Monday, September 10, 2012

France, Day 3, 8/24/2012

Our bed and breakfast, pictured below, is run by an elderly couple who speak no English, are very nice, and serve a giant breakfast. It's the same as everywhere else—croissants, bread, butter, jam, coffee—but they're perfect specimens of their kind (except for the coffee, which is never all that great here).

Today's hike to Cancale is very nice, through farms and cliffs. It's short, so we have lunch there instead of picnicking. We go to a crêperie called La Cancalaise. Lindsay gets an egg, cheese, and smoked ham galette (buckwheat crêpe). They cook the egg sunny side up on top of the crêpe, and the yolk works as a sauce. For the second time in two years, I accidentally order andouille, a sausage made from pork intestines. It's in a galette with apple sauce, which tames it somewhat. I still don't really like it, but I enjoy it a lot more than I did last year. Maybe I'm developing a taste for it? Lindsay says it tastes like a barn, which is a great description. We also get dessert crêpes, which are not made from buckwheat. Mine has chocolate sauce, and Lindsay's has apple compote and is flambéed in Calvados. Delicious.

After we walk around Cancale, we sit in a café writing postcards. I get a Perrier, Lindsay a Kir Breton, which is a little flute of cider with strawberry liquor. It's bubbly, light, and good, just a little bit sweet.

For dinner we go to Au Pied d'Cheval, another place owned by an oyster producer. We get a dozen oysters and a half-bottle of Muscadet. As we're eating them, cutting them apart from the shell and leaving a disc of connective tissue behind, a man (the owner?) approaches the table. He takes a butter knife, picks up a discarded shell off our platter, scrapes off the disc of connective tissue, and feeds it to Lindsay, saying "c'est très bon!" He's right: it tastes like an oyster but doesn't squish like one.

After the oysters, we have whelks, little pink shrimp, and langoustines with mayonnaise. All of them are good, the shrimp exceptionally so. We enjoy everything, though we realize that we haven't had a vegetable in two days and resolve to have dinner tomorrow somewhere that serves more than a pile of seafood.

Cancale from a distance.

Addresses:
Crêperie la Cancalaise
3 Rue de la Vallée Porcon
35260 Cancale

Au Pied d'Cheval
10 Quai Gambetta
35260 Cancale

2 comments:

Seth said...

Is it not "andouillette"? I remember one of my friends ordering andouillette in Cannes or Antibes in 2002. The waitress said, "Eh, you know, it is...sausage?" in broken English. He said he knew. But what she meant to say was that it was tripe sausage, which he didn't know, and that it was disgusting, which we soon found out.

Toby said...

I think it's the same as andouillette but bigger. It is definitely not the same as tripe, though, which I actually came to appreciate in Hungary.