Omelette and a Glass of Wine (42 page)

And if you happen to arrive on a Monday evening you could see a typical Norman market, both wholesale and retail, at Duclair early on Tuesday morning. It is as good a way as any to the beginnings of an understanding and appreciation of any French province, to see the local markets in action, to watch the produce unloaded from the carts and vans, to hear the talk of the farmers and buyers in the cafés after the main business has been transacted. And to us, whose country markets are rapidly vanishing, the extraordinary activity and the variety of foodstuffs on sale in a little town of only three thousands inhabitants like Duclair, so few miles away from Dover, has a particular fascination.

One could almost go over there to do one’s weekly marketing–or on into Rouen, where the big market day is also on Tuesday, and from where you could bring home butter made from unpasteurized cream, great bowls of
tripes à la mode
, and duck pâtés, and baskets full of big round Breton artichokes for a tenth of the price we have to pay here. And Norman cheeses too: genuine Pont-l’Evèque made on the farms of the Pays d’Auge from milk still warm from the cows; Livarot, that powerful and marvellous cheese which has been made in the district since the thirteenth century; even a good Norman Camembert can be found if you look. But progress is on the march in Normandy, and in a big way. It won’t be long before cheeses such as these become rarities. More and more of the farms are going over to pasteurized milk, their produce is sent to the co-operatives, the butter and the cheese no longer have the characteristic ripe flavours
one used to expect. On the whole, though, the Norman producers are acting with sense and foresight over the development of their dairy industry. They are frankly calling their new cheeses by new brand names, making them in different shapes and original packings, selling them on their own merits rather than attempting to pass them off as the great traditional products of an unmechanized and unstandardized age.

There are, of course, big areas of Normandy where the farmers are still producing milk, butter, cream and cheeses by the old methods. The outlet for these products are the local wholesale markets.

The great centre of the rich Pays d’Auge, also cider and Calvados country, is Vimoutiers, only a few kilometres from the cheese villages of both Camembert and Livarot. The big butter market is on Monday afternoons. The centre of the Bray district is Gournay, where over a hundred years ago Petit Suisse cream cheeses were evolved by a farmer’s wife and a Swiss herdsman. There are now almost a dozen different varieties of these cream cheeses, and the Gervais factory, at Fernères, absorbs something like 50,000 gallons of milk daily for the demi-sel and other fresh cheeses.

Yvetot is the great butter market of the Caux country and provides a sight worth seeing if you happen to be in the district on a Wednesday morning. Out of the vans are coming huge cones of butter fresh from the farms. It is made from ripened, unpasteurized cream, and divided into loaves of 35 or 70 kilos each; they are wrapped in crisp white cloths or in polythene wrappings and stacked in huge baskets or wire carriers. Each parcel of butter is tasted with a long scoop and then re-weighed before a buyer will accept it. On the long rows of stalls are ranged all sorts of fresh farm products – eggs, vegetables, salads, churns of cream, live chickens and ducks – brown Rouen ducks, black Muscovy ducks, white Pekin ducks, turkeys, baby chicks; one old woman has just one basket of produce for sale – eggs, a few fresh peas, and a bunch of green turnip-tops. But even this little collection of cottage garden produce won’t change hands without some stern bargaining.

As for the farm butter, it is being borne away by the purchasers in the great baskets which look as if they might have been used by the Scarlet Pimpernel to smuggle refugee
aristos
out of Paris. Tomorrow this butter will be enriching many a roast chicken, thousands of omelettes and cakes and pastries, filling the kitchens of France with the incomparable scent of butter gently sizzling in a frying pan…

And indeed it is high time to think about lunch. There is Tôtes not far away on the Dieppe road, and the famous old Hôtel des Cygnes where Guy de Maupassant wrote
Boule de Suif
and where the proprietor appears the very embodiment of Norman robustness. At the Marée in the market place of Rouen there are delicious fish dishes, excellent food at the Beffroy in the rue du Beffroy, all the more unexpected because the place looks too like Ye Olde Bunne Shoppe to be true. But perhaps it is better to avoid Rouen, the midday traffic going in and coming out is too much of a worry. Better to drive a bit farther, down in to lower Normandy and the beautiful Vallée d’Auge, past old Norman farms and manors, through country thick with apple trees, and pastures so opulent and green that unless you have seen some of the raw, rebuilt little towns, it is hard to believe in the terrible devastation of only fifteen years ago.

At Orbec, twenty kilometres from Lisieux, is the Caneton, a restaurant which you know is going to be good as soon as you enter its doors – the smell is so appetizing – but it is small and not exactly unknown, so it is prudent to telephone for a table in advance. The
menu gastronomique
at the Caneton is generous and good value for 1800 francs, but a trifle fussy and rich, and a better choice for my taste is the
plat du jour
, with perhaps a duck liver pâté, or local
charcuterie
, to start with, which is what you see the inhabitants eating.

Vogue
, February 1960

The Markets of France: Montpellier

‘Buy a pound of choucroûte from a village charcutier. As you pass the municipal pump, pause a moment…’

Any English cookery writer who published a recipe opening with these words would be thought distinctly out of touch. The evocative sentence comes in fact from a little book called
La Cuisine en Plein Air
by that most adorable of French gastronomes, Dr Edouard de Pomiane. The little volume, which deals with cooking out of doors for motorists, cyclists, campers, walkers, and fishermen has never been translated into English and wouldn’t be of much practical use to us if it were, because the majority of the recipes are based on the
products to be bought at the ‘village
charcutier
’, an institution which doesn’t exist in the British Isles.

It is only when one has haunted the markets of France and the food shops in the country towns and villages, watched the housewives doing their shopping, listened to them discussing their purchases at the
pâtisseries
and the
charcuteries
that one realizes how much less they are tied to their kitchens than we had always been led to suppose.

The point is that in France no shame is attached to buying ready-prepared food because most of it is of high quality. The housewives and small restaurateurs who rely upon the professional skill of
charcutiers
and
pâtissiers
for a part of their supplies see to it that the pâtés and sausages, the little salads for hors-d’œuvre, the galantines and terrines and fish quenelles, the hams and tongues and pies, pastries and fruit flans, the petits fours and the croissants maintain high standards of freshness and excellence, and that any popular regional speciality of the district continues to be cooked with the right and proper traditional ingredients, even if the methods have been speeded up by the introduction of modern machinery.

Here in England we find little in our local delicatessen shop – the only approximation we have to the
charcutier
who sells many ready-prepared foods besides pork butchers’ products – but mass-produced sausages, pork pies and fish cakes off a conveyor belt, piled slices of pale pink and blood-red flannel which pass respectively for cooked ham and tongue, bottles of pickled onions and jars of red cabbage in vinegar, possibly a potato salad dressed with synthetic mayonnaise and, with luck, some herrings in brine. In any French town of any size at all we find perhaps three or four rival
charcutiers
displaying trays of shining olives, black and green, large and small, pickled gherkins, capers, home-made mayonnaise, grated carrot salad, shredded celeriac in
rémoulade
sauce, several sorts of tomato salad, sweet-sour onions,
champignons à la Grecque
, ox or pig’s muzzle finely sliced and dressed with a vinaigrette sauce and fresh parsley, a salad of mussels, another of cervelas sausage; several kinds of pork pâté; sausages for grilling, sausages for boiling, sausages for hors-d’œuvre, flat sausages called
crépinettes
for baking or frying, salt pork to enrich stews and soups and vegetable dishes, pigs’ trotters ready cooked and bread-crumbed, so that all you need to do is to take them home and grill them; cooked ham, raw ham, a galantine of tongue, cold pork and
veal roasts, boned stuffed ducks and chickens… So it isn’t difficult for the housewife in a hurry to buy a little selection, however modest, of these things from the
charcuterie
, and plus her own imagination and something she has perhaps already in the larder to serve an appetizing and fresh little mixed hors-d’œuvre.

When we visited the big open-air retail market in the upper town at Montpellier, there was an ordinary enough little
charcuterie-épicerie
stall offering the ingredients of what might be called the small change of French cookery, but to our English eyes it looked particularly inviting and interesting.

The atmosphere helped, of course. The sun, the clear sky, the bright colours, the prosperous look of this lively, airy university town and wine-growing capital; the stalls massed with flowers; fresh fish shining pink and gold and silver in shallow baskets; cherries and apricots and peaches on the fruit barrows; one stall piled with about a ton of little bunches of soup or pot-au-feu vegetables – a couple of slim leeks, a carrot or two, a long thin turnip, celery leaves, and parsley, all cleaned and neatly bound with a rush, ready for the pot; another
charcuterie
stall, in the covered part of the market, displaying yards of fresh sausage festooned around a pyramid-shaped wire stand; a fishwife crying pussy’s parcels of fish wrapped tidily in newspaper; an old woman at the market entrance selling winkles from a little cart shaped like a pram; a fastidiously dressed old gentleman choosing tomatoes and leaf artichokes, one by one, as if he were picking a bouquet of flowers, and taking them to the scales to be weighed (how extraordinary that we in England put up so docilely with not being permitted by greengrocers or even barrow boys to touch or smell the produce we are buying); a lorry with an old upright piano in the back threading round and round the market place trying to get out. These little scenes establish the character of Montpellier market in our memories, although by now we have spent many mornings in different southern markets and have become accustomed to the beauty and profusion of the produce for sale and to the heavy smell of fresh ripe fruit which everywhere hangs thick in the air at this time of year.

Well, plenty of tourists spend their mornings in museums and picture galleries and cathedrals, and nobody would quarrel with them for that. But the stomach of a city is also not without its importance. And then, I wouldn’t be too sure that the food market
of a big city shouldn’t be counted as part of its artistic tradition.

Where do they get their astonishing gifts for display, these French stall keepers? Why does a barrow boy selling bunched radishes and salad greens in the market at Chinon know by instinct so to arrange his produce that he has created a little spectacle as fresh and gay as a Dufy painting, and you are at once convinced that unless you taste some of his radishes you will be missing an experience which seems of more urgency than a visit to the Château of Chinon? How has a Montpellier fishwife so mastered the art of composition that with her basket of fish for the
bouillabaisse
she is presenting a picture of such splendour that instead of going to look at the famous collection of paintings in the Musée Fabre you drive off as fast as possible to the coast to order a dish cooked with just such fish? And what can there be about the arrangement of a few slices of sausage and a dozen black olives on a dish brought by the waitress in the seaside café to keep you occupied while your fish is cooking that makes you feel that this is the first time you have seen and tasted a black olive and a piece of sausage?

When one tries to analyse the real reasons for the respect which French cookery has so long exacted from the rest of the world, the French genius for presentation must be counted as a very relevant point, and its humble beginnings can be seen on the market stalls, in the small town
charcutiers
’ and
pâtissiers
’ shops, in the modest little restaurants where even if the cooking is not particularly distinguished, the most ordinary of little dishes will be brought to your table with respect, properly arranged on a serving dish, the vegetables separately served, the object of arousing your appetite will be achieved and the proprietors of the establishment will have made the most of their limited resources.

This in a sense is the exact reverse of English practice. We seem to exert every effort to make the least of the most. When you order a grilled Dover sole in an English restaurant it will very likely be a fine sole, fresh and well cooked. But when it is dumped unceremoniously before you with a mound of inappropriate green peas and a pool of cold tartare sauce spreading beside it on the hot plate, then your appetite begins to seep away…

To decorate a dish of smoked salmon, so beautiful in itself, with lettuce leaves, or to strew it with tufts of cress, is not to make that salmon which has cost 38s. a pound look as if it cost
£
3, but to belittle it so that you begin to feel it is some bargain basement left-over which needs to be disguised. Alas, where here is our
celebrated capacity for understatement? Well, we have our own gifts, but the presentation of food is not one of them, and since French cooks and food purveyors so often appear to lose the lightness of their touch in this respect when they leave their native land and settle abroad, one can only conclude that the special stimulant which brings these gifts into flower is in the air of France itself. Does it sound trivial or over-rarified to make so much of such small points? I don’t think anyone in full possession of their five senses would find it so.