Today was a very exciting day. I discovered Jim's British Market. While I have never understood people who go on holiday to a Greek island and seek out the obligatory ex-pat-run Olde English Pubbe or O'Doherty's Irish Bar - surely a large part of the point of going on holiday is to explore and enjoy a new culture, instead of resorting to watching the football on a giant TV screen in an unconvincing replica of a traditional British pub? - I am not on holiday. And besides, so far we have really been enjoying lapping up the French culture and, with the exception of some decaf teabags and Heinz baked beans that we brought out with us, I haven't missed many home comforts. Disregarding the frogs legs and the snails, the proliferation of tripe and the penchant for horse steak and veal, the French way of eating isn't really so different from our own.
But as Christmas approaches, I've noticed a few gaping holes. For a start, the French don't really do Plain Flour. They do flour for cakes, flour for brioche, flour for pastries, flour for quiches, flour for baguettes and flour for country bread, but they don't do plain old plain flour. Neither do they really do wholemeal flour, except in some of the bigger stores, and even then it's not always available. So when I made some shortbread the other night for the CERN Christmas Fair (yes, my WI halo continues to glow), using my foolproof Bero recipe (since you ask, it's 3oz sugar, 6oz butter, 9oz flour and just mix together until you can roll out then bake for 15-20 mins at 190oC) and just about the plainest of the flours I could find on the French shelves, it came out flaky. When I started moaning about this to another CERN wife the next day, she said: 'Ah, you need to go to Jim's British Market. He has everything.'
She wasn't wrong. I called in to the shop in St Genis this afternoon and came out a very happy lady. Not only did I get my plain flour, but I also got the ingredients for our Christmas cake. That's another thing about the French - they don't really use very much dried fruit in their cooking, so when it comes to buying raisins, sultanas and the like, they sell them in tiny little packages. It would take four of five of these tiny packages of raisins to make a decent Christmas cake, by which point the charming homemade aspect of the cake would start to be rather undermined by the sheer cost of it. Slice of extremely expensive dehydrated fruit mixed with incorrect flour anyone? But Jim had big bags of raisins, big bags of sultanas, big bags of currants and even - wait for this - tiny pots of mixed peel and glace cherries. The Christmas elves would be most pleased.
I had to restrain myself from going a bit mad in the shop to be honest. As well as the obvious items - Cadbury's chocolate, McVities biscuits, Hellmann's mayonnaise, wedges of cheddar and stilton - he also sells things like bacon (which the French don't eat - mon dieu!), suet, porridge oats, and proper British ales. Since I've been keeping down my caffeine intake while pregnant, I've been getting people visiting from the UK to ship in decaf teabags by the bucketload, but no more: Jim sells PG Tips Decaf. They also stock English greetings cards - which I think my family will be pleased to hear about, as I fear that the novelty of me sending French ones is starting to wear a little thin - and the cute tea shop attached to the shop sells cream teas, tea cakes and full English breakfasts. The only snag is that because all this produce is imported, the costs are at least double what they might be in the UK. So my bag of plain old plain flour came in at a whopping 4.50 euros - roughly four quid for one of the world's most staple food items. So I'm not sure that one big bag of raisins will work out much cheaper than several little French ones after all. If I happen to offer you a slice of Christmas cake in the coming months, please accept it and tell me how delicious it is: short of going to Fortnum and Mason's, it is probably the most expensive Christmas cake you'll ever eat.
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