Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to people. Bring along your sense of humour as well as
your appreciation of things French. Most of them open
around 8:00 am, so you can come for breakfast and linger
all morning.
The Speciality Food Stores
The i rst little shop that will draw you irresistibly inside
will be
la pâtisserie.
Featuring fresh warm
croissants
from
7:00 am, an endless variety of beautiful sweet cakes, and
some savoury pies and
gateaux
, a feast for the senses. At
lunch, they may offer fresh sandwiches 'to go'.
Lord knows who consumes all of these delightful, fattening
delicacies. Certainly not the skinny French. They are heavenly
places no dieter would dream of entering. The
boulangerie
will specialise in those long
baguettes
of Paris, baked fresh
twice daily, in early morning and early afternoon, as well as
Sundays. No French person has to be reduced to consuming
half-day-old bread.
You needn't even look for a
pâtisserie
or
boulangerie
.
You will smell them. If the weather is at all decent, the
shopkeepers wisely leave their doors open, cooling the
bakery room and sending tempting wafts of fresh bread out
to potential customers. Pure seduction. Better buy before
1:00 pm, though, as they also close for lunch.
Next to marvel upon must be the i sh (
poissonnerie
)
and meat (
charcuterie
) shops. Rudolph Chelminski has
another quotable passage in his book on the
charcuterie
in France:
'... the
charcuteries
rank along with the wheel, gunpowder
and Catherine Deneuve as fundamental contributions to
civilisation. Literally, the word refers back to the cookers
of meat—in medieval French,
chaircuitier
—but in modern
terms it has come to mean a very special kind of artisanal
food shop halfway between a butcher, where everything is
raw, and the grocery store or supermarket, where everything
is cooked, canned, conserved and industrially embalmed in
one way or another. The
charcutiers
are more cooks than
grocers, and what they sell is meant to be taken out and eaten
at home or in the ofi ce. All of them offer the usual selection
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