April 1st - neither fish nor fool

Our local bakery clearly had better ideas for today than to play tricks on their numerous customers. As I was queuing up this morning for my daily bread, or baguette tradition as it’s now called, I spotted, among the always mouth-watering display of cakes, tarts, pies and breads, a tray full of….. fish ! The pastry case was in the form of a fish with a wide tail, the scales were made of small, evenly-cut slices of apple or pear, a glaze provided the shine and the eye was a large blueberry.

Although our household is not a great consumer of cakes and pastries, I couldn’t resist these and bought one apple/fish and one pear/fish. Both were delicious!

Nobody seems to agree where the expression poisson d’avril, the French for an April fool’s trick, comes from, except that it goes back to the middle ages at least and may be connected with the end of Lent or the opening of the fishing season. Judging by the number of people buying the baker’s fish tarts this morning, the fishing season in his shop must have closed just a couple of hours after opening.

As I write, there has just been a news flash saying that the French government has announced €1 billion worth of measures to the people of Guiana after two days of negotiations with their representatives.  (cf: my post two days ago). I hope, for their sake, that this is not an April fool’s trick!