Shopping in French Food Markets

Eating at French restaurants is great, but eating out all the time can be expensive. You can save money and still eat well by shopping at the small shops and larger markets.

First a vocabulary list:

Boulangerie--this is where you buy the famous French bread, from the baguette to the heavy pain de compaigne.
Patisseries--Pastry shops, the smells will entice you in from the street.
Confiseries--The world's best chocolates and other sweets here. Fromageries (sometimes crémerie)--For the best cheese come here; you'll find the greatest variety and freshest cheese. For a taste ask: 'est-ce que je peux le goûter, s'il vous plaît?
Charcuteries--a delicatessen with sliced meats, seafood salads, pâtes etc. If you see traiteur they have take away food.
Boucherie--a generalized butcher, a boucherie chevaline sells horse meat.
Epiceries and Alimentations--small grocery stores with a little bit of everything. Some of these small shops are open when others are closed and may stay open later in the night.
Supermarkets (Supermarché)--Most town and city centers have at least one department store with a large supermarket.--Intermarche, Prisunic are two names.
Hypermarché--These huge supermarkets are usually on the outskirts of town and about as interesting as a supermarket in the states.
Open air markets--each town or district has one or two days a week for their open air markets. There are a variety of things sold here, but the fruits and vegetables are often fresher and of better quality than in the stores.

Shopping in the food markets is roughly the same process as in most countries of the world: take your basket, or cart, and pick up the food you need. There are some differences. In the produce section, bag your produce, find the scale, put the produce on it, and then tap the picture above the scale that corresponds to what ever you have. You will receive a stick-on tag to put on your bag. If you reach the check-out counter without your tag, you may be sent back to get one.

There is a lot less pre-packaging of items than in the U.S. or U.K. Meats and cheese are sold from behind counters. You will have to tell the person behind the counter how much or how many you need. If you're not sure, hold up the number of fingers (the French start counting with the thumb as 1, the index finger as 2, etc.) and say "2 personnes", and they'll show you an amount, if it looks about right say Oui! (or nod yes). You can also use hands and fingers to indicate how much, like how large a slice of cheese you want.

The French drink a lot of bottled water. The tap water is perfectly safe to drink, and usually tastes all right, but you'll see people with a 6 pack of 1 liter bottles going out of the markets. Soft drinks are very expensive in France, about par with beer or wine.

Usually the boulangerie attatched to the market is on the way out the door, buy your bread then. A baguette tastes best if it's eaten within 4 hours of baking.

When you get to the check out counter watch the people ahead of you. Usually you unload your cart for the checker. If he/she tosses a plastic bag toward the end of the counter, you should start bagging your own groceries. You can buy hard liquor in a supermarket--like gin and scotch.

French supermarket are open fewer hours than in the states. Usually they close about 6 or 7 in the evening. Outside of Paris they often close for lunch, for 1-2 hours. On Sundays they close after 12-12:30pm and don't reopen until Monday or Tuesday a.m. Restaurants are often closed Sunday afternoons also, some reopen around 7pm.

Shopping in a supermarket is a great way to build vocabulary and get insights into the French culture, but nothing beats the open markets. Most towns and villages have one each week in France. The myriad colours of home grown vegetables and produce are well worth seeing, to say nothing of the mouth watering aromas of local cheeses, cooked meats and fish. The weekly market is a meeting place for the locals, where the perfect shape and colour of a tomato is not as important as the taste, where the wine harvest is more important than world affairs and where time seems to stand still at least for a little while.
Article courtesy of Constance Montague. Photos by Peter Hayward.