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Market to Table: Tour of outdoor stalls leads to a lesson in making lunch
Journal Photo by Laura Giovanelli
Paule Caillat (left), who teaches cooking to Anglophiles in Paris, works on lunch with Saundra Tobman of Montreal and Natasha Copeland of Vancouver.
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Published: June 1, 2008
There are certain unspoken rules at outdoor markets in France.
Beware the cheese lady and her tempting cases filled with pristine, moldy little disks of Camembert and brie. The cheeses are arranged like jewels, but Madame doesn't humor gawkers.
Second, be aware of your personal space. There were eight of us -- in a crowd of solitary shoppers serious about gathering their dinner, that's the equivalent of an army marching through.
And tres important, look, but don't touch. No poking potatoes or pinching peaches. "With the French, you don't help yourself, and not only do you not help yourself, but you don't touch," Paule Caillat warned us as we walked toward a cluster of food booths with canvas roofs.
There are grocery stores and big-box discount stores in France, and small specialty shops that sell just cheese, just meat or just seafood. But food markets are the heart and soul of the French table.
There are markets most days in Paris, and collections of semi-permanent stalls sprout up on set days in neighborhoods across this food-loving city.
When my husband and I started to plan a trip to France, I knew I wanted to go to markets. But without a kitchen to cook in, it would have been an exercise in frustration. It would have been like being on the beach on a hot July afternoon without a bathing suit.
So even as the dollar continued to fall against the euro, I searched the Internet for a Parisian cooking class that would take advantage of the food markets, too. Caillat's class sounded perfect -- a market tour, followed by hours of cooking, a cheese-tasting, and a long but simple lunch. It wasn't cheap -- thank you, exchange rate -- but this is what I really wanted to do in France. Some people want to spend all day in museums. Other people like to buy shoes. This is what I was going there for.
My husband and I were joined by three friends from Vancouver and London who were celebrating a birthday, plus a woman from Montreal. Caillat and her assistant met us near the steps of the Oberkampf metro station in the Marais, a neighborhood in northeast-central Paris that feels like a French version of the gentrified parts of Brooklyn.
A few steps later, and we were in front of the dreaded cheesemonger's cases in the Popincourt Market, an outdoor market that is open every Tuesday and Friday on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.
"Now," Caillat began. "The word fromage is a derivative of the word ‘form.'"
This was early April. The booths were bursting with imported produce from Spain, Italy and sunnier countries, but French produce was ripening, too -- lettuce and leeks and little red and white breakfast radishes, vivid against their green ruffly stems.
Health-department inspectors in the U.S. would have a fit at the sight of recently departed chickens, their limbs still attached to their plucked pink bodies, only inches away from a prepared food buffet of paella and salads and quiches.
And yet the French seem to survive. "You know if they have heads and feet, it's a sign of freshness," Caillat said.
France is a country where fresh, seasonal food is a birthright that seems as revered as liberte, egalite and fraternite. This is a country where protesting farmers once dismantled a McDonald's in protest of higher U.S. tariffs on some traditional French foods.
So even if the customer service is quirky, and there's a strict unspoken code, how could any food lover not fall deeply in love with France's markets?
One gray-haired man stopped and stared at us as we walked by, a gaggle of rubber-necking food tourists carrying cameras instead of baskets. "Enjoy your market!" he called after us in accented English.
Petite and precise, Caillat cheerfully shot back at him in French, then soldiered through, pointing out the market booth that stocks just kidneys, sweetbreads and brains -- tucked in tidy little boxes, like a pint of berries -- and the vendor who just sells horse meat, bright and lean as ahi tuna. She kindly waved us around dog droppings -- it's a constant hazard in French cities -- and in the same breath, clicked her tongue disapproving at one vendor's artichokes. "They're everything I don't like in an artichoke," she said. "They're big, and they're dark."
But the baby turnips that she had waiting in her kitchen had spoken to her. They apparently had told her to braise them with carrots and spring onions and a veal roast, along with some of her own veal stock. Cremini mushrooms wanted to be folded into warm, savory custards with fresh chervil, a delicate and quintessential French herb that tastes of anise, and of spring.
"I saw these things and they talked to me," Caillat told us as we walked back to her apartment.
After a stop at her favorite boulangerie for baguettes, we climbed up a short flight of steps and got to work in Caillat's kitchen, fueled by strong little cups of espresso. Our menu -- warm mushroom pates (here, custards cooked in ramekins in a bain-marie, or water bath) on beds of mesclun, veal roast with spring vegetables, chocolate souffles and a lemon tart made with sweet oil olive from the southern French town of Nyons.
Feisty and petite, Caillat moved like a small bird around her bright, open kitchen, batting back answers to our volley of culinary questions as she chopped herbs, unwrapped veal bones to add to the roast and watched over a caramel sauce brightened with the sweet taste of oranges.
She talked butter. She dissected olive oil. She introduced us to tonka beans, a dark, wrinkled hard bean similar to nutmeg, but with a much more beguiling flavor. Fashionable with French chefs -- I saw macaroons, a French cookie, flavored with tonka beans in one shop -- tonka beans contain coumarin, a chemical banned in the United States by Food and Drug Administration. Coumarin has been found to cause liver damage when used in large quantities. But I have to admit, it adds to tonka beans' allure. And a little seems to go a long way -- Caillat grated a tiny amount of tonka bean into a pan of sauteing mushrooms.
I grew up with fierce warnings from my pie-baking mother about the dangers of warm hands and squishy butter. I always followed that code of pastry-baking -- making it with cold hands and cold butter so that when it went in the oven, the butter melts away and leaves flaky layers. Caillat turned that notion on its head when she showed us how to make her family's tart crust, a pastry recipe that begins with a mixture of boiling butter, oil, water, sugar and salt. She added flour to the liquid quickly, one spoonful at a time and working it with her fingers until it formed a ball and no longer stuck to the sides of the bowl. Then, she spread the pastry with her hands in a tart pan. It went into the oven. "You don't even know delicious yet," Caillat said later as she checked on it.
Caillat has an opinion about everything French and culinary that's as refreshing as a glass of rose. And it's like not like being with someone who has written best-selling cookbooks or cooked in gleaming restaurant kitchens, but someone who has spent a lifetime simply being curious about food.
"I tell you, it's about courage," she said as she watched a pot of sugar cubes melt into caramel.
A former fashion buyer who speaks flawless English, Caillat turned to teaching cooking to English-speaking Francophiles in 1997 after she decided she needed a change of pace. "It had to be in my home because...where else?" she wrote in an e-mail to me after the class. "I started in another place, a large apartment with a small kitchen so I only had two or three students at a time."
So Promenades Gourmandes was born.
Today, her classes are still intimate. Most of the cooking is done around a sturdy wooden oval table. Come midafternoon, when the meal is ready, a tablecloth comes out and that's where we eat, too, all of us still pumping Caillat for her endless list of suggestions for creperies, cafes and restaurants.
This is the best kind of lunch. We are eating good food. We are talking about good food. And before we leave, I have three pages of my little moleskin notebook filled with places to find good food, all written in Caillat's elegantly messy scrawl.
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
Cook like a native
Online, food-oriented message boards are a good resource for finding cooking classes at vacation destinations. Here's a short list of cooking classes (taught in English) abroad:
• Promenades Gourmandes. France: Paris and day trips to Lyons. Cooking classes with market tours, three-course lunches and cheese-tasting. Gastromonic walking tours. From 110 euros, though cooking classes are cheaper if you reserve with a group, www.promenades
gourmandes.com. I paid about 720 euros (about $1,128 at the current exchange rate) for two people for a full-day session, which included a market tour, a class, a cheese-tasting, lunch and a walking tour.
• Divina Cucina. Italy: Florence, Chianti, and Sicily. Market tours, cooking classes and trattoria lunches. From 125 euros (about $196), www.divinacucina.com.
• Mexican Home Cooking. Mexico: Tlaxcala, which is near Puebla, in central Mexico. Weeklong cooking classes. From $1,250 for classes, lodging, all meals and alcohol, www.mexicanhomecooking.com.
• Cook and Taste. Spain: Barcelona. Cooking classes starting at 60 euros (about $94). Market tours are separate, www.cookandtaste.net.
• Wine Country Cooking School. Canada: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. One-day, two-day or weeklong cooking classes with trips to growers, a market and a wine tasting. Starting at $195, www.winecountrycooking.com.
• Nimmy Paul. India: Kochi, Kerala, on the southwestern coast of India. Cooking lessons and meals in an Indian couple's home. From about $29 for a cooking class and one meal; about $129 for a day of cooking classes and meals, www.nimmypaul.com.
LAURA GIOVANELLI
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