Salade

I love salads. When I’m in the states, I tend to eat a lot of them, sometimes every day, which really, is not such a bad habit to have, even if it may seem a tad obsessive. Left to my own devices, I tend to put bits of every vegetable in the fridge right into the salad along with whatever leafy accompaniment I have on hand, usually baby spinach leaves. Then I debate over which salad dressing I’m in the mood for and what I actually have on hand. Some fresh ground pepper and I’m happy as a clam.
Now, the French do eat salads, and quite often a meal is begun with a salad course before moving on to the main dish. Yet their idea of what entails a salad is slightly different from my own heavy handed approach. For the most part, simplicity seems to rule. A salad could be just “salade” (i.e. lettuce which shares the name) or just beets, or just shredded carrots. Usually this has a bit of a quick vinaigrette mixed in, just some balsamic and olive oil. My French mom once went wild with a salad; she put in tomatoes and along with it some bits of cheese, plus the prerequisite vinaigrette.
I tend to get rather excited over the word salad even if its just one vegetable since sometimes that is the only vegetable I will see all day. I do not count potatoes as vegetables. Though I must admit, I was given a slightly skewed first impression of my host family’s eating habits when I first moved in. They wanted to make me feel special and really show me some very “French” meals, so lunches and dinners were heavily weighted towards meats and seafood. Now they have realized that they can put anything in front of me and I’ll eat it and it doesn’t have to be special or stereotypically French. Thus my introduction to cèpes and a couple other vegetable centered meals such as last night’s chou-fleur (cauliflower) and the previous night’s artichokes which gloriously littered our plates with tooth-scraped leaves.
Salads in restaurants have a tendency to be a bit more complicated, though not by much. There is the classic goat cheese salad. This involves taking a green salad, romaine lettuce, adding maybe some walnuts and grated carottes and then on the side including two triangles of toast with a warm round of goat cheese sitting on top. This is quite tasty and I’m really developing a liking for goat cheese. Another salad I had in a restaurant was what they called “une salade gourmande.” This included some very nice salad greens and sliced tomatoes along with seemingly every type of charcuterie known to mankind piled on top completely hiding the “salad” part of the salad. Though it certainly ranks as one of the meatiest salads I’ve ever had or, really, ever seen, it was pretty good. And it gave me a chance to try foie gras on the sly since it was included on a bit of toast in the same manner as the goat cheese.
But the most puzzling salads that I’ve found are those that are quite short on vegetables in general. Often they will take blé (wheat) or rice or couscous, mix in a few finely diced onions, carrots and maybe a few other things so tiny as to be unrecognizable, and pass it off as a salad. I am well aware that we have veggie-less salads in the states, for example fruit salad, pasta salad and jello salad (which completely baffle me, but that is a whole different subject), but the fact that you have to be very careful to read the ingredients of a salad before ordering to make sure there is salad involved takes some getting used to. I actually quite like the blé salads, they can be refreshing.
I looked up the definition of “salade” in Le Petit Larousse, a French dictionary which is not at all “petit” and after defining it as what we know as lettuce it listed this:

“Plat composé de feuilles de ces plantes, crues et assaisonnées. ”
Which roughly means: a dish composed of leaves of this plant (lettuce), raw and seasoned.

An interesting definition since salads very often do not contain lettuce at all, and with the rice and blé salads, they often need to be cooked first, even if they are served cold.
I also checked Word’s definition of salad and was met with several responses:

1. a cold dish consisting mainly of a mixture of raw vegetables, whole, sliced, chopped, or in pieces, usually served with a dressing for flavor. Many other ingredients may be incorporated into a salad, which can be served as a separate course or as an accompaniment to other food.
2. a cold dish consisting of a particular type of food such as a single vegetable or a selection of fruit, cut into pieces or slices, and served usually with a dressing
3. any leafy vegetable commonly used to make a green salad, typically the many types of lettuce, watercress, chicory, and endive
4. a confused or varied mixture

So I suppose maybe I am too strict with my idea of salads. As with everything else here, I am truly broadening my horizons. Though, still, I was inordinately excited when I ordered “une salade végétarienne” and received a plate twice the size of my head piled high with practically every vegetable that is in season here right now. Sometimes habits are hard to break.

crevettes and cèpes

The last few days have been met with some new adventures in my culinary world. Honestly I’ve been quite proud of my gustatory accomplishments, I was never an adventurous eater and was labeled “very picky” as a child. That was putting it mildly. But I made the resolution that I would try anything that was put in front of me during this lovely sejour in France. For the most part my resolution has yielded some pleasant surprises. Though not my favorites, I can now eat oysters on the half shell with no curling of the lip. It’s much better to just swallow them, rather than chewing, and a good dousing with lemon juice helps them to slide down nice and easy. The mussels cooked, au natural, with just some onion, parsley and a bit of water were quite good. Plus its rather fun to take the empty shell of an eaten mussel and use it, pinched between the index and thumb, to extract the other mussels from their shells. Everyone thinks that the French are terribly elegant and sophisticated, and thus that must translate to how they eat. In fact, though they are quite adept with the fork and the knife, the French are just as likely to abandon all silverware and go at things with their hands. Hence my lesson in the correct manner of eating mussels. In addition, meals are typically accompanied by bread, stereotypical, but stereotypes and clichés tend to have origins in reality. A slice is kept, not neatly on a separate plate or perched on the edge of the main plate, but plopped on the table, crumbs and all. But the best part about the bread is that it is perfectly acceptable and normal to use it to sop up all the juices and seasonings left on the plate after the meal has been finished. Or it can be used to push food onto a fork. I love to use my bread to pick up all the little bits that get left behind that I can never get with a fork but always seem to taste the best.

My host mother went to the market this weekend, not really anything out of the ordinary for the French but it resulted in two things: crevettes and cèpes. We began lunch with the crevettes, just simple shrimp, really there was nothing done to them at all. Perhaps this may seem rather unremarkable, but let me emphasize the fact that nothing was done to them. Ok, yes, they were cooked, but that’s it. The lovely little shrimp we were to enjoy at lunch got to keep their heads, shells and legs right to the table. Once again, my beautifully elegant French family set the table with all the accouterments: plates, cups, forks, knives, spoons and napkins, only to ignore the silverware and grab for the shrimp with their bare fingers. Soon there was a building pile of shrimp heads, legs and exoskeletons on my host father’s plate. He eagerly pulled off a head, briefly sucked on it to extract any morsel that might have been left inside, then efficiently removed the shell, legs and tail all at once to expose the tasty flesh. This was then dipped in the excellent mayonnaise which was made, much to my amazement, half and hour before with a few brief turns in the food processor of an egg, mustard and some oil. I glanced over at my host mom and saw that she was repeating the procedure, though without the head slurping and with far more decorum. (Not a surprise, she tends to tell him that he eats like a “cochon:” a pig.) After a few hesitations and after eating a few of the other offerings on the table, I decided that I couldn’t be a baby about things and should go ahead and try the shrimp. I grasped one, the long antennas trailing from the bowl and clumsily pulled off the head, putting it aside. Then, I tried to pull off the exoskeleton but discovered that for me, it only came off in little bits and that it took me quite awhile before I had a naked shrimp in my grasp. I politely asked for a bit of mayonnaise, which was given to me with the encouragement to take as much as I wanted, dipped my shrimp and bit into the newly exposed flesh. I’m not sure when I’d last had shrimp (there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for eating shrimp as a veggie, you remember, and before that I was firmly a hater of all seafood), but I was quite happy with what I discovered. Shrimp, especially covered in fresh mayonnaise, is much, much better than I remember. My guess is probably that it’s because they are actually fresh rather than the poor specimen usually found at the supermarket, headless, legless, and frozen of any fresh flavor that they might have ever contained.

After the dejeuner, my host mom started to prepare the cèpes, some enormous mushrooms that had to have been bigger than my head, which she had gotten that day at the market as well. I was under the impression that they were some sort of regional specialty which was in season, but an internet search revealed them to be a very mature variety of porcini. Unfortunately, once porcini, or cèpes, reach such maturity, they begin to have “petits vers” that start living in the gills. That would be worms for those of you non Francophiles. Teeny, tiny white worms that come out when you either put salt on the mushroom or cook it in the oven. The oven method works much better, but my host mom did not find that out until after she had cut up the mushrooms and thrown them in a saucepan with some oil and garlic and all the little vers started running for the exits with no place to go. Really I had pretty much accepted that there were going to be worms in my dinner of omelette aux cèpes, I couldn’t see them and passed it off as best as I could as a bit of added protein. I’d accepted it until my lovely host sister started picking through her cèpes asking, “is this a worm?” “is this one?” continually reminding me of the fact that I was eating wormy overly mature mushrooms. They are supposed to be a delicacy but even ignoring the worminess, they didn’t taste as good as the smelled, and really they smelled quite good with all the garlic and parsley. I finished my portion, slightly greenish in coloration from the wormy gills which were an interesting shade of “vert” and declined a second portion despite a deep love for both omelettes and mushrooms. (Interestingly, my host family made a big deal of saying how beautiful the mushrooms were, with green gills and slightly slimy caps: beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.) Dommage, too bad, but maybe next time there won’t be worms … or maybe we’ll buy different mushrooms. At least I tried it and finished it, right? I’ll give myself a pat on the back, even if no one else will.
But as it usually is in life, our little battles are often rewarded. The Sunday dessert this weekend was a lovely tarte aux framboises, seen at the top in all its glory. It was incredibly easy to make, just some pre-done "pates sable" (pie/tarte dough) baked up in the oven then filled with first a layer of crushed frozen raspberries, then a layer of nuttella and finally, decorated with beautiful circles of the same frozen framboises, uncrushed this time. Its as simple and as tasty as it looks and sounds. Bon Appetit!

Les Huîtres

This past weekend, our group took an excursion out to the Bassin d’Arachon, famous for the highest sand dune in Europe, beaches and also for their oysters. In true French form, the priority stop, the first one, was of course at the Maison d’Huîtres where we learned about the farming of oysters in the museum before moving on to an oyster restaurant for the dégustation (the tasting). The dune and the beach could wait.
At the museum we learned that the Bassin d’Arachon is an ideal spot for producing oysters. Unlike some places they grow them in mesh bags to protect them from predators whereas other producers grow the oysters just on the floor of the bay. Oysters can live at least 25 years, longer even I think though I don’t remember the exact number. We typically eat them when they are three years old. The oysters from the bay of Arachon taste different from those in the open ocean because of water salinity and other such things. From what I understood of the presentation given in French the Bassin is an estuary, giving very visible changes the depth of the water at low and high tide. Oysters have been eaten since prehistoric times. The Romans would eat anywhere between 100 and 150 oysters per person and the Greeks used the shells as voting papers. Louis XIV absolutely adored oysters and gave them their status as a delicacy. Don’t quote me on this but I think they said that his chef committed suicide or died because he was unable to serve oysters one night.
After our instruction on the production and life cycle (including reproduction, they switch gender back and forth, one year female, then next male, without consistancy) of the oysters, we walked around the boat landing to a tiny restaurant passing piles of empty shells, stacks of tiles and empty mesh bags giving the area an air of authenticity. Our group of Americans all crowded around picnic tables inside and outside and stared, both impatiently and warily, at the plates piled high with les huîtres crues, the raw oysters still on their shell. The salty water which probably came from the ocean still covered the oysters and the plate surrounding them, specially made with impressions around the circumference for the shells to rest in. A few slices of lemon were casually placed on top of the pile.
We were given our marching orders; one glass of wine and six oysters per person. If there is extra, it is to be passed to the next table. Afterward there will be meats, cheeses and a tarte. For the vegetarians (those who are not taking a break like I am), a cup of nuts was given in place of the oysters.
For such a small animal, oysters can be fairly intimidating, but we plunged in, most of us without too much cringing. After watching the first couple brave souls clumsily detach the oyster from its mooring on the shell, squirt them with lemon and swallow them down without any ill effects it was time for me to try. I had been pretty excited about the chance to taste them, but for some reason I was imagining something plump and white, and the thin, grey creature on the shell was less appetizing than I was expecting. Despite this I took my plastic fork and scraped the creature free and after pouring off a bit of the extra seawater that appeared I dumped it into my mouth, chewed a couple times and swallowed.
Those who said it tasted like ocean were dead on. It was as if a bit of ocean solidified into a slightly slippery/slimy chewy mass inside a shell. Now there is nothing wrong with the taste of the ocean, I’ve gotten a few mouthfuls in my time just messing around on the beach, but as a delicacy, I have not been completely sold. I tried one oyster on a piece of bread spread with butter as the guy across from me was doing, but the smooth butter just accentuated the slipperiness of the mollusk (it is a mollusk right?). Occasionally bits of grit and shell came with the flesh which added authenticity, but was not the most enjoyable thing texturally.
I did not finish my share of six but did make it through four without any gagging or choking. I was very proud of myself since I was once a very picky child who reacted badly to even a zucchini. My neighbor to my left took care of any extras that were left by me and others who were unconvinced of the greatness of the oyster. Not just finishing the extras on our table but collecting some from other tables who completely hated them and finishing off at least an entire plate by himself, probably eating a minimum of 25 oysters (at least he didn’t try and go for the gluttony of the Romans or we might have needed to find him a vomitorium). This is before the cheese and charcuteries (like deli meats) with bread, fresh tomatoes and fruit tarts for dessert. Others had friends take pictures and video clips of their oyster tasting, complete with the slurping and twisted faces pulled while swallowing. I opted out of the photo opportunity.
In typical fashion, the tarte aux pommes was my favorite though I enjoyed the tomatoes greatly, taking far more than my share. The crust of the tart was flaky and the apples were crisp yet flavorful. I could have eaten many more of them, going through tartes like some went through oysters.
But I can now say that I have tried les huîtres, I am not lacking in my adventurousness with food. I would be willing to try them again, perhaps cooked this time. Baked or cooked in butter or maybe fried. I mean, Julia Child always felt that everything is better with butter so it must be true, right? Although, I don’t know if frying oysters is ok, it might be too undignified for such a delicacy. Perhaps I need to try eating them in the manner of the French, as explained by my French instructor the next day. Instead of chewing them as Americans assume needs to be done, they are swallowed whole, straight from the shell. On ne sait jamais, you never know, maybe it is better that way. However now that oysters have been tried I think that I can move on through my list of very French foods. Snails seem like a good step after oysters. We’ll see what shows up on the menus.

again, pictures to follow once I have better access to the internet!

Les canelés bordelaise

Walking the rue Sainte Catharine or anywhere else in Bordeaux you will inevitably pass various patisseries displaying their wares in the window. Almost as inevitable, you will see caramel brown molded pastries. These are canelés, one of the specialties of the region. Unfortunately I do not know the history of these sweets, just that they are everywhere. We found them sold all over Saint Emelion when we spent a Saturday there and they are even sold from a cart on the pedestrian street of rue Sainte Catharine with the large sign behind it claiming that these are artisanal.
Since I am still a tourist here, not settled in with a host family and living in a sort of limbo between summer and the actual start of university courses, I went for the touristy little cart for my first taste of canelés. They are not large, just about as tall as a normal sized finger is long. Since there was no one to explain the proper way of eating it, I went straight in and took a bite from the top. Though baked and solid, the inside is like a very sturdy custard. Not so custardy that it would begin to ooze, firmer than most crème brulées, but not a bread-like pastry that one might expect from looking at the outside appearance.
The taste, I must admit, was not the explosion of excitement that I had been hoping for. Pleasant to be sure, it was sweet in a caramel way, with a hint of the rum that flavors it, but nothing too complex or different about it. Now I have quite a sweet tooth, which everyone here has quickly discovered, but despite being glad that I tried the canelés, I see no particular reason to search them out again. Bien sur, I would not refuse one if it was offered to me, but I think my waistline is safe from canelé gorging. Too bad I can’t say the same thing about the chocolatiers or the baguettes.

pictures to come once I have better access to the internet

A fish with the head on

It’s been a year since last eating meat. I was perfectly happy as a veg, feeling healthy and maybe even a bit self righteous and superior. But now I’m in Bordeaux, France and I had to say “au revoir” to my dietary choices. France is not a country that accommodates a vegetarian lifestyle. Their meals tend toward carbs and meats with very few vegetables or fruits. Of course, despite this regime they remain slim and svelte and generally gorgeous. Perhaps they know something we don’t. That secret is learning how to “be” rather than “do” which is terribly difficult for Americans. Hence their prevalent café culture where you can sit for hours over a tiny espresso and people watch.
As for the food, there is a reason that one of the main gastronomic capitals of the world is in France. A meal is not something to rush through, its not fueling or a method of survival. Instead it is a way of life, to be eaten over several hours accompanied with good conversation and slowly sipped glasses of wine.
Yesterday a friend and I chose to slow down and skip the cheap (but tasty) sandwich for dinner and actually go to a brasserie to sit down and eat. We ordered a demi-picher of vin rouge which was brought along with some tasty olives to tide us over until our order was ready. The olives with their tangy oily surface brought out the flavor in our red wine for a very enjoyable flavor experience.
The menu was a challenge, our French skills still in the baby stage, yet we managed to choose and order. My friend chose the “comfit de canard” (duck) and I chose from the list of “poissons” (fish). My taste of the duck was rich and with a well rounded flavor that filled the mouth and felt smooth on the tongue. At first that one taste made my own meal choice seem like it was perhaps a mistake.
The fish (an unknown variety of which I cannot even remember the name) was cooked in the style “Espagnol.” The plate set down was beautifully arranged with a neatly molded pile of rice above a full fish: head, tail, skin, bones and eyes. It looked to be pan fried with garlic, bell peppers and olive oil covering the body. The first tiny bite required delicate removal of translucent fish bones from my mouth and was bursting with fishiness. The best I can say is that I did not gag, nor did I give up. Nor did I covet my dinner partner’s duck, at least not too much or for too long. With each bite the fishy flavor dissipated and was replaced by a taste of white flesh resplendent in olive oil. My palate fared better when taking a bit of bell pepper along with the bit of cream white flesh or padding the flavor with the perfectly cooked white rice. After consuming most of the flesh of the fish I was remarking, “I ate fish and I liked it!” with an overzealous sense of awe. I felt perhaps I should try the cheek or the eye since those are the foodies prized portions but I simply was not ready for that. Maybe next time, though it might require more wine before that is possible. I’m still getting used to taking bites that have been carefully removed of bones before entering the mouth.
For now it is enough that I have gone from a meatless diet to eating a fish, head still attached, when I hadn’t liked seafood or fish even when I was still eating meat before. My palate and my stomach are being taken for quite the ride. Thanks to French waiters they are given plenty of time to rest and recover while waiting for l’addition (the check) and sipping the remaining wine. They are also being rewarded with baguettes and dark chocolate from a gorgeous little chocolatrie on the Rue Sainte Cathrine, the longest pedestrian street in all of France.

Welcome to a vegetarian’s exploration of food in France in all its fleshy varieties.