27 December 2016

“Sea fruits” (and eat them)

Seafood in France goes by the plural name « fruits de mer » — sea fruits. At least shellfish, including shrimp and squid, and crustaceans (crabs, lobsters) are called that. Fish (poissons) is a separate category. Evidently, the terms « fruits de mer » was borrowed from the Italian « frutti de mare » around the time of the French Revolution.


Fruits de mer are, along with poultry, some of the most popular holiday foods in France. Winter is their season, anyway. Remember the old saw about eating oysters and other shellfish in months with a R in their names. We'll be having oysters on New Year's Eve. We get them from the fish and seafood vendor at the open-air market on Saturdays in Saint-Aignan. They are brought in overnight from the coast near the town of Marennes and the Ile d'Oléron, as in the ad above. Brittany and Normandy, also not far from here by car or truck, are also famous for their oysters. I like them raw, on the half-shell — or lightly steamed (mi-cuites), the way we ate them in N.C.


In fact, no part of France is very far from the sea, compared to the central parts of continent-size countries like the U.S. and Australia. Even the areas that are farthest from the coast like Burgundy or our region, called Le Centre, are at the most a four- or five-hour drive from the sea. For comparison, cities like Asheville in North Carolina are farther from the coast than any place in France, and west of N.C. you have Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and... well, thousands of miles of territory where seafood is not, or used not to be, readily available. People out there don't have a seafood culture the way French people do.


Walt and I eat a fair amount of shrimp (crevettes). I grew up eating them on the North Carolina coast, back when shrimp were abundant and cheap. They were so inexpensive that we used them as bait to catch little fish that most people nowadays wouldn't even bother fishing for, much less cleaning or cooking and eating. Those days are gone. Most shrimp in France are sold already cooked, which I don't really understand in this cold climate. Once in a while you can find affordable raw shrimp on the markets or at the supermarket, mostly frozen. We get them from Asian grocery stores in up in Blois and over in Tours. I like to clean and cook them myself, not buy them pre-cooked.


In the ad above, queue de lotte is monkfish, which until the past few decades was not really popular, even along the coasts. Queue means tail. Have you ever cooked and eaten monkfish tails? Saumon is of course salmon, most of which is farmed nowadays — Scotland and Norway are big producers. Dos de cabillaud means the dorsal part (the back) of the codfish (cabillaud). It's the thickest and most sought-after part of the cod fillet. Back in the early 1980s, when I lived in Paris, cod was considered an ordinary, run-of-the-mill fish choice. It was cheap. Nowadays the prices are sky-high. It's not as expensive as scallops — noix de Saint-Jacques — though.

23 comments:

  1. I seem to have read somewhere that a lot of what is sold as "scampi" in British supermarkets and cheap restaurants is actually monkfish tail.

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  2. In New England, they used to call monkfish 'the poor man's lobster'.

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  3. The seafood this year at the market has been extraordinary. I've never seen such a variety all at once. I don't know why some of the Atlantic boats don't freeze their prawns raw, but they are all set up to cook them. They have to do one or the other to keep the prawns in good condition. Unfortunately prawn flesh is like lobster, and deteriorates very quickly once the beast is dead if you don't process it in some way.

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    1. I'm not sure I ever remember seeing cooked shrimp in American supermarkets. There were plenty of frozen raw shrimp available. Of course in N.C. on the coast we had fresh shrimp all the time — caught and sold locally. Still do, actually. It's one of the foods that I particularly enjoy when I go back there (upcoming trip, Feb.)

      What I don't like about the cooked shrimp as in France is that they haven't been de-veined before cooking. Besides, I like to peel the shrimp and then use the peelings (and heads, if they haven't been removed) before de-veining them and then make broth for putting in whatever curry or soup or whatever I'm cooking the shrimp in. Sorry, I just can't use the term "prawn" — it's foreign to my English dialect.

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    2. You get both in Australia, about equally or maybe somewhat more cooked. They are not deveined there either. I didn't know you could buy them deveined.

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    3. You can sometimes buy them de-veined, but normally you have to do it yourself. That's what I do. We always de-veined them in N.C. because they lived on sandy bottoms and the vein (gut) was full of gritty sand. I used to get peeled, de-veined, cooked, frozen shrimp at ED, and they were good, but that's now history.

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    4. Ken, it's pretty common these days, to find pre-cooked, flash-frozen shrmip (of various sizes), in the grocery store. I never bought shrimp when I was younger, but we get it now for most special family get-togethers. The ones we had for Christmas Eve were even already de-veined!

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    5. Thing have probably evolved since I left the U.S. nearly 14 years ago. I remember arriving in Champaign, Illinois, in 1971, and being stunned to find out there was no seafood available. Nowadays, the seafood offered in supermarkets in a place on the N.C. coast, where I visit anually, might be very different from what you find in the Midwest. I'm glad you can get good shrimp in St. Louis.

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  4. In English fruit is can also be 'profit' or 'reward', so one can have the reward of fishing in the sea or the fruit of one's labours. I understand that most 'scampi' in the UK is also irradiated to preserve it. I'm afraid that I don't like oysters (texture ?) and that is a capital offence here in France! Your Christmas meals have looked delicious.

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    1. Tant pis pour vous en ce qui concerne les huîtres. Have you ever tried them lightly steamed or poached. You might find them tasty that way. And yes, seafood is the "fruit" of the sea, when you say it that way. Like "the fruit of your labor". It's the goodness we reap when we do the hard work of harvesting it.

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  5. Here we can buy both cooked & raw shrimp (I like the seafood at Harris Teeter) and the raw can be had already de-veined (for a price) .....some wild caught & some farm raised, so there's a pretty big selection...I would like to see shrimp with heads on more often (like to use the shells for a stock too)
    after a meat-filled couple of days, we're back to craving seafood.....happy new year!

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  6. I have always been intrigued and baffled by the deveined notion in English, especially when talking about shrimp. I was curious to know what the translation was in French. Some internet dictionaries say it is déveiner which is a direct translation of the English word and doesn't make sense in French at least when shrimp is concerned. CNRTL says déveiner doesn't exist! Vein has two meanings in French. The first, as in English, is a blood conduit, the second is luck. So does it mean the shrimp is out of luck when you devein it in France?

    P.S. Le Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, CNRTL pour les intimes, is in my opinion as good as Grand Robert and could be relied on for good information about french language. In addition, it is free online.

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    1. In American English, "vein" is a euphemism when it comes to shrimp. The vein in question is actually the gut or intestine or tube digestif of the crustacean. Because it is the intestine, it might contain matter that could alter the taste of the shrimp flesh. And as I said, in places like North Carolina where the bottom of the ocean, the inlets, and the sounds where shrimp are caught is very sandy, the animal's intestine might contain grains of sand that it would be unpleasant to bite into.

      English "vein" also means "filon" in geological or mining terms. Robert says: Masse allongée (de roches éruptives, de substances minérales existant dans le sol au milieu de couches de nature différente). Filon d'étain, de cuivre, d'argent. -> Veine.

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    2. Here is what Ricardo, the Quebec chef, has to say about the de-veining of shrimp:

      DOIT-ON RETIRER LE BOYAU NOIR [ de la crevette] ?
      Le boyau en question est le tube digestif de la crevette. Les crevettes cuites décortiquées sont presque toujours déjà déveinées. Ce sont les crevettes crues qui peuvent parfois présenter une veine noire visible. L’enlever ou non relève davantage d’une question d’esthétique que de goût. La meilleure manière de le faire est d’inciser la crevette le long du dos pour exposer le boyau et le retirer en tirant doucement avec la pointe d’un couteau d’office.

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    3. Yes, I forgot about filon. Mais quand on a le filon, on a de la veine :-)

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  7. Growing up in North Carolina, we ate fish quite often, especially when my dad stocked our lake with perch etc.
    As a "grown up" I have always eaten as much fish as possible, partially because I don't eat red meat but I love seafood.
    Imagine my dismay upon breaking out in a bright red rash on night, after a shrimp dinner.
    The doctor told me the next day, that I have become allergic to shrimp. That the genetic makeup of a shrimp is about as far as you can get from the genetic makeup of a human, thus more people are allergic to shrimp than other seafood.
    Lucky me .. growing up eating fried shrimp in NC .. I am now allergic but happily can eat all the fish I want, just staying away from shell fish.
    My grandfather was a chef, he made the best ever bouillabaisse ... sigh ~

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    1. I've known people who were deathly allergic to shrimp and other crustaceans. Sorry that you have this affliction.

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  8. You might be interested in the film "Wild Caught," about the decline of a coastal NC fishing town as factory farming of shrimp took over. The filmmaker is a professor at UNC Greensboro, and there's some lovely footage of fishermen and the coast. As a result of watching this, when I buy shrimp now it's always wild-caught.
    http://www.folkstreams.net/film,201

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    1. It's true that when I go to Morehead City and buy fresh-caught local shrimp in the fish markets, they are so much more flavorful than the farmed shrimp I get in the supermarkets over here in France. Thanks for the link, which I'm reposting live.

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  9. Hi Ken. Cliona is looking for fish-cheeks. They are used in Irish recipes. Are they available in France and if so, do you know the name in French?

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    1. Cod cheeks are joues de cabillaud -- joue [zhoo] means cheek. I see recipes here.

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  10. I grew up on the Louisiana gulf coast. We ate oysters only in the cooler “ R” months. I think most people followed this custom without knowing why. The summer waters harbor Vibrio vulnificus. This relative of cholera is a little known but horrible pathogen. Lots of info is available on the net.

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    1. I wonder if the Vibrio is as much a problem in the cold French waters. Even in summer, the water stays cold, compared to water temperatures in Louisiana or even North Carolina (where the Gulf Stream bathes the coast).

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