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Showing posts with label Trouville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trouville. Show all posts

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Touring Trouville: Visiting Normandy's Famous Fish Market Town with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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




Ruth Paget Selfie