Les Douceurs Du Marché

This is the place to find many (but not all) of the unusual products. When you are looking for something usual, this should be the first place you go to. Also, they carry some of the jams from the Preservation Society. An amazing selection of hot sauces, so you can burn your mouth.

Although I pass every now and then in front of this store, I never stopped before today. I was looking for a balsamic vinegar, a brand I had the pleasure to taste the day before and that had been recommended to me. The clerk who helped me, a young man, was very knowledgeable and passionate. I worked in the field of customer service for several years in the past and I can say with certainty that his service was one of the top 10 best experiences I had in a store. I was also impressed by the great selection of products. If you like to discover new products and cooking ideas, I recommend this place for sure. Kudos.

Les foodies les plus… foodies, se trouveront au paradis dans ce magasin à l’un des coins externes du marché Atwater. C’est un vrai coffre à trésor où l’on trouve tous les ingrédients et produits les plus obscurs. Vous y trouverez un mur de sauces épicées, un autre mur d’huiles d’olives, un troisième de vinaigres et un dernier de moutardes. Des chocolats, ils en ont d’un peu partout au travers du monde. En fait, j’en suis ressortie avec quelques barres Dolfin que j’aime autant pour le goût que l’emballage. Des farines un peu difficiles à trouver se cachent vers l’arrière avec des épices, des confitures, des conserves, et encore plus. C’est certain que c’est plus cher qu’une épicerie «normale» mais vu la variété et surtout la rareté de certains produits, ça me fait plaisir de payer un peu plus quand je trouve une perle rare comme celle-​là!

I honestly don’t believe there’s a shop anywhere in Canada like this. Yes there’s some truly awesome quality markets like Toronto’s McEwans, but to be so especially well stocked in such European delicacies is just beyond belief.
I was re-​acquainting myself with the Atwater Market after a 10-​year absence since moving to Calgary, and needless to say, it was a culinary homecoming long in the coming. And as I walked by the many cheese, produce, meat and seafood vendors, I came upon the shock to find Cassoulet in a can.
For those of you not in the know, Cassoulet is one of the densest, richest foods ever created in the French cuisine, and is a wonderful comfort food in the cold winter months. Comprised of beans, pork fat and a Leg of Duck confit, it’s cooked ideally in an iron pot for hours on end. Needless to say, it’s filling, heavy and one of those kind of meals that tends to knock out people for hours. It’s an unofficial national dish of France, and there it was, in a CAN.
That piqued my interest, and so on I went in, and found myself inside a wonderland of sights, smells and colours of food cans and bottles of all types. It was simply wicked to experience and see, and the shop was much like the TARDIS, so much larger on the inside than what it looked like on the outside. Deep inside, the shelves were replete with fresh pastas, imports from France, Italy, Greece and so many more nations filled with Unilocaly yummy goodness.
Walls of tea, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and so on, I was just overwhelmed by the wonderment, and happily left with a really nice 18-​yr old balsamic vinegar recommended to me by the owner (yes, despite having a huge store filled with shoppers, the owner herself took the time to guide me in my choices) and a few cans of Cassoulet for a fellow Calgary Unilocaler.
Needless to say, this place has now made my must-​visit places the next time I visit my old hometown, especially since as awesome the Calgary food scene has evolved in recent years, especially with my favorite Cassis Market on 17^th Ave and the ever changing Kingsland Market, there’s always going to be some special items that I will never be able to get anywhere else!

When I first stumbled into this place on a Ribena-​hunt, in the late eighties or early nineties, I think, it was some kind of low-​rent but authentic Caribbean supply house. They had all kinds of pepper sauces, and dried peas I’d never seen, and weird crazy shit with strange labels and names like Lucozade and Mauby. They also had a table in the back room covered with while plastic buckets, with SALT BEEF and PIG SNOUT crookedly written on them in big black Sharpie. Jamaican patties were sold from a heat-​lamp cabinet next to the cash, behind which were all kinds of shampoos and hair lotions that looked like they’d been packaged and labelled by Martians. They had about sixteen kinds of brown and Basmati rice, though, and some spices I used a lot of, and large-​sized bottles of Tabasco that my local foodstores can’t be bothered to stock, so I kept making the trek a couple of times a year to resup. Never really stopped.
Maybe fifteen years ago, though, the place changed hands. The new owners took things upscale. Noticeably upscale. The buckets of bloody snouts disappeared, as did the scalp-​poultices; in their places went artisanal hand-​rolled pastas, freakishly unusual and expensive fruit preserves, and an entire wall of assorted high-​end olive and nut oils. To their great and everlasting credit, however, the new guys kept most of the old, low-​end, rice-​and-​beans dry & canned goods inventory people were used to. They just fleshed it out. Hugely.
You can still get just about any bean or seed CLIC puts in a bag or a can, here, right alongside six types of organic brown rice from California and spelt personally harvested by Brigitte Bardot. Need bulk sea salt, or a hundred grams of sun-​dried tomatoes, or a bag of malt flour, or those delicate Scottish biscuits that little old ladies eat? They got all of that, along with frou-​frou canned cassoulet and bottled sirops from France, oven mitt-​sized vacuum bags of Malabar peppercorns, blackcurrant & quince jams from those crazy little European countries that people are always driving tanks across, and an entire shelf of curry spices imported straight from the Mercator of Hell.
And they still sell my big bottles of Tabasco. As I was paying for my winter’s supply of the stuff at one end of the counter yesterday, I heard another customer ask the other counterman, «Can I still get a Jamaican patty here?» And I think the answer was «Yes.»
If they still sold salt beef, I’d give ‘em five stars. But hell, then I’d prolly have to live there.