Sunday is Market Day, or why mud encrusted carrots taste so good

Ah, Sunday! Church bells ringing softly in the distance, the song of birds unsullied by the usual hustle and bustle of a workday. But, the morning's quiet is soon broken by the whir and rumble of motor cars as our neighbors rush off to "The Market".

Most towns and villages in France have a designated "market day" when traveling stores and local producers (in theory) bring their products to us poor, underprivileged town folk who make do, the rest of the week, with what is offered in the giant supermarket chains and the local price gougers otherwise known as "convenience stores".

If you live in a small town or village, market day is pretty close to what is once was, that is, under a creaking assemblage of roof planks and wooden columns erected in the Thirteenth Century and optimistically called "Les Halles", local farmers bring unskinned dead rabbits, trussed up chickens with some feathers still clinging to their carcass, a potent brand of firewater brewed by a man with hooded eyes and a perpetually red nose, vegetables and fruits from people's gardens, and are joined there, of course, by the ubiquitous traveling shops, those amazing vans that transform from a rolling vehicle into a shop with awning, glass counter, and all in a matter of minutes.

But, since we don't live in Hicksville-sur-whatever, and our community is plagued with middle class and upper middle class snobs who go to market wearing designer clothes and sunglasses, and toting grocery bags and baskets bought at the Louis Vuitton store in Paris, our "traditional French market" offers shoes made in Spain, delicacies from Morocco, Indian food, and all sorts of cheap goods from China.

Ah, but the butchers and cheese vendors are from France, non? Well, I think they are although the cheese guy keeps addressing my wife as "signora" and his Saint-Nectaire cheese tastes suspiciously like Gouda.

But, the stars of the show are the vegetable and fruit vendors. Nowadays, everything is labeled "bio", which apparently means that the dirt is left on the produce and the prices are doubled. But, our yuppie and snobbish neighbors love this stuff. To them, buying "bio" is buying the salt of the Earth and from the look of the mud encrusted carrots, that is exactly what they are buying: earth.

So, off we go around eleven o'clock, optimistically thinking that the crowd would have thinned by that hour only to find that most people have indeed done their shopping but have stayed to enjoy half a dozen oysters and a plastic cup of thin white wine (for the price of a three course meal anywhere else) at the fish monger's stall.

We drive around for half and hour, cruising the near-by streets looking for a place to park. When we find one we rush to the market because by that time some stalls are starting to close down. So, we throw dirt covered vegetables, dusty fruit, a morsel of fake Saint-Nectaire, and some Moroccan pastry into our sack, and we head for the stand that sells roasted chicken.

What is left at that hour is a "free range chicken", which means that the bird was so old it died of heart disease and cholesterol-choked arteries since chickens hardly ever get triple-bypass surgery. We take the forlorn roasted oldster home with us only to find that ranging free has given the chicken muscles like hemp rope, and that it tastes like cardboard soaked in chicken fat. I end up boiling the thing to make it edible.

But, the fun starts when I empty our sack of garden variety soil that has some vegetables and fruit among it. My first impulse is to dump the whole mess into the kitchen sink in order to wash off the dirt and grime. But, ignorant of the ways of preserving the taste of French legumes, I am stopped dead on my tracks by my wife's voice:

"What are you doing?"

"I, I, am going to wash the things we bought," I stammer.

"No, no, no; WE in France never wash the vegetables!"

I am taken aback by the royal "we" she has thrown at me. She makes it sound like "défense de lavage de légumes" was a royal decree by Louis the Umpteenth or somebody.

"But, the things will rot if we don't wash them," I say defensively.

"Not at all," she assures me.

"Why would you not want to wash them? There is all kinds of bacteria in the soil. I can almost hear the mother bacteria saying, 'Á table' to the bacteria kids."

"If you wash them they loose their flavor."

"Yeah, their flavor of dirt."

"Vegetables must be left like that. Everybody knows that."

"Everybody in France, maybe; the rest of the world thinks that getting rid of dirt where cows might have pooped or insects laid eggs is a good idea."

"Tu exagères," she pooh-poohs. "Put them in the frigo; you will see."

I did indeed see: in two days the tomatoes looked like stewed prunes and the you could tie knots with the celery sticks. I won't even mention what the limp carrots looked like.

"Good God! " I said in my best I-am-alarmed voice. "Have you seen what the gooey mess the vegetables have become?"

"There is something wrong with the frigo," she says.

"What? There's nothing wrong with the refrigerator. No, I am talking about the produce we bought last Sunday. It is rotting!"

"I think the vegetables spoiled because the frigo is not right."

"The frigo is perfect. Look the stuff in the freezer: sold as a rock. Look at the milk, the soup from last October, the left-overs from last Christmas' dinner; they are in perfect condition. But the damned vegetables look like compost."

"I think you should adjust the temperature of the produce drawers. That is the problem."

At that point, I give up. I thought of suggesting that we "adjust" the temperature of the produce drawers to that of water's boiling point but sarcasm never seems to work in our arguments.

Tomorrow: The 400 Euro Hedge Fund