Thanks to our daughter Louise, whose instincts were honed as a child of brocante-visiting parents, we arrived at the Sunday street market at Buttes-Chaumont while most people were still setting up.
The garlic lady, however, must have been there since before dawn, since her table was spread with what looked like the materials for a painting entitled France en Automne. Her apples, hard and plain as small cannonballs, begged to be wrapped individually in newspaper and stored in some fragrant attic until spring; the same attic where her skeins of garlic had already hung for years, since the plaited stems crackled, and shed fragments at a touch.
Next to them was a basket of darker, individual bulbs; smoked garlic, she explained. I looked sceptical, so she said “You should try.” Instead, I took a skein of the unsmoked, and a jar of peeled white shallots, home-pickled with peppercorns and white vinegar, crowded into containers that once held mustard and mayonnaise. Filling my bag, she added a bulb of the smoked garlic – “un cadeau”.
Ten or twelve stalls further down the hill, another non-antique dealer was selling spices. Looking at his trays of peppercorns, bundles of stick cinnamon and bags of vanilla beans, I had a Proustian moment.
It was decades ago, in Mumbai, old Bombay, on the west coast of India, and we were standing outside the red sandstone Crawford Market, on the edge of the city. Somewhere inside was what we’d come to see: a fountain designed by Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father. To find it, however, we would have to brave the torrents of people passing purposefully in and out of the wide entrance.
As we hesitated, a tall Indian in a once-white dhoti spotted us.
“Lady and gentleman and young lady!” In England, his resonant baritone would have won him a job as toastmaster or, a century earlier, town crier. “You wish to visit the market?”
He indicated a large brass badge pinned to his chest, Official Guide. According to whom? It didn’t say.
“Perhaps,” I said cautiously. “What is there to see?”
“What to see?” he boomed in incredulity. He waved an arm. “Is everything to see. Meat market. Animal market. Chicken market. Fruit market, Clothing market….”
I had an inspiration. “Spice market?”
“Of course spice market. Very excellent spice market.”
Waving us to follow, he plunged into the maelstrom.
Over a century, Crawford Market, like a sunken ship colonised by sea creatures and crusted with coral, had been transformed. Arcades that, under the Raj, had been lined with neat merchants’ offices were now engulfed in gimcrack stalls. Everywhere were matchboard partitions, toppling shelves, bulging sacks, cages in teetering towers, and people, people, people...their noise, their smell, and yet more noise…
He showed us the fountain, an ornate creation, now half-buried in fruit crates and cardboard cartons. In its basins, dry for generations, dogs and children drowsed. But by then, the place had us in its grip.
We passed an alley stinking with guano, and raucous with squawks and cocks’ crows.
“Bird market,” our guide said, unnecessarily, and, at the next, “Snake market.”
“Snake market?’ Marie-Dominique shuddered, but a twelve-year-old Louise looked interested.
Through high windows unwashed since Lord Curzon was Viceroy, slabs of dusty sunlight fell across the long corridor. Everywhere -in the shadows, at the corner of the eye - one sensed languid movement; the ripple of light on skins that flowed like oil. That narrow space concentrated all India’s strangeness.
The next alley exuded a different pungency, a wave of clove, pepper, cinnamon and bay that stung the nostrils, and caught at the back of the throat.
“Spice market,” said the guide.
The next hour was an education. Who would have thought there wasn’t simply one variety of pepper but dozens? Why had I never seen these black cardamoms pods the size of beetles, their wrinkled shells hiding clusters of moist, aromatic seeds? Fenugreek, doled out in tiny cellophane packets by Indian grocers in Europe, could be bought here by the kilo. I bent to sniff tubs of vivid yellow turmeric, dusky red paprika, sour-smelling grey/green cumin...And chilies! Yellow, black, crimson, purple, each ready to explode like a firecracker in your mouth.
My elation lasted until we were about to land in Sydney, and the cabin staff handed out cards demanding that we declare “cereal grains, popping corn, raw nuts, chestnuts, pine cones, birdseed, unidentified seeds” and all herbs and spices, under pain of instant imprisonment.
Oh, well, it had been fun to contemplate the great curries one could have made with my Mumbai purchases. I showed my bag of spices to the Customs Officer and explained its contents.
“Go to Gate 17,” he said.
To my delight, the officer manning Gate 17 was an enormous Sikh, made even more towering by his turban.
I held up my sack. “I bought some dried spices in Mumbai.”
A grin divided his mass of facial hair. Between the two of us, each devoted to the joys of curry, passed a silent message. He didn’t even bother to look in the bag.
“No problem! ” he rumbled, and waved us through.
…..Now, however, I was in Paris, not Mumbai. But some of that enchantment lingered. Watched by a delighted buyer, I filled a bag with the greatest of all levellers, fragrant peppers, herbs and seeds, the spices with which fortunes had been founded, over which wars had been fought, and the search for which had powered the discovery of America. All for ten Euros. Not a bad deal in these hard times.
Lovely writing, John - can almost smell those spices - and the guano.
Love the story and descriptions of these parallel spice universes! 🫚🌶️