Of course! French food and the French with their food is important and rightly so. But, growing up in UK and being led to believe that it was the gold standard was, in retrospect a bit of a con.
French produce and the raw ingredients are truly amazing, but, and it can be seen with the French love of Pizza, the obsession with food seems to be going …the wrong way. Pizza, in my not so humble opinion is no more than a tasty snack at best and French pizza, even if from a food truck is…well, ‘different’ and for sure my southern Italian friends would not eat it unless very hungry or drunk or both.
So, I’m a bit confused about the food scene in France. Great produce, sketchy restos and a love of ‘pizza’. Not sure also about the 18 euro menu. Can’t be quality at that price either?
Not complaining though and happy to be able to cook with amazing ingredients and be content with occasional trips to Paris and Lyon for quality cooking.
Oh…the fish and oysters here are amazing. Another good reason to be here…
I use a lot of spices from around the Mediterranean, but I don’t consider these ‘exotic’ even though their origins once were (just like the tomato or the avo). However, I don’t share the English obsession for trying to find a ‘good’ curry in France, while my wife who’s spent most of her life in a city whose population is 25% Indian is far more scathing than me about this English peculiarity and has no desire to recreate a Durban or Cape curry in France.
When I lived in S Africa, I’d cook with local ingredients like fresh papaya, kudu, springbok and exotiic fish fresh from the Indian Ocean, but these days for me there’s enough to learn and discover in regional southern European cuisines and ingredients.
Haha…I made Babotie for some homesick friends from CT a few years ago. I followed to the letter T an authentic SA recipe and it tasted and smelt like, all I can describe….a Sharwood’s brand of ‘curry’ powder. Neither good not bad but just straight down the middle of the road bland. Kinda too sweet, too much cumin powder but I guess this is how the colonialists like it.
Unfortunately I’m now allergic to oysters but previously I’ve eaten them in many parts of the world and would suggest that If you ever get to visit your wife in Namibia, check out their local oysters from the cold waters of the South Atlantic, they’re as good as any you’ll find on Cape Cod, and far better than those from our local, warmer European waters.
Like a lot of traditional SA cuisine, bobotie’s just horribly sweet (nothing personal), but there’s nice traditional things like kudu pie with blue pumpkin and papaya, or warthog chops (forget sanglier or free range pork); there’s also many fantastic raw ingredients available in SA, whilst Cape Town and Jo’burg are great cities for new wave global cuisine and eating very cheaply if you have € or £.
What an interesting thread this has morphed into, with food up front (plus a changer )
Can I ask -
Shiba, I’m so curious why you say that, would you mind if I asked? No need to reply, though I picked out your remark as possibly one of the most important reasons ‘why france’, to my mind.
My love affair with my home country England was badly tarnished in 2016. There is of course still very much to like about the UK - the humour, Auntie Beeb, beautiful countryside in many parts. Poor weather in Shropshire kept us indoors and the cost of housing meant we couldn’t afford a detached property in a nice part of town. Food offerings usually meant a pub - often very noisy unless we went to a country inn. We long ago stopped going to pubs in the town on weekend evenings - too difficult to converse. Population density was 2000/km2. We now live in France in a rural area with 17/km2! We still joke about the traffic - OMG grid lock today We moved this year from an Edwardian semi with a postage stamp garden and no off-road parking to a modern easy to heat, bright bungalow with as much garden as we can manage and a pool. We constantly admire the big skies and the constellations at night. A short drive takes us to a beautiful georges and a lovely old town with probably the most beautiful bridge in France. We can actually drive to Spain and Italy and beyond or use a decent rail network. We love how polite everyone is - the bonjour, the bonne journée. We enjoy the France /GB network with it’s French classes, other workshops and outings. We love the meet-ups with the small English community and our new French friends at the Saturday village market. We are doing various classes alongside the natives. There’s a lovely sense of community. We are very content with eating a ménu outside restaurants with pretty views in the sun. There are some oriental restos in the town, good French places there we haven’t visited yet and a superb restaurant an hour away. What do I miss? Family, friends, confidence to deal with anything on the phone, dealings with officialdom, more affordable diy suppliers, generally higher driving standards and security. Living in a country one cannot be kicked out of is a huge thing, especially when one loves their adoptive place so much. I despair at the rise of the right wing in the UK making it feel ever more alien. Of course it’s happening here too. I just avoid the news coverage.
There seems to be several negative comments about French food.
If I wanted hearty Greek cooking, I would have moved to Greece. If I wanted interesting Chinese cuisine, I would have gone to China and if I wanted authentic, desi style, Indian food, I would have stayed living near Bradford.
In my experience, local produce in France is head and shoulders better than any found in UK, where supermarket supplies have caused people to forget what food is supposed to taste like.
I agree. Local producers in this neck of the woods often sell at the Super U locally, Lidl & Aldi locally too as well as direct to the public by way of fliers in post boxes or the local press. If I want foreign, I have a go myself and adapt to what ingredients and spices I can find. The subject of food is as snobby as comparing expensive cars and properties these days.
I say that because it is free here unless you are over 25 and we could never have afforded the UK system which has left two of my nieces with thousands of pounds still outstanding from their UK university days and both are almost 40 now. My son did five years in total at Uni because he decided to train to teach instead of a manual trade which he qualified for via Lycée and he now has a good job in a big city college as head of the English dept and my daughter is a manager for one of the biggest US online education companies, both from gaining a good university degrees in France.
I think there’s a difference between buying local food and taking it home to prepare yourself, using your own culinary skills and what one finds in the average French restaurant in an average town in Lot et Garonne.
I’m not talking about what you can find in cities - I had the most wonderful falafel in Paris.
I’m also not talking about the Michelin star aspiring restaurant 15 minutes drive away - the chef produces the most stunning creative meals I have ever had in my life - but also I would not want to eat it every day.
Let me give you some examples of the parochial attitude to food in my part of France.
Yellow French beans are more tasty than their green counterparts and what we always grow. Go to a garden centre at the end of spring and the plants left to buy will be yellow French beans. Why, because they are not green
Go to an average restaurant in the centre of any small town and you will struggle to find the vegetables on your plate - it’s no coincidence a veg patch in France is called a potager and soup is called potage
Lot et Garonne is known for its duck industry - huge great fat birds in their thousands flocking on some muddy patch of land. There will often be three or four versions of a duck dish on a menu, the alternative being salmon. In our first days here, we ate the duck and enjoyed it and thought how novel because we rarely ate duck in the UK. Year in, year out, never changing, totally predictable, we now, never eat duck (which often reduces our choice on the menu by a third)
18 years ago I wanted to make roast veg for our first Christmas here - including butternut squash and parsnips. People didn’t know what I was asking for. I finally found them on a stall run by an English woman. I have French friends who still don’t know what I am talking about.
Yes, I know this is all to do with the war, but that was 80 years ago. This shows how conservative the French are about their food, and how slow they are to change and the same half dozen recipes in every ordinary restaurant do not inspire. We now rarely eat out, we feel we are wasting our money and time. We now only go to the “heading for a Michelin star” place, maybe two three times a year. This is not what we expected when we first came here and find it quite sad.
Not completely. Potatoes here are quite often dire, but other wise seasonal veg is good. But one has to search for good meat products. Free range pork can be hard to find, and most chicken is pretty tasteless.
And as for restaurants we find them dull. There is a massive range of french cuisine, but generally restaurant menus are limited. Round here the staples are poulet de Bresse with morilles, and trout with vin jaune. Both nice enough, but if we go out I would quite like to eat something different that I can’t cook at home (we cook a wide range of other ethnic food).
France being cheaper depends on where in France. The south coast is more expensive, increasing from west to east. A town like Aix en Provence is ~€6,800 per square metre to buy property. Same for Cimiez Nice, even without a sea view. All other costs are up in relation. Weather, and sunshine quota is a defining factor
)
We moved this year from an Edwardian semi with a postage stamp garden and no off-road parking to a modern easy to heat, bright bungalow with as much garden as we can manage and a pool. We constantly admire the big skies and the constellations at night. A short drive takes us to a beautiful georges and a lovely old town with probably the most beautiful bridge in France. We can actually drive to Spain and Italy and beyond or use a decent rail network. We love how polite everyone is - the bonjour, the bonne journée. We enjoy the France /GB network with it’s French classes, other workshops and outings. We love the meet-ups with the small English community and our new French friends at the Saturday village market. We are doing various classes alongside the natives. There’s a lovely sense of community. We are very content with eating a ménu outside restaurants with pretty views in the sun. There are some oriental restos in the town, good French places there we haven’t visited yet and a superb restaurant an hour away. What do I miss? Family, friends, confidence to deal with anything on the phone, dealings with officialdom, more affordable diy suppliers, generally higher driving standards and security. Living in a country one cannot be kicked out of is a huge thing, especially when one loves their adoptive place so much. I despair at the rise of the right wing in the UK making it feel ever more alien. Of course it’s happening here too. I just avoid the news coverage.
