September 2023 Newsletter
Becoming a food tour guide! Plus French recs and why I will never make an 'authentic' carbonara
To watch:
120 battements par minute (120 Beats Per Minute)
120 battements par minute captures an extraordinary moment in time. Following the experiences of the director Robin Campillo who joined Act Up in Paris in the 1990s, this film is a restless portrayal of a renegade branch of Act Up as they campaign and protest for the release of HIV drugs - they march in the streets and throw pigs’ blood around the offices of the pharmaceutical companies that don’t appreciate the urgency. Rather than just documenting the group’s increasingly desperate cries for help however, the film veers off-course, refocusing on the love story between Sean (played by the same invincible actor from last month’s Au revoir là-haut) and Nathan as one of them starts to die from the virus. Be prepared to sob.
To read:
Janine Marsh is one of those people who, like Mozart, manages to find additional hours in the day. Since moving to France 14 years ago, she has built not only a website packed full of helpful handy articles and hints about moving, living and holidaying here, but she’s the editor of one of the most widely-read English-speaking French magazines with 2.77 million monthly readers - a magazine I highly recommend you read, especially the recently released Autumn issue as the images and articles are carefully curated single-handedly by Janine, and all I want to do right now is frolic off into the fairy tale French countryside, leaving my to-do list behind.
It’s always a delight to meet fellow food obsessives, but for me, the best treat are those who cannot finish eating until something sweet passes their lips, a kind of dietary full stop. This is the case with
who writes the Pale Blue Tart, a newsletter on highly-relatable dirty desires for dessert, however, she assesses the sweet side of life from a regenerative and climate-friendly standpoint. There is a lot to be done within our food industries to ensure the sustainability of the food we love, yet most discussion circles around meat. I love that Caroline is opening the debate on desserts too.To check out:
I stumbled across Nicola’s artwork on Instagram a few months ago. At first I couldn’t believe they were illustrations. No, surely these were photographs of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, their foil glinting in the light? On closer inspection (minute inspection let me clarify) I stood corrected, yes these are illustrations. Every now and then, one of her pictures appears on my Instagram feed, and every single time I do a double-take - ah a photo of a yummy tea cake, waaaaiitttt no this is an illustration…
Nicola’s skill is extraordinary, how she captures that perfect crinkle of a chocolate bar wrapper or the warped illusion of a straw in a bottle has me triple-checking the image simply to make sure I am correct, that she did actually draw this?! What’s more, these stunning illustrations are created with biro. To think my mere handwriting in biro is a messy smeared scrawl yet she can create these hyper-realistic works of art is astounding.
Find Nicola’s artwork, tributes to the treats of her childhood, here on her website, her Instagram here, her Facebook here and her Twitter here.
Onwards to September - a summery oasis in Toulouse, to starting a new job, to eating oysters and pancake burgers (yes, that really is a thing), and why I will die on this hill and never make an authentic carbonara…
Hellooo! So, where were we?
Summer is gripping onto the edge like a terrified parachuter, not ready to drop out of sight and make room for autumn, yet for some reason, the mornings are nippy here, lulling me into a false sense of cosiness. So, each day I suffer the excruciating experience of the sweltering Toulouse metro while wearing a coat. You’d have thought I would have learnt by now, but no each day this week the coat has accompanied me to town.
Somehow it’s the end of September and quite frankly it’s all blown by in a messy blur, every morning I wake up and for the first hour or so (often much, much longer) my brain feels gummy like a hangover, even though that happened only once this month, I swear.
Also, I have been absent from this newsletter for weeks. While maybe your inbox has been mercifully emptier as a result, I have missed sharing my slice of Toulouse with you and the food I currently haven’t been making - so please let me explain this rude absence and the recipes sitting in my notebook and the photos waiting on my camera, impatiently tapping their fingers, waiting for their time to shine.
This month has been unusual, to say the least. The reason is because I have started a new job as a culinary tour guide for the acclaimed food tour company Taste of Toulouse!
So, please sit back and let me tell you about the life of a tour guide and about Taste of Toulouse.
I first met Jessica, the founder of Taste of Toulouse, a year ago. We met for drinks at a canal-side bar where I might as well have been taking notes as I quizzed her about her move to France and her subsequent food business. Meeting fellow étrangers in Toulouse is easy, but finding people who move here to set up food businesses? We’re talking about the city of aeronautics and engineering. Let’s say 90% of people move here for Airbus (fyi this percentage is completely unsupported statistically). France may be the capital of cuisine, but foodie entrepreneurs in Toulouse have to be instigators. Fellow foodies are diamonds in the rough, and Jessica is such a diamond.
Jessica is from Michigan and moved to Toulouse with her husband six years ago. Within a year, she had set up her Taste of Toulouse food tours, guiding tourists around the city’s incredible food market Marché Victor Hugo, as well as wine tours in the evenings where guests guzzle delicious vin, and pastry and chocolate tours for sugar addicts such as myself.
Marché Victor Hugo is a sight to behold, in both senses. On one hand, it’s covered by a multi-storey car park so it’s easy to see why people who move here don’t really notice or appreciate it for what it is. Yet, full of vendors selling French cheeses, local meat and charcuterie, honey, spices, and exquisite patisserie that you can find only here (which I will get to later), the market is an institution, housing stalls for innovators in the Toulousain food scene.
As a result, it is both hidden and intimidating to expats and tourists.
So, this is where Jessica and Taste of Toulouse comes in. After first moving here and exploring the market herself, she wondered why there weren’t tours to acquaint people with the French market culture, to provide background on all the delicious food on offer, and to explain how to proceed with the overwhelming act of buying French cheese. This service was non-existent, in fact, the Office de Tourisme was completely confused by the idea. So, Jessica set up the tours and her business herself, in French might I add, to highlight the incredible selection of cheeses and wines in Toulouse and to celebrate the local producers who put so much dedication into creating their delicacies.
The tours were an instant success and she has not only received rave reviews from customers, but National Geographic, BBC Good Food, Delicious and Lonely Planet have all had the pleasure of following her around the market as she introduced them to sellers and picked up cheese and charcuterie for their pleasure of tasting.
Because yes, that is the absolute highlight of the market tour: you get to drink wine and eat all the cheese, charcuterie, foie gras and patisserie at the end.
And, to cap it all off, this month I started as a Taste of Toulouse culinary tour guide.
The popularity and demand for these foodie tours had reached a new level, so Jessica has all hands on deck. Meanwhile, this opportunity couldn’t have come at a better time for me because I had been looking for my own roots in this French city, for an excuse to get out there, bumbling along in French, and to dive back into the tangible world of food that I love. Working from home is all well and good but it does mean becoming best friends with your laptop. So, what is involved as a culinary tour guide?!