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.
Writing of the work of Chardin, whose most profoundly moving paintings are revelations of how trivial, homely, everyday scenes and objects are transformed for us when we see them through the eyes of a great painter, Proust says, ‘Chardin has taught us that a pear is as living as a woman, a kitchen crock as beautiful as an emerald.’ Since Proust wrote these words painters and writers have revealed other beauties to us – they have made us see the poetry of factory canteens and metro stations, the romance of cog-wheels, iron girders, bombed buildings, dustbins and pylons. But in the excitement of discovering these wondrous things we shall be poorer if we don’t also give a thought now and again to the pear and the kitchen crock.
Vogue, March 1960
The Markets of France: Martigues
One of the meals we all enjoyed most during our journeyings round the markets of France last summer was a lunch in the end-of-the-world little town of Salin-de-Giraud on the edge of the Camargue. After a pretentious dinner and a bad night – it is rare, I find, to get through even a fortnight’s motoring trip in France without at least one such disaster – spent in à highly unlikely establishment disguised as a cluster of Camargue guardian huts, we left before breakfast and spent a healing morning lost in the remaining lonely stretches of this once completely wild, mysterious, melancholy, half-land, half-water, Rhône estuary country.
Much of the Camargue has now been reclaimed, roads and bridges have been built, and huge rice fields have been planted. They have been so successful that from an initial yearly production of about 250 tons during the middle forties these rice fields now yield 145,000 tons a year and supply France with the whole of her rice requirements. It has been a great triumph for France’s construction and agricultural engineers, a dazzling testimony to the industry and enterprise of a people who so often appear, to those who do not know them, to be in a perpetual state of political and economic chaos. One cannot but rejoice for France, and wholeheartedly admire the determination and ingenuity which has turned an almost totally waste land into a productive and prosperous one.
Alas, though, for the animals and the wild birds, for the legendary beasts which frequented the Camargue, for the shimmering lonely stretches of water, for the still heart of this mournful mistral-torn and mosquito-ridden country. The harpies from Paris running the road houses which must inevitably multiply will be a worse scourge than the mosquitoes. Owners of souvenir shops selling china Camargue bulls and plastic flamingoes and scarves printed with Provençal recipes will be more implacable than the mistral.
These rather gloomy thoughts were in our minds as we arrived, a bit soothed but still edgy, to find that the last ferry over the Rhône from Salin which would take us on to the road to Martigues had left at 11.30 and there would not be another until 2 o’clock. Forlornly we made our way to the local restaurant.
And there, instead of the omelette and the glass of wine which we had expected to swallow in a nervous hurry, we found the Restaurant La Camarguaise serving a well-chosen and properly cooked and comforting meal in a clean
and high-ceilinged dining-room. The menu was 600 francs, and while the food was very simple it reminded me of what Provençal restaurants used to be like in the days before even the most ordinary of Provençal dishes became a ‘speciality’ listed on the menu as a supplément at 750 francs. There was an hors-d’œuvre of eggs and anchovies, there were hot grilled fresh sardines to follow, the vegetable course was côtes de blettes, the rib parts of those enormous leaves of the spinach family which we know as chard and which are much cultivated in the Rhône valley; the leaves themselves are cooked in the same way as spinach, the fleshy stalks and ribs were, on this occasion, sautéd in olive oil and flavoured with garlic and were delicious. The bœuf Gardiane which followed brought tears to our eyes; we had been overwrought and dropping with fatigue, and while the food we had already eaten had cheered and comforted us, it wasn’t until the cover was taken off the dish of beef stew and we smelt the wine and the garlic and the rich juices and saw the little black olives and the branches of wild thyme which had scented the stew laid in a little network over the meat, that the tension vanished. We ordered more supplies of the cheap red wine and decided that the 2.30 ferry would have to go without us.
Well, God bless the French lunch hour. It must have been nearly 5 o’clock when, having finally got the cars across that ferry, we eventually drove into Martigues in dazzling late afternoon sunshine to see the fishing boats come in.
In this still picturesque village, beloved and painted by generations of English as well as French artists, so charmingly, proudly, and absurdly known as the Venice of Provence – it is built on the Lagoon of Berre, west of Marseille – most of the inhabitants still live by fishing, and in spite of tremendous industrial development round about it is still comparatively unspoilt. It won’t be for long. Martigues will soon be all but swallowed up in the new harbour constructions planned to stretch west from Marseille.
But for a little moment Martigues still stands, and we drink coffee on the quay as we wait for the boats to come in. Anthony is taking pictures of a faded blue warehouse door on which pink and coral and pale gold stars are hanging. They are starfish dried by the sun. Somewhere here in Martigues they are also drying something slightly more edible – the famous poutargue, compressed and salted grey mullet roes, a primitive speciality of Martigues whose origin goes back, they say, to the Phoenicians. It is made in Sardinia, too, and Crete, and for collectors of useless information, poutargue, or botargo, was among the dishes served at King James II’s coronation feast. As a matter of fact we had some too, with a bottle of white wine for breakfast next day at M. Bérot’s lovely restaurant the Escale, at Carry-le-Rouet, across the hills from Martigues and overlooking a real honest-to-goodness, glorious postcard Mediterranean bay.
The children watching us are also watching for the boats, and they have spotted the first of the fleet coming in. So have the cats. The Yves-Jacky chugs into her berth, ties up; the skipper’s wife, ready at her post, wheels her fish barrow aboard. Almost before you can see what has come up out of the hold the fish is loaded on the barrow and trundled off at breakneck speed, followed by the small boys and the cats. The auction in the market place on the quay has started.
A few minutes later, in quick succession, come the Espadon and the St-Jean and the Bienvenue. The boats are blue, the nets are black, and the whole scene does remind me a little of the Adriatic, even if not precisely of Venice.
None of the boats have sensational catches today. This part of the Mediterranean is terribly overfished. A large percentage of Marseille’s fresh fish supplies is brought from the North Sea and Channel ports. But still there are some fine and strange-looking fish gleaming with salt water and sparkling in the sun. There’s a brown and red and gold beast called a roucaou; it’s a bit like the famous rascasse which goes into the bouillabaisse, but larger. Here is a boxful of tiny poulpes, a variety of squid which never grow big and which are exquisite fried crisp in oil. There’s a langouste or two, and some kind of silver sea bream which they call sarde round here, and some baudroie, that fish with the wicked antennae-like hooks growing out of its huge head – the fish they call rana pescatrice in Western Italy and rospo on the Adriatic, and angler or monk fish in England. The baby ones are as pretty and appealing as kittens with their little round heads. And there is a familiar friend, a gigantic turbot, and a long black fish with an arrow-shaped head. They call it émissole here, and to us it’s a dogfish. There is a silver loup de mer, or sea-bass, and some big, rather touchingly ugly John Dories, called St-Pierres in France, because of the black St Peter’s thumb marks on their sides.
Some of these big fish fetch big prices, two or three times as much as we would pay for them here, and they will go to the classy restaurants or the Marseille fish shops, but the boxes of little slithery bright pink fish called demoiselles and the miscellaneous collections of bony little rock fish, undersized whiting and other small fry, will go for very little. Most of the buyers are women – so is the auctioneer, a brawny, competent, good-humoured young woman with a Levantine cast of countenance and a thick Midi accent – who will re-sell them locally this very evening; any minute now the housewives of Martigues and Lavéra and round about will be turning them into la soupe or la friture for the evening meal.
Vogue, April 1960
The Markets of France: Valence
To drive from Lascaux of the prehistoric caves in the Dordogne right across country to Valence on the Rhône is possibly not the most expeditious way of getting from the deep south-west of France to the Mediterranean. But if time is not too desperately important it is one way of seeing a vast stretch of surprising and magnificent country, some interesting and unspoiled old towns, perhaps even of discovering some village in the heart of the still primitive agricultural Auvergne, some little-known hotel where one would like to stay instead of hurrying on, to which one would return another year. At the least, perhaps a country inn somewhere in the Limousin or the Cantal district will yield a new dish or a wine which was worth the détour. A charcuterie in Aurillac or Vic-sur-Cère or some other small but locally important town will possibly provide a pâté the like of which you never tasted before, or a locally cured ham, a few slices of which you will buy and carry away with a salad, a kilo of peaches, a bottle of Monbazillac and a baton of bread, and somewhere on a hillside amid the mile upon mile of golden broom or close to a splashing waterfall you will have, just for once, the ideal picnic.
Was it up here above Aurillac that one of our party found the best picnic place in France? A stretch of water, mysterious, still, full of plants and birds, away from the road, sheltered with silver birches, and with a stone table evidently waiting there especially for us?
We had driven from Montignac near Lascaux. We had stayed at the Soleil d’Or, a little hotel as warm-hearted as its name. We had eaten a good dinner – among other things a golden bolster of an omelette bursting its seams with truffles – and drunk some excellent red wine of Cahors and afterwards a glass of that remarkable eau-de-vie of plums called Vieille Prune which is one of the great Dordogne products – another is the odd and delicious walnut oil with which, if you are lucky, you may get your salad dressed.
In spite of all this, or perhaps because of it, we made an early enough start to reach Aurillac in plenty of time to buy our picnic lunch and see something of the old town. Had it been a Saturday we should have stayed to see the cheese market. For Aurillac is one of the centres for the distribution of the splendid cheese of Cantal, to my mind one of the best and most interesting in France. It is a cheese which has a texture not unlike a good Lancashire, and when properly matured a flavour which beats most modern English cheeses on their own ground. There is also a less interesting, creamy, unripened version called a tomme de Cantal, much used for cooking, especially in farmhouse potato and egg dishes.
After our picnic lunch we’ll have to hurry. We must get across the Plomb du Cantal, into the Velay, and through the scruffy pilgrimage town of Le Puy. But I shall stop to buy some of those beautif
ul little slate-green lentils for which the district is famous and which a greedy guest of mine recently proclaimed as good as caviare – and also to telephone to Madame Barattero at the Hôtel du Midi at Lamastre to say we are coming for dinner.
Valence is the big shopping centre and market town for Lamastre. The wholesale fruit and poultry market opens before dawn on Saturday and is all packed up by seven o’clock in the morning. In the big retail market which opens later on the combined scents of ripe peaches and the fresh basil and thyme plants lying in heaps on the ground gave us our first sniff of Provence. But the plump little white ducks and the fresh St-Marcellin cheeses from the Isère, the exquisite black and green olives from Nyons which we bought for lunch tempted us to drive north or south-east of Valence instead of directly south.
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine Page 31