At Place des Prêcheurs, I weaved through outdoor bistros, dodging waiters running between packed outdoor seating and the empty restaurants serving them. Nestled between restaurants was Boucherie-Charcuterie du Palais, aka the Meat Nazi. Streetside, a faded red awning shaded a glass case on casters, full of roasted chickens. But the splendor of the meat display inside was almost indecent. Laid in perfect rows was a yoga class of headless, skinned rabbits, performing sun salutation stretches. There were orderly groupings of magret de canard (duck breast), rognonnade d’agneau (lamb kidney), andouilletes (pork sausages), and fourteen kinds of pâté. Tied in precise bundles were alouettes sans tête (larks without a head), which weren’t larks, but beef stuffed with bacon, sausage and spices. Carol cooked them in a traditional Provençal sauce she perfected.
Some displays were not for the faint of heart. Our butcher arrayed lamb and veal brains, looking exactly like wet, mini, human brain models used in medical school. The brains flanked a cow’s tongue, the shape and size of a football. Who bought the unidentified animal knuckles and feet? There were a bunch of bloody, sweating, grossities left over from some satanic ritual which I didn’t want to look at too closely.
Except for one portly man in a white apron stained crimson and terracotta from nipple to thigh, the butchers were no-nonsense, severe women demanding strict adherence to the unwritten rules governing requests for meat and payment for same.
I waited at one end of the long, glassed-in meat counter. There was a queue every day. I planned to buy chicken thighs for poulet aux lardons (chicken with bacon), but the chicken was at the far end of the counter; if I couldn’t see the meat I wanted from my place in line, too bad. I was not allowed to leave my spot to look at meat further away. As customers were helped, the line advanced, everyone shuffling along one position. With each shuffle I saw more of the meat display, but once past a section, there was no going back. It was my turn when a butcher, the one with the spiky copper hairdo, doing her best Jacques Brel impersonation, shouted, “Suivant!”
I knew this woman well; when I arrived in Aix, my ignorant meat questions provoked much eye-rolling and shrugging. But she taught me something valuable the previous month, when I asked, “Could I please have one and a half kilos of stewing beef, madame?”
“What are you making?”
“Bœuf Bourguignon, madame.”
“When are you making it?” she asked, with sidelong suspicion.
“Tomorrow.”
“Come back tomorrow and buy your meat for tomorrow’s meal.”
I never repeated that error; imagine, buying meat a day early! What was I planning, to keep it refrigerated for a day? Put it in the freezer? She knew I would come back. As my meat-buying skills improved, so did the friendliness of my tormentress. When I asked for chicken thighs that day, she almost smiled, not grilling me about their imminent preparation. Wrapping my meat in brown butcher’s paper with a deft hand, she said her signature, “Avec ÇA?,” shouting the second word, asking if I needed anything else. She kept my package on her side of the counter.
“I would also like some bacon, cut into lardons, please.”
I saw a hint of a smile. She nodded, knowing lardons were part of the chicken recipe, to be used that day.
Before moving to France, Carol and I took turns patting each other’s backs while serving lean and salt-reduced turkey bacon. What great parents we were, saving our kids from future health issues. In France we were addicted to sizzling hunks of pig fat. No self-respecting French man or woman would ever eat turkey bacon.
Marbled, thick-sliced butcher’s bacon was cut into quarter-inch, bite-sized pieces to create lardons. At the supermarket, several shelves were devoted to pre-cut lardons, in every variation imaginable. How could I avoid buying this? Not only was it bacon, inherently irresistible, but they even cut it up for me! In the lardons aisle of Casino supermarket, I was Homer Simpson, drawing out “baaaaaaaaay-con” in a low, sensuous whisper.
“Avec ÇA?” my butcher said. I hoped she couldn’t hear me thinking about buying lardons at the supermarket.
We continued our dance until she held four brown bundles and I said that was all for today. This is when you think I would receive my packages and pay, but you would be wrong. My butcher traversed the length of the shop, and I matched her step along the customer side of the counter. At the end of the display case, she put my order in a red plastic shopping basket and pulled a plasticized number from her breast pocket. She placed the number in my basket, regarded me solemnly and said, “Thirty-seven.” As I thanked her for my basket, I could see the back corner of the shop. The male butcher was serving people in a line of two or three. I learned later this line was for important people, family and friends of the butchers. So much for égalité.
Basket in hand, I was required to immediately take two steps, and place it on a roller conveyor belt, a smaller version of the one at A&P when I was a kid; at my hometown supermarket, groceries were packed in brown paper bags, arranged in plastic bins and placed on a conveyor which disappeared through the wall. A teenager would load them into our car outside. The Boucherie conveyor was only six feet long, and it was blocked by customers standing beside their respective baskets, waiting for the cashier. In the crush, I could not approach the conveyor to unload my purchases, so I stood there like an idiot, holding my basket of meat. Understandably, all hell broke loose. The lady butchers stormed from behind the meat counter in a race to be first to explain why my foolish actions could lead to the end of 400 years of diplomatic relations between Canada and France. My basket was taken, and several people in the cashier’s line were asked to move, allowing my basket to be placed in the correct order on the conveyor. I felt relieved to be standing basketless, like the other customers waiting to pay.
Each basket inched along the conveyor when another order was rung in. We stood beside our baskets; why couldn’t we stand in the correct order holding our baskets? When it was my turn to pay, the cashier moved my basket to the little shelf beside her cash register. She tossed my number thirty-seven in a pile without looking at it. The number was unfailingly taken from the basket before the meat; otherwise, it was anarchy! The purpose of the plasticized numbers, and the payment system, remained a mystery to me. My instincts warned that questioning the procedure in fractured French could result in banishment from the shop, a risk I was unwilling to take.
