The drive-by butcher

Walt blogged about our newest rural service yesterday — it's a local butcher who comes around in his market truck once a week, on Tuesdays. He honks his horn, and one of us goes out to buy something. Monsieur Céran is a boucher/charcutier, which means he sells beef, chicken, veal, lamb, and pork, including cured pork products like sausages, pâtés, ham... well everything. Local specialites and standard French items.

His truck is a refrigerated market vehicle. One side panel of the truck goes up kind of like a garage door, revealing a display counter full of tempting items. His prices are comparable to regular shop or supermarket prices. And the quality looks to be excellent. Everything we've bought so far has been really good.

Thésée-la-Romaine is a village across and down the river
from us, about 5 miles.

As Walt wrote yesterday, one of the big advantages of buying from an itinerant vendor is that you don't have to drive to his shop, of course, and you also don't have to wait in line while other customers are waited on. When we went to the Céran shop in Thésée a week or 10 days ago, we waited at least 15 minutes while others ordered large quantities of meats, some of which had to be cut and trimmed to order.

This is how it works in a culture where it isn't assumed that everybody owns and drives a car. The fact is, however, that nowadays, most people do drive — I wrote yesterday about the traffic jams in Saint-Aignan caused by high attendance at the Beauval zoo south of town, and Keir, our neighbor to the east, has confirmed it in a comment. I think we'll be buying things from Monsieur Céran every week to encourage him to keep coming by, just as we buy bread (good baguette tradition, it is too) every time the bread lady drives up and toots her horn.