Women of Toulon Buy Foods Much as is Custom in Some American Cities

1917

Pays To Go To Market

To the continental woman, marketing is both a time-hallowed custom and a leading outdoor sport. Europe has always been far more economical than America, and this method of careful food purchasing is one of the first aids to economical housekeeping, according to Niksah. You see what you are getting, there are always opportunities to pick up bargains, and there are no delivery costs. Marketing by telephone is almost unknown in Europe outside a few big cities, because the telephone is not nearly so much a household institution there as here.

Toulon market is open every day from seven o'clock until noon. If you are a Toulon housewife of the upper class, you sally forth about 10 a.m., followed by a maid with a basket or a cord bag to carry your purchases. If you are not rich enough to have a maid, you carry your own vegetables in an embroidered cloth bag swinging from your arm. This cloth bag is an important point, because it marks you as an independent housewife. If you were to carry a basket or a cord bag, you would be taken for somebody's maid.

On either side of the pavement under the plantains are ranged scores of stalls covered with drab awnings. Most of the stall-keepers are women — Frenchwomen, Italians, Corsicans, Spanish. They sell all the vegetables known to botany, and delicacies like mushrooms, snails and ravioli, which is a dish made of macaroni and meat, as well. There are booths for the sale of flowers and medicinal herbs, and chickens and doubtful looking cuts of meat. The cream of the custom comes between nine and eleven. in the last half-hour there is a great bargain sale of everything that will not keep until the next day and the poorer classes rush the booths to purchase slightly damaged but nourishing goods at ridiculously low prices.