A Paradocs Abroad

Everyone knows about French cheese. There are hundreds of varieties. Our Saturday market in Saint-Renan has at least 6 cheese vendors. Three of them have selections rivaling the Les Amis du Fromage shop in Vancouver; and they are in trailers that they move from market to market each day!

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One or two others specialize in nothing but chêvre (cheese made from goat's milk). What really blows my mind though, is that you ask for a piece of a particular kind of cheese (comté, camembert, whatever), and the merchant offers you 2 or 3 choices for that particular cheese - strong or mild, harder or softer, saltier or sweeter. I asked for a particular camembert one day and the merchant started questioning me about how soon I was going to eat it so that he could decide which piece was the correct runniness!

Add butter to the list of things with a wild array of choices - at least in Brittany. The SuperU stocks about 10 different brands of butter, and each is available in mild, semi-salted, and perhaps a couple of other types. I was surveying the selection this week when I noticed "beurre de sel de mer" - butter made with sea salt - not all that surprising. A closer look revealed that some of those sea salt butters are "buerre aux cristaux de sel de mer" - butter with crystals of sea salt. One bore the motto, "Ah, le plaisir du petit grain de sel qui fond sur la langue!" - Ah, the pleasure of little grains of salt that melt on your tongue. I couldn't resist buying some, and sure enough, it contains visible crystals of salt, and they melt on your tongue, and give you burst of sea-saltiness.

Four months, and we're still discovering new pleasures of eating in France - amazing!