Читать книгу One More Croissant for the Road онлайн

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Give or take the odd farmhouse, it’s a landscape that doesn’t look much like it’s changed in centuries. ‘Nice and flat anyway,’ says Matt with some satisfaction as we turn for home.

Km: 157.5

The omelette is an ancient dish, known and loved long before Mont-Saint-Michel was even a twinkle in a monkish eye, but the island has been famous for ‘the exquisite lightness and beauty’ of its version for over a century. These are not the creamy baveuse omelettes of classical French cookery, but puffy soufflés, whipped until they rear from the pan like sea foam, and finished over a wood fire with copious amounts of Norman butter.

One of the benefits of staying at the top of a huge hill, of course, becomes evident the next morning, when we speed out of town like racing demons, Matt shooting past too fast for me to see the smile on his face. We’ve already learnt one valuable lesson today: many things in France, including, incredibly, boulangeries that even open on Christmas morning, are closed on Mondays (see ssss1, Pause-Café – French Opening Hours). How I’ve never realised this before is unclear, but after wandering disconsolately around the shuttered streets for half an hour, we finally spot a man with a baguette under his arm and sprint to catch up. My reward for accosting a complete stranger in a foreign language before I’ve had so much as a coffee: a pretty decent, very flaky 8/10 croissant. Coffee, however, remains a distant dream.