好英语网寻访巴黎郊区圣丹尼的美食集市
ST.-DENIS, France
圣丹尼，法国
EVERY once in a while on Sunday morning, I find myself crowding into the No. 13 Metro with determined cart-wheeling shoppers, heading north to the end of the line.
每隔一段时间，我就会在星期天早晨挤上巴黎地铁13号线，和一群拉着手推车，心意坚定的购物者一起，赶往这条线北分支的终点站。
Our destination is not a marché bio (an organic food market) like the one on the Boulevard Raspail close to the Luxembourg Gardens, where even the olives are sold as organic. Or a marché-cum-entertainment like the one on the Rue Mouffetard in the Fifth, where the same middle-aged performers come every Sunday, rain or shine, to lead the crowd in song-and-dance nostalgia.
我们的目的地不是有机食品市场，比说拉斯巴耶大道靠近卢森堡花园的那个，在那里，甚至连橄榄也被当作有机食品出售。我们也不是要赶往带有娱乐表演的集市，比如第五区穆非塔街举办的那种，每逢星期天，同一批中年表演者就会前往那里，用歌声和舞姿勾起人群的怀旧之情，风雨无阻。
巴黎圣丹尼郊区集市是法国历史以及法国历史上一连串移民潮的缩影。
No, we are in search of bargains and exotica in the ethnically and racially rich suburb of St.-Denis.
不，我们要去的，是多民族、多种族聚集的圣丹尼郊区(St.-Denis)，我们要去那里寻找便宜食品和异国情调。
Few foreign tourists make the pilgrimage here. The suburb is part of Seine-St.-Denis, or Department “93,” which won notoriety as an area rocked by riots and car-burnings in 2005.
很少有外国游客前来这里朝圣。这个郊区所属的塞纳-圣丹尼省行政代码为“93”，曾在2005年因骚乱和汽车焚烧事情招致恶名。
Tourists who do come generally arrive in tour buses and head straight to the most French of destinations, the St.-Denis Basilica. Given its historical and architectural importance, it has to be the least appreciated religious gem in the Paris area.
旅游者就算来这里，通常也会坐着游览大巴直奔最有“法国味”的目的地——圣丹尼大教堂(St.-Denis Basilica)。在巴黎地区的宗教名胜中，圣丹尼大教堂受到的赏识之少，简直与它在历史和建筑学上的重要地位极端不相称。
Legend has it that when St. Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was decapitated near Montmartre in the third century, he picked up his head, washed it off and carried it five miles to the north before he collapsed. A shrine was built, later replaced by a soaring basilica; 43 kings (from Dagobert I to Louis XVIII), 32 queens and 63 princes and princesses were buried here.
传说在3世纪时，巴黎第一位主教圣丹尼(St. Denis)在蒙马特附近被斩首，他捡起自己的头颅，将它洗净，并捧着它向北走了5英里路才陡然倒下。人们在这里建了一座圣坛，后来又改建为一座高耸的长方形教堂；一共有43位国王（从达戈贝尔特一世[ Dagobert I]到路易十八[Louis XVIII]）、32位王后、63位王子和公主被葬在了这里。
The basilica is undervisited, solemn and quiet, the ideal place for prayer and reflection on a Sunday morning.
圣丹尼大教堂人不多，庄严静穆，是在星期天早上祈祷和省思的理想场所。
But this spot has been a center for fairs and markets since the Middle Ages, when merchants throughout Europe came to trade their fabrics, timber, leathers and live animals. And just a few hundred yards away are the noise, disorder and exuberance of a gastronomical pleasure palace.
但是自中世纪以来，这个地方就一直是集贸市场的中心。欧洲各地的客商前来买卖服装面料、木材、皮革和活畜。距它仅仅几百码的地方，是一座噪杂、混乱而繁荣的美食宫殿。
Getting there takes a bit of maneuvering. You are greeted at the Metro station exit by a Gypsy beggar or two and a sign for McDonald’s.
往那儿去，你得多留些神。刚出地铁口时，你会看到一两个吉普赛乞丐和一个麦当劳标志牌。
Then you navigate a warren of outdoor stalls with the feel of a North African souk. Here, vendors hawk the stuff of everyday life: bolts of cheap fabric, mountains of socks and underwear, clay cooking pots, shag rugs, men’s pajamas, Islamically correct head scarves, motor oil and mousetraps.
然后，你在拥挤不堪的路边摊中间穿行，感觉如同置身于北非的集市。小贩兜售着各种日常生活用品：一卷卷的廉价面料，堆积如山的袜子和内衣，还有陶质烹饪锅、粗毛地毯、男士睡衣、穆斯林头巾、机油和捕鼠器。
And then a 19th-century structure of metal and glass looms large in front of you. It houses a food market like no other.
然后，一座19世纪的金属玻璃结构建筑赫然耸现在你眼前。一个别具一格的食品集市就在它里面。
Inside is a microcosm of French history and its successive waves of immigration. Parisian-born Frenchmen with tattoos on their arms mix with ethnic Portuguese and Italians whose families immigrated to France a century ago. French-Arab merchants who hold French identity cards in their pockets and Arabness in their voices serve shoppers from Cameroon and the Antilles islands who have moved to France.
这个集市是法国历史以及法国历史上一连串移民潮的缩影。生在巴黎的法国人胳膊上纹着文身，跟一个世纪前移居法国的葡萄牙和意大利家庭的后代混在一起。法国籍的阿拉伯商人口袋里装着法国证件，说话却带着阿拉伯口音，从喀麦隆和安的列斯群岛移居到法国的移民则在他们的摊位上选购食物。
Here the merchants and the customers (no matter what their religion, age, skin color or country of origin) seem to have two common goals: buying and selling food products and anticipating the pleasure that comes with cooking and eating a Sunday afternoon meal.
这里的商人和顾客（无论他们的宗教、年龄、肤色或原籍如何）似乎都有两个共同的目标：购买和出售食品，并期待着在星期天下午享受烹饪和用餐的乐趣。
The majority of shoppers are women. They fall into three general categories: working-class Frenchwomen in jeans who look as if they remain attached to the town’s roots as a leftist industrial center; women from France’s former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, dressed in bright print confections and matching headdresses, who carry their babies on their backs; and French-Arab women, some in head scarves, some not.
大多数来买东西的都是妇女，她们可分为三大类：穿着牛仔裤的法国工薪阶层妇女，看上去似乎仍然怀念着这个城镇左派工业中心的渊源；来自撒哈拉以南非洲地区法国前殖民地的妇女，穿着鲜艳的印花女装，戴着与之匹配的头饰，背上还趴着自己的孩子；法国籍阿拉伯妇女，有些戴着头巾，有些没戴。
The merchandise appeals to the various constituencies. One Sunday I brought along Alain François, the owner of the nearby Coq de la Maison Blanche restaurant. He had never visited the market and was immediately drawn to a smiling pig’s head with upturned ears at a pork stall.
这里的食品吸引了各式各样的顾客。某个星期天，我带着阿兰·弗朗索瓦(Alain François)来到这个集市，他是附近 Coq de la Maison Blanche餐馆的老板，之前从没来过这儿。一家猪肉摊上的猪头立刻吸引了他的注意，猪头耳朵上翘，表情好像是在微笑。
“Ahhhh, that’s a beautiful head,” Mr. François purred. We watched in wonderment as a female vendor lifted up long, white, slimy strings (pig’s intestines) that would be used as casings for West Indian blood sausages.
“嗷，那个猪头真好看。”弗朗索瓦先生轻叹道。我们惊奇地看着一位女摊主举起又长又白还粘糊糊的猪肠，它可以作西印度血香肠的肠衣。
Then Mr. Francois identified for me the liver, heart, tongue, stomach, lungs and kidneys, lined up in neat rows. “This is like the old days, when every part of the animal would be eaten,” he said. “Nothing is left to waste.”
弗朗索瓦为我一一指出猪的肝、心、舌、肚、肺和腰子，它们都整齐地摆在摊位上。“这就像是从前，人们会吃掉动物的每一个部分，”他说：“哪儿都不会被浪费。”
A few stalls away, three Algerian-born women were making savory galettes stuffed with vegetables and beef, a meal for 2.50 euros (about $3.15).
在几个摊位之外，三个阿尔及利亚出生的妇女正在制作蔬菜和牛肉馅的风味干饼，每个卖2.5欧元（约3.15美元）。
An Italian who runs his stall with his daughter offered samples of Sicilian pecorino Romano with red pimento and a soft Abruzzese version of an almond macaron. When I told him I had a hard time finding a Parisian source for Averna, a digestivo from the Sicilian city of Caltanisetta, the home of my paternal grandparents, they said they would order it for me.
一个意大利人和女儿一起照看摊位，他们让人试吃带有红甜椒丝的西西里罗马绵羊奶酪，和一种软软的阿布鲁佐风格的杏仁马卡龙饼。我告诉他们，我很难在巴黎找到阿韦尔纳(Averna)，这是一种餐后酒，在西西里的卡尔达尼塞塔城酿造，我爷爷奶奶就住在那里。他们说可以为我订一些货。
Claude Lambert, the market’s lone horse butcher, doesn’t just sell horse meat for roasts and burgers. He also puts horse meat in his homemade mortadella. “The horse is a very healthy animal,” said Mr. Lambert, who owns Boucherie Chevaline (Horse Butcher) in Coudun, France. “Horse has less fat than other red meats.”
克劳德·兰伯特(Claude Lambert)这个集市里唯一的马肉屠夫，你可以从他那里买到制作烤肉和汉堡包的马肉，此外他也把马肉掺到他自制的混合香肠里。兰伯特说：“马是一种非常健康的动物。马肉的脂肪比其他红肉低。”他在法国库丹有一个屠马场。
I wasn’t convinced. The only time I knowingly ate horse meat was on a tour of the former Soviet Union with Warren Christopher, who was secretary of state at the time. We arrived in Almaty in Kazakhstan after midnight, and it was either a horse meat paprika stew or hunger. Once was enough.
他没能说服我。我惟一一次明知面前是马肉还去吃，是在和当时的国务卿沃伦·克里斯托弗(Warren Christopher)一起去前苏联的时候。我们在午夜之后抵达哈萨克斯坦的阿拉木图，当时你要么吃灯笼椒炖马肉，要么就只能忍饥挨饿。那样的东西吃一次就够了。
Then the fish! You won’t find much upscale central-Paris fish like tuna steaks or turbot here. But the giant octopuses, the fat carp, the mountains of eels are cheap. There is a fish called Atlantic vieille with such bizarre bright orange squiggles and spots that when our friend Valerie Sherman was visiting from New York, she photographed it.
还有鱼！在这个集市里，你不会找到很多像金枪鱼排，或是大比目鱼那样的在巴黎市中心出售的高档鱼产品，但是巨型章鱼、鲤鱼，以及堆积如山的鳗鱼都十分便宜。还有一种鱼叫做“大西洋隆头鱼”，有奇异的亮橙色波浪线和斑点。我们的朋友瓦莱丽·谢尔曼(Valerie Sherman)从纽约到这里来玩的时候还给这种鱼拍了照。
Greengrocers offer root vegetables the size of melons with names like dasheen and igname. One grocer gave me a bunch of fresh green-gray leaves I didn’t recognize. He told me to smell. Licorice. The leaves turned out to be absinthe, used in Moroccan stuffings and stews and added to mint tea.
菜贩们出售像甜瓜一样大小的根茎类蔬菜，比如芋头和山药。一个摊主给了我一把新鲜的青灰色叶子，我认不出来，他就叫我闻一闻。闻起来有种甘草的味道。原来它就是苦艾，用来做摩洛哥菜的馅料和炖菜的，还可以添到薄荷茶里。
But more important than culinary discovery is price: 15 euros will buy 3 small guinea hens; 10 euros, 4 rabbits; 6 euros, 2 kilos (almost 4 1/2 pounds) of chopped chicken gizzards. During asparagus season, white asparagus were selling at St.-Denis for 10 euros a kilogram, compared with 32 euros in central Paris. (O.K., the asparagus here weren’t “calibrées” — matched according to size the way they would be on the Boulevard Raspail.)
比起提供冷门的烹饪食材，这里更大的卖点是价格：在这个集市，15欧元可以买到3只珍珠母鸡；10欧元4只兔；6欧元2公斤切碎的鸡胗。在芦笋上市的季节，圣丹尼的白芦笋价格为每公斤10欧元，而在巴黎市中心要32欧元（当然，这里的芦笋个头没有拉斯巴耶大道上的那些大）。
As closing time approaches, 1:30 p.m., many merchants slash their prices and shout out the deals: “Leeks, leeks, leeks, one euro, one euro, one euro, and they are beautiful, too!” or “Five kilos of tomatoes, Madame, half price!”
集市在下午1点半结束营业，随着这个时间的临近，很多菜开始大降价，摊主们开始也大声吆喝：“大葱，大葱，只卖1欧元，只卖1欧元啰，新鲜大葱！”或者“5公斤西红柿，半价啰！”
Some of the old-timers, like Jacqueline Buridant, find the global ambience and disorder unsettling. Ms. Buridant still comes every week to sell her whole-grain breads, as she first did 50 years ago, but complains that in the old days, St.-Denis was “top.” Now, she said, “Maybe 15 or 20 of the merchants are good, the rest are zero.”
一些老资格的摊主，比如说杰奎琳·比里当(Jacqueline Buridant)，觉得这种全球化的氛围和混乱让人心神不定。比里第一次来这里卖全麦面包是50年前，现在她仍然每周都在这里出摊。但是她抱怨说，以前圣丹尼是“一流的”，但现在“也许15%或20%的商人都很好，其余的就不怎么样了。”
Others who have grown up in the market have made peace with its transformation. Pascale Guigardet, 48, runs a family-owned spice stall with her Antillean-born husband, Ali Benabbou. She came here as a child to help her mother, and took over the business eight years ago.
其他一些在这个集市里长大的老摊主则平和地接受了这种转变。48岁的帕斯卡尔·吉戈尔德(Pascale Guigardet)跟出生于安的列斯群岛的丈夫阿里·本纳布(Ali Benabbou)一起经营着家传的香料店。她从小就在这里给母亲当帮手，8年前正式接手了生意。
She remembers when the market was higher class, when the merchants outside sold French-made shoes of real leather and children did not dare touch the merchandise. But she still takes pleasure in blending curries for special customers and urging them to sniff deep into jars filled with culinary promise: star anise, chamomile flowers, vanilla beans, black sesame, hibiscus. And so much more.
吉戈尔德记得这个集市档次比较高的日子，那时集市外面的商人出售法国制造的真皮鞋子，孩子们都不敢伸手去摸。但是她如今仍然喜欢为特别客户配制咖喱，并叫他们去嗅闻那些装着美食香料的罐子：八角、甘菊、香草豆、黑芝麻、朱槿，以及其他很多很多。