6 reasons why I love French supermarkets so much
Doing the same weekly round with the shopping cart through the same local supermarket doesn’t exactly make me happy. But on holiday, the French supermarket suddenly becomes a top attraction. Why, you ask?
When I swipe through my holiday photos on my phone, it’s immediately obvious: they’re all photos of supermarket shelves. I’ve discovered that the French supermarket is my favorite holiday destination. Every day, drooling over the cheese section, browsing the cookie and cake aisle, and hesitating between the most bizarre chip flavors: let other people go abseiling or road cycling or visit one museum after another; if I can compare twenty different pots of yogurt, I’m happy.
Drinks
Let’s get this out of the way first: alcohol in the supermarket. In the Netherlands, you have to squeeze your cart through the gates of some kind of supermarket annex to get to a bottle of store-brand Sambuca. The French absolutely don’t understand that kind of restrictive nonsense: on supermarket shelves, bottles of whiskey, vodka, and the most bizarre liqueurs simply stand opposite the cola and apple juice. And yes, there are also bottles of absinthe among them. I happily left them there—we didn’t want to lose our ears—but the fact that those bottles are simply sitting there is incredibly inspiring in itself.
Cheese
The cheese section of the supermarket is incre-di-ble. One extraordinary cheese after another is displayed in a showcase the size of a swimming pool in the middle of the supermarket. Your cart is irresistibly drawn toward it, and suddenly you’re standing there like a zombie transferring enormous wedges of blue cheese, farmhouse cheese, and soft Brie. A cheese board every evening, and back to that store every afternoon to stock up again. Eat cheese, sleep, repeat.
Toasted sandwiches
A toasted sandwich from the supermarket? A little strange. But not when you see the Olympic-sized croque monsieurs. They’re gigantic, come in different varieties (with Emmentaler, with goat cheese on top, with thick slices of ham), and they’re delicious. All you have to do is finish baking them in the oven of your holiday home, eat them at record speed, and then experience a food coma on a garden bench in the sun.
Cake and pie
Of course, the most delicious and fun option is those beautiful French pastry shops, with displays full of gorgeous little cakes, macarons, mille-feuille, and even more treats. But in the deserted, boarded-up farming village where we happened to be spending our holiday, the only baker was open in the mornings to sell baguettes—and nothing else. Luckily, the supermarket is a fine second choice. Lemon and meringue tarts, éclairs in every flavor, Norman apple pie with a thick layer of fresh marzipan on the bottom, beautiful apricot tarts: it was all there, and it all got to come home in the trunk.
Chips
Do you want paprika or plain? No, that’s not how things work in a French supermarket. Garlic-flavored chips, blue cheese and pancetta-flavored chips, cheeseburger-flavored chips (I left those behind and now regret it), and goat cheese-flavored chips—they’ve already appeared on FavorFlav. Why isn’t our chips aisle more adventurous?
Pickles
I don’t like pickles quite as much as Delilah does, but when I saw that the supermarket had an entire aisle filled with jars of pickles—an entire aisle!—I was thrilled. And apparently you can recycle those jars into lemonade glasses, which is also a very reassuring thought. And I haven’t even mentioned the billions of jars of mustard across the aisle yet.
