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

Sud de France 2.8: Blessed Are the Cheese makers

When Charles de Gaulle became President of France in the 1950s he famously said, “How can you govern a country that has 261 kinds of cheese?” 

Well, it turns out that the tall Gaul was underestimating the scale of the problem.  A quick Wikipedia check finds that there were 350-400 officially recognized traditional types of cheeses back in the 1950s. Today it is closer to 1000. Variety may be the spice of life but this is a case of too many choices. 

A typical cheese market display

Wednesday is market day in Clermont and there are a half dozen or more cheese vendors in attendance. Some come with vans full of cheeses from all over France while others are farmer’s who sell their “fermier” or homemade cheeses from simple stands. Talking to one of them I learned that there are four categories of French cheese production. 

“Fermier” or farmer cheeses are home made cheeses produced on the farm where the milk is produced and according to several fermiers are naturally the best. Tolerable and often quite good I am told are the artisanal cheeses made in relatively small quantities by farmers using their own milk and milk from their neighbors. The cheeses the fermiers don’t like are the big wheels of cheese and the packaged cheeses produced by cooperative or “industriel” factories. 

Within these categories though there are hundreds of different types of cheeses and it going to take a long time to get out my brain and our lips wrapped around them which is which. 

More cheeses

Talking to friends I’ve learned about some specific Languedoc-Roussillon cheeses. Roquefort, for instance, is a blue cheese that comes from Roquefort and is made from sheep’s milk and has been aged in the caves of Roquefort. Not aged in caves or from Roquefort, France it isn’t real Roquefort.

But of course those in the know with a tap of their nose would say that the better than Roquefort is the local Bleu d’Auvergne which is made from cow’s milk and is milder and less salty.

And that’s the thing about cheeses. Just like wine the are different flavors within a single type of cheese and they vary all over the place. Brie from one fermier will have a slightly different flavor and texture than the brie from the farmer down the road. 

At the market one of the farmers sells discs of cheese that look to me to be chèvre. The farmer offers me a taste. It is like chèvre but has a little bite to it. I really like it. It's called Pélardon or pélardou and it’s a locally made in the Languedoc of goat’s milk. To help distnguish it from chèvre it is made into larger rounds.

One of the pleasures of walking through a French farmers' market it trying the samples of products that producers offer you. The cheese on the right (below) is I believe a fermier version of a mimolette. The cheese maker gave me a taste and despite its rough look it had an almost caramel sweet taste.

There’s a lot to learn about the 1000 French cheeses and we've discovered that it’s just a microcosm of the hundreds of details to France. 

When we planned to move here the last thing we thought we’d have to do is learn about was food. Well we are just neophytes. After cheese the next project is to learn about the dozens of types of sausage. 

Who would have thought that it would be so much work to resettle in France?

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 2.4: Market Dazed

Living in France market day is a special part of the week and Wednesday is market day in Clermont l’Herault. It’s an important part of any town’s economy and the markets are scheduled so that the farmers, cheese makers and other sellers can be in a different town on different days of the week, to spread the joy around so to speak

Market day is a medieval tradition and beloved because not only is it an opportunity to get extraordinary food, but it provides townspeople a chance to meet friends and catch up on the latest news and gossip.

So this Market day morning we grab our shopping bags and set out early for our first look at the Clermont market. When we arrived we parked at the municipal lot and walk about three blocks to the “Centre Ville” and the market.

The heart of Clermont l’Herault is the old church and as it has been done for centuries the market spreads itself through the streets surrounding the church. 

Even from blocks away from it you can see the market stalls extending for blocks in all directions. And even though it is early in the morning --some vendors are still setting up--there are dozens of people already shopping.

Walking into the market I am amazed at the variety of the stalls. There’s are three or four olives stand each with at least twenty varieties of olive concoctions, a couple of honey vendors, half a dozen produce stalls, about as many cheese stands and so on and so on. There’s a housecoat and pajama seller and a lingerie booth and a soap seller. A guy with a petite goatee is selling kitchen knives and across from me there is a van selling horse meat. 

Yes, there’s a horse meat vendor and he sells out of the side of his small van. There’s a small wooden riser in front of the van and after a minute or two I realize that it is for the older French people, who are physically very short and are his main clients. Horse meat isn’t all that cheap so I suspect that these older folk simply acquired a taste for it as children during the hard, hungry years just after the Second World War. We forget how devastated Europe was by the war. While America boomed countries like France and Italy were literally, no actually starving.

It’s always a good idea to walk the entire length and breadth of a market before you start to buy anything. It was a good idea here because there was something at the Clermont market I hadn’t seen at other French markets, sellers of fresh mushroom.

Clermont lies in the green, forested hills of the Herault and it seems that a lot of the locals go out and pick wild mushrooms to sell at the market. There were several at the Clermont market with improvised stalls made of old crates. On top of the vertical crates sat horizontal crates filled with huge boletus mushrooms the size of a softball, chanterelles by the ton at $5 lb and lots of wild mushrooms I’d never seen before.

At the produce stands there were lettuces the size of sombreros (1 euro each) and piles or berries and melons.

It was truly overwhelming and humbling. It is what life should be about, friends and good fresh food.

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer