Life in a food-crazed nation

Last week at the gym, I was trying as usual to relieve the boredom of the crosstrainer by observing the characters around me. Occupying side-by-side positions in the row of exercise bikes in front of me, a man and woman were engaged in animated conversation.

Actually, the man, a trim, dark, and very Gallic-looking specimen, was doing most of the talking, while the woman, a dishy blonde, seemed to be taking mental notes. (In Paris, most men are dark-haired while the majority of women are blonde. I'll let you figure it out.) He pumped his legs and mopped the sweat from his brow while describing in agonizing detail how to make a very complicated-sounding eggplant dish. She listened in absolutely rapt attention, posing the occasional technical question, pumping her pedals a bit more delicately and managing all the while to look very chic and feminine.

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One Friday a few weeks ago, Denis and I were driving on the A13 on the way to Normandie for the weekend. We pulled up at one of the many toll booths on the way. (In France, if you want to pay a highway toll with cash, you have to go through a human-operated booth.)

The toll-taker, a woman, held her hand out distractedly for our coins while talking animatedly on the phone to a friend. She finished describing a detailed culinary procedure involving puff pastry and Roquefort, hung up, and turned to us with our change.

"Sounds good!" Denis told her. "Are you giving out samples with the change?"

"No," she laughed. "But it's absolutely super to munch on with an apero (aperitif), and it's so simple! You just roll out a sheet of puff pastry, crumble Roquefort all over it, roll it up, brushing the edge with egg white to seal it. Then you cut it into slices about a centimetre thick, brush the top with egg yolk, and bake at 180 degrees (that's centigrade, for those of you who are taking notes) for about 15 minutes!"

Now, remember our setting. We are at the toll booth on a main superhighway, at a very high-traffic moment when much of Paris is heading out the country for the weekend. Cars are lined up behind us. But, especially remarkable for cruelly impatient Parisian drivers, no one honked at us. Perhaps they had noticed we were having a conversation, a sacred rite in France. Perhaps they furthermore intuited that in fact we were discussing that most sacred of subjects--FOOD.

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On the Métro earlier this year, I watched in amazement as the following scene unfolded before my incredulous eyes. A dapper young man (dark-haired, of course) in a suit and tie settled himself in the seat across from me. He placed his briefcase flat across his knees. Then he positioned a plastic bag of haricots verts (very thin and tender green beans) on one corner of the briefcase, and set about methodically topping and tailing his beans, making a neat rectilinear heap of them as he went and likewise meticulously dropping the tops and tails in their own little pile.

Now here was a young man who had obviously been devoting some mental space to thinking about what he was going to eat for dinner! I could identify with him, as I myself--except on the rare days when we eat out--spend a considerable amount of time thinking about that very thing.

*****


A couple of weeks ago was one of the year's best food-shopping opportunities--the annual Salon d'Agriculture, Paris' enormous agricultural expo. This event probably draws more people than any other single happening in town. Probably half the people come to show their children the fabulous bovines, goats, pigs, and other farm animals on display, and to renew their attachment to their treasured regional rural heritage. But the other half come for the food.

I am no exception. While it's true that I never tire of seeing France's majestic cows, I mostly look forward to browsing through the stands of hundreds of artisanal food producers. Cheeses, charcuterie (sausages, hams, etc.), olive oils, wines, breads baked on-site, honeys, and other diverse regional delicacies too numerous to count are displayed for tasting and purchasing, direct from the producers.



One of the biggest crowds this year was found around an animation on the wonders and virtues of...(brace yourself, Fat Free America) butter! Against a gigantic board announcing Couleur de Beurre--le Jeu (Color of Butter--the Game), three hosts/butter technicians in white lab coats demonstrated the making of butter the old-fashioned way. They shared their mikes with the audience and invited them to participate in the wondrous process of making butter, passing out sealed jars of rich cream to the kids in the audience and showing them how to shake it until the butter formed. See that globby heap of pale yellow that is being scooped into an old-time butter mold in the photo? Does it help you understand that, in France, butter is a good thing?

The agricultural expo is a food-maven's paradise. I returned home with aching shoulder sockets from my stuffed shopping baskets, which seemed to gain weight as I made my way home by Métro. (The expo's popularity makes it useless to drive there; you can't find a parking space.)

When I got home, I unloaded my treasues on the dining room table (main photo). Here's what I bought: Corsican ham and lonzo--a peppery cured pork loin; bags of sweet and bitter almonds from Provence; a nutty cow's milk cheese and a sausage from the Ardennes (Denis' birthplace); hunks of Laguiole (a buttery, incredibly flavorful, cheddar-like cheese) and blue cheese from Auvergne; a 5-liter (!) jug of golden, cloudy olive oil, produced by my preferred producer in the Baux Valley (home of France's best olive oils), the Moulin Jean-Marie Cornille (www.moulin-cornille.com); a loaf of organic chestnut bread; and a bag of the most incredible croquants d'amandes à la lavande, a hard and crisp Provençal cookie similar to Italian biscotti, full of whole almonds and in this case, flavored with lavender blossoms.


These cookies proved so irresistable to me that I somehow failed to tell Denis about them. I simply ate them all up, compulsively, one after the other. I cursed the fact that I didn't taste them while I was still at the expo, so I could have bought more. My culinary sleuth of a palate told me that they were made without butter or egg yolk. I perused the web relentlessly looking for a recipe for croquants without these two ingredients--in vain. Guess I'll have to experiment myself to find the secret formula.

It'll be just another chapter from my life in a food-crazed nation. No wonder I feel so at home here in the land of happy cows!

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