"La Crémerie" - It's all about the cold..

There was a particular little shop that used to exist on almost every French street corner, and although most of them have quietly disappeared, their ghosts remain if you are lucky enough to spot one.

You will be walking through some entirely ordinary town or village, when your eye drifts upwards and catches an old façade, it's painted signage faded and faint, but sure enough - perhaps above a mobile phone shop, an estate agent or some other high street blandness, you will see it still picked out in fading gold leaf or carved confidently into the stone itself:

"Crémerie"

I love that moment. Seeing the bleached, commercial tattoos of "autrefois" - of time long since passed. As if the building would forget. We might, but they don't. Etched into brickwork and plaster, advertising archaic trades and bygone brands of toothpaste and shoe polish.

We imagine, naturally enough, that the crémerie was simply a dairy shop. Somewhere to buy your milk, butter, cream, eggs and cheese before scurrying home again. Which would be perfectly true - if our job here was to just scratch at the surface of life back then. A bit of supplementary scrutiny would actually reveal we are shortchanging ourselves and the important work we do - defining the crémerie through its produce, rather than through its purpose.

You see, I have begun to suspect that we are looking at these little shops - or the faded signage that just about bears witness to their past presence - through thoroughly modern eyes, because what they were really selling was not just the ordinary stuff of dairies. It was not just a basket of farmyard-based groceries...

They were selling cold.

That will sound odd to many of you, when your kitchen is - even now - humming quietly with a refrigerator the size of a small family car - but for most of human history cold was not something you could "own". It was a problem you needed to solve. Unless your Mum was a Viking.

Milk and butter behaved the same then as they do now, in a warm cupboard - not well. Cream would have designs on becoming something else entirely, very quickly. Eggs were OK, as we in Europe do not wash our eggs with chlorine or ammonia, like they do in the U.S. - but they still like a cool corner.

The foods gathered together inside the crémerie had very little in common except for one inconvenient denominator - they spoiled quickly. The dairy-on-the-corner really existed to keep time very much at arm's length.

We think today that these shops specialised in dairy, because dairy happened to be what they sold. I rather think the people who built them would have described their trade differently. They specialised in perishability. Before every household possessed its own little patch of upright, stainless steel winter, someone had to create one for the whole town. Cold had its own address. The French, in their love of all things abbreviated, had a little verbal shorthand for the trade of the crémerie - BOF - beurre, œufs, fromage.

Trades and professions of specialist beauty and quiet refinement like the crémerie are the ones that we miss the most, yet we seem determinedly unwilling to fully support. And I don't know why. Because these shoppy vocations just ooze charm and wicker. We used to bandy around (not so long ago, either) the charming suffix of "monger" - from the old English mangere - meaning a trader or a dealer in things. Fishmonger, cheesemonger, ironmonger and the charming term of Costermonger - the fruit seller - from the word costard - a heritage variety of English cooking-appley thing.

Sadly, these charismatic callings have been swallowed whole by big commerce and in their stead, we have attached the productive, charm-oozing, vocational appendix to more sinister and unpleasant assignments - Warmonger, Gossipmonger, Scaremonger etc. No-one is proud to be any of those.

So, yeah.. we no longer need to be sold any cold. Our LG 's and Sub-Zero fridgy behemoths are here to stay. But the knock-on effect is still quite front and center. You see, the crémerie was not only the purveyor of cold, but the way they did things also had a unique charm. The weighing, cutting and measuring was a lovely act of skilful intimacy. Placing the wire on the cheese is still something I enjoy. That simple and personal judgement of "A little more, sir"?..

It was so pleasantly transactional - always requiring two people to be present within each act of mini-commerce. It was an encounter at the counter. Killed in cold blood, it quietly disappeared once efficiencies and barcodes became the higher virtues. We no longer want to share the giant slab of butter, or the wheel of cheese. We not only lost the purpose of the crémerie, but we also lost the "manner" - how it did its trade. We now want our own plastic-bagged portion.. just for us. "It's mine"...

So the crémerie lives on a little, with the many fading shop signs that still scatter towns and villages of import or history. And also in a cute little phrase that the French still use today "changer de crémerie" - lierally meaning "to change one's creamery" - when deciding to take our support somewhere else, to switch football teams or political party affiliation. To try somewhere new.

We are lucky to have a crémerie in a town near us. When we walk in, it is easy to realise that it is not only preserving an old way of doing business, but also an older way of thinking. Vanessa and I are dyed-in-the-wool creatures of participation. Things are better discussed, rather than simply scanned. Weighing, portioning and wrapping are all un-hurried and done with care.

You do tend to leave the crémerie with less than you might from the cash and carry of a supermarket, but it still feels as if you have more in your wicker basket. You are not simply buying, you are acquiring. It's the priviledge of particpation.. If you know, you know.

Words have curious afterlives. Long after the world that invented them has quietly slipped away, they continue doing the work they were created to do. They carry tiny fossils of forgotten trades, vanished customs and obsolete technologies inside perfectly ordinary conversation. We use them without realising that they are, in their own quiet way, little museums.

And every now and then, above some entirely ordinary building in an entirely ordinary French town, the faded shop sign, still just about catches the afternoon light.

Not remembering the butter.

Remembering the cold.

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.