Ketchup on Camembert

One morning I woke up craving something “New York deli” with only a baguette, camembert, and a bottle of ketchup at hand. Bagels have been a hard thing to find here, or when I do, they are ONLY sold as sandwiches, which is truly weird. So I slapped together an omelette, tucked it into a warm, crackly roll, and drenched it in ketchup.

It felt like home, but like a home you haven’t cleaned in a while. It was delicious.

TL;DR

• “Gourmand” = joyful, cheap, tasty excess. “Gourmet” = rare, refined, expensive. I wrote about this because the terms confused me for a while.
• Made a NYC-style egg sandwich with baguette, camembert, and ketchup—surprisingly perfect. Gourmand. Bag of chips? same - or can be
• McDo in France with beer, macarons, & disco lights.
• Musical interlude at the end, not interluding…

Gourmand

That moment—cheesy, slightly salty, defiantly gleeful—felt both thoroughly American and stubbornly French. That is gourmand. It’s not gourmet, but it’s filling, oddly comforting, and cheap and really tasty.

The French do have a real appreciation for this. Most parties I’ve been to have cheap chips next to expensive cheese and choice wines.

The €3 wheel of discount raw milk camembert isn’t really so available in NYC. And yeah, this is a funky sandwich which is one of my guilty pleasures, even a bit more so on a croissant. For the record, it’s kind of amazing on a baguette with a heavy sprinkling of Everything Bagel seasoning.

I’m not here to impress anyone. It’s tasty.

Egg & cheese on a roll, salt, pepper, ketchup

We get eggs from a store called Nous Anti Gaspi (“we’re against food waste” or gaspillage), or a local provider, along with some other goodies. A favorite is a local no frills raw milk camembert. At 3€ a wheel, we get it a lot.

I am also one of those that likes ketchup on eggs. So every so often I wake up with a hankering for a New York style bacon egg and cheese on a roll with salt, pepper and ketchup.

Pretty standard order in NYC, even if delis use a week’s RDA of salt in half of one of those sandwiches. Bagels here are not good, so I use a baguette, make an omelette covered with cheese and then ketchup. It’s delicious, even if camembert is not the best choice, but it was what was in the fridge.

Ooh. I like good news about bad food.

Tasty. It may or may not be expensive. Gourmand.

In the city we live in, Nantes, I rarely see the word gourmet anywhere, but “gourmand” is everywhere.

There’s a lot of this in French culture. Kind of guilty pleasures, but also legitimately tasty stuff. Gourmand, gourmandaise, etc. - same idea.

Le Gourmet Français

When I was growing up, French food was just gourmet. Like all of it, kind of automatically, but I grew up in New York and anywhere that was French was expensive and pretentious. This was the 1980s with the explosion of the French wine trade in the US, Grey Poupon mustard & Bain de Soleil advertising, and so on. My ideas about France came out of advertising that made it look attractive and expensive.

French people: this ad is famous.

I also never realized that they are both eating in their cars with a knife and fork, dishes, the whole lot. Two guys driving in the country in Rolls Royces, both eating in their cars with forks and knives. and who is the guy with the gloves getting the mustard? He’s got a chauffeur and a butler in the car?

Nobody eats like that. But we had Grey Poupon in the house and that went on every baloney and cheese sandwich I had as a kid. I love all spicy mustards.

Those guys in the Rolls Royces? They were supposed to be the gourmets.

Me with the baloney sandwiches? Gourmand.

So - What is Gourmet & what is Gourmand?

A gourmet is an expert on foods, wine, etc., with a refined palate. Someone who knows better. A rare individual, perhaps. Anything elite and refined food is therefore gourmet, you are not expected to shove your mouth full of it.

Gourmand is the opposite, as if to say, “this is delicious, and you can eat all of it.” “Stuff yourself with tasty things.” This is really tasty, but it’s not refined. Cheap and cheerful.

Of course, both of these terms are over applied, which is why it can get confusing.

We’ve been to great bistros that provide fast, tasty food in an unpretentious place. The last gourmand café that we went to served mussels and fries, steaks with wine and beer.

McDo

McDonald’s fits this category.

McDonald’s  (“MacDo” – pronounced “mack-doh”) is really popular here – there are over 1,000 of them. France is McDonald’s #2 market in the world, after the US, of course. Besides having croissants and macarons on the morning menu, it’s pretty much the same - although the fried chicken sandwich looks tempting.

All of those folks you see lining up at McDonald’s are not American tourists on vacation. They’re French.

A French McDonald’s feels different. It feels a bit more relaxed.

Here, people sit down over their meals, and might be there for an hour or two as adults, not just kids.

These places are often FULL.  On Saturday nights, I went into one that was like a disco. The lights were down, the place was packed with teens and families and the music was Club Level.

Clearly, the French approach to McDo is different.

In the US, they always feel a bit like an emergency room, for some reason.

But the food is pretty much the same.

Guilty Pleasures?

I would love to hear about your bad ideas about good food. Any guilty pleasures? Tell me all about it.

I am still trying to get French friends to understand a fluffernutter and banana sandwich. …and a few Americans.

Super Bon Bon Soul Coughing (1996)

Super Bon Bon (“super candy” or “really tasty,” in French), isn’t really a phrase you’d hear in France. Soul Coughing was a New York City band and seems like a bottled 1990s sound to me — jazz-spattered, beat-poetry weird, and sample-heavy grooves. The hook—“Move aside and let the man go through”—loops like a subway announcement with whatever meaning that they had for it just a bit lost on me.