Sud de France 3.8: A Day in Sète, the “Venice of the Languedoc.”

Someone wrote once that Sète “smells of fish.” Ptolemy mentioned the town around 75 A.D and he didn’t seem to notice that. But Sète's never smelled of fish when I’ve been there, just a delightful hint of salt in the air from the sea that surrounds the town. 

Sète’s has a unique location, nestled up against the 577 foot (176 meters) high Mount Saint Clair and bordered on one side by the Mediterranean and on the other by the Bassin de Thau a very large, salt water lake.  

 These elements make for a strikingly beautiful setting. Mt. St. Clair stands out high above the nearby landscape that it can be seen from miles off the coast, making it a convenient coastal landmark for sailors for centuries. Today the mountain is home to a number of restaurants and hotels with spectacular views of the harbor and sea. 

The Bassin de Thau is filled with thousands of crisscrossed mussels and oysters growing racks. It is separated from the Med by an eight mile (13.5 km) long sand spit full of sandy beaches and bird filled marshlands. In the past the beaches were packed in summer with campers from all over Europe. Their parked camper vans often blocked traffic but today a newly completed parking and traffic revision has eased the problem. 

Sète is the largest French fishing port on the Med and is called the “Venice of the Languedoc” because of the system of canals that thread through the town. Bridges cross these waterways and while not as Renaissance pretty as Venice, it still makes Sète a lovely water loving city. It’s also the southern end of the Canal du Midi, a manmade waterway that goes all the way through France to Bordeaux and the Atlantic. The Canal is a favorite of boaters who kayak or rent barges to take leisurely up the Canal on a summer vacation. 

The other day we went to Sète for its annual used book fair. Our first surprise  there was parking our car in the underground or rather under the canal lot that was literally cut out of the rock beneath one of the city’s waterways. We drove down through what looked like a cave tunnel. Happily like other parking facilities in France, calming classical music was piped in to the chambers of the lot to reassure drivers that all was okay.  

We were parked under this lady's dog.

 

The used book fair is a modest affair held in the Place d la Republique, a small park with the Mayor’s office on one side of it. Across the park is the main office of France’s second major political party, the Parti Socialiste. I guess the arrangement allows the Socialists to keep an eye on the Mayor. 

The book fair was a small and easy event. A dozen folding tables were set up under the trees and books were laid out in piles. The texts ran from manga Japanese comics to 16^th century travel guides.

Browsing the book fair's offerings

 We went through the fair but didn’t find anything special to buy. So we next set off to Sète’s “Les Halles.” Like the Halles found in most large French towns and cities this is a covered produce market with a high glass and iron framed ceiling. Inside the Halles are the usual vegetable and meat stand as well as a number of lively restaurants. 

The sports bar in Les Halles

The owner of Chez Leon Louis on les Halles

In Les Halles we got some olive oil and preserved fruits and then headed out for lunch. Despite it being a late fall Sunday the streets were full of people. Many were shopping others just strolling along the canals. 

We walked a block down from Les Halles to the Quai de la Resistance along one of the main canals. We chose a small sidewalk place from the four or five restaurants that were open. As we entered the place, a waiter dashed by us with a huge tray of clams and oysters perched on his shoulder, evidently he was off to deliver a take-out order. We took a seat under a large tent like canopy facing the restaurant so we could watch the owner standing one side of the sidewalk shucking oysters. He worked calmly and meticulously but always stopped for a minute to greet and chat with passersby. He seemed to know everyone on the street.  

For me the treat is not oysters but the local mussels. I ordered a bucket of moules (mussels) in a light cream sauce that was incredibly fresh and tasty. One of my favorite things about living here in Mediterranean France is access to totally fresh, locally caught seafood. Especially mussels, that are petite and delicate and about a third the size of the monsters mussels (read older and tougher) we’d get back in the Pacific Northwest. 

Finishing lunch and our “demi piche”, half pitcher, of rosé we got up and strolled along the Quai. The whole meal for two us came to under 20 euros.

About a block from the restaurant we came upon “La Biscuiterie, Sucré & Salé. It’s a new shop that’s only been open for a few months and it was doing a lively business. Sucré & Salé bakes and sells only biscuits and Madeleine cakes. 

Seemingly simple things you’d think, but they make these two humble cakes something of a culinary art form. They have Madeleine cakes flavored with lemon, with apricot, pistachio, walnut, olive oil, spice, honey, chocolate and more. And the biscuits receive the same treatment spiced with everything from paprika to Provençal herbs.

The two young couples that run the place are taking Proust’s humble Madeleine and improvising on it in a most delightful way. 

Their whole presentation is whimsical and most theatrical.

Naturally we loaded up on cakes which made for a sweet way to end a very pleasant day in the Sud de France.

Sud de France 3.4: Something’s Fishy Here in France

Something fishy here in the Herault and I don’t mean the smell form a week’s accumulation of garbage as the refuse collectors join the anti-retirement reform movement. I’m talking about real fish and it’s real fishy.

Just a few of the fish available in a French market

Since college cooking has been my way of relaxing at the end of the day. Over time I’ve accumulated a good sized collection of cookbooks. These cookbooks are by the stars of chef-dom, Pepin, Puck, Child, Hazan and the like. But I’ve come to I realize that these tomes are just fairy tale storybooks. This may be a hard to swallow for Rachel Ray’s viewers but it’s true.

This hit me like a lead sinker when I started trying to buy fish at the local fishmongers. While my cookbooks contained dozens of recipes for salmon and sole, shrimp and crab, here in rural France I’m encountering fish capelan, sar noir, merlu, gobie, dorade, dorade royal, baudroie, lotte, rouget, polpi, raie, anchovies, sardines and cornets.

And these are not exotic fish but the everyday fish that dominate the local fish stands and that home cooks and restaurant chefs seem to buy and cook very well. But I’ve never seen them before and for all my cookbooks I’m at a loss to know what to do.

And I’m not happy about it.

When we lived in in Gig Harbor outside Seattle the town called itself a “maritime city.” Considering it was surrounded by Puget Sound and the Pacific you’d have thought we’d have had tons of fish in our markets. But hell, while we had our fishing fleet we didn’t have a single fish stand. The boats went up to Alaska fish each summer caught tons of fish but not an ounce made it to the Harbor. Adding insult to injury most of the salmon you could buy came from the Atlantic. What was up with that?? Throw in farm raised fish from Southeast Asia or the Mexican catch and the Pacific Northwest looks like a fish wasteland. Talk buying cheap products from overseas.  

Sea urchins and more

What was craziest was that my cookbook never mentioned any the fish I see every day in the markets. I’m sure that a few of the star chefs and food writer’s must have seen these fish and been curious about them. But you wouldn’t know it from the cookbooks. I can’t explain these omissions except to think that offering recipes for fish you can’t buy in America may not be a good marketing strategy. 

But you know America once had abundant supplies and a wider variety of fresh fish. I know because I grew up in the Bronx and in the 1950s my grandmother would buy live carp for making gefilte fish. She’d toss them in her bathtub until she was ready to make them into delicate yummy fish patties. As a kid I remember being fascinated by the carp as I'd watch them swimming in her fifth floor bathtub. 

Today in the States you don’t see live fish or even whole fish, just slabs of white or red meat that taste about as good as cardboard.  

The sign reads "None of the fish at this stand is farm raised."

And making it worse is that not only is diversity gone but the big fish--salmon, cod, halibut, crab and tuna--the ones we eat, are at the top of the food chain eating up the diversity. They consume lots of smaller fish, and they’ll even eat each other. In every bite of salmon you are eating pounds of other fish. The little fish in the French markets are  lower down on the food chain and learning to eat fish like lotte (monkfish) and dorade (John Dory) doesn’t just widen my choices but it’s makes it easier on the marine environment.

So I’m tossing out my old cookbooks and giving up on these tired food writers who can’t see beyond a salmon mouse. All they’ve accomplished has been the  numbing down of our pallets.

This is the uncollected garbage and its smelling pretty bad

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer