Comfort Food

When looking for a packet of bread sauce in a supermarket called Leclerc in Bergerac I discovered a shelf dedicated to English produce. It was even flagged up with the Union Jack. Sadly no bread sauce but I bought a tin of Heinz baked beans for the princely sum of 1.5 euros, three times the price in England.

Other English fare on display included:

Oxo cubes; HP Brown sauce; Bisto gravy; Branson pickle; Bramley apple sauce; Cross and Blackwell salad cream; Tate & Lyle golden syrup; Scots porage oats; Ready Breck; PG Tips tea; Tikka Masala curry sauce; bottles of Tangle Foot Badger Beer brewed in Dorset.

Another supermarket chain called Leader Price, a branch of which can be found in Bergerac, does a very nice line in joints of frozen New Zealand lamb at half the cost of similar sized cuts of Gigot d’Agneau.

About 20 kilometres south west of Bergerac is the bastide town, Eymet, where half the population is British. It is the ideal place to look for British comfort food. L’Epicerie, otherwise known as “The English Shop”, in the Rue du Temple, stocks everything from Christmas plum puddings, three varieties of baked beans, Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies to Scottish oat cakes, Coleman’s English mustard and Oxford marmalade. I found exactly what I was looking for – a box of Darjeeling tea bags.

The shop is run by a South African called Michael Rice who has another similar outlet in Brantome, north of Perigeux, the prefecture of the Dordogne. His emporium was running short of stock because Michael is moving back to England to open a shop in Glastonbury, Somerset. A retired English couple have bought his business in Eymet. Michael was shutting up shop ,he said, because trying to expand his business in France had been fraught with bureaucracy and punitive social security charges.