Cèpes

Early Autumn in France is marked by a profusion of woodland fungi many of which are edible. Cèpes are chief amongst these and many roadside stalls spring up with trays of them displayed to passing motorists. We stopped and bought some but were confused about which to select – some were very large, some were smaller, some were at a higher price than others. Our French is far from fluent so we didn’t understand some of the finer nuances of the descriptions the sellers gave us. They occasionally broke off the edges of the mushrooms, presumably to demonstrate that they didn’t contain the burrowing insect that surprised us when we prepared some we bought in Northern Italy. A non-consensus decision by one of us saw the purchase of two very large specimens. We cooked them in a simple dish described in Joanne Harris’s the French Market. They were very fresh and cooked nicely in a hot griddle pan to produce firm golden brown slices that we mixed with slices of potato, garlic, walnut oil and parsley. The flavour of the cèpes was very strong which was fine in itself but it did rather overpower the other ingredients, perhaps we were a little generous with the amount. At lunch in a simple restaurant a couple of days later we enjoyed an omelette aux cèpes where the strong flavour was moderated by the creaminess of the eggs.

Yesterday whilst driving through the town on Villefranche we came across a cèpe market. We didn’t understand very much of what was going on there at all! It was held in a covered marketplace but there were no stalls just large trays of cèpes on the floor surrounded by two or three people who were often talking in an animated way with many gesticulations. Each tray had an official looking piece of paper which contained details about the cèpes, including their site of origin but there didn’t appear to be a price. We assume that the people surrounding the trays were negotiating a price amongst themselves because occasionally one of them would pick up a tray and take them to a car. We were also left to speculate what the purchasers were going to do with the cèpes, one man loaded six large trays into the boot of his Mercedes. Were they destined for a large restaurant? Is there a secondary trade in cèpes? (but they don’t keep for much more than day) Were they going to be dried?

The house that we are staying in this week has a woody drive and under some of the trees there are large mushrooms which look like cèpes. In the UK we could buy a mushroom identification book and check their credentials but in France they have a much more practical scheme, all pharmacists are trained in the identification of fungi and they will tell you whether any specimens you bring them are edible or not. Further proof that this is a country which takes food more seriously than the UK.

The French Market by Joanne Harris & Fran Warde

We brought this cookery book on holiday with us. It was toss-up between it and Rick Stein’s French Odyssey and the French Market won because it was smaller. However it has proved much the best choice since its recipes are centred around in Nerac in South West France, only 45 minutes drive from where we are staying. All the regional ingredients mentioned in it are easily available at the local markets.

The book is very well written with a great main introduction and introductory paragraphs for each recipe. Joanne Harris is a well-known author of novels such as Chocolat and her literary style carries across into this book. The book is lavishly illustrated with excellent photographs taken by Debi Treolar. There are pictures of most of the finished dishes interspersed with perceptive images from markets and small French towns.

Since we have been staying in houses with well-equipped kitchens we have been able to try out many of the recipes. Some of them are simple assemblies of the wonderful produce that can be bought at French markets whilst other require more cooking. All are unpretentious dishes that make a memorable meal without hours of preparation. The salade aux noix takes advantage of the ready availability of walnuts and their oil in the French South West. The chèvre aux figues has been wonderful with baskets of fresh figs available for only 2 Euros at the markets, we tried it with both young and aged goat’s cheese and preferred the taste of the young as the recipe specifies. The lentilles en salade is a great blend of Puy lentils, courgettes, tomatoes and herbs which still tastes summery even with the lentils, exactly as the introductory paragraph suggests, or perhaps we are just suggestible.

There is a previous volume titled the French Kitchen which we haven’t seen yet but we look forward to using. It is good to see that Joanne Harris is donating all her earnings from these two books to Médecins Sans Frontières.

The diversity of tomatoes in France

The huge number of different types of single vegetables or fruit that are available in France when compared with the UK is often highlighted by food writers and cooks but that doesn’t lessen the impact of this in reality. We have visited four markets in the first week of our French vacation and have seen an amazing variety of produce.

This diversity seems most marked in tomatoes. We have seen at least a dozen markedly different varieties on market stalls. Last night we prepared a salad with four different varieties – medium-sized red round tomatoes, medium-sized yellow round ones, elongated red tomatoes with a pronounced point at the end, and very photogenic large orangey red tomatoes with a yellowy green star radiating out from the stem. All of them tasted different. The yellow ones were a little disappointing with a rather bland but the large striped tomatoes were as spectacular in taste as appearance with a huge burst of flavour that was sweet enough to justify tomatoes’ classification as fruit.

Most other produce is available in a similar diversity. Peaches can be yellow or white, round or flat. Lettuce can be green or red, straight-leaved or frizzy. Courgettes can be green or yellow, elongated or round. It makes shopping at the markets, cooking and eating food so much more interesting and rewarding.

The paucity of choice in the UK can be explained by a number of reasons. In French markets the stallholders are often the producers and so there will be representation of a large numbers of growers in a single market. Most produce grows well in Southern France so there will be little need to import any, it can be harvested and sold in the same day so storage and preservation is not an issue. In the UK there are a growing number of farmers’ markets where there is a greater diversity of produce but they are still not an everyday source of fruit and vegetables as the markets are in most of France. The majority of fruit and vegetables eaten in the UK is purchased at supermarkets run by a small number of companies. The variety of produce is slowly increasing in British supermarkets. It is now relatively common to find plum-shaped as well as round cherry tomatoes. Waitrose are expanding their range of produce and are including sections of seasonal regionally-grown fruit and vegetables. We even found stripy Marmande tomatoes in Waitrose last summer, though at a price ten times higher than on French markets. However most supermarkets still present an almost monocultural face of produce with virtually no choice for a single type of fruit or vegetable.

Could supermarkets change this without substantial increases in prices? We are no experts on food distribution or storage but it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a large tomato producer could grow two different varieties instead of one with only minimal increases in costs, only when the number of varieties increased to a point where specific extra deliveries were needed would transport costs increase. We look forward the regular appearance of irregularly shaped stripy tomatoes in British supermarkets.