The French markets

Fruit and veggies with flavour!

Also in Cherbourg, whilst looking for a boulangerie (bakery) for croissants and baguettes, we ran into our first marché (market). Here, in a jumble of stalls spread out in the town square and adjoining streets, an array of mouth-watering food was on offer; delicious fresh fruit and veggies, stinky and less-stinky cheeses, saucissons, fruit-de-mer, and home-made honey and jams.

Unlike the mostly unripe, rock-solid and tasteless fruit and vegetables one can buy in Australian and Dutch supermarkets year-round, here in the marché everything is seasonal, often local, and just oozes flavour and ripeness.

That ripeness actually caught us out when bought things ‘in advance’ thinking that stuff needs a week to ripen, only to find out that it is actually already ripe and just needs eating, right now. What a feast!

Butter is serious business here

Another delicious discovery at these marchés is that butter is taken seriously, very seriously, in this neck of the woods. To the extent that there is always at least one stall where butter is the only product on offer.

At these stalls Breton butter, in a variety of saltinesses, demi-salé, salé, sel de mer (an interesting novelty version, imho), is on offer by the kilo, and ready to be wrapped and taken away. According to the (undoubtedly sound medical) advice from the Brittany Tourism bureau, butter is ‘not fattening when eaten in reasonable quantities’. Already huge fans of butter, we have been indulging in ‘reasonable quantities’ of Breton butter on freshly baked and still warm and crunchy baguettes ever since.

Needless to say, these marchés have since become one of our favourite past times to stock up on food and where possible we plan our visits to harbours to coincide with the day of the week they occur on.