Paris Revealed Page 17

  But I don’t think the students have been getting a representative sample. Logically, people wandering about alone at lunchtime are more likely to be getting a takeaway than going to a restaurant. And if you go to any office area in Paris—behind the Champs-Élysées, for example, on the grands boulevards, at the Bourse or in the north of the Marais, the cafés are always crammed with workers enjoying a sitdown meal with their friends and colleagues. They may not take two hours for lunch like they did (or claim to have done) in the past, but they’ll be feasting on the plat du jour or even the whole three-course menu of entrée, plat, dessert. Since it’s la crise, more of them will be drinking water from the carafe rather than having wine, or they will opt for just two courses—most restaurants and cafés offer a choice, entree/plat or plat/dessert for a reduced price. But they’ll be there, day in day out, lunching their way through the economic siege.

  No doubt talk at table will be at least partly about their working conditions, but they’re French, after all, and no conversation between French colleagues—even during a well-cooked, efficiently served lunch in a Parisian café—is complete without a whinge about how hard life is. The people tucking into that camel ‘roasted English style’ back in 1870 probably said much the same thing, although they were being bombarded by Prussians, so perhaps they had more of an excuse.

  In the market for a market?

  The market that Zola described in his novel Le Ventre de Paris was knocked down at the end of the 1960s and replaced with the homeless persons’ toilet and underground big-brand shopping hell that is Les Halles today. The food stalls were deported to Rungis, seven kilometres south of the city, near Orly airport, which is still one of the biggest and most varied food markets in the world.

  Fanatical foodies would drool over a visit to the immense market at Rungis, but everything interesting happens there before dawn (the fish market, for example, is only open from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m.), all buyers need a membership card, and they can only buy in bulk. So unless you’re in the market for a whole cow or half a ton of potatoes, it’s not a practical place for visitors.

  But this doesn’t matter, because at their best, the street markets in Paris itself are every bit as droolsome as Zola’s descriptions.

  To get the full market experience, it is wise to avoid the posher parts of town, where you’re not allowed to touch anything, and head to an arrondissement numbered over nine (except the 16th).

  My favourites are the big market in the 12th at the place d’Aligre, between Bastille and the Gare de Lyon, which combines cheap stalls with an upmarket covered hall, and my own local market in the 19th, at the rue de Joinville, reputed to be the cheapest in Paris.

  The Joinville market takes place every Sunday and Thursday, and its hundred or so stalls push Parisian small-shop specialization to the limit. There is a trader selling only onions (red, white and shallots) and two types of garlic. The herb sellers display nothing but different types of wet green leaf—parsley, chervil, marjoram, sage, coriander, mint. Another stand sells only dates (wrinkly or smooth) and raisins, which rise up from the table in three glistening golden mountains. The mushroom man is just as specialized—he deals only in grey button mushrooms from his farm in the Aisne, a hundred-odd kilometres northeast of Paris. He sells out every time, and by the end of the morning his stall consists of nothing but a stack of empty wooden crates, a handful of unsold mushrooms and a huge smile.

  The three or four cheese stalls all have a hundred or so varieties on offer, including adulterated kinds for those who think the French are fanatically purist—goat’s cheese coated in golden sultanas, or a soft, whitish variety covered in dried papaya. Cheese is probably the only product that’s more expensive at the market than in the nearby supermarkets, which may be why there are rarely queues in front of the fromager. At one of the stalls, I once heard a lady seller, impatient at the lack of custom, start to call out ‘Allez, mangez, régalez-vous, on est là!’—‘Come on, eat, enjoy yourselves, we’re here,’ which sounded almost like a call to cannibalism.

  At food markets in Paris’s poorer neighbourhoods, there are two zones—one selling higher-priced, top-quality merchandise and a second, in the case of Joinville squashed up against the back wall of the church, where people go to buy irregular cucumbers, fennel bulbs that have been amputated to take off the rotten bits, mottled (though perfectly edible) bananas, and dirt-cheap strawberries that will be fine for lunch, but by dinner time they’ll have mutated into a cross between a summer-fruit smoothie and Roquefort cheese.

  The crowds in the cheap section of the market are worse than anywhere else. People shove through with shopping baskets, crushing feet, while the street lamps become roundabouts in the flow of pedestrians, and when it rains, the earth at the base of tree trunks turns into a lake of trampled mud.

  Surprisingly, though, it is quite easy to get served, even in this chaos. You just have to be assertive à la parisienne.** At fruit or vegetable stalls, you fill a plastic bag with cherries, bananas or tomatoes and then hold out the bag at the end of your arm, waving it under the seller’s nose. Eventually, he will weigh it and ask for the money. Fish, cheese and chicken sellers have more organized queues, while smaller stalls may have no one waiting.

  The fringe of the market is fascinating, too. There are always some semi-legal stalls selling books, socks, flowers and more herbs, and the street is lined with the traders’ vans, all of them covered in graffiti. The clever traders get a tagger to paint every square centimetre of their van, so at least it looks tidier than the ones that are spider’s-webbed with scrawly, illegible signatures and arrondissement numbers.

  By 2 p.m., the market is winding down but the activity is still frenetic—now, green-suited cleaners are spraying the ground, shovelling cardboard boxes into a giant crusher and stacking wooden crates for collection. Poor people will be picking through the mounds of discarded food for fishtails, chicken feet, bruised pears, snapped and browned celery, or a tray of strawberries already turning into Roquefort.

  For six or seven hours, twice a week, it is pure Ventre de Paris, just as Zola described it. And the best thing, surely, is that on market days, the streets of this poor neighbourhood are invaded by an army of people pulling home their shopping trolleys, crammed with fresh fish and seasonal fruit and veg. It’s easy to imagine the scene in their households on market day—a bored teenager gets up from the couch, wanders into the kitchen and rummages through the food cupboards.

  ‘Mum,’ he or she moans, ‘why haven’t we got any Pringles?’

  To which the mother replies, ‘Shut up and eat an orange.’

  No wonder they stay slim.

  ‘Bacteria aren’t dangerous’

  It can be unnerving to watch all the food-fondling that goes on at a market, even more so to walk past a closed restaurant early in the morning and see boxes of lettuces, sacks of potatoes and trays of tomatoes sitting on the doorstep, left there by a delivery man who couldn’t wait for the restaurateur to turn up. Surely, you think, the veg is going to need an extra scrub to make sure it is free of all the dirt that can come its way while it is lying in such a vulnerable place? And even then, would it really be a good idea to eat it?

  To get an official view of the dangers of contamination from passing dogs, rats and inconsiderate humans, I went to visit Professor Gilles Brücker, just before he retired from his post as director of the Institut de Veille Sanitaire, France’s health-monitoring institute. His role, he told me, was to tell the government how dangerous a particular flu virus might be, or outline the measures necessary to combat an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease, and keep tabs on the general state of the nation’s health. A very healthy-looking doctor, he seemed totally at ease with the state of Parisian hygiene. As soon as I began to question Paris’s hands-on relationship with food, he flew to its defence.

  ‘You’ve got to get out of this phobia about touching food,’ he said. ‘People say that everything we touch is contaminated, and that everything that is
contaminated is dangerous, but it’s just not true.’

  I had always thought that ‘contaminated’ was a slightly negative quality in food, but apparently not. Surely, I asked, he wasn’t suggesting that bugs like e-coli and salmonella might be good for the human body?

  ‘Of course not,’ he said, ‘but they are extreme cases. There are plenty of other types of bacteria that are not dangerous.’

  ‘So it’s OK to touch food and pass on bacteria that we might have on our fingers?’

  ‘In some cases, yes. Cohabiting with bacteria is absolutely indispensable. The diversity of life is a fundamental part of our survival.’

  I tried to explain my own reservations about the diversity of life that might end up on a baguette after it had been fondled by a boulangère who just touched a coin that someone had picked up out of the gutter. He conceded that this might not always be very hygienic, but was scornful of the idea that it was always dangerous.

  ‘In many cases,’ he said, ‘touching a baguette like that would just be a perfectly acceptable exchange of everyday bacteria.’

  So it’s official. The body needs bacteria to survive, and Paris is a good place to come and stock up after living far too long in a sterile, plastic-bag and rubber-glove environment.

  Little did I know that I was destined to put this theory to the test.

  Give us this day our daily baguette

  The baguette is far more than a vector for germ exchanges. It is also the most sensual, and most publicly fondled, Parisian food. An obvious phallic symbol, surely it can be no coincidence that the word is just one letter away from braguette, the flies on a pair of trousers.

  ‘Just going to buy some nice pigs’ feet for dinner.’ This photo was taken outside a Parisian charcuterie back in 1970, but today only the headscarf would be different.

  The baguette is also a good indicator of a restaurant or café’s quality of food.*** If they serve up baskets of fresh baguette with the meals, it’s an excellent sign—it means they probably use the nearest boulangerie, and go to fetch fresh bread whenever they run out. Personally, I snub restaurants that use mini-baguette rolls, which are almost certainly bought in bulk and always seem to be undercooked. They’re often stingily served, too, and you’re lucky if you get a refill after your first ration of one roll per diner. No, the best eating places bring a basket of freshly sliced baguette to your table when your food is served, and will refill it on demand, or even spontaneously—for free, of course.

  If I am sounding like something of a baguette nerd, it’s because I am—officially. In March 2010, after more than a decade and a half of living in Paris, I was granted the honour of being a judge in the Grand Prix de la Baguette de Paris. (No, this is not a bread race—it means, literally, the grand prize for the Parisian baguette.) I had been selected to choose the city’s best bread.

  When I first received the letter from the Hôtel de Ville, I thought it must be a cruel joke. I assumed that only bakers and chefs were worthy of such an honour, or at the very least native-born Parisians. Aren’t Oscars voted for by movie people, and isn’t the manager of the French football team always a Frenchman?

  I was convinced that a friend of mine had got hold of some headed notepaper and was having a laugh, especially because I knew that the result of the competition could have a profound impact on the nation’s politics. As well as a cash prize and sackloads of publicity, the winner gets a year’s contract to supply bread to the Élysée, the presidential palace. It seemed incredible that Paris would entrust the task of deciding what the head of state ate for breakfast to a British writer whose website was at that very minute trumpeting the arrival of his new book called 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.

  But then an email came through from the office of Madame Cohen-Solal, the Deputy Mayor in charge of Commerce, Craftmanship, Self-Employed Professions and Art Trades, confirming the invitation. Apparently, someone in the department had read my books and had decided that I might know something about baguettes.

  And, in fact, baguettes do loom large in at least two of my books that have been translated into French. In A Year in the Merde, there’s a passage, often quoted to me by French journalists, about a visit to the boulangerie, which the hero Paul West describes as the only place in the world where the French will form an orderly queue (he’s not quite right, but then he’s only just arrived in the city). And in Talk to the Snail, I trace the pilgrimage of the baguette from boulangerie to restaurant table, noting every stage along the route where it is squeezed, sniffed and exposed to bacteria before entering the unsuspecting oesophagus of the Parisian diner.

  In any case, I accepted the challenge avec plaisir, and I’m very glad I did, because it turned out to be one of the most Parisian experiences I have ever had.

  Judging was to take place at the Chambre Professionnelle des Artisans Boulangers-Pâtissiers (an artisan being a ‘craftsman’) on the Île de la Cité, the part of Paris that has been inhabited since before Roman times, and presumably where the city’s first loaves were ever cooked. The building houses grand but rather rundown offices, including, on the first floor, a banqueting hall the shape of a slice of tarte aux pommes—a long triangle, panelled in wood the colour of a well-cooked baguette crust. From the wall hangs a breadmaker’s version of the tricolour, featuring an olive branch (make bread not war?), a pretzel and two baker’s oars—the wooden paddles used to remove loaves from the oven.

  The fifteen judges, most of them bakers or City Hall officials, sat at three long tables, one along each side of the triangle. I was between two bakers, both of them floury-fingered thirty-somethings, and one of them a previous winner of the prize.

  ‘So have you delivered bread to the Élysée every morning for a year?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oui, twenty baguettes a day.’

  His shop was in the 15th, the south of Paris—quite a hike across town to the 8th during rush hour, I sympathized.

  ‘Oh, they wanted me to deliver it at eight every morning,’ he said, ‘but I said I couldn’t get there before ten.’ Even the President had no authority over a Parisian baker, it seemed.

  ‘And did you ever see Sarko or Carla Bruni eating one of your baguettes?’

  ‘Never even got invited in,’ he grumped.

  ‘Still, a great competition to win,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, my turnover went up 15 per cent because of it.’

  Definitely a prize worth having, then, which might explain the incredibly strict entry requirements. Entrants had to be owners or employees of a Paris baker’s shop listed in the city’s business register, and their baguettes had to conform to the criteria laid out in decree number 93-1074 of 13 September 1993, which (in case you don’t know it) specifies that a baguette must be between 55 and 65 centimetres long and weigh 250–350 grams.

  Consequently, twenty-two of the entrants were immediately eliminated from the judging, thirteen of them for being oversized. I pleaded for the big ones to be retained—after all, who’s going to complain about receiving too much bread for their money? This, though, was shouted down as a typically Anglo-Saxon obsession with quantity over quality. And rules were rules.

  So far, so methodical, but anarchy quickly kicked in. Like most Parisian meetings I have attended, the theoretical agenda didn’t turn out to be the actual one. First, a baker who had come along to be a judge wasn’t on the list, and began complaining that he would have entered the competition if he’d known he wasn’t going to be on the jury panel. He was given some judging forms and allowed to start tasting (rules are rules, unless someone French complains).

  The main source of typically Parisian chaos, however, was the hygiene, or total lack of it. The waiting baguettes, all laid out as naked as a Saint-Tropez sunbather except for the ring of paper bearing their number, were heaped up on a table at one end of the room, in a tasty-looking logpile. When the judging began, the loaves were gathered up in batches of five (by bare-handed helpers) and taken to the tasting tables, where they were sliced, fo
ndled, sniffed and chewed by the judges, all of whom had shaken hands before the competition began just to make sure that any bacteria picked up in the métro or on a door handle had been shared out evenly. During the whole judging process, no one wore gloves or used napkins. It was the food-hygiene equivalent of an unprotected orgy. At one point, a TV cameraman accidentally swept a batch of baguettes on to the floor. They were simply picked up and replaced on the table.

  After my initial shock, however, I realized that this was the only way to get the authentic taste of a Parisian baguette. If the bread hasn’t been through the bacterial obstacle course, it won’t have that truly Parisian tang. The loaf must bear traces of deodorant, as if it had been hurriedly transported from boulangerie to café under a waiter’s arm or clutched to his chest. It also has to have other people’s fingermarks on it, because, realistically, before the bread is eaten it will probably have been squeezed by the baker, the shop assistant, at least one waiter or waitress and, if it has been served up and not eaten by one tableload of diners, it will have been re-served to a second table, possibly being tested for size and freshness by a few picky eaters along the way.

  In short, we were road-testing these baguettes in real-life conditions rather than giving them a sterile laboratory test. The winning loaf was going to be a worthy champion, fully capable of standing up to anything the city could throw at it.