Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [38]
The produce and seafood market on Moselle Bay—in a half dozen interconnected, airy pavilions with bright blue tile roofs—opens at 5:00 A.M. each day and becomes the busiest place in the city within a couple of hours. The community living room, where neighbors come to chat as well as buy, it’s also the only place where we see much mingling between people of European and Melanesian descent. The ethnic interaction seems normal on our first visit on Monday, but by our return at the end of the week, it’s clear how rare it is in Nouméa.
The fruit and vegetable sections lack variety in this spring season, but tubers abound, from taro to the yamlike igname, and fruits as well. Two adjoining stalls must carry every variety of papaya on earth, along with bananas of all sizes and colors. Other produce includes limes, pineapples, oranges, scallions, small local shallots, eggplants, vanilla beans, mint, and basil. French and Asian selections often sit side by side, frisée with Chinese greens, for example, or in the prepared-food cases, Vietnamese pastries next to croissants, and quiche Lorraine surrounded by Indian samosas (fried turnovers) and Philippine lumpia (egg rolls).
The greatest diversity in stock shows up in the fish and seafood sheds, filled with mahimahi, tuna, salmon, marlin, rouget, oysters, calamari, shrimp, and langouste cigale. “These seafood salads look luscious,” Cheryl says, surveying a display of chilled “Tahitian” and other similar salads accented with spices and little bits of vegetables. Bill is more fascinated with the fish treated like meat, such as rillettes au thon maison, shrimp-stuffed vol-au-vent, and tuna sausages.
Street markets pop up occasionally as well. On our last night in town, we happen on a music and food version near our hotel. A local group called Mahalo stages a hulalike dance show, and home cooks sell prepared take-out dishes, including the Melanesian specialty known as bougna, a combination of chicken and seafood steamed in banana leaves with yams, sweet potatoes, and coconut milk. Other stands boast a range of snacks and sweets, from cotton candy to West Indian salt-cod accras, so unfamiliar here that the Caribbean entrepreneur labels them “samosas.”
As in the French homeland, supermarkets flourish as well. A large one in the Port de Plaisance mall carries a good range of wines for our evenings on the balcony and also stocks robust quantities of both French and Asian foods. There’s mousse de canard, Strasbourg terrine, pâté Breton, lardons (bacon), Toulouse sausage for cassoulet, and foie gras. As you would expect from an island with lots of cattle ranches, the meat cases hold plenty of local beef, often in steak cuts such as onglet and bavette, along with rotisserie chicken, pintade (guinea hen), rabbit, pigeon, and andouillette (tripe sausage). Down other aisles, shoppers get a choice of five varieties of rice paper for spring rolls, a dozen kinds of Asian noodles, and multiple variations on coconut milk, curries, soys, and fish and chile sauces.
The strengths in these market selections don’t always carry over to restaurant menus. In many French colonies, such as Vietnam and the West Indies, a distinctive cuisine emerged from the interaction of European and local culinary traditions, but that didn’t happen here, largely because of ethnic enmity. The dominant cuisine in Nouméa remains continental French, whether it fits the hot climate or not. The few restaurants with haute pretensions flaunt this disposition, making concessions to the weather only through an emphasis on cool, raw sashimi, tartare, and carpaccio preparations. Many smaller establishments, curiously, seek to disguise the French essence in their cooking by professing to offer a different kind of specialization, a conceit that seldom convinces.
The haute restaurants don’t appeal to us, but we do check out the menus, always posted by the front door. At one place, Cheryl says, “What an odd selection of appetizers. The lobster carpaccio or the smoked swordfish spring rolls might tempt me here, but can you imagine starting