This is what a French chip looks like.
Consecutive posts about food; impressive for someone once called anorexic by ESPN’s most famous sideline reporter, although, it probably is impossible to live in France and not be impressed, and disappointed, by food on a near-daily basis.
Food is very much the binding tie for life, and most meals are inane and uneventful – consumed only to fulfill our basest need for sustenance. France is dramatized as a land of fantastic delicacies and delectable confections, and while this stereotype is certainly based in truth, what about those snacks in-between or those meals that aren’t meant to be gourmet but just filling?
I have already noted the difficulty I often have eating in France, with my distaste for cheese and such. This past Sunday I took matters into my own hands and sought out a replacement to one of my biggest culinary voids: Cheez-its.
Cheez-its have been my snack food of choice for as long as I can remember, following me through the fat and skinny Stefan eras, from Benicia to Connecticut and everywhere in between. I get upset in the states at a convenience store that doesn’t carry the low-fat low-sodium varieties I have come to love. I nearly pulled out the happy dance upon discovering the low-fat White Cheddar box in Chicago. Not having Cheez-its in France is a major difficulty.
Now, I have come across such a conundrum in the past, usually in vending machines, but often there is some other relatively inoffensive sodium-laden alternative – your Triscuits or Wheat Thins will usually suffice. In France these too are non-existent.
The French prefer sweet snack foods. The cookie aisle in any French market is astounding, and there are shops dedicated to pastries, chocolates and cakes. Not one baker providing the three, but a pastry shop next to a chocolatier, adjacent to the cake-maker, and this is just in my particular suburb.
The salty option is decidedly lacking, but the major saline snacks are chips – crackers are nearly extinct. I had to go to three different markets just to find saltines. The French though, have co-opted as their own potato chips, but beware of the flavors: Bolognaise, Rotisserie Chicken and Paprika, and those are just the Lays.
For some reason the French want to make potato chips match the flavors of their meals, and not a seasoning. As anyone who follows along on Facebook knows, I gave the Rotisserie Chicken flavor a whirl, and won’t make that mistake again. I saw a small child appearing to enjoy Lays Bolognaise at the airport waiting for my delayed flight to Switzerland, and almost tried explaining to him that there are so many better chips waiting for him in the US. Paprika was the most acceptable of the options I have seen or tried, but still, what happened to barbeque, salt and vinegar or sour cream and onion?
So, on Sunday I decided to bite the bullet going to the local G20 store in Bois-Colombes with the intent of finding the best Cheez-it substitute, or at the very least a serviceable salty snack option. In the entire store I found three vaguely enticing: Ritz crackers, Dutch cheese crackers and bacon flavored chips.
One would assume that the Ritz crackers would be the safest alternative, being a familiar brand from the US. However, as I mentioned before, Lays is American, yet produces Bolognaise potato chips in this market. I can’t quite put my finger on it, maybe it’s the fact they aren’t packaged in those zip-locked cracker towers, or that the cracker itself is smaller, but French Ritz are different and not in a good way.
Option two was by far the worst: Dutch cheese crackers. I wanted this to work. The first one I tried and almost immediately had my brain working to convince my taste buds of its acceptability. I was thinking, nearly audibly, ‘this is ok, perhaps, its cheesy in a fake cheese kind of way, this could work.’ After about ten I almost wanted to vomit. It is safe to say that unless my 17-year-old ‘co-locataire’ eats them, those Monaco crackers will be staying in Bois-Colombes longer than I.
This brings us to the bacon chips. Firstly these are from the brand Vico, which produces the French equivalent of Ruffles. Now Franco-Ruffles are shaped like waffle fries, and due to this have a quality that is somehow inherently wrong to me. Also, bacon in France is more of a ham flavor, which I don’t care for nearly as much as that delicious greasy, morning bacon taste, but after having attempted Nederlander crackers I was willing to try anything.
Sunday afternoon I sampled the bacon chips to get rid of the vomit sensation from the cheese crackers, but with such a small sample size, withheld judgment. Tonight, I decided to go full bore, combining the bacon chips with a prosciutto sandwich and a beer to wash it down. These pseudo-Ruffles aren’t bad, even if they don’t taste at all like bacon ham or any other meat on this Earth. The closest thing I can approximate thir taste to would be the Ruffles Works chips they had for a short period of time when I was an undergraduate. They are a little tangy, and a little sweet, and completely inoffensive. We have a winner!
I am still not a junk food person, but it was very good to find a palatable snack food option that doesn’t make me want to yak. I promise the next post will be about something non-food related.
~Ruffles have ridges.
