The Tuesday Market

The Friday market at Ventimiglia is the famous one. It sprawls along the seafront, it is largely for tourists coming over the border from France for the day, and it sells a great deal of leather and very little worth carrying home. Tuesday is the one worth the early start: smaller, closer to the water, and considerably less interested in whether you are enjoying yourself.

I have been going for years now and I still get it wrong about a third of the time. What follows is most of what I have worked out, offered in the spirit of somebody who has bought a lot of mediocre fruit at full price.

Go at the beginning or do not bother

By nine, the good stuff is gone. Not picked over — gone. The people buying for restaurants have been and left, and what remains is the second tier at the same price. Seven is right. Half past six is better and slightly unhinged.

The corollary is that the market is a morning, not an errand. You are not going to slot this in around something else. Accept that the day starts here and plan lunch around what you find, which is the correct way round anyway.

Start at the far end and work back

The first stalls you meet are the ones positioned for people who will not walk far, and they are priced accordingly. This is true at every market I have ever been to and it is astonishing how few people act on it. Walk the whole length first, buy nothing, look at everything, and then come back.

You are looking for the stalls with the least on them. A trestle with four things on it means somebody grew those four things. A stall with forty means somebody went to a wholesaler at four in the morning, which is a perfectly honest job but it is not the same job.

What is actually worth carrying

The small violet artichokes, which are more work than they are worth and worth it anyway. Anchovies packed in salt rather than oil — you rinse and fillet them yourself and they are a different species of ingredient from the tinned ones. Bread from the stall at the far end, which always runs out first and is the single best reason to be there early.

Tomatoes still warm from the crate, obviously. Whatever herb somebody has an entire table of, because a table of one herb means it is at its moment. Cheese from the person who is also making the cheese, which you can tell by asking one question about it and watching how long the answer takes.

What not to carry: anything that needs to be cold for more than an hour, anything you would have bought at home anyway, and olive oil, which is always cheaper and usually better bought properly rather than from a stall with a hand-written label and a tourist in front of it.

The woman with the artichokes

The first year, I asked for artichokes on a Thursday and was told, flatly and without discussion, that they were not ready. They looked identical to the ones she had sold me the week before. I said so. She shrugged in a way that ended the conversation and sold me chard instead.

She told me the artichokes were not ready. They looked identical to the ones she sold me the week before. She was right and I was wrong.

I have learned to stop arguing. If a stallholder tells you something is not worth buying today, they are protecting their reputation for next week, which is a far longer game than the one you are playing. The single most useful question at any market is not what is this or how much — it is what would you buy today. Ask it, then buy that, even if it is not what you came for.

How to get it home

Bring more bags than you need and one rigid one for anything soft. Buy the heavy things last so you are not carrying potatoes the length of the market. Eat something at about eight — there is always somebody frying, and shopping hungry at a market is how you end up with four kilos of cherries.

And leave a gap in the plan for the thing you did not expect. Half of what I have learned to cook came from buying something I could not identify from someone who was very willing to explain it, provided I was there early enough that they had time to.