Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 - (Page 48)

Market strategy New Orleans’ Old French Market serves as the model for a growing trend past years I’ve been musing at its transformation. I shake my head More years ago than I like to count I spent my junior year of at the souvenir stalls selling African airport art and brightly polkacollege in Paris. I remember vividly much of the trip, but more dotted luggage. I watched as the food vendors diminished and than anything I remember the markets. There was the Marché de then disappeared. In passing, I close my eyes and dream of the Neuilly where I used to shop on Sundays with the father of the time when visitors marveled at the bounty of the place. I think of French family with which I lived. There, I’d tag along in awe as he the days when, “the confusion of tongues in the market,“as one thumped melons, sniffed parsley and selected the freshest visitor wrote “was simply delicious”. He continued, “French, mushrooms for the champignons a l’ail that he prepared for Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and “gumbo” contended with Sunday lunch each week. The sensory assault of the market was each other for supremacy.” Another mused,”there are Gascon love at first sniff for me. butchers and the Italian and Spanish fruit vendors and the German Paris, indeed, was the scene of my market epiphany and I still vegetable women.” Of course there were the Choctaw women recall the frisson I got as a roommate and I set our alarm clocks for from near Lake Pontchartrain who sat quietly on their blankets and 2 a.m. and headed out into the darkened rue Gay Lussac to flag sold spices, handmade crafts, and herbs and down a taxi to take us to the big daddy of them powders like filé. African Americans had the all: Les Halles. Called le ventre de Paris (the monopoly on coffee, and sweet belly of Paris) by no less a writer confections like pralines and calas, than Gustave Flaubert, the old the rice fritters that were its Halles were a series of market perfect accompaniments. halls devoted to selling the The French Market was a food that came in from veritable United Nations the countryside to of tongues and tastes feed the City of and the place where Light. Arriving at Les the foods of the Halles, night turned Americas, Africa and into day and my Europe came friend and I together as they watched agape as would on the city’s men referred to as tables. the forts (or Established in strongmen) hauled 1791, The French beef carcasses on Market was not the one their shoulders and area that we think of moved flats of tiny today; rather, it was the fraises du bois (tiny entire complex of buildings woodland strawberries) and Illu str much like the Halles that I more varieties of mushrooms . atio 890 remember so vividly from my n fr than I could count. We watched as in 1 om d the l unde Parisian days. The market included a Halle abel o flower vendors snapped up their fragrant ory, fo f French and Chic Market Coffee des bouchers or butchers’ market, a fish market, wares and as the fishmongers and dairy folks a fruit and vegetable market and the market’s Red Stores in plied their trade. Then, as tradition held it, we decamped to which groceries could be purchased. The market had begun to Au Pied de Cochon for a hearty pre-dawn meal of onion soup and show its age by the late 1850s, so a new round of construction the obligatory pig’s foot as the sun was coming up over the Seine. began with the Bazaar Market built in 1870, designed by Joseph As the market halls were being sluiced down for another day, we Abeliard, one of the first African-American architects in the United headed back home to sleep. Les Halles has long been a thing of States. The Halle des legumes or vegetable market was built in Paris past and now even Rungis, its newer out-of-town 1882. incarnation, is showing its age. I, though, while showing my age That the French Market was New Orleans’ Halles is undeniable, only slightly, am still enamored of markets and of none more than but it was far from the only market in the city. There were markets the French Market in New Orleans. in most neighborhoods and at the end of World War I there were Somehow, after my market beginnings it seems only fitting 31 different markets around the city, at least one in each that the American town in which I have planted myself to take neighborhood. Like the French Market, they sold prepared foods new root is one that is home to the country’s oldest city market: and produce and many sold meat and fish and even wild game as The French Market. Living in the Faubourg Marigny as I do, most well. Family cooks and good housekeepers, in those days before treks into town involve crossing in front of the market and in the 48 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities New Orleans Immortelle The Historic New Orleans Collection Highland-Fairfield: The Historic Heart of Shreveport The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Perils of the Mississippi River Louisiana Foodways Harvest of Life King Oliver: The Forgotten King of Jazz Louisiana Architecture Jazz Notes Louisiana State Museum Eye of the Storm Louisiana Association of Museums Soul Resin Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

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