Black Bream

The fishmonger at the Bastille market had a new catch today - line caught black bream, or dorade grise, from the costal fishing fleet of brittany. It costs just under 10 euros a kilo - as a comparison, regular bream costs anything from 8 euros (small, farmed in greece) through 16 euros (wild caught in the atlantic) to 29 euros a kilo (line caught). Black bream is one of these excellent under-rated fish - the flesh is not as pretty and white as a regular bream, but it's tastier to a keen palate and it's also much more abundant, which means you can eat a line-caught, good sized one with a conscience as clean as a whistle. Our one was a very decent size, and will feed us tomorrow as well. We roasted the whole thing en papilliotte, and filletted with the fancy knife sam's mum gave me for christmas.

When I go to the Bastille market, I usually take a coffee in the bar du marché. This is firmly in the category of places that will never be recommended by the lonely planet, but if you want to see a real parisian bar, this is it. It's about 20 square metres, and it's run by two brothers. The curved bar is real zinc, and judging from the number of dents and scratches in it must be at least 50 year old. behind the curved bar is a set of fridges with the catering-style lock handles, made of wood and fitted to the curve. The name of the manufacturer is still on one fridge - Meallet - and it was made when paris phone numbers only had 6 digits. It's always busy on market day. The clientele are of the 'pupils of the much respected old school' (I read that in Dickens! Did Victorian Englishmen really say 'yeah he's really old school'?), and when I'm taking coffee at 11am, most of them are on wine, demis, or calvados. Sometimes two of the above. The chap next to me today, with a hat like mine, had a white face and a long nose and looked like he'd been up for several hours. He complained about his colleagues, said he needed to find a job where you could work on your own, then ordered a refill of his beer glass while he stepped out for a cigarette. He stepped back in, downed the glass, wished bon courage and disappeared. Later, I was strolling round the market very happy with my huge black bream, and I crossed to the left side aisle of stalls. Like most markets, the bastille market has a certain geometry dictating where the good stalls are, where the expensive ones, the cheap ones, and the bad ones are. There are two very big and busy fish stalls, on th right hand side, where i regularly shop. There are a dozen servers at each one and half a dozen more people scaling and gutting behind. They also have managers who run around behind shouting 'let's sell some fish!' at the workers 'and i must be crazy look at my prices' to the general public. Everything I've bought from both has been very fresh and it's mostly served straight from cartons from the Rungis wholesale market close to Orly airport, with coded and dated labels. That way you know the fish has probably been out of the water for 24 hours at the most. On the left hand aisle are two deciededly more down at heel fishmongers where i've never bought anything - the fish are often very cheap but look second best, they often parcel them up on trays and price them before weighing them. It's a bit of a gamble. And they won't gut or scale anything for you. Anyway, as I was strolling past the southern one of these, I saw the proprietor shouting allez allez buy these cheap fish, and yes, it was the long nosed beer-downing man from the bar..