We seem to spend a large amount of our time each week shopping for food, cooking food, eating food, thinking about what to have for the next meal, all of which is entirely normal in France I'm sure! So this week I have decided to take you with me to the supermarket, to show you a few of the sights! While Jean has taken over the major shopping responsibilities I have shifted efforts from finding the perfect croissant or pain au raisin to understanding the various cuts of meat, the extent of the potato chip range and tasting as many different brands of wine as possible. I thought that would be a useful contribution!
This particular supermarket is about 25 minutes drive away; we have a couple of closer ones, but this is the biggest - hence the name: "Hyper U" pronounced "eeeeper uuuuuu"! This is the big brother of "Super U" and it sells clothes, kitchen gear, mobile phones, car stuff, whitewear etc. However, we're only in it for the food.
But first, obtain your trolley: why the rest of the world hasn't adopted this idea I don't know, as it would certainly cut in half the number of supermarket trolleys found in river beds or left rolling erratically around car parks .
1. Approach the trolley park with your one euro coin in hand (or two euros, or 50 centimes)
2. Place euro coin in slot of first trolley in the queue of patiently waiting trolleys all chained up together in a little car port structure
3. Push coin in firmly whilst pulling trolley towards you until the red thing comes out of the socket, releasing the chain, and releasing the trolley into your tender care for the duration of your shop
4. Reverse the process once you've done your shopping and got it in the car, not forgetting to take your coin with you for the next shopping experience
(5. Ignore fellow French shoppers who wonder why on earth you are photographing the whole exciting process!)
And now, into the shop!
It takes us a phenomenal amount of time to get our shopping done, partly because we don't know the layout of the supermarket yet, but also because everything is very unrecognisable, and I need to read the labels quite carefully sometimes to make sure I'm actually buying just a tin of tomatoes, and not tinned tomatoes stuffed with foie gras or something similar! But its all very interesting and entertaining, as long as we start the day with a good breakfast, and set aside the whole morning, we get through the experience amicably.
Some things are very different, and wouldn't be found on any shelf in Countdown or Pak n' Save:
Fish soup....
Or how about a tin of preserved duck instead of baked beans?
Maybe a jar of snails...
Or perhaps a jar of chicken stew!
As you can imagine, it's fascinating examining the jars and looking at the contents.
And if your freezer is big enough, you can always take home some crab legs and a few lobster tails:
Some things are peculiar to France: there is a whole aisle of the supermarket dedicated to "tartines" which are packets of dried white sliced bread which the French have for breakfast, spread with jam and dunked in their coffee.........who would have thought there would be so many different varieties of something so simple:
Our favourite area is the fish counter. These photos aren't out of focus, or deliberately misty around the edges for romantic effect - the chilling function results in mysteriously spooky fog floating over the fish, occasionally clearing like sea mist, so you can see what you are buying more clearly!
I have to carry a list of all the fish names with me when shopping, so I can work out what to buy. Who would have thought that "englefin" is haddock, while "cabillaud" is cod. Some fish is very cheap, like salmon fillets are the equivalent of $14/kilo, while other types are more expensive, like cod. We are enjoying the north sea fish like haddock, mackeral and sardines, which we don't see very often in New Zealand.
Leaving the fish counter behind, we enter the confusing dairy section, particularly the yogurts. I thought we had a huge choice of yogurts in New Zealand, but its nothing compared to France. I think I've finally cracked the difference between yogurt, fromage blanc and fromage frais, but it was doubly confusing until I worked out that they also group these products by their fat content. Therefore once I've found the natural yogurt section, I then need to work out what fat content I want - usually a choice of 0% (not quite sure how that's possible, or even edible) 3.4% or 7.6%
Here's the choice:
Remember this is just the natural, unsweetened, 3.4% fat content choice! I haven't dared consider the fruit/flavoured yogurt section yet as that's another similar minefield. Lew spends his time on the other side of the aisle, amongst the similarly vast choice of chocolate mousse desserts:
And I needed a wide angle lens to do that aisle full justice!
Round the corner and we're into the milk section. But no chiller cabinets here - all milk in France is UHT. Well, you can buy fresh milk, but its very expensive, and is tucked away in some insignificant part of the supermarket as no-one buys it. I actually quite like the taste, as it reminds me of French camping holidays when I was a child, and Lew seems to have got used to it quickly. So, you pick up your 6 pack of plastic litre bottles and they can sit all day in the car on the way home, coming to no harm at all!
By now, an hour or so has passed and we're getting towards the home straight. But its the cheese counter, and that demands a whole heap of attention and decision making, just when your blood sugar has dropped to an all-time low.
So far we haven't bought anything we don't like - apart from Lew and the goats cheese, but I'm sure that will be an acquired taste and he'll love it by the end of the year! Very unlikely! It's very strong. I prefer the brebis (sheep) cheeses - soft, rich and creamy. Yum.
We're particularly enjoying the sheep's cheeses, and hard or semi-soft cheese seems to be more to our taste than the softer bries or camemberts. At Hyper U, the cheese counter is a bit different in that the cheeses are already cut and packaged, but there is still an attendant there to answer any of your questions, and if you want a smaller amount than one of the packages, she will recut it for you.
By now the blood sugar is at rock bottom, so, with clever marketing management, the patisserie section is at the end of the supermarket! Again, very good quality tarts and cakes can be bought in the supermarket, at pretty good prices - hard to photograph through the packaging, but these berry and apple tarts looked very impressive.
I haven't even mentioned the wine section - that will come in another post!
No bags whatsoever are provided at the checkout. You can either buy fairly strong reusable plastic bags, bring your own, or just reload your trolley at the end of the checkout, and then unload directly into your car. Or, like us, you forget your plastic bags which you bought at the supermarket last time, you think you're only going in for a couple of items, end up buying more, feel too stingy to buy more bags, so struggle out of the supermarket juggling 27 items between us!
We're finding food prices on the whole are much cheaper here. Certainly fruit and vegetables are way cheaper, and while they aren't all necessarily from France, most produce is from France or nearby Europe - its the law that the country of origin has to be displayed on all fresh goods. We're in the middle of winter here, but we're buying tasty tomatoes, courgettes, peppers and aubergines for less that NZ summer prices. Meat is also cheaper if you keep a look out, so Lew has been enjoying pork, chicken, sausages and beef, mostly very good quality. We went to a butchers today in Salernes when we went over for the Sunday market - tiny shop down a side road, husband and wife team, a queue almost out the door, so we knew it was the place to go. We watched a customer select a large topside of beef, then the butcher cut off two large slices, and fed them into a machine: it forced the meat out the other end into a flat round mould and he slid it out between two pieces of paper - a perfect pure beef burger, nothing added!
While the markets are fun to go to, we've been advised that you don't buy your food there on a regular basis, as its more expensive than the supermarkets or small shops! And we've discovered that that's definitely the case - especially cheese, bread and olives, all can be bought cheaper and just as good from the nearby shops. Even the fruit and veges are slightly more expensive, which is bizarre compared to Nelson market where everything is better quality and price than the supermarkets.
French toilets - two words which can strike terror into your heart if you are caught short in a strange town! They have a well deserved reputation of being decidedly dodgy at best, ranging from the hole in the ground, which threatens to swallow you up if you lose your balance, right up to the tardis capsules in the centre of town where you pay your money, and the door opens and closes automatically - hence making you terrified that the door will open "mid-procedure", exposing you to the whole market place! Therefore I was delighted to come across my best toilet experience in France to date - in a little cafe in Salernes this morning - I'll leave you with the photo....and yes, those lights on the seat were flashing!!
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