In the night market

When the temperature rises, the way we live changes. We stay up later, we eat lighter and the summer night markets begin. Plus a menu for an easy, almost-no-cook dinner.

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On summer evenings now, night markets begin to fill the streets of local towns and villages. Monday, it’s Valras Plage, Tuesday Vias, Wednesday and Friday, Pézenas, and here in Marseillan, market night is Thursday night.

In Pézenas old town, many of the artisan shops open until midnight, selling hand-thrown pottery, artfully woven baskets and silver jewellery. In other places, the offerings are considerably less raffiné, less shopping-to-the-sound-of-a cello – it’s more cheap T-shirts and sneakers with Cindy Lauper blasting out over the speakers. But the atmosphere is the same. After the heat of the day, walking slowly, shopping, eating, meeting friends for drinks and chat, is delicious.

In our village, visitors mingle with locals, people stand about in lively conversation, the benches in the small park in front of our house are fuller at 10pm than they are at 10am. On these market evenings, there’s barely a perch to be had in the restaurants along the port. Couples, groups of friends, and large families are crammed around tables. Babies doze, their mouths falling open on their mothers’ shoulders, while everyone else tucks into moules frites. Small children, their fat little beach-brown toes squished into sandals, deftly handle their mussels, using one shell to lever the meat out of another, copying their older siblings. You don’t often see children with screens at the table, and you don’t often see tantrums either, despite the lateness of the hour. Someone needs to create a masterclass in how they pull this off, for the benefit of humanity, or at least for the benefit of people who frequent restaurants.

Before we lived in Marseillan, when we just visited on holiday, there was a man who did chainsaw sculptures in the main part of the square at the night market, hacking huge chunks of wood into, to be honest I could never quite tell. He seems to have gone on to pastures, well, I hope just pastures, far away from human habitation because my god, what a racket. That part of the square is now dominated by a pretty, painted carousel, filled with tiny, excited children taking a twirl on a cow, a swan, a tiger, a camel or a giraffe. The air smells of sugar and sun cream.

There are stalls filled with jewellery I could probably make myself – given a spare couple of hours, a box of beads and a glue gun - others sell bags of lavender and surprisingly-scented soaps (if you want to smell like salted caramel, I can fix you up). There is a man cutting fresh nougat from vast slabs, and a woman braiding hair with ribbons, beads and feathers to reveal tight, white lines of scalp. Another man engraves customers’ names onto drinking glasses while they wait, and another is selling pot stands in the shape of the Occitan regional cross.

Lighting up Marseillan night market.

When I used to come here on holiday, I’d always want to buy something at the market, to take a tangible memory home. I’d scour the stalls, leaving no tat unturned, and probably end up with a pair of earrings which would languish, unloved, unworn, in my jewellery box. Holiday self-presents are often like the bottle of local booze you drank all summer then hauled back home, hoping it wouldn’t break in your case and ruin your best strappy sandals. But the truth is, none of us ever kept that holiday memory alive by drinking ouzo, pastis, grappa or raki at home on a rainy Monday night in November.

These days, I wander around the stalls, stop to chat with friends, possibly have a drink, and usually buy nothing. In the past, I took cards from the steam punk lamp stall and from the dog lead lady, a form of let’s-finish-the-kitchen-first displacement activity. Now, I don’t feel the compulsion to have a souvenir, to cling on to holiday happiness through the totem of a cheap, colourful scarf or a soft straw hat, because we live here and I need to spend my earring budget on plumbing and paint.

It is blisteringly sunny – as I type this at 7pm, it’s 34C in the shade on our terrace, and earlier today I took off my necklace as it was making me too hot. So this weekend, we’re eating cold food only. I love today’s recipe for mussels with ravigote, the tangy, herby, creamy sauce that goes so well with so much. You serve the mussels and sauce cold and you can prepare most of it ahead. I’ve made it into the star of this week’s menu, which I’m calling: A Menu For When It’s Too Hot to Eat, Almost (but you still want to show off a bit). If you think that sounds like something you’d like to try, I give a full plan of action so you can either take your time and know you’re not going to forget anything, or use my tips to make most of it ahead.

Aaaand, relax. No earrings required.

A little news…

I’ve been invited to join a collective of thirty scarily impressive food writers, including Bee Wilson, Georgina Hayden. Olia Hercules, Mark Diacono, Fuchsia Dunlop, and Ravinder Bhogal on a site called Scribehound Food. We each write a monthly column, so subscribers get an original piece of food writing from one of us every single day – and if you prefer to listen than to read, we record them too.

What will I be writing about over there? My adventures in home cooking, the triumphs and disasters, the inventing, creating, winging it and pulling it off every single day without losing my mind, along with stories about my career as a food writer and so much more – because we can write exactly what we want to write about, unfiltered, every month.

I appreciate all of your support here on Substack, my first true love, more than I can say. It means I can carve out time to keep creating this newsletter every week so I’m enormously grateful to all of you, for your subscriptions, your comments and likes, your emails and just general heart-warming enthusiasm. You make my day more often than you know. I’ll always keep my French stories and recipes here. On Scribehound Food, I’ll be writing more generally, about things that interest and entertain me outside of my French life, and other stories about my career as a food writer back these nine hundred years.

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to see you there, where we can carry on a different conversation and you can feast on the words of some of my brilliant friends and colleagues, too. If you’d like to try it out for a month, you can sign up for £1 to see if it’s for you. Here’s the link.

Moules, sauce ravigote

Mussels with ravigote sauce

Today’s recipe – with only a few tiny tweaks from me - is from one of my favourite cookbooks, one which – before we lived here – I used to carry with me on holiday each year: Caroline Conran’s Sud de France: The Food and Cooking of the Languedoc (I think it is out of print now – astonishingly – and second-hand copies are quite expensive, but the Kindle version is available.

Caroline Conran lived in this region for many years and her wonderful book records some of her favourite Languedocien and family recipes, as well as the kind of local knowledge and stories that only come from living in a region with your whole heart for a long time. It’s rare that a book is as enchanting as it is useful, but this one certainly is. If you’re visiting this region, or simply want to make some wonderful food with a South West flavour, I highly recommend it.

Her mussels with ravigote recipe is from the L’éstagnol restaurant, now closed, which was just by the halles in Narbonne - another place I highly recommend to you if you’re in the region this summer. It frequently wins the competition for the best halles in France.

Serves 4, as a light main course, 6 as a starter