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| The Empty Sea Front at Tharon Plage |
In France the provenance of food receives serious attention. On the fishmonger's stall in the market, all sorts of shrimps nestled among ferocious looking lobsters waving their minor appendages. Some were labelled as from ‘the equator,’ others from Madagascar, both were relatively inexpensive. Others, looking much the same, were ‘local,’ but twice the price. Nevertheless, these proved the most popular and so we bought some. Cooked with garlic and piment they were delicious. We also bought conger eel (also local!) on the grounds that I had never eaten it before; the fishmonger cut it into steaks (the original animal looked large enough to have fed the five thousand) and gave us copious culinary advice. In the end we dusted and pan fried it, and while the result was interesting I suspect the poor conger will struggle to make the grade as a gourmet fish.
In France far greater attention is given to food, buying it, preparing it, eating it than in the UK, or most other places come to that. With the emphasis on local produce and quality, bread baked twice a day, twice weekly food markets, traceability and a strong food culture, the proportion of French GDP devoted to eating must be significant. What effect, I wonder, does that have on the economy as a whole? Compared to other industrialised countries, does it detract from the efforts to achieve a strong economy, or strengthen them? And does it make people happier, other things being equal?
Still you can have too much of a good thing. In the interests of internationalism we made some carbonara - an Italian dish of spaghetti in a cheese sauce with small pieces of bacon - delicious but rich. Not wanting to waste it I heated up the leftovers, adding more cream, butter and parmesan ......but a few hours later I was in agony. I felt I had been kicked in the stomach by a horse. I was suffering, so my hostess said, ‘une crise de foie,’ (liver crisis) something very well known in France and caused by eating too much rich food. I wasn’t so sure. I thought about those lardons of bacon and wondered whether I had heated them through properly. I had researched the symptoms of botulism poisoning for my novel ‘Boraya,’ and I wondered if this could be the initial stages of a creeping nervous paralysis that would eventually kill me. Would the hospital in Pornic have Botulinum antidote? No, said my hostess, it was ‘crise de foie,’ and it would disappear by itself. Which it did, of course. I even managed a rich butter croissant for breakfast the next day.
The boulangerie is some three-quarters of a mile away, so someone has to walk or drive there to fetch the breakfast croissants. I prefer to walk for the route is along the promenade, most beautiful in the early morning when the sun is climbing over the grey winter sea. Above you in the sky flocks of gulls ride the wind, all going in the same direction, as if they, too, are on some morning commute. Besides, the walk gives you an appetite, all that sea air and a chance to reflect. In the middle of winter, Tharon is deserted, the houses shuttered until Easter. Strangely this loneliness gives you a feeling of belonging, somehow, as if you and the solitary man on the beach with his metal detector were heirs to this holiday town. I wondered whether he was also recovering from a ‘crise de foie.’
