The unmiss­able… French food!

Although I love my maple syrup on pan­cakes, I must say I’m always happy to go back to my roots — that’s my excuse for eat­ing jambon/ beurre/ cor­ni­chons sand­wiches (ham/ butter/ pick­les on a baguette) daily.

France is prob­a­bly most famous for its “vien­nois­eries” — sweet pas­tries. The crois­sant, of course, and also the pain au choco­lat (sweet bread with a thin choco­late bar wrapped in the mid­dle). Oh, and the pain aux raisins — sweet bread with raisins. There’s also the flan (cus­tard pie with prunes), the lemon pie, the banana pie with choco­late, the chaus­son aux pommes (apple pie)… All these can be found in any boulangerie/ pâtis­serie (bak­eries). They also sell the tra­di­tional baguette and you will often find peo­ple queu­ing at noon and at 19:00 to buy bread for lunch or din­ner. No meal with­out bread!

Crois­sants, Pains aux Raisins and Pains au Chocolat

Lemon Pie, Flan and other Yummy Pastries

We went to the weekly mar­ket on Sat­ur­day morn­ing and I was sur­prised to see the demo­graph­ics changed quite a bit. There are now quite a few “eth­nic” food stalls and a lot of first gen­er­a­tion immi­grants shop­ping there. That’s nice to see, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing mar­kets were dying not that long ago…

So, French were shop­ping for tra­di­tional ingre­di­ents as well as North­ern African extremely sweet pas­tries (pic­tures below). And also olives for the cous­cous, a middle-east dish: semolina and a mix of veg­gies (pep­pers, toma­toes, olives, raisins, zuc­chi­nis…) and lamb or chicken, with some sweet sauce. Delicious…

Mid­dle East­ern Pastries

Fresh Olives

And some other food stalls were more tra­di­tional, such as these two below: saucis­son (dried sausage, often spicy) and huîtres (oys­ters). Oys­ters are arguably the “gross­est” French dish… they are eaten raw with lemon. Fairly inex­pen­sive in Brit­tany, peo­ple eat them for appetizer.

Char­cu­ter­ies, Salami

Oys­ters

Bon appétit!

Related arti­cles:

1. French Pas­tries
2. The Food Saga: The Sweets
3. French Bak­eries
4. A French Market
5. French Cui­sine