Technique WHY THE MARKET IS NOT ENOUGH
“As
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for all the others, I used to think that, with their humourless expressions, they had missed their vocation. They would have made good undertakers.” Such were the traders at London’s Covent Garden vegetable market, according to Michel Roux. Almost to a man, he says, they seemed lazy, with little interest in their customers. It was reflected in their produce, which was “enormous and lifeless,” where it was available at all. Even in 1969, he tells us, courgettes were considered a luxury, and therefore unavailable. So too were many other things that he had known in France: button mushrooms, tiny onions, fresh young carrots, little blue turnips or extra-fine beans were not to be had for love nor money. The Billingsgate fish market and the meat market at Smithfield fared better in his estimation. Billingsgate offered monkfish, salmon, sole, turbot, bass, eels and carp, all fresh-eyed and pink-gilled, direct from the sea. Shellfish was plentiful and cheap—the domestic
demand was then so small that much, ironically, ended up on the Continent. The vendors there were cheerier, too, and the porters, dressed in waterproof coats, fisherman’s boots and flat, rigid hats, still carried the lighter items perched on their heads. At Smithfield, the porters pulled carts laden with half a tonne of meat down narrow aisles, and one needed one’s wits about one. The produce was of a standard, with vendors putting aside a case of plump squab pigeons or a particularly good lamb for a customer who wanted only the best. A jerrycan of pig’s blood saved from the abbatoir might also be had, though “only at the offal counters was I disappointed,” Roux says, with sweetbreads and kidneys often old, shrivelled and unappetising.
SOMETHING FROM NOTHING The French provincial chefs had no such problem. Those that were situated near Lyon had access to one of the country’s great markets
GREAT, GR AND & FAMOUS CHEFS AND THEIR SIGNATURE DISHES