a rather large turkey dinner.
One day later, a nice snack of your cheese and those apples would go down well. Mmmm.
Now I am hungry… looks delicious!
Europe has the US beat when it comes to small producers and locally sourced produce. It’s so great that you can just run outside and find this incredible bounty! In so many cities in the States that is not at all possible. Even in Boston, a city full of yuppies (myself among them, at one time) striving for more awareness in they food choices, the produce options are limited to sterile supermarkets. It’s gross, and bad for the local farmers.
This actually reminds me that I need to go to the farmers market tomorrow. There is a new in my neighbourhood, but I keep missing it, and Toronto’s farmer’s market season is almost over. (One is year-round, I think, but that one’s indoors…)
When I visited France as a kid with my parents (every. single. summer.) we’d always go to at least one local market AND one hypermarche. We loved how hilariously gigantic the latter were. An entire aisle of toilet paper in all colours of the rainbow! Amazing. (Yes, my childhood memories of France involve shelves upon shelves of toilet paper.)
Happy Thanksgiving – belatedly – Richard! But I can’t get used to it being on any day but Thursday. And for the last fifteen years, I’ve had to celebrate it on Saturday (except for once when I was in the U.S. with family).
I’m writing about food because writing about work is a little complicated. Nothing special, but complicated right now.
I remember when I lived in Barcelona, I loved observing the market and the order of the vegetable, etc. All in very meticulous arrange. Haeather, really this sort of perception, arrange the mind.
I rememeber too, in the supermarkets in the Pyrenees Catalan-French packed and orderly with great amount of French and Swiss cheeses of all tastes. obviously, I also felt hungry.
Somewhat unrelated – here in Canada we are used to everything being labeled in two languages, English and French. Last time I was in France, I found myself picking up food items in the store, and automatically turning them around to look for the English.
Sad, but 100% true.
Following the story, in the Pyrenees Catalan-French, it was all in French.The most interesting of all is that the products were fully 90% French and 10% Spanish.
Heather ; I have no idea what happened there.. seems to happen to me more often if I press preview. Weird indeed.
HUNGRY. All this post is lacking is some of those really good olives that fill up stall upon stall at French markets.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.