By Stephanie Sommers
While Nice is holding its Carnival the pretty Riviera town of Menton, on the other side of Monaco, is holding its Lemon Festival. I went to the Citron festivities on Friday night but I’ll write about that later this week because I want now to tell about a rather gorgeous Sunday I passed in Nice’s Carnival epicenter. I could also write at length about how we finally had a beautiful sunny day, not too cold, and how my friends and I gathered together on the Promenade des Anglais along with a few thousand tourists to watch the parades. But what I really want to do is write a love letter about a very typical Niçois street food called the socca.
Socca is a thin, moist-on-the-inside, crispy-on-the-outside pancake made of chickpea flour, olive oil and salt and baked in huge pizza pans in wood burning ovens. It is delicious, especially if, like me, you have been living it up all weekend and you are moving just a bit slower than usual on a Sunday afternoon. It is served on little paper plates. You just add pepper.
I’m not the only one who loves socca. In the Albert 1er gardens next to Place Massena, the Carnival held a socca party and everyone queued for over half an hour just to get a plate of socca. The line was so long that kids waiting with their parents were bored silly and as a result used up most of their Silly String cans on all of us waiting in line. Other targets included the wandering bands of Spanish singers, a few clowns and the occasional palm tree. On most Sundays the queues are just as long at the socca restaurants in old town Nice.
The socca in “Vieux Nice,” the old part of town, is served alongside other Niçois specialties such as pissaladiere (caramelized onion pizza sometimes with bits of anchovy and black olives), pan bagnat (little buns brushed with olive oil, then filled with green pepper slices, black olives, onion slices, anchovies, tomato slices and hard-boiled egg slices — all drizzled with vinaigrette), Niçois farcis (vegetables like zucchini, peppers and onions cut into bite size pieces and topped or stuffed with delicious fillings made of meat or fish or other vegetables), and beignets (shrimp or meat fillings dunked in a thick batter and deep fried). All of these are finger foods—although your fingers tend to get very greasy—and families, couples, and friends gather together at brunch time to sit at the picnic tables outside, eat some Niçois street food, and wash it all down with a glass of rosé. Yum!
So as I had a fabulous weekend (which also meant that once again I didn’t study enough) I am skipping writing about the Lemon Festival for the moment in order to pay homage to simple Niçois street food. I will pick up the Citron in a few days, but I leave you with this tasty preview: it’s all about lemons and oranges and a tasty little pie called the tarte au citron, a very French lemon meringue pie…
Oh no. I’ve made myself hungry again. That’s why, while I may not be fat, I will never be skinny.