MILK, EGGS, BUTTER
Let’s start with milk. Leave your preconceptions at the door. For a culture that loves its cheese, it doesn’t give a damn about milk. Forget about your dairy aisle packed with milky options: 5% cream, lactose-free 2%, organic whole milk, skim fortified with milk solids for that “richer flavour” – I never thought about milk in Canada because I could have it in whatever form I wanted it, whenever I wanted it. Not here. The French buy their milk off the dry-goods shelf in room-temperature plastic jugs, in skim, 1.5% milk fat or 3.5%. Or, if not jugs, they buy it in nondescript white and blue tetrapacks, standing one hundred to a layer on skids at the side of the grocery store. These tetrapacks should just have the words FOR CHRIST’S SAKE YOU’RE NOT CONSIDERING DRINKING THIS ARE YOU? written on them because they communicate a kind of platonic ideal of the kind of thing not intended for internal use. This is “sterilized milk,” and you should be glad you’ve never seen it or drunk it. It’s been microwaved, ultrasounded, deloused, thrice-filtered, and poked with a stick. I wouldn’t be surprised if they shot it through the middle of the sun for good measure. It pours with a weird glug, is faintly yellow, and smells of shoes. If you chill it to almost freezing, you can drink it. But you shouldn’t. You should never drink milk that has an expiry date further in the future than the can of Coke you bought at the same time.
Luckily, there is a sort of “specialty” fridge at some of the bigger stores where you can buy cold “fresh” milk, but only the 1.5% variety, and for twice the money. It comes out looking a lot like milk and even tastes quite a lot like milk, but I have a powerful suspicion that it’s the tetrapack stuff, bleached and chilled, and all of it gives me the shivers.
As for coffee-cream, go away. We’ve searched high and low, and anything over 3.5% is treated as a dessert cream, thickened with corn starch and agar agar and other crap and is completely unsuitable for coffee. Which is fine because coffee is a lost cause here. You should give up coffee before you come to France. And milk. Everything else is a revelation, but better give up coffee and milk.
What the hell are the French doing with their milk anyway?
Ah, right. They’re making cheese. Gawd, they’re making cheese. The variety of cheese we’ve eaten in the last month is bewildering, and even the stuff that’s not great is better than anything we’ve ever eaten. This morning, we were in Collioure with the kids (we went for the weekend, more in our next post) and it was market day. At the foot of our hotel was a nice little old lady selling freshly-made goat’s cheese out of the back of her little old white truck. Goat’s cheese dribbled into little plastic drinking cups that morning, the rennet (a “coagulating” agent — I know — just tell yourself “coagulate” means “to harden”) added probably only three hours beforehand. And wasn’t it the sweetest, freshest, purest cheese we’d ever eaten? I wanted to go back and kiss this old lady, but she'd sold out within the hour and she was gone.
But milk is the only bad news on the grocery list. You can just cross the aisle to butter and you’re in heaven. The butter selection takes up one whole case in the cold section and you might as well be at the beer store: there are twenty-five varieties of Normandy butter, some with accolades on them from various butter competitions. There are AOC butters, meaning they come from farms or collectives whose products have been elevated to a “protected” status, there are rare butters, and there are specialized butters. Then you have the salted, the unsalted, the English butter (of course, to the French an “English” butter has a certain cache, which is very funny) and so on and so forth. I came to France weighing less than I have in five years. That was a month ago. No comment.
And then there are the eggs. I buy ours from the egg lady who has the tiny stall near the south entrace of Les Halles (our market). These eggs were inside chickens that morning. She has regular, large, extra large, and colossal. I bought colossal last week just for the heck of it, and they wouldn’t fit into the eggtray in the fridge. When you crack an egg in France, the first thought that comes into your mind is: how did that clementine get into that egg? Because the yolks are a fiery orange, not yellow. A dark, sunset orange. And the eggs taste thick and sweet – I realize now that the eggs back home have been refrigerated and kept cold: you can taste it in the albumen of the egg. Something frail and watery. These eggs have never been colder than a chicken’s bum until you’ve put them into your fridge, and as long as you eat them quickly — and how could you not — they’re the freshest-tasting eggs in the world.
Later, some other sundry items: toplessness, driving, and my first, greenish, thoughts on wine. I’ll have our weekend at Collioure (which was stunning and wonderful fun, complete with feeding masses of wild fish cookies … yes, cookies …) up by Tuesday. In the meantime, here’s an image of that incredibly wild coast to whet your appetite …
High atop the castle on the beach at Collioure, looking south
