eG Foodblog: bleudauvergne

[daniellewiley]

Drooool

This reminds me of when I was in france...and oh the cheese...the cheeese!!!

I still remember packing a big empty tupperwear container going, and coming back with a full tupperwear of (mostly) soft unpasturized goats and sheeps milk cheeses...i know, naughty me.

Ah, I must go back sooner or later!

Amazing pictures, merci beau'coup.

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I agree! The cheese photos just do me in.

Last fall, we traveled to Paris, and during a light lunch of a cheese plate at Fauchon, I found myself crying. Just because it was so goddamn good.

[daniellewiley]

Lucy:

Thank you so much for sharing your bounty with us.

My life ground to a halt yesterday evening as I read your gorgeous blogs, both this one and the archive. My husband was waiting for me to pick him up from work. He saw that I was still online, and asked if everything was OK. "No," I said, "it's not. We need to move to France. Now."

~A

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I wonder how many of us did that! Last week I emailed my husband and said, "please find a job in Vancouver."

Today, I emailed and said, "OK, I've changed my mind. We're moving to France."

[chefzadi]

I think that Lucy's blog is making a good case for the reasons why I lost 20 pounds when I moved out of France. Can you imagine growing up on food like that and then having to leave it?

I'm really enjoying her pictures of the city as well.

[bleudauvergne]

I got stuck in a brocante shop on the way home. Therefore tonight is the night I will eat out.

[Rachel Perlow]

What does a brocante shop sell?

[therese]

What does a brocante shop sell?

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Stuff. Cool, old, weird stuff. Or at least that's what I'm looking for when I go in one. And they are easy to get stuck in---hours pass unremarked.

Lucy was probably looking for something unusual and vaguely menacing to use in one of her photos.

[edited for punctuation]

Edited March 24, 2005 by therese (log)

[Liz Johnson]

Broncante sounds like "bric-a-brac." Same root?

[therese]

Broncante sounds like "bric-a-brac." Same root?

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Brocanter (the verb) is apparently originally borrowed from German, as per this reference. It's listed on page 203. A cool paper, particularly (I think, anyway) the doublets listed on 197 and 198, words that entered French twice. Fragile and frele ("frail" in English, so we've got the same phenomenon) are a great example.

Anybody out there know enough German to tie brocanter to the original term?

I don't know if bric-a-brac is related to brocanter. There is a version of it, "de bric et de broc" that could be related to "bricoler" and "brocanter".

Okay, so now I need to get this back on topic somehow...Oh, yeah, wasn't Lucy going to tell us about what school kids eat for lunch? The canteen lunches when I was in high school were better than what was served in most U.S. restaurants at the time. I hope they're still that great.

Because you need a lot of energy to figure out obscure etymology questions.

[bleudauvergne]

I just stayed in the neighborhood and had a couscous. There's quite a few in the little micro-neighborhood behind the place de Terreaux (which is the place where Hotel de Ville is and the Musee des Beaux Arts). It's about 4 blocks from my house.

On the way home I walked by the theater which has a pool hall in the basement. Being a Thursday night, it was dead but on the weekends they are full.

Goodnight all! I'll talk about the brocante and school lunches tomorrow!

[pam claughton]

Such beautiful produce!

I'm unfamiliar with salsify. Is there anything else its taste or texture compares to? Is it a starchy root? Is it crunchy and watery like jicama?

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Pan,

The closest "other" vegetable to salsify is burdock root (gobo in Japanese). Salsify has a somewhat more delicate flavor. It's sometimes called "oyster plant" because of its flavor. Both salsify and burdock are crunchy, but dense rather than watery or juicy.

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I'm not that familiar with burdock root, either. Lucy's right: I'll have to try it myself.

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Pan,

I had it recently in a restaurant, and loved it. I had it as a fettucine type sidedish with scallops. The salsify was shaved into thin strips, cooked, and dressed with truffle oil. The texture is similar to cooked artichokes, and there is a hint of an oyster flavor, which matched really well with the sauteed scallops and truffle oil. It's a dish I want to try to recreate, if I can find some salsify locally.

Pam

[rlivings]

great photos and great butcher story.

[rjwong]

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Is that tagine (tajine?) to the left of the couscous? What kind was it? Lamb? Was it spicy? Was it served with harissa?

This photo definitely reminds me when chefzadi gave me some lamb tagine & couscous a while back (with some spicy harissa) ...

[Abra]

Wow, oeufs mayonnaise with couscous?! The restaurant was totally empty too? What's up with that?

[bleudauvergne]

Everything is generally empty on Thursday night. The weekends see these places completely full. Anyway. The eggs w/mayo were pretty grisly, I just picked the egg pieces off. I ordered them because lately I've had this thing for ordering the cheap things on menus that cost barely anything at all to see what they give you.

The bowl of vegetables in their sauce and the meat plus the couscous is what you get when you order a simple lamb couscous. Tunisian style has potatoes. I guess it was alright.

I could have gone to another neighborhood place but honestly speaking, I didn't want to blow the cash. It was late when I got there, there were only a couple of people. I suspect these people do most of their business at lunch.

The son of the proprietor, a 14 or 15 year old kid with braces took some money from the cash drawer, came to my table to take my order, and then left with friends. His father came out and served my food.

I wasn't looking for anything fancy or special in the meal, really. I guess I should have chosen a place full of people. Customers came and went, a lot of people coming through for takeout pastries, and a couple for sandwiches.

As couscous goes, this one tasted alright and I'd say it was average for what you get when you order couscous. I went to this restaurant because it's cheap. There are other places (where the food's no better) where you pay double the price for some mood lighting. My meal came to 10€. That was fine with me.

There is something about a pool hall that piques my interest. I wonder what stories go on there. Who sits at the Club House Bar? I think it would be a very interesting place to set up a meeting. I used to play pool some nights when I was an art student at the university. I had a steady hand but not enough sense to know where to aim. There was another student, he studied architecture, who would point to where I should aim and we'd clear the table that way. We had a long winning streak several nights in a row that astounded us both.

[bleudauvergne]

This morning's weather was foggy.

On the bus.

[legourmet]

Broncante sounds like "bric-a-brac." Same root?

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Brocanter (the verb) is apparently originally borrowed from German, as per this reference. It's listed on page 203. A cool paper, particularly (I think, anyway) the doublets listed on 197 and 198, words that entered French twice. Fragile and frele ("frail" in English, so we've got the same phenomenon) are a great example.

Anybody out there know enough German to tie brocanter to the original term?

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A Brocante shop is an antique shop.

As far as I know brocante is not related to any basic high german word.

I think brocante is derived from "Baroquante" which means basically the same. But there is a swiss term "Brocken" which means antique. It must be the other way round that this word is derived from the french brocante.

The German word "Barock" of which you might think is the basic for brocante, but it's also derived from the French "Baroque"

[Boris_A]

Anybody out there know enough German to tie brocanter to the original term?

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[offtopic]

In (Swiss) German, there exists the "Brockenhaus", a term for a place like a warehouse where you can find used furnitures that are not antiquities. Very popular among students and so on. Many of them just collect well usable furnitures from people who don't want to kick it away. Some of the profit goes to charity organisations. I guess it's related to the English "broking" like in stockbroker etc..

[/offtopic]

Edited March 25, 2005 by Boris_A (log)

[bleudauvergne]

In France, there are brocante shops and antique shops, which are different, mainly because something has to be at least 100 years old to officially be an antique. In France, Antique shops are generally stuffy and expensive with a few very high end furniture pieces in excellent condition running in price from €4,000 on up. General clients in an Antique shop here will wear large solitaire diamond earrings, be tan and svelt, and generally be dressed in black leather and fur. Others will choose to adorn themselves with artisan smythed precious metal medallions, and wear hand made silk and linen gyspy costumes with coordinating fine hand sewn lambskin booties.

Brocante shops are for the things less than a hundred years old. Someone who often frequents brocante shops can be identified by their trench coats. So I was looking at stamped pattern plates from the 30's, 40's and 50's. I picked up a nut dish in the shape of Corsica from the 1950s. These things here are not considered antiques. I have always particularly been drawn to glasses and things that have things printed on them. I don't know why. Last night I went through a whole bunch of glasses. I rarely enter the shops because it's extremely difficult to get out of them.

As long as we're covering this type of thing, the next level down is the puce, which is where I do most of my rummaging for kitchen and food related items and dishes. This takes place weekends and is mainly the only place where you can find good stuff and convince someone to take your price for it. I generally feel more comfortable at the puce, because I can really talk price. You have to put more effort in at the puce to find anything worthwhile, i.e. get up very early, move quickly, make offers on the right things without hesistating. It should be noted that everything in a brocante shop is generally found at the puce and then marked up.

In American English, 'brocante' translates to 'antique' for all intensive purposes.

[bleudauvergne]

Back to food - typical "traiteur" food. "Traiteur" a French take-out place, or what we might call a deli. This one generally carries some French and Italian dried sausages plus cured and boiled ham by the slice. I took this picture this morning at the traiteur located just next to my bus stop. She was getting ready to open up for the day. I generally don't pick up things for lunch at this place because she's not open by the time I have to catch the bus.

This traiteur does a lot of things "en gelee" and vegetable and fish terrines, although not everyone does this. Every traiteur has their own personality and line of things. This one has a lot of hot food or home cooked things for sale by weight.

The lobster tails on the half shell is something we see commonly in the windows of a lot of traiteurs.

As you can see by the decor they are getting ready for Easter.

[bleudauvergne]

I'll post the shots of lunch today with a disclaimer: The cafeteria has gone horribly down hill in the past 6 months. They really do serve terrible food these days. So in the interest of full disclosure, here's lunch in its naked ugliness.

I didn't eat the rice, it tasted bad.

[ludja]

...

As long as we're covering this type of thing, the next level down is the puce, which is where I do most of my rummaging for kitchen and food related items and dishes. 

....

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And 'puy' is flea, non? Flea market...

Is the first luncheon dish "spring radishes with sweet butter". Have to admit that your camera doesn't lie; normally this dish is a thing of beauty!

[SobaAddict70]

I think someone thought they could make radishes look like tulips...

What is that dessert looking thing?

Soba

[bleudauvergne]

Oh it was terrible. I'm not sure I think they were trying to do a flan or something, it sucked. Full of watery canned fruit and it was raw in the middle.

[Eden]

Cooking...

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So what is the little round item to the right side of the knife block?

As a tribute to your writing and photography Lucy, I am sitting here reading your blogs, absolutely famished & being made hungrier by the second, but refuse to get up from the computer to go find food because I'm too absorbed in eating vicariously And just when I had sworn off reading blogs because they suck up so much of my time, I not only found & had to read this, but go back & read all of the first one as well!

[ellencho]

^^ Looks like a little tea strainer ball to me.