France Dining Report
Trends, tips and cooking French in France, or chez toi.
Is France the country that thyme forgot? Eleven days into my stay here, I still have yet to locate one tiny branch of the fresh herb — and I’ve looked in three supermarkets, a hypermarché, a farmers market (in Lacanau, the tiny town where Thierry’s family has always spent summers), an organic foods shop with an otherwise splendid produce assortment, and a gorgeously provisioned market hall in a Bordeaux suburb.
How is this possible? If I had to pick one herb as being most important to French cooking, it would be thyme. The other contender would be parsley, and even the parsley situation has been grim — hard to come by, and past its prime when we did find it. The thyme thing, though, reminds me of what happened last year: We couldn’t find Dijon mustard; it turned out there was a national shortage.
On the other hand, the variety of other ingredients you can buy here is stupendous. If you’ve been reading this newsletter more than a week or two, you might remember I’m crazy for plums. You don’t get my all-time favorite Santa Rosas here, but you do get things I’ve never seen stateside. Today I found the purple ones you see in the foreground of the photo above — ID’d in the organic market just as “prunes rouges” (red plums). They’re deep purple, actually, and much tinier than they appear in the pic — each is the size of a jumbo grape! Very sweet. The reddish ones surrounding them were identified as “prunes jaunes” (yellow plums). Nice bright flavor, fun! In the b.g. are a couple of Reine Claudes (I think these are the same as greengage), and a red plum, all left over from last week. And there were other beauties at the store I passed up. Crazy!
And then there’s the fish situation. A few days ago the standalone fishmonger here in Lacanau had beautiful dorade (two kinds — royale and marble, I think), monkfish, rougets, loup de mer (a.k.a. branzino), sole, halibut, sardines — all whole fish.
