Trouville: Visiting Normandy’s Famous Fish Market Town
with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
My
husband Laurent and I broke up a rainy, polluted Parisian winter day by driving
out to Normandy to visit the oceanfront town of Trouville on the English
Channel.
Trouville
sits across from Deauville (home of the American Film Festival). You have to cross the tiny, River Touques to
go from one town to the other.
Deauville
and Trouville are neighbors, but are completely different from one
another.
Deauville
is a resort with yachting facilities, a casino, a long beach boardwalk, a
horserace track, and numerous restaurants with outdoor terraces for showing off
expensive sunglasses and signing autographs, if you are in show business.
People
will still eat seafood platters in Deauville when it is 50 degrees outside and
be perfectly happy in their cashmere sweaters and scarves.
Trouville,
on the other hand, is famous for its fish market. More people cook at home here despite the
very good port restaurants.
The
fish market is the most exciting part of town.
The day’s catch is displayed with good wines to go with the fish. Fish with glistening eyes and crimson red
gills are what housewives look for to cook at home.
Housewives
scurry about with their metal, wheeled shopping caddies to buy lots of fish and
six bottles of a wine they know at a time.
The
travel writer Jan Morris described Trouville as a town of artists in her book
Among the Cities. A statue of Gustave
Flaubert greets visitors to the port.
The writer Proust vacationed here as did the Impressionist painter
Monet.
I
was also ready to call Trouville the City of Artists for all its specialty food
shops.
One
of Trouville’s local pastry shops was named “Au Succulent.” Another shop had a cookbook on Norman cuisine
with bottles of Normandy’s apple brandy called Calvados next to it.
Calvados
and a little crème fraîche on steamed mussels sounded great I thought. We ate some mussels prepared that way called
Moules à la Normande that made a cold day visit to Trouville seem very warm.
I
still love breathing in salty, ocean air and think it makes food taste better.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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