Bread & butter in Paris

Once you've had your breakfast tartine, there are few occasions in France when butter is served with meals. Inevitably, though, you get brown bread and butter with oysters. A dark rye. At the best places, you get the best butter, too: from the Isigny cooperative in Normandy.

If you order bulots as well as oysters, as we did at the grande brasserie La Coupole, you get the richly eggy, mustardy French mayonnaise, too. Bulots are whelk, a sort of sea snail poached in aromatic broth; chewy, spicy, delicious.

The oyster assortment was lovely, including the prized flat oysters from Belon and several spéciales oysters from a well-known shipper namedGillardeau; they're grown in the intertidal waters of the Marennes estuary, on the Atlantic coast south of La Rochelle.

A rival to Gillardeaux are the so-called Perles Blanches, from another shipper, Ancelin. Parisians are great oyster-eaters; these were being served--along with bread and butter, naturally--at close to midnight in a modest brasserie in the Marais.

Posted by Ronald Holden at March 21, 2007 8:21 AM