As a food lover living in France, columnist Debora Robertson can list the joys (market day, posh frozen food, this month’s fiercely traditional recipe...), but there are aspects of the UK food scene she misses too
My cooking year: September
When we moved to France almost two years ago, I pictured myself shopping each day, basket swinging from one arm, a scarf tied jauntily around my neck and a song in my heart. In truth, the setting was more busy Hackney pavement than small village in the Languedoc, and resembled my London life quite closely. I’d spent decades cos-playing the French lifestyle – it informed my shopping and my cooking – until I finally got to play it for real.
Tuesday, market day, is the highlight of my week. It took months to train myself not to buy everything in sight, rendered greedily grabby by the quality and variety of the produce. I tried to remind myself it would still be there tomorrow, if not on the stalls, then at one of the three greengrocers in our village of 8,000 souls.
But it’s not all wicker baskets, market day breakfast rosé at the Marine Bar and chatting with neighbours over the peaches. Our local HyperU supermarché is about the size of a small town. I kid myself I go there only for cat litter and detergent, but I still manage to fill my trolley. It’s like a badly lit social anthropology field trip into the habits of the French. The yogurt aisles alone could fill a Tesco local. Greek yogurt, fruity yogurt, pudding-y yogurts with chocolate, chestnut purée or salted caramel; goat or ewe’s milk, non-dairy… take your pick. The French eat over 20kg yogurt per person per year. That’s a lot of healthy gut bacteria.
And then there’s Picard (see Discoveries, p30), the frozen food brand that’s what would happen if Iceland and Fortnum & Mason ran away and had a baby. In among the vanilla ice cream and frozen spinach are bags of morels, brandade parmentier, scallops in muscat sauce and capon, chestnut and butternut squash crumbles (the French love a crumble, savoury or sweet). Many an apéro hour is graced with plates of petits fours, gougères and tiny glasses of chilled soups straight from the freezer of the smart French hosts’ worst kept secret. Fish fingers – exotically known as bâtonnets de poisson – are also available.
While I love being able to buy celery by the stick and the way the greengrocer tucks free sprigs of parsley into my basket, what’s taken some getting used to is a more
