Saint-Aubin: The Sunday Market in Toulouse
We landed in Toulouse after midnight and only managed a welcome drink at the beer bar Le Père Peinard. It turned out to be the best investment of the whole trip: the bartender told us to skip the cafés on Sunday morning and head for Saint-Aubin instead, where we would find local food and street performers.
The Sunday market at Saint-Aubin is an open-air market that spreads out once a week across the square and the streets around the church of the same name on the eastern edge of central Toulouse - and French cuisine turns out in full force, from sausages to spiced bread.
A Church, a Free Commune and the One Sunday a Week
The market borrowed its name from the church. Saint-Aubin, named after an early medieval bishop of Angers, looks ancient, but the building went up between 1847 and 1853 - the largest church Toulouse built in the 19th century. The quarter around it used to be a suburb, and some of that old edge has stuck: neighboring rue de la Colombette declared itself a "free commune" in 1944 and the bohemian streak has stayed with it. The market crowd matches that - a Toulouse magazine described it as "anyone from hippies to the bourgeoisie" and Sunday morning by the church is more a social occasion than a shopping trip.
Toulouse has no shortage of markets - the covered Marché Victor Hugo and the long market on Boulevard de Strasbourg run from Tuesday to Sunday. Saint-Aubin does the opposite: it runs on Sunday and Sunday only, and alongside the food there is a flea market, craftspeople, booksellers and musicians in front of the church, who change from week to week. Get the day wrong and turn up on Tuesday, and you find a closed church and an empty square; come at noon and you mostly get to watch the stalls come down. The right time is the morning.
Sausage Coiled into a Spiral, Aligot Pulled from the Pot
The eating end of the market belongs to the southwest. Saucisse de Toulouse, a thick pork sausage coiled into a spiral, lies here next to Pyrenean cheeses, and a few stalls down someone is pulling aligot out of a pot, the cheesy mashed potato from Aveyron - the pulling is half the sale and half the theater. The rotisserie chicken, the star of every French market, is a safe bet here too: a good stall sells a hundred of them in a day. Buckwheat galettes and sweet crêpes are cooked right in front of you. Nobody leaves this market hungry.
The rest of the market only brushes up against food. The stall I photographed as "the one with plums" was in fact selling pruneaux d'Agen, the famous dried plums of southwestern France - fresh ones would have been nowhere to be found in April - and next to them a row of plum jams. As for plants, don't expect the usual pots: what sells here are kokedama moss balls, and a little further along books and costume jewelry - the stalls that get the market officially classed as a food market and a fairground market at once.
What Pain d'épices Is and How It Got to Toulouse
The stall that held me up longest was the one with loaves of pain d'épices. Pain d'épices is a dense sweet bread of flour, honey and spices that a Czech nose reads straight away as Christmas gingerbread - and no wonder, both go back to the same medieval honey cake. Pain d'épices is a guest in Toulouse, arriving from Dijon, Reims and Alsace, but it is sold the French way, by weight: the stall had loaves with figs and with dried plums - a combination Alsatian beerawecka would understand - and the tradition also runs to small nonnettes filled with orange marmalade.
A Slice by Weight before the Trip to Carcassonne
We came to the market hungry, because a trip to Carcassonne was waiting for us that afternoon, and an empty stomach was the right way to start - the vendors are friendly and let you taste almost everything. At the pain d'épices stall I worked my way through the samples and picked a loaf with orange peel, an old weakness of mine. The honey came through from the first bite, the bread was not cloying, and the orange peel went with the honey exactly the way I had hoped. The bread is sold by weight and the vendor will happily cut you the thinnest of slices, so you can taste your way through a good part of the counter before you decide. A kilo comes to about 15 EUR.
