What we spent: France
Joe and the Chartres cathedral
Lovely lights on the Chartres cathedral at night
I’m going to break our France spending into three categories: the nearly four weeks we spent in France during May and early June, our eight week GR10 hike, and finally, the nine days we spent in Hendaye and Bordeaux after the we finished the trail. The first and last parts of our time in France were sort of “normal vacation” and the middle part was, of course, a standard European long walk. The table below only includes the first part of our French idyll.
The (empty) green market in Chartres
Even though our daily spending hovered higher than most other countries we visited this year, France didn’t feel unreasonably expensive to us. We spent basically no time in Paris and mostly cooked meals for ourselves using extraordinary French ingredients, especially meat (rabbit! guinea fowl!), bread and pastry, cheese and local produce. And butter. Also cured meat. (I’ll stop now. Except wait: also wine.) Quality was high, so we always felt like our purchases represented good value.
Maybe not the finest available
Having said that, often those ingredients aren’t cheap. Here’s an example: Label Rouge chickens. As with bakeries, the French government certifies quality in a variety of foodstuffs, appending the Label Rouge appellation to foods of superlative quality. Years ago, I read Mark Schatzker’s approving treatment of Label Rouge chickens in his excellent book abut the science of flavor and the name (and idea behind it) stuck with me since. So we were delighted to find these smaller, deeply yellow chickens in butcher shops all across France, some with the heads still on, often with a few stray feather to be plucked at home. As I said, Label Rouge chickens aren’t inexpensive; we generally paid €22-28 for a (smallish) whole chicken. But oh! This chicken, roasted simply with salt and pepper and of course a lemon or two in the body cavity, tasted divine. Thin, crispy skin and richly favored, almost herbaceous meat. I only wish these chickens were available in California. And I’ll probably start raising meat chickens in my backyard, in part because of our experience eating French chickens, but that’s another story.
Not Label Rouge chicken (it’s rabbit on tagliatelle with asparagus)
