Walking whilst the city wakes...
Most weeks, my days at Ferrandi start early, I’m up at 6:15, out of the door by 7:00 and in the kitchen at quarter to eight to set up for the morning’s cooking. Although it would be easy enough to take the metro, which would give me an extra fifteen minutes in bed, I walk every day.
Paris that early in the morning is beautiful. Although in winter it’s dark when I leave the house, within a few weeks it will be dawn, and then, later, morning-proper as I cross the Seine and wind my way through the Latin Quarter to school. That early in morning, the city feels different; hushed and expectant like a theatre about to be filled. And it smells different too; that curious, European, early-morning smell of petrol fumes, coffee and all manner of things cooking and baking for breakfast.
I’ve started to recognise some regular faces, also up and about early: there’s the lady who leaves the house with her tiny white dog at exactly 7:15 every morning in St Germain, there’s the man who sits on the pavement (whatever the weather) drinking an espresso before the cafe is even open, waiters bustling around him to set-up for the day, there’s the delivery man who unloads crates of vegetables for a Thai restaurant most mornings and the fishmonger sculpting huge mounds of crushed ice for his display with care and attention only to spend the day watching it melt away.
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Today we went on a tour of Rungis, the largest wholesale food market in Europe, just south of Paris, which was opened by the French government in the late 60s to replace the ageing Halls in the centre of the city. The new market came with modern infrastructure, to cope with the mind boggling logistical of dealing with 65,000 professional customers every day and supply one of the world’s most foodie cities with anything and everything, and it came with space, acres and acres of it.
We met for the tour at 3:15 near school so I walked over just before 3am. It was a curious time to walk somewhere±my mind was already thinking in terms of today (‘What will I do later today after the market? Perhaps I will sleep…’), but as I passed the restaurants and bars that are usually closed when I pass, I overheard snatches of conversation, laughter and shouting, also talking about ‘today’. But in this strange liminal zone, between yesterday and tomorrow, between sleeping and waking, my today was still their tomorrow.
The market was magnificent, and our guide Francis steered us through the throngs of stern retailers, pointing out interesting examples of produce that we might not have seen: oysters, lazer-engraved with the brand logo (to denote their top quality), salmon from Scotland, two enormous alien looking mahi-mahi imported from East Asia, a man skinning veal heads for the classic French dish ‘braised mask of veal’, Bresse chickens, still with their heads on to demonstrate their pearly white feathers (Bresse chickens can compete with Wagyu beef for the title of world’s best meat), winter truffles, wheels of gruyere stacked high, and row after row of beautiful vegetables. And all of this produce being sold in the middle of the night by the gram, the kilo, the tonne in massive cathedrals of food that most people do not know even exist.
