What to Pick Up at a Paris Supermarket

Here are some things worth tasting or taking home from France. First, cheese and butter. They need refrigeration, so they're hard to carry back, but they're worth eating plenty of while you're here. There are more than 360 kinds of cheese, cheese-only shops are easy to find, and cheese often turns up on restaurant dessert menus. With so much variety, though, many are strongly flavored. To your guide, even blue cheese, goat cheese and Camembert are on the pungent side. Milder French options include Comté and Caprice des Dieux; Edam and Gouda, though Dutch, are fine too. The cream cheeses come in many flavors and are delicious. Prices are low here, too: Madame Loïk cream cheese, often pricey abroad, is much cheaper in France. Do eat lots of butter too. Salted butter on bread is her recommendation, and internationally loved Isigny and Échiré are easy to find. Bordier butter, sold in department stores, is one you'll regret not trying.

Next, jam. She recommends Bonne Maman, which comes in a huge range of flavors, including ones you can't easily find elsewhere, so try something new. The jars are pretty enough to reuse as decor once empty. Strictly speaking it isn't jam, but chestnut cream also makes a good gift. Mixed into plain yogurt it's really good, and it's said to be delicious stirred into warm milk. Sauces are another recommendation. Everything is set up to make pasta easy, with an enormous range of sauces and noodle shapes, many of which she'd never seen; her first French supermarket visit amazed her. Dijon is famous for mustard, so mustard is worth taking home too, with lots of varieties to choose from. There's also Samurai sauce, mildly spicy and smooth; she dips sausages, fries and fried chicken in it all the time. It goes with just about anything.

A bit unusual, but body wash is another pick. The scents are so varied that choosing is hard; she buys several and switches with her mood. It's also the aisle where she spends the most time. Recently she found a Haribo-scented one that really smells like Haribo. It's meant for kids, but she bought it for fun. Quite a few guests at her guesthouse tried the body wash there, loved the scent and bought some to take home. It's heavy, so you can't buy many, but one or two should be fine.

Finally, fruit. Many people ask about flat peaches, but they're summer-only, appearing around June at the earliest. The early ones aren't very flavorful; they're best fully ripe. Figs, cherries, melons and mangoes are great too. She also loves mandarins, but French ones often taste more like oranges than mandarins. European fruit is cheap and often different from what you get at home, so eat plenty while you're here.