05 September 2010

patronizing the rollmop guy: le marché de la villette, 75019


By which I simply mean that I bought some rollmops from him. I didn't, like, badger him with facetious questions about proper fish-pickling technique.

I've always walked by his stand at the market and kind of pitied him, because his product - all manner of smoked and pickled herring, a real cornucopia of herring - is so deeply ill-suited to commercial display.


Actually, I was so reelingly hung over the other morning that I wound up making a lot of silly impulse buys. Overripe époisses, absurd quantities of young coconut milk, almost a tenner's worth of rollmops...* The latter because someone had told me recently that rollmops (pickled herring rolled around pickles, onions, red pepper, etc.) were terrific for curing hangovers. A total lie. I ate a few and then bicycled home, feeling quite like I myself had been pickled and bent around a cocktail stuffing. 



Wherein I Try To Relate This To Wine Somehow: Never drink wine with pickled rollmops. Why? All the high acid vinegar involved makes wines taste flat and formless. But I learned there is another kind of rollmop cured in oil, which would on the contrary marry very nicely with, say, some brisk cornhusky Muscadet.

*Contest: Who can make a dish involving these three ingredients?  

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