What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is not just any old potato. No no no. Oh, no. These are Bonnotte potatoes, from the island of Noirmoutier, just South of Brittany. Noirmoutier potatoes, which benefit from copious rains imbued with sea salt, are considered to be the best, and the Bonnotte variety is the cream of the crop.

I bought a kilo of these last week at the Salon Saveurs, for 4.80 €. The guy at the stand, unlike most of the other stand-keepers, was slightly impatient and bordering on the dismissive, but still, I had to ask about the best way to cook them. He said, without so much as a moment’s hesitation : steam them.

Their skin is very thin and edible, and I asked about the cleaning step : should I rinse them under water and brush them gently? He looked at me as if I had just suggested slashing his firstborn’s throat open before we had even had lunch, and he said, “Oh no, god no! If you do that, they’ll take on the taste of water!”. This left me sort of puzzled. Potatoes? Taking on the taste of water? Um, whatever you say, sir, you’re the expert. “You have to rub them together with coarse salt in a clean dishcloth”, he said.

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Le Ventre de Paris, translated into The Belly of Paris, is a novel written by Emile Zola in 1873. It is the third of the twenty novels of his naturalist cycle of books, Les Rougon Macquart. The series is about two branches of a large family and their members — the rich and powerful Rougon, and the poor and miserable Macquart — whose lives intertwine from the middle of the 18th to the late 19th century.

Each novel focuses on certain nodes of the family tree, and is the occasion to cast a sharp and crude light on the different social layers, situations and worlds of that time : miners, farmers, department stores employees, priests, financial magnates, small-town inhabitants, workers, prostitutes, artists, doctors, soldiers…

In this one, Zola takes a dive into the fascinating universe of the Paris food market, Les Halles. Since the 12th century, this area in the center of Paris has been devoted to food vendors of all kinds, selling a vast profusion of goods, coming in fresh every morning. Huge halls of iron and glass, Les Pavillons Baltard, were constructed in the 1850’s to organize the different markets, and each street around the pavilions was specialized in a type of product. In 1969 however, the area had become too small to accommodate all the activity, and the traffic was terrible : Les Halles were moved to Rungis, in the South of Paris, and the beautiful Pavillons Baltard were torn down, to the scandalized clamor of the Parisians. The only remnants of that era are some buildings and restaurants, and the presence of many cooking apparel stores, E. Dehillerin in particular.

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And here you thought, ingenuously, that a bunch of rhubarb was just a bunch of rhubarb.

But no. A bunch of rhubarb, or any other delightful but fleetingly seasonal fruit, is in fact a test that life puts before you. Think Cosmopolitan meets Jean de la Fontaine : are you a grasshopper or an ant?

The grasshopper will enjoy the rhubarb now, and make a compote, a cake, a crumble, a tart, a pie, a buckle, a grunt, a cobbler, or hey, maybe even a slump.

The ant, however, will be good, will be wise ; the ant will show foresight and will prepare for the winter months. The ant will make jam.

Although I would love to claim that I am a grasshopper — much more glamorous, no? — our brimming kitchen cabinets certainly state otherwise. I will settle for a cross between grasshopper and ant, if such a thing is even possible, DNA-wise.

In any case it is the ant in me who decided to use the rhubarb and lemon I had in the fridge to whip up some Confiture de Rhubarbe, following yet another recipe in Christine Ferber’s trusted little book “Mes Confitures”. Organic rhubarb jam at that, since the rhubarb and lemon came from my Campanier basket.

No tasting notes as of yet : jam should be kept in a dark and preferably gloomy place for a few months, it builds character. But what I can already tell you is that it looks lovely, with its shades of baby pink and pistachio green. As you can see on the pic above, the rhubarb pieces all bobbed up to the surface of the syrup, which would probably put Christine to shame and make the jars unfit for sale in an upscale gourmet store, but guess what, that is not quite the destiny I had in mind for them.

I three-quartered the recipe below to adjust it to the amount of rhubarb I had, and was delighted to see that I had very precisely enough to fill three Bonne Maman jars. Not a drop more, not one less.

And this, of course, makes my inner ant very happy.

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Last Friday, I attended the Salon Saveurs, a food show held at the Espace Champerret in Paris twice a year. To make a happy event happier, I was blessed with the company of five other food enthusiasts and C&Z readers — Amy, Pascale, Alisa, Ethan and Isabelle.

We were all delighted to make each other’s acquaintance, and it was really great to explore the halls together, getting all excited about the same things, gesturing wildly to the rest of the bunch when we discovered something that absolutely had to be tasted, peeking into each other’s goodie bags, and sharing glasses of armagnac.

The show was set up in two huge halls, with myriads of small stands at which you could taste and buy a great variety of products : cheese, charcuterie, fresh and canned seafood, condiments, olive oil, honey, jam, chocolate, bread, cakes, pastries, candy, cooking equipment, wine, beer… Since it was a weekday, the halls weren’t too crowded, and the stand-keepers were very friendly and helpful, not to mention generous with their samples.

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