June, according to La Cuisine de tous les mois, one of my French books on cooking, is par excellence le mois des légumes—unsurpassed as the month of vegetables. Now nature pours forth into the markets her first great profusion of vegetables from the spring plantings. This seasonal classification of foods is typically French, typical of a kind of discrimination reserved for la bonne cuisine they love so dearly.
Mais oui, France has, just as we have, carrots, peas, potatoes, and all sorts of vegetables during the other months of the year. But not the tender little spring carrots that will cook without water, just in butter, to luscious succulence in a mere ten or twelve minutes; not the first picking of peas, tiny, juicy, sweet peas that need hardly more moisture in the pan than stews out of the lettuce usually cooked with them; nor those round new potatoes with skins so fine and thin that coarse salt and a few strokes of a cloth will rub them off. To a Frenchman, each season and each month of the season have their special offerings that no other time of the year quite equals. To him, June is literally unsurpassed as the month of vegetables.
Thinking of vegetables recalls the last words in Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste: “And finally, you, gastronomes of the year 1825 [the year he finished the book], who find satiety in the lap of abundance, and dream of some newly made dishes … you will never see the importations which travelers yet unborn will bring from half the globe which has still to be discovered and explored.” He was right about that. We have had plenty come to us from faraway places during the last hundred odd years. But could he have suspected the improvements we would see in foodstuffs native to our own lands? Could he have foreseen that the rarities of his day would now be available at every green-grocer? What a pity that Brillat-Savarin was never able to visit Les Halles in Paris on any June morning of the past forty or fifty years—except, of course, those years when France was fighting a war or, as she is now, struggling out of one.
I, for one, would have liked to escort Brillat-Savarin through the pavillons of Les Halles as I knew it and to watch him gaze upon row after row of carrots, peas, beans, onions, asparagus, turnips, strawberries, cherries, and everything else you can think of, all bringing their fresh country smells to the metal-roofed aisles of this great market. That famous old gourmet whom we all quote would most certainly have given us a few more “Meditations.”
Les Halles—in case you have never been there—is the food center of Paris. It is the big covered market from which so much of the city is fed, and fed, I might add, with foodstuffs so fresh they are always less than twenty-four hours old when they reach the housewife or the chef. All through the night, country carts of every size and description make their way from the surrounding countryside into Paris and along the streets leading to Les Halles. They come from all directions, east and west, north and south, from places like St.-Germain, Chantilly, Malakoff, Clamart, and all the nearby garden spots. If you live anywhere near the rue de Rivoli or the rue St.-Honoré or other streets leading to the market, the regularity of the rumbling wagons will often lull you to sleep. Before midnight they are all in, lined up in the streets around Les Halles, waiting their turns to dispose of garden produce picked from the vines or pulled out of the ground only a few hours earlier.
Les maraîchers—the vegetable farmers—unloading their great baskets are just like the farmers around my grandfather's farm that I remember admiring when I was a boy living in the center of France. They have the same hearty vigor, the same country clothes, and many wear the old-fashioned wooden sabots that French peasants find so much more comfortable than leather boots. And when I was in France in 1931, they were still driving horses, not motor trucks. Those big, patient farm horses with their necks in high, heavy horse collars to help ease the load, knew every inch of the tree-lined, chalky-white roads that led home from the city. How else would a farmer get back if a good political argument kept him overlong at the Café Jean Bart and too close to a bottle of his favorite marc or Calvados? If the reins slackened, then slipped from his hands as he swayed and slept in the gray dawn, at least the horse knew the way to his own stable and would bring the jolting wagon there safely.
When you go to Paris, don't miss visiting Les Halles, but go very early in the morning, before dawn. At daybreak the small merchants who come for their stocks of provisions, the men and women buying supplies for hotels and eating places of all kinds, the pushcart vendors, all are arriving to bargain for the provender to feed Paris for another day. So, before the sun gets very high, the stalls start to look empty, and by the time business people are getting off to work, Les Halles is being cleaned of the débris and looks far less picturesque than at three or four in the morning when fully stocked and crowded with busy people. You will soon learn, too, that the restaurants in and around Les Halles serve some of the best food in Paris. Those country people and the people who work in the market know good food and won't patronize a poor eating place. You can't find better prepared fish dishes or finer tripe à la mode de Caen and other regional specialties. And the onion soup, a breakfast essential there, is the tastiest you will ever eat. There are other smaller markets in Paris which are interesting too, but there is only one Les Halles.
One could go on endlessly writing about Les Halles, its meat, fish, and fruit sections, the breath-taking sight of the flower stalls, the clacking clatter of the live-poultry aisles, and its myriad other activities. But the point I want to emphasize has to do with spring vegetables, les primeurs, that in France are always fresh, fresh every day, even in the largest cities—one more example of the meticulous attention to detail that makes the French cuisine so fine. A good housewife or a chef won't bother to cook dried-up, second-rate vegetables any more than a well-groomed man will go out wearing run-down shoes. It doesn't make any difference whether their incomes are large or small or whether the restaurants are famous or obscure, they can't seem to tolerate either poor food or indifferent cooking, and merchants have no choice but to supply the fresh products their customers demand. A greengrocer in Paris, for example, may have an empty-looking shop at four in the afternoon but in the morning he will have very few, if any, perishables left over from the previous day.
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