The Chefs / Episode 3

Perrine, 26 years old, MASTER PRESERVER
In public canneries, the Master Conservers, veritable cooking craftspersons, are busy all the day.
The ripe fruit and vegetables when harvested must be transformed as quickly as possible.
With queues forming, the Master Preservers don’t know here to turn: the canneries are running at full capacity.
Both managers and craftspeople of these public venues, the Master Preservers welcome and assist citizens but also soup makers and farmers in preparing the transformation of their produce.
It’s impossible to do without them; like magicians, they help you to change pounds of cherries into pots of jam, kilos of tomatoes into jars of sauce and hundred-weights of apples into litres of juice.
Engraved on the façade of the canneries, Lavoisier’s famous maxim serves as a motto: “Nothing is created or lost, everything is transformed”. The Master Preservers will always have just the right recipe to take advantage of your late harvests, overripe apricots or tatty-looking aubergines.

Dany, 32 years old, SOUP-MAKER
Strategically positioned at street corners, soup-makers are street vendors of soups.
These street professionals concoct their vegetable potions each morning after picking the ingredients from their vegetable garden.
Most often located in the urban-periphery of towns and cities they take advantage of uncultivated land.
Each morning, depending on the vegetables’ ripeness, on their three-wheel scooter cooking terminal, they cook as varied a combination of flavours as the season offers.
At the end of each summer comes the Vegetable and Preserves Festival.
Gathering at the local canneries, they busy themselves in preserving the surplus from their vegetable gardens, selling the jars, from door to door, during the winter.