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food markets

Beef and chicken à la française

So here we are in France. We arrived on Sunday morning, in Lyon, and I for one am rejoicing in the cooler temperatures – Parma was a steamy 35 degrees when we left. We’ve had our customary stage weather – chilly and drizzly with a bit of sun thrown in.

We had a free night in Lyon and headed for Le Nord, one of the Bocuse brasseries, on the expert recommendation of a local (thanks Jeremy). An excellent salad of green beans, artichoke hearts and a silky slab of foie gras de canard, followed by a wholesome waffle with sides of applesauce, warm chocolate and cream. Pas mal, and a good entree to France.

Monday we were up with the birds and off to Bourg-en-Bresse where we met our new friends Philippe Marchenay and Laurence Bérard, researchers in food and bio-ethnology, who talked to us about geographical designations and biodiversity in French food products.

Our first example was Charolais beef, plodding towards AOC/PDO designtion and so widely known already that they have their own museum at la Maison du Charolais, where we had a talk and a tasting.

Then onto the bus and off at a Charolais farm.

Dominique Gateau, the owner, talked to us about his breeding practices, which involve 24 hour video surveillance during calving, which lasts from January till June. We met a few of the newcomers and were shown some of the qualities that make good beef cattle.

Afterwards, he set up a little wine and cheese party on some hay bales, featuring of his own goat and cow cheese.

And then back to le Maison du Charolais where they also have a restaurant, and we had a Charolais steak before heading off into the night.

Tuesday morning we ambled across the street to Lyon’s excellent food market, les Halles de Lyon, where Philippe and Laurence guided us through the stalls.

We fetched up at a great cheese stand and bought plenty for lunch which we enjoyed in Philippe and Laurence’s comfortable house in the country.

Lots of cheese, wonderful bread, salumi, apple juice, Philippe’s cornichons, a bowl of fresh strawberries, and their neighbour’s wine.

Then to the Bresse Chicken farm owned by Christophe Vuillot, who, at 37, thanks to skills at poultry farming learned from his grandfathers, has a happy life raising his happy chickens who fill the fields around his house, with a small flock of guinea fowl and a grey border collie keeping an eye on them. The birds are long maturing, fed on a mixture of special poultry feed and what they forage in the grasses, and they are given a helping of whey in their feed which works as a natural preventative against worms and parasites. They are also, of course, healthy enough that they don’t need the chronic antibiotics that battery farmed chickens do.

We were given a demonstration of the dressing of these very special and very expensive chickens, which are slaughtered on the farm, their head and neck feathers left on (for aesthetic purposes, the farmer explained) and then sewn into a linen casing that expels air and acts as a secure protection for up to a week. The chickens are prepared this way for competitions and feast day – 150 of them are hand sewn each Christmas at this farm alone.


And for supper, we had… chicken.

Modena: more than vinegar

Spent Saturday in Modena; near to Parma and blessed that day with great weather. There was some kind of Ferrari show going on which was a little confusing as I think we came away with a distorted sense of the proportion of Ferraris to centrally located parking spots. We had a nice amble and a nice lunch. Here are some sights…


A couple of the carvings on the duomo.


An old English friend makes an appearance in a food shop in Modena.


Michael Schumacher – shorter and hairier than I thought he’d be. We were constantly reminded that Modena is cartown as well as vinegarville.


An excellent covered market with lots of my favourite things…

In Modena, the dogs are careful and the pumpkins are haunted (is that why the tortelli di zucca taste so good?):

Belgian cuisine to kitchen gardens

We said a fond farewell to Peter Schollier on Wednesday, after an entertaining journey through Belgian cuisine and the poles of food neophilia and neophobia.

Belgian cuisine, which for most of us (who might think of it) means moules et frites, or Belgian waffles, or perhaps even waterzooi, has been subjected to scrutiny and refinement by modern Belgians and is now a large and growing and diverse – and as we might expect, somewhat regional – gastroterritory. Which is what you get from a country that only achieved independence in 1839, after centuries of wandering borders and serial occupation by and influence from the big guys on every side. Anyway, the only Belgian restaurant I know of outside Belgium is Belgo in London (its founders were a Belgian and a Canadian!); Schollier says that the incomparable Leon’s now has branches in Paris.

He then stepped carefully through the history of post-WW2 dining habits in Germany and Italy, building a case to compare the relative adventurousness of the Germans with the nationalistic, if not regionalistic preferences of the Italians. It was a story we’ve certainly seen played out ourselves in Italian restaurants and markets: no foreign dishes or products besmirch the menus of local eateries, and it is fiendishly difficult to find ‘foreign’ ingredients in traditional food retailers, including the open air markets. Which makes sense in many ways; it is absolutely consistent with the vision of Slow Food, for example, which advocates the preservation of local cuisines. But a tough course to follow with today’s international appetites: even in Italy the workforce is swimming with foreign labour which will surely have some kind of effect down the line.

I was curious about the kitchen garden (potager in French) class as I remembered the term from living in England. In Canada I think we exclusively used the more prosaic term ‘vegetable garden’. Which to the niggler doesn’t completely describe something that typically includes fruits and herbs.

Antoine Jacobsohn, from Le Potager du Roi, Versailles, is a specialist in the history of food and horticulture and he shared a bit of his ethnographic research into gardeners and gardening.

In one sesson, he gave us what must be a preview of the paper called “Hot Bed Techniques and Morals: Out of Season Produce in Early Modern France” which he’ll be delivering at a conference in Glasgow March 15-17 (Gardening: Histories of Horticultural Practice). He told us about hot beds which were used by Parisian market gardeners (and others, but Paris was our focus) to force vegetables out of season, with the aid of bell jars (aka cloches) and frames. Pretty much the same tricks used by home and allotment gardeners today. The morality discussion about out of season produce – is it right to trick nature into producing greater yield which, by nature, is less flavourful than seasonal produce? – is, he argued, not a contemporary one, but actually started sometime around 1600.

We learned that, for Parisians, the split between production and consumption only really happened in the 1960s when Les Halles, the vast central market, as well as the city’s slaughterhouse (from where the science museum, La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie now sits) were moved out of town. A good idea in many ways – traffic congestion and hygiene among them – but it did remove food’s origins from the lives and sight of the population who were buying it. The central market used to be a popular meeting and social place outside market hours (which were few as they only traded for four hours in the early morning). The new market at Rungis is ringed by roads suitable for road transport and is not particularly open to visitors, although a determined punter can get there by bus and perhaps manage to pay an entry toll for a look round.

He concluded with an overview of his oral history project, discussing with food producers around Paris their views on the food products of today. He surprised most of us, I think, by reporting that the people he spoke to are by and large pleased and proud of the food they produce, and consider it better in many ways than what was grown in the past, in terms of hygiene, cultivation methods, nutritional value and yield. They did not always evaluate it in terms of flavour, but those who did were able to state that what had tasted best in the past was also the trickiest to sell in high volume. Quality is a perishable commodity, and that’s what makes it hard to produce, difficult to distribute, and of course expensive to buy.

Market Envy

We have a lot of excellent markets and farm shops in Victoria, but reading a pair of articles in the Guardian about food markets made me pine and yearn all over again. Borough Market is one I try to visit every time I’m in London, and it seems to get better every time; the variety and quality are staggering, and the ambience incomparable. In the companion article about new vs traditional food markets the excellent point was made that marketeers offer human contact in an age where we’re removed not only from the source of our food itself but also from the people who raise, process and package it. And that small scale trading in food is not a bad way to make a living, for both sides of the barrow. Supermarkets are cheap, fast and impersonal, like so much of our world today; I’d rather give my money straight to the farmer if I can.

It’s not unlike buying discounted books: if you buy a cut-price read from Walmart or Costco or an online discounter, you are also cutting the royalties of the writer, which are slender enough. So too the farmer loses on the profit margin for retailing through supermarkets. So I don’t begrudge paying a supermarket price to a farmer any more than I do paying the retail book price to an author (who’s had to purchase the book from the publisher).

Something struck me in a recent interview with 87-year old Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“My poetics are totally different to something like the Ginsberg school, which is based on the idea of ‘first thought, best thought’. It is a solid concept to get the most direct transcription of your consciousness, especially if the person doing it has an original mind. Allen Ginsberg had a fascinating and genius mind and so the poetry is fascinating and genius. But when this method is laid on to thousands of students, many of whom don’t have original minds, you get acres of boring poetry.”