Ferney-Voltaire’s Marché

Produce purveyor at Ferney-Voltaire's Saturday market

Some merchants arrive by 5 AM to set up their stalls at Ferney-Voltaire’s Saturday market.  By 8:30, the marché is open for business.  The Ferney market is famous in this region, and because it borders Switzerland, it’s one of the more expensive ones in France.  Most of the vendors live hours away, but most of the customers live in the Ferney area or in the Geneva suburbs.  But shoppers from Lausanne will drive 40 kilometers to buy produce in the Ferney market at prices that they perceive to be less expensive than what they would pay in Swiss grocery stores.   

Although I buy more produce at Ferney’s less expensive supermarkets than at the marché, I go to the Saturday market because it’s a celebration.  The quiet town mutates into a retail festival, with one section of the main road devoted to the sale of food and the other section allocated to clothing.  Rectangular polychromatic  umbrellas transform the streets into narrower passageways where young parents push baby carriages, elderly couples walk arm in arm, middle-aged men and women fill backpacks, baskets, or shopping carts with food for the week, and children whine for chocolate or churros. 

Shoppers at the Ferney market

 Customers at a butcher's stall

Lining up at a cheese seller's truck

The Ferney market is a United Nations of shoppers.  This area is home not only to the French, but also to an international array of personnel employed at the various NGOs and UN agencies in Geneva as well as at CERN.  So milling about the marché, inspecting assorted fruit, vegetables, breads, cheeses, meats, pasta, olives, wine, flowers, clothing, tablecloths, fabrics, jewelry, books, and ready-to-eat food, are Africans, Chinese, Indians, Americans, Arabs and multilingual Europeans. But interacting with the vendors requires some knowledge of French.

Of course, there is appealing fresh produce

Cheeses from the region

Beaujolais wine, produced two hours from Ferney-Voltaire

Teas

Moroccan olives

French olives for tasting

Few of the merchants are actually farmers.  Most are produce purveyors who create colorful tableaux with overpriced fruits and vegetables.  Fishmongers drive more than four hours to Ferney and then they transform their long refrigerated trucks into extended display counters to sell fresh fish and seafood from the Mediterranean Sea.  Bakers retail baguettes and pain au levain as well as unusual loaves that can’t be found at local boulangeries (such as breads made with chestnut flour, or with figs, cranberries, or hazelnuts).  And cheese sellers often give miniscule tastes of raw milk cow, goat, and sheep cheeses that are produced in the region.  Then there are immigrants who market ready-made food, such as paella, schwarma, tagines, and fried plantains, and French natives who sell vin chaud (hot spiced wine) or choucroute (a dish of sauerkraut covered with anemic-looking sausages and thick slabs of pink ham riddled with fat).

The fishmonger's display

Specialty breads

North African food for sale

Choucroute

Grand Rue, the cobblestoned pedestrian street, is where weary shoppers sit in the sun at outdoor cafes and watch women contemplating the skirts, blouses, hats, stockings, soaps, and jewelry that are displayed along the other side of the road.

Taking a shopping break at a cafe on Grand Rue

Trendy tops

Sweatshirts printed with fictitious American college names

Lingerie stall

Winter hats

The marché, crowded, animated, carnivalesque, closes at 1:00.  Customers leave.  Merchants pack their trucks and head out to their next destination.  Cleaners remove the rubbish and sweep the streets.  By 2:30, Ferney-Voltaire returns to its tranquil, provincial, sleepy self.

French Refrigerators

Food shopping in France is a pleasure.  When I go to the weekly outdoor markets or the hypermarches (very large supermarkets that sell not just food, but also clothes, computers, books, dishes, dishwashers, washing machines, and refrigerators), I admire the variety of garden-fresh produce, raw-milk and pasteurized cheeses, assorted breads made from different types of flour, fresh pasta, chocolate cakes and fruit tartes, and myriad yogurts with flavors that don't exist in the United States (chestnut, mirabelle plum, or hazelnut, for example).  But the problem is, I can buy very few foods that need refrigeration.  That's because French refrigerators are the runts of household appliances.

French refrigerators and freezers, covered with the same veneer as the rest of the cabinets, blend into the kitchen décor – unlike conspicuous American refrigerators, which announce the newest trend, such as brushed stainless steel, as if the exterior of the item indicates how well it keeps food cold.   French refrigerators, though, are too small for me.  I’m used to obese American ones with shelves stuffed, drawers gorged with produce, and doors overfilled with drinks and condiments.  In the United States I don’t have to think about how much food I’m buying.  In France, I wonder whether the refrigerator could accommodate the cucumber.

The veneer matches the cabinets

18.25" wide, 11.75" deep, 38" high
(including the 2 produce drawers)
The refrigerator is 4.72 cubic feet.
Our American refrigerator is 26 cubic feet.

Other countries have Liliputian refrigerators, but why does France, the country famous for its food, wine, chefs, and Michelin stars?  How do people plan for dinner parties if there is no room in the refrigerator to prepare a dish the day before? (meaning, could the French ever celebrate a holiday like Thanksgiving?)  Isn’t there wastage with discarding perfectly good leftovers ? (I know a woman who makes soup every day for dinner, and what’s not eaten goes down the drain.) How many times a week do French people shop for food?  Do they think of their refrigerator space when they’re grocery shopping?  Or do they have, as many if my French friends do, an extra refrigerator in the garage?

French freezers, unlike their American counterparts, are well-designed, although stunted.  Open the door, and you see closed drawers, each one of which can be organized to hold a certain type of food (frozen vegetables in one drawer, desserts in another, and so on).  In the American freezer, you see foods packed and crammed into a large space, and finding what you want is an endeavor in arctic archeology.  

The freezer

A freezer drawer

A few days ago I bought a bag of 7 small organic oranges from Spain, 2 fennel bulbs, one lettuce, 3 turnips, 2 sweet potatoes from the U.S., one leek, 3 Granny Smith apples, and a small box of mushrooms.  I was able to fit everything in the refrigerator, after chopping off most of the green part of the leek.  Then I realized that I could have bought that yogurt.  There was space on the top shelf.  And that’s one thing that keeps commerce going here: returning to the grocery store to buy what we wanted to get in the first place, but didn’t know if the refrigerator had room. 

After grocery shopping

Packed produce drawers
Each drawer is 8.5" wide, 11.5" long, and 6" high

The Big Freeze 2012

It's warm today: minus 1 Celsius.  This morning it was -11.  I no longer have to calculate temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit.  I'm getting used to the metric system in temperature and kilometers, grams and liters.  Measuring the length of one's body in meters, however, is a concept I can't figure out yet.  Feet and inches for height, that's what I understand.  Otherwise, I'm becoming bilingual in measurements.

The Big Freeze 2012 hit this area almost 2 weeks ago when we had a day and a half of wet snow which, not being cleared, turned to ice on the sidewalks.  Most of the ice has evaporated in Ferney-Voltaire, but not so in the Swiss towns that border Lac Leman, where wind whipped up waves from the lake and spray covered walls, plants, pavement, and even cars, converting all into uncanny ice sculptures.

I braved the bone-chilling wind and sub-zero temperature (with the wind-chill factor, it felt like minus 6 Fahrenheit, or minus 21 Celsius) and drove to two towns on Lac Leman, Versoix (10 minutes from Ferney-Voltaire) and Nyon, and then to Geneva.  Here is what I saw:

Versoix

Versoix

Versoix

Nyon

Nyon

Geneva

Geneva

Geneva

Ferney-Voltaire

A bronze Voltaire - leaning on a cane, his left foot out to take another step, an expression of amusement on his face – stands on a pedestal that is engraved with the honorific, “Patriarch of Ferney.”  When Voltaire moved here in 1758 at the age of 64, Fernex, as it was called, was a poor hamlet with a population of 150 on the border of Switzerland. He built a chateau for himself on a small hill that overlooked the village (the chateau is now a national monument open for guided tours).  By the time of Voltaire’s death in 1791, the impoverished community had turned into a thriving town of 1,000 people – thanks to Voltaire, who drained swamps, cleared land for farming, constructed a theatre to put on his plays, built a fountain, school, and church, fed people who were hungry, and developed workshops for making pottery, watches, silk stockings, and leather goods. He also changed the spelling of Fernex to Ferney.  The town became Ferney-Voltaire in 1878 in homage to its patriarch.

We’re living in Ferney – as locals call it – which is now a small city of 8,000 people, many of whom are foreigners, here temporarily, living in apartment buildings and working at CERN or at the various NGOs and UN agencies in Geneva.  In fact, Ferney abuts Geneva, and many Swiss people have moved into this area with open borders because housing here is cheaper than it is in Switzerland.  That’s good for the Swiss.  Not so for us.  The only furnished apartment we found to rent is so close to the Geneva Airport that from our apartment we see planes taking off and landing, and we hear their roar if our windows are open.  But we also see one of nature’s miracles from our kitchen window: Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe.  Often it’s hidden in a blanket of clouds or haze, but on clear days when the white crown of Mt. Blanc appears and towers over the surrounding Alps, I’m awestruck. For a frozen mountain, Mt. Blanc is not just magnificent.  It’s voluptuous.

Mt. Blanc's white crown as seen from our kitchen

To arrive at the heart of Ferney-Voltaire from our apartment, we walk down Rue de Meyrin for ten minutes and pass several houses that were built during the time that Voltaire had lived in the town.  We reach the corner of a one-block cobblestoned pedestrian street with the ironic name of Grand Rue.  On one corner of this intersection is the boulangerie-patisserie where we buy bread in the morning.  On the other corner is the only bookstore in Ferney, a restaurant called “Le Patriarche,” and in front of that is the fountain that Voltaire had built.  Across from the bookstore (caddy-corner from the boulangerie) is the Hotel France, which had been the home of Voltaire’s secretary over 230 years ago.

Grand Rue

Boulangerie-Patisserie

Voltaire's fountain, Ferney's bookstore

Hotel de France

If we walk up the pedestrian street, we pass restaurants, cafes, boutiques, and one of the best cheese stores in the area.  Then we come to the intersection of Ferney’s only two-lane shopping street, Avenue Voltaire, where we find a small supermarket, pharmacy, flower shop, organic food store, some electronics shops, the post office and town hall, and the statue of Voltaire.  On Saturdays, the largest outdoor market in the region transforms Avenue Voltaire into a carnival of fruits, vegetables, breads, cheeses, meats, fish, olives, candy, clothes, dishware, and people.

Ferney-Voltaire isn’t on the tourist map.  But maybe it should be. 

  

La Chandeleur

February 2 was “la Chandeleur”- a holiday in France.  For the previous two weeks, the supermarkets had displayed an assortment of flours, sugars, oils, jams, honeys, milk (UHT, which doesn’t require refrigeration and can therefore be exhibited with all the other ingredients), as well as Nutella, with half-off sales on Grand Marnier, Cointreau, and rum (I bought a bottle of Grand Marnier).  Near the presentation of ingredients hung all sorts of crepe pans of various sizes and qualities, next to a table stacked with boxes of electric table-top crepe griddles.

Carrefour supermarket's advertisement

Yes, la Chandeleur is a holiday for eating crepes.    

I asked two ex-Catholic French friends what’s the meaning of la Chandeleur.  It’s just a holiday to eat crepes, they replied.  Not a satisfactory answer, because the translation for Chandeleur in my dictionary is “Candlemas.”  I consulted Wikipedia.  In brief, Candlemas is a holiday commemorating both Mary’s emersion in the ritual bath (the Jewish mikvah) 40 days after Jesus’ birth,  and the presentation of Jesus in the Temple.  The word “chandeleur” comes from the French word for a large candle, “chandelle” -- which, it is believed, refers to large candles that were burning in the Temple (are they referring to the menorah?).  La Chandeleur had been a Christian adaptation of Roman celebrations in which people walked with candles in the streets during the first week of February to commemorate their gods and dead ancestors.  The festival then became a holiday in which priests blessed candles.   

Again, what do crepes have to do with candles, or Mary’s ritual purification, or Jesus being brought to the Temple in Jerusalem?

Nothing.

Crepes for la Chandeleur, according to my devout French Catholic friend, Catherine, represent the sun, and in February we realize that the days are getting longer and we see the sun more. 

The groundhog, as well, comes out of it’s burrow on February 2 to look for the sun. 

In other words, la Chandeleur is just one of many religious holidays whose agricultural and pagan origins have been absorbed and glossed over with Biblical interpretations.  Crepes of one sort or another undoubtedly existed in France before Christianity came here.  Round like the sun, crepes represent hope, the future, springtime, warmth, the harvesting of wheat.  And they taste good, too.

Making Catherine's Crepes at the table

Catherine’s Crepe Recipe (I translated the French, but not the metric measurements)

1 egg per person

Beat all the eggs together with a little bit of salt

Add a glass of milk

Add 2 rounded tablespoons of flour for each egg 

Mix to obtain a smooth batter

Add 3-4 soup spoons of a neutral oil [I, CERN Wife, used melted butter]

Mix in the quantity of milk necessary to obtain the batter as you like (as an aside to me, Catherine said that she uses a liter of milk for a batter made with 5 eggs)

The ideal is to make the batter a bit in advance so that the flour swells, and you then you have to add a little bit of milk.  But if you don’t have the time, it’s not essential [to make the batter in advance].

Catherine’s Recipe for Caramel au Beurre Sale (salted butter)

75 grams sugar

35 grams salted butter

10 cl cream (not the light kind!!!)

Make a caramel with the sugar and a little bit of water, until light brown.

Add butter and cream (beware of hot splashing).

Cook until it reaches a nice “honey-like” consistency.

Have fun and treat  yourself!

CERN Wife

I'm sitting, for the first time in my life, in the CERN library.  Why?  Because somewhere in our apartment building, and I think it's from the floor above us, construction is going on, and the earsplitting wheezing, whistling, whining sounds of saws screech and pulsate into every room.  Even the best earplugs I own don't help.  My way of escaping the cacophony was to flee our flat in Ferney-Voltaire, France, the town where we're living for a year, to the library at CERN in Meyrin, Switzerland - an eight-minute drive.  Being the spouse of a CERN physicist does have its benefits.

CERN is the French acronym for “Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire” (European Council for Nuclear Research), founded in 1952 to develop a European fundamental physics research institute.  By 1954 the laboratory was created, and the name changed to the “European Organization for Nuclear Research” (l’Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire).  But the acronym, CERN, remained.

A view of some CERN buildings

Cutting-edge science occurs here. In a vast campus of dilapidated barracks, tin sheds, stained concrete structures, and a few well-designed buildings, physicists from 84 countries examine collisions of particles that occur in a 27-kilometer circular tunnel that is buried 100 meters underground.  In teams of hundreds, they are working to find answers to essential questions about matter and the universe.

Barracks that are scientists' offices

The ATLAS building

CERN's main site is in Meyrin, on the outskirts of Geneva, with subsidiary facilities in the nearby French countryside where corn grows in the summer and sunflowers in the fall, and where cows munch on grasses from the spring until frost forms.  In a tunnel 328 feet below these fields and villages surrounding CERN, collisions reach temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the sun.

My husband studies the quark-gluon plasma, which is created during violent collisions of particles in the tunnel’s accelerator.  His interest in such physics comes from a curiosity to understand the big bang.  My interest, on the other hand, is people, and I am curious about similarities and differences in human cultures.  I studied anthropology.  But I’m here, not as an anthropologist, but as a CERN wife.  And it’s in that context that I am writing this blog.  In fact, blogging might not have been possible without CERN, which claims to be the place where the world wide web was invented.

This CERN library is more silent than the anthropology library where I devoted so much time when I was writing my dissertation.  Two young men are sitting three tables away absorbed in their computers.  No noise but the occasional hum of a copy machine.  What a pleasure.