Food: A History of Sila. Part One- France

After seven months of sailing, we have come across many different foods. We found that each country has a set of foods that were special to only that country. We started in France so you'll start on the delicious food adventure in France as well.

France had a huge variety off heavenly foods. Here is my top ten list:

10        Canned Vegetable

9          Pre-made Crepes

8          Duck Cassoulet

7          Mushroom Pâté

6          Fresh Mussels

5          Mustard

4          Cheese

3          Petit Beurre Cookies

2          Butter

1          Bread and Pastries

You may be wondering why canned vegetables is even on the list. We depend on cans because we can't refrigerate everything for long in our ice box. We enjoyed many cans of corn, mushrooms, spinach, carrot, peas, artichoke hearts, and others. The canned mushrooms in particular were fabulous. They were a variety of fancy mushrooms whose names I have never heard before. We put them in sauces for pasta or rice or used them as pizza toppings. Mama in particular loved the canned spinach. I thought she bought too much canned spinach but it turns out it was great.

Another awesome food was precooked crêpes. They were sold in bags like tortillas. We ate them four different ways. The first, and my favorite was the Grumpy Creperie. We teased Daddy about being the Grumpy Creperie guy even though he made great breakfast crepes. He would heat them up with a little butter and sugar. My second favorite was the cold snack crepe. We would take a crepe from the bag and spread butter on it and eat it like that. My third favorite we only got on special occasions. We put Nutella and whipped cream on a warmed crepe for dessert. And the fourth was a savory crepe that Mama would make for breakfast or lunch. It was a sad day when we left the land of the crêpes.

 

Duck Cassoulet is also a great food. It is canned white beans with chunks of duck, which is a wonderful food. It has lots of protein so it helps keep people happy and strong. We especially like it on passage because it is a one pot, easy meal. We also can make extra rice for the next day. Besides it being healthy, it is delicious. Hot sauce goes well with it so we can have it as spicy as we want. At first, we were hesitant to try it. I had never eaten duck before. We also weren't sure what was inside the can, the outside only had a picture of ducks walking around. Thankfully, we thought to stock up on this wonderful food.

Mushroom Pâté is another French favorite. It was a paste we would spread on crackers for lunch. The small container that it came in held the right amount of pâté so that we used one jar per lunch. Nothing in France was particularly spicy; the pâté is one of the few things that had any zing. It is also another mushroom product of France. We might have another jar buried in storage, which would be awesome.

In Brittney, there are lots of especially good fresh mussels. We normally had them with butter, garlic and lemon on pasta. Mama says that the best mussel meal we had was when we invited Jacques, another Boreal owner, to have dinner with us. His family owns a famous vineyard in France so he brought the wine. We had mussels so often in the early summer that Jack Rabbit explicitly asked not to have them for a while. I never got tired of them because they were large and sweet.

Number 5 is Dijon Mustard. Mama stocked up on mustard that I never tasted. I don't like mustard and I almost never have any. The Parents love it and stocked up on it. I guess the only time I have the mustard is when Mama disguises it in sauces or salad dressing. I included it on the list because it was good in sauces and everyone else on Sila seems to really like it.

Cheese. Our family generally really likes most kinds of cheese. In Leadville, we had lots of not-so-great cheddar so we were happy when we got good cheddar from Wisconsin via Denver. In France, there were more cheeses that I had ever seen in one place, but it was all soft cheese, like Brie. I never thought that there would be no parmesan in France, which I thought was known for its cheese. The hard cheeses in general were really expensive. The soft cheeses were not expensive and were totally delicious. We had brie or camembert on almost everything! Our favorite was LePetit Camembert because it was a stinky cheese that was flavorful.

We also found Petit Beurre Cookies. These are basically a butter cookie with chocolate on top. Each cookie had a picture of some country in the chocolate so we often traded for countries. I didn't care which kind I got until I realized that Russia had the most chocolate. We still have a box or two reserved for guests or other special nights. We learned that anything with the name petit in it was generally pretty good!

Butter is on the list because we put it on practically everything. At the grocery store, there was an entire aisle completely devoted to butter. It often took us a while to find our favorite butter. What made the butter so good? It was creamy and sweet, not bitter, and difficult to explain. The butter was just perfect. You need to taste it to understand what made it so good.

At the top of the list are the pastries and bread. I am going to write a whole blog about those later but it is worth mentioning that the bread was a good vehicle for butter or cheese. I also forgot to include in the list the nectarines and peaches. They were juicy and delicious and inexpensive so we bought them every time we went to the store and I ate at least two every single day in France.

There were negatives about France though. As I said, France never had many hard cheeses. We also couldn’t find any decent coffee. I can tell because my parents are less grumpy in the mornings now that we have good coffee.

In my next blog, I will write about the food in Spain, Portugal, the Canaries, the Cape Verdes, and maybe even the Caribbean. – Porter