Want Culture? Get Groceries

When I arrive in a new city, the first place I want to go is the grocery store. Okay, maybe it’s not the first place, but it’s always one of my favorite places to go. And it’s not because I need groceries all the time; I just love going to the market. 

Markets tell you so much about a place. I love to check out the local market places whenever I visit somewhere new, because unlike all the standard tourist activities you might do in a given city, markets really give you a feel for the local culture and daily life of a place. Grocery stores and market places are different everywhere. Food is such a personal thing; you can learn a lot about somewhere based on what its grocery stores stock and what kind of people shop at the stores.

Local market places and farmers markets are even better. Big open markets with a variety of stalls are my favorite (for Americans, think Pikes Place in Seattle, the Ferry Building in San Francisco, Reading Terminal Market in Phili, and Eastern Market in DC). There you can get a feel for what is truly local and often also what the immigrant community is like, based on the various specialties on display.

I’ve always loved wandering around markets, but it wasn’t until I went to Stuttgart, Germany last weekend that I realized just how much I enjoy doing that to get to know a city. In one day, I went to three markets. I didn’t really set out to do a market tour of Stuttgart, but it just kind of happened. And I must say, I had a wonderful day and learned a lot about Germany.

I arrived Thursday night to visit my friend Kari, who was living in Stuttgart for a few months. The first thing we did Friday morning was walk to the small neighborhood grocery store a few blocks her apartment to get some food for breakfast. It was a teeny little market, and several things struck me immediately as quite different from both the US and France. There was not a lot of processed or prepared foods, but there were many fresh vegetables, a lot of dried fruit, and an impressive variety of yogurts. And all the bread there was some type of whole multigrain bread. I personally couldn’t resist a little package of different breads marketed as “German bread for lovers.”  

The package of Bread I bought that Kari and I dubbed "German Bread for Lovers"

A few hours later we went to the larger grocery store in town because Kari needed to restock her fridge and I needed to get some stuff for lunch on the way home the next day. The German supermarket was quite similar to the French supermarkets I’ve been to, except with more foods I like. See, Germans have a love affair with yogurt. And I also happen to have a strong love of yogurt. I like my little Stoneyfield Fruit on the Bottom yogurt cups and my thick greek yogurts, and even the occasional Icelandic yogurt/cheese thing that I forget the name of (Kiir, maybe? Something like that...). But Germans take it to a whole new level. 

In the German yogurt aisle (which takes up approximately twice the space of the American one) there are three main types of yogurt: quark, yoghurt, and kefir. First you have your quark, which is the thickest and richest of the yogurts and often eaten for dessert. Then there is regular yoghurt, (which is just the German spelling for yogurt), and that tends to be about average yogurt consistency. The final type is kefir, which is a much liquidier yogurt. They have a lot more plain yogurt than in the states and some of it comes in glass jars! And after trying it, I can now say that for whatever reason, yogurt tastes way better out of a jar. 

And then, to go with your yogurt, there is an entire aisle of muesli cereals. I love granola and muesli, so to me it was like the holy grail of cereal aisles. I had never seen so many varieties of muesli in one place before.

After that, I went to the bread aisle and almost died of whole-grain-happiness. But I’ll spare you the details on that one. Suffice it to say, despite the unhealthy rap German food gets, I found more funky hippy whole-foods goodness in Germany than France. German markets stock my kind of stuff.

I had not even been awake six hours yet when I found myself in my third German market of the day. Kari was showing me around Stuttgart, and one of our stops was the Stuttgart Markthall (Market Hall in English--really different right?). 

The Markthall in Stuttgart was my favorite place I visited there. And the place where I took the most pictures (almost all of food).  There were so many different kinds of food stalls. You had your standard farmers market stands: local produce stalls, local artisanal cheesemongers, local honey producers, etc. And then all the German butcher stands, each with it’s own collection of giant legs of smoked ham (at least I think that’s what they were) hanging overhead. And next to them, the German delis, with the most interesting and intense cream cheeses I had ever seen. 

Legs of ham (?) above the German butcher's stand

 Those egg-like things in the center are German cream cheeses. I don't know what makes the one on the right orange...

And then there were all the ethnic stands. I saw several India spice stands with a floor to ceiling selection of spices. And then Greek stands with homemade halvah and more fresh made eggplant dishes than you’d know what to do with, along with several other cultures scattered about.

Got spice?

One thing that caught my eye particularly though, were the dates. Several of the Middle Eastern dessert stands/pastry shops had display cases filled not with chocolate, but with stuffed dates. I had never seen such a display. These were gourmet dates, stuffed with everything from cheese to nuts and chocolate, I even saw some filled with candied orange peel!

It's hard to tell, but that is an entire display case full of dates.

It was there that I realized how great a cultural window markets can be. Food is such an important part of cultural identity, and everything from where people buy their food to what kinds of foods you see most provide clues to understanding the identity of a place. Even in the United States, food culture says a lot about where you are.

Kari made this point to me while we were strolling around. “One of first things I like to do when I get to a new place is go grocery shopping. Most people don’t really understand why though.” But I understand, and I agree with her. The market will be high on my to do list during the rest of my travels in Europe. 

You don’t go grocery shopping for the groceries; you go for the culture.

Gophers, Waffles, Groundhogs and Crepes

“La fête de gopher? Hunh?” That was the beginning of a big lesson in French culture I got this week, which started at dinner Tuesday when my host mother announced that today was the gopher holiday.

Or at least that’s what I thought she said. What she actually said was la fête de gaufre which means the waffle holiday. Which is, you know, only slightly less strange. So, while I was scratching my head, thinking gopher holiday, is that like groundhog day in the States? they were actually talking about waffles, not small burrowing mammals. Go figure.

Now, I googled the fête de gaufre and it appears that waffles are just a celebratory food, so I’m not really sure what we were celebrating, but I think they might have just decided to make waffles because the kids had a half day of school that day. As my host mother brought out the homemade waffles, pointing to them and saying gouffere, my confusion disappeared and was soon replaced by the pleasant feeling of a stomach full of waffle (and I mean full, they kept telling me to eat more, and when I protested saying “oh, pssh, it’s only air!”).

I tried to explain to them why I had been so confused. But explaining what a gopher is is really hard in another language. So instead I tried to explain that we have a holiday with gophers in the US (at that point the idea of trying to explain two different burrowing creatures whose names both start with G in French seemed impossible, so for my purposes groundhog day became gopher day). Apparently, that tradition must have come from Europe because my host family actually knew what I was talking about(?!). They were nodding along, especially when I mentioned the 2nd of February and predicting the length of winter, while talking about this “petit gopher” that lived in a “tunnel,” which was about as detailed as my description got.

 

After dinner, I went up to my room to do my reading for French class. It was a short essay explaining a French holiday called la Chandeleur which, as I read, I discovered happened to be on February the 2nd and originally served the purpose of predicting how much longer winter would last. There were no gophers involved though. Or groundhogs. Or even waffles. There were, however, (and I find this so very French) lots of crepes.

That’s right. In France, February 2nd is the crepe holiday. And yes, they actually have a crepe holiday. Originally the day had some sort of religious significance, now it’s mostly just an excuse to make and eat a ton of crepes. And most people own one of these mini-crepe party griddles (not even kidding about the name, they all say that on the side) with six little 4 or 5 inch spaces for crepes on them.

Now, in case you were worried, this doesn’t mean that this is the only day of the year people eat crepes. People eat crepes here all the time. February 2nd is just a day where everyone eats LOTS of crepes and the whole family sits down together to have one giant meal of crepes. 

There are two kinds of crepes--savory and sweet. Savory crepes are made with buckwheat flour while sweet crepes are made with regular wheat flour. I learned this week that it’s actually ridiculously simple to make crepes, as long as you have a griddle. There are really just 3 ingredients: flour (depending on the type of crepe you make, either buckwheat or wheat), eggs, and milk. Though I’m sure adding a pinch of salt wouldn’t hurt. All you do is mix them together and then ladle the batter onto the crepe pan and cook for a minute or two, flipping it over once it starts to brown. And then you have to make sure to eat it while it’s still hot!

On Wednesday we had a little crepe party of our own in French class (shhhh don’t tell, it was February 1st). Our professor taught us how to make the batter and cook them on a mini-crepe party, and brought in the standard toppings for us to use on our crepes. Savory crepes are usually filled with shredded gruyere cheese and ham (they eat a lot of ham in Alsace), while sweet crepes have a lot more options, though the favorites tend to be nutella or jam. Or nutella and jam. Or nutella and jam and then more nutella on top for good measure. Nutella is kind of a big deal here. Especially among the Americans.

After eating far more mini-crepes than ever necessary in one sitting, setting what I’m pretty sure was a personal record for most nutella consumed in a day, and then proceeding to go to gymnastics class (during which I surprisingly did not throw up, despite the fact my instructor decided that it was a good day to work on backflips), I came home Wednesday night to my host mom telling me that tomorrow was la Chandeleur and we would be having a special family crepe dinner. 

Let me just say right now that I think I’ve eaten more crepes in the last 48 hours than in the rest of my life combined. (Though if you’re only counting full sized crepes instead of mini-crepes that might not be true.) That being said, I’m surprisingly not sick of them yet, and dinner tonight was actually my favorite meal I’ve had so far in France.

Here’s why:

Tonight was the first time I ate with my entire host family. Most nights dinner is just me and my host parents. Everyone who lives in the house was at dinner tonight though. There are my host parents, who are actually the family grandparents, their son Philippe and his wife, their twelve year old daughter, and their two year old son. Plus me that’s 7 people at the dinner table.

Imagine, if you will, a small dining room where we’re all seated around the crowded table, with the mini-crepe party in the center. In the corner of the room, grandma stands over a larger, more traditional sized crepe pan on a tv table, with a stack of crepes she made earlier at her side, ready to be reheated, topped and served. Nicola, the two year old, somehow ended up in the seat closest to this pan, which is just at eye-level height for him (he’s pretty tall for two). He’s already burned his hand by reaching for it once this afternoon, but he keeps getting up from his chair and wandering back over there, wanting to touch the very hot crepe pan, despite (actually, maybe because of) the numerous calls by the adults of “pas touche!”

Meanwhile, Philippe is taking turns with his daughter ladling crepe batter on the 6 disks of the mini-crepe party, at the same time participating in parts of several loud conversations, adding the toppings of gruyere and ham to the crepes that are ready to melt the cheese, and attempting not to let anything burn. Grandma keeps coming over to the table periodically with another finished large crepe, enthusiastically unloading it onto an empty plate she sees. There is also a bottle of hard cider on the table from which Philippe somewhat overzealously refills my glass whenever he notices it getting low, which despite all the other tasks he’s doing, is surprisingly often. 

Between the noise Nicola was making (two-year-olds are very good at the whole being loud thing), a new crepe being thrust onto my plate pretty much the second I finished the last one, the madness of 7 different crepes being cooked at the same time, the constant refills of cider, and the effort to comprehend and/or participate in one of the conversations happening at any given time, I found myself thrust into a moment of beautiful chaos. The dinner was just so familiar in so many ways. Despite the fact that I could only understand about 50% of what was being said, if that, and that I was in a completely different culture than my own, in so many ways it felt like I could have been at a family celebration anywhere.

It was exactly the kind of large, loud, loving, chaotic family meal you expect on a holiday. Except this was a normal Thursday, and everyone had work and school and all their normal activities the next day. It wasn’t like Christmas or Easter where everything closes down, but they were still gathering together to celebrate this as a special occasion. And what was so great about it was that even with all the madness going on, I felt 100% included. Everyone was extremely welcoming and inviting towards me the whole time. I had conversations with members of the family I hadn’t previously had the chance to really talk to before, I got to help flip the crepes a few times, and was more than copiously fed.

After I’d eaten about as many ham and gruyere crepes as I could manage, and finally refused to have any more, I was told, “Oh, but we haven’t even started on the sweet crepes yet.” And yes, I did manage to find enough room in my stomach for one big nutella crepe. After which Philippe’s wife told me that, yes, they like to eat in Alsace, and they eat well (also meaning a lot) here. 

At the end of the meal, which naturally took over an hour and a half, the children were prepared for bed, after which their parents came back downstairs to join the grandparents and I for tea to finish up the meal. Everyone listened very patiently as I fumbled my way through several tenses of French grammar, trying to tell a story. Philippe and his wife then asked me if I would be interested in watching one of the American movies they had and offered me a couple of options.

Being handed a silly American movie to watch was the best thing I could have asked for right then. Our house doesn’t have wifi (though that may be fixed in the next week--we’ll see), which has been mostly just inconvenient, but also a major bummer because that means I can’t just watch a movie on my laptop because I can’t get on Netflix. I didn’t bring any movies with me, and there are some nights when I would rather stay in and watch a movie than trek downtown to grab a drink, especially nights like tonight when it is bitterly cold outside. And, not gonna lie, American movies are definitely somewhat of a panacea to homesickness for me. Mindless American entertainment is honestly (and somewhat sadly) one of the things I’ve been missing the most here.

So, to be told at the end of a lovely family meal that they have some American movies I could watch if I’d like, when that was all I really wanted to do with my night but was the last thing I was expecting to be able to do, on an particularly cold and windy Thursday night at the end of a long week, was pretty much the perfect ending to a wonderful evening. 

And I enjoyed my mindless movie entertainment very much.

Groundhog day in France is way better than Groundhog Day in the States. Bill Murray might have enjoyed himself more if the movie Groundhog Day had taken place in France.

In conclusion: Crepes make life better. So eat more crepes.