shewhomust | Marketing

Bank holiday weekend, and the entertainment proposed by the City of Durham was a market - a "French & Continental Market", whatever that may be. The bit about markets in France got cut from my recent rant about shopping: what a bonus it is when you wake up and discover that the town in which you randomly decided to stop for the night has filled with trucks and stalls and great heaps of vegetables...

The leaflet from the tourist office urged us to

"Meet 'Inspector Clouseau' a lookalike of the hilarious French Detective & watchout for Manuel a lookalike of the crazy calamity waiter! Enjoy a taste of the continent with french style accordion music accompanying live street entertainers."

[sic], which was unnerving, but we decided to risk it, and rightly so, because we didn't meet any of those things.

I bought:

olives
Always a risk, because it always seems to be the olive seller who can't bear to give you the quantity you ask for; everything comes by the shovel-full. From maybe a dozen kinds of olives, I chose mixed green ones flavoured with orange (the mix included one kind of olive - I think it was an olive - which was very crunchy, with a citrussy, gingery flavour) and tiny black niçoise olives.

two little tins of tuna rillettes
from a vendor who was offering tasters of various kinds of fish in sauce, and seemed rather disconcerted when we said, thankyou, that was very nice but wanted to buy other items from his stock - the rillettes for me and a big bag of coarse salt for Chaz

saucisson sec
that is, salami style sausages; I chose duck, venison, walnut and one flavoured with Cahors wine. We ate the duck for lunch the same day, but the others will keep, and I'm planning a lunch party...

a mixed bag of jars of terrine
Likewise, in the store cupboard ready when needed.

bread
from the stall with the longest queue in the entire market. A big pain de campagne, labeled with the recommendation to warm it for five minutes in the oven "for the crusty", and two small square loaves (or large rolls) of walnut bread.

a kouign amann
a Breton speciality, a very buttery yeasted pastry (there's an English lardy cake which is similar in principle, and which Google tells me originates in Wiltshire).

several cheeses
not quite selected by going along the stall saying "one of them, and one of them and...", much as I would have liked to. The little cylinder with no name (just "from Normandy") was particularly good, but there's another one we haven't tried yet...

three bars of soap
because there was such a huge display of very plain, old fashioned rectangular bars of savon de marseille in such a vast choice of perfumes: fruit, herbs, spices, peach, thyme, sandalwood, shea butter - I chose rosemary, herbes de provence and opium (which is very sinister, almost black).