Picard's Foods

The Picard store in Ferney-Voltaire

Picard is my favorite French grocery store.  Although they don’t carry milk, cheese (a necessity in France), seltzers (or wine and beer – additional necessities), salad greens, and some other staples, which means I make the rounds of different food markets, Picard is a specialty-item enterprise: they sell frozen foods. 

Picard's rows of deep-chest freezers

Picard’s stores look somewhat sterile, with rows of deep-chest freezers packed with tempting packages whose alluring graphics of the foods within entice buyers like me to pick up more foods than the tiny French freezers could hold.

Flash-frozen fruit

The company flash-freezes fresh produce or prepared products, which preserves their texture and taste.  Picard’s non-GMO foods are gourmet, flavorful, well-made, easy to use, and do not have artificial preservatives or flavorings.  But what makes Picard my favorite French grocery store is the choice and the fact that whatever I buy doesn’t taste like frozen food.  Take, for example, frozen spinach.  In the US, I could buy a 10 oz block of frozen spinach, but what if I want to use just a quarter cup?  I’d have to take a hammer or saw to cut it up, or thaw out the entire thing and toss most of it out.  Picard’s frozen chopped spinach, on the other hand, like all their pureed vegetables in bags, are molded into individual little rectangles, around an inch by an inch and a half, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick.  I just pour out as much as I need and freeze the rest.

Frozen cubes of pureed peas, pumpkin, and spinach

Whether I buy frozen fresh vegetables, like cauliflower florets, peeled fava beans, or chanterelle mushrooms, or a vegetable mixture such as a Moroccan tagine or grilled eggplant and peppers, or salmon wrapped in puff pastry, or vegetarian pureed soups, or some sort of ethnic food (such as frozen Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, or Moroccan meals), or herb mixtures or sauces, or any of their mouth-watering cakes and ice creams, preparing everyday gourmet dinners feels like cheating. 

Appetizers

Pureed soups (all vegetarian)

Fish

Ethnic vegetable mixtures

Crepes

Tartes and Quiches

Japanese foods

Cannelloni (Manicotti)

Thai foods

Cakes

Desserts (no calories, of course)

Ice cream confections

Ice cream desserts

The Picard insulated bag

One small purchase in my Picard bag

Like many French women (yes, women still do most of the cooking), I’ve become dependent on Picard, and I dread to think that, when I return to the US, I’ll have to make from scratch so many of these foods that I buy frozen in France.  Maybe we can get Trader Joe’s to carry more of Picard’s items (in fact, some of Trader Joe’s frozen foods from France are Picard products with TJ’s labels).  Better yet, maybe we can get Picard to open some stores in the United States – starting with Oakland, California.

The one frozen Picard item we don't need in the U.S.

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