Tag: food

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Culture Food France

Stuff You Might Miss

A menu from the Banquet du Chasse yesterday. Lots of food.

BONJOUR!

Sorry for my extended absence. La grippe can be a harsh taskmaster. Anyway, this is about some things you may miss if you visit, or move to, France.

  • Good Mexican (Tex-Mex anyway) food. French food is undeniable fine, but the French never have come to appreciate the tang of a chili. They do have chilis, of course, but they all seem to be the mild variety. I grew up in a household like that: Mom thought that pepperoni was “too hot to eat” so we never ate it, or anything like it. Same with the French, although they do use Spanish chorizo on pizza.
  • Pepperoni. You might think that pepperoni is a basic Italian sausage, but it isn’t. In fact, pepperoni was invented by Italian immigrants in New York City. Yes, the most iconic pizza topping of them all is absent from French pizzarias, even though the pizza is, in general, pretty good.
  • Mac and Cheese. They do sell the stuff in boxes, but it ain’t Kraft, buddy. Not even close. Of course, you don’t have to miss Mac and Cheese if you learn to make your own, which, in fact, is pretty easy. Still, Kraft we don’t have. Sorry.
  • Hershey’s chocolate. It seems that people who didn’t grow up with Hershey’s chocolate tend not to like it, probably because it’s made with a different process from other chocolate products, a process that turns the milk ever so slightly, which is why Hershey’s tastes uniquely like Hershey’s. This extends to chocolate syrup for ice cream, where everyone “knows” that Hershey’s is the best of the lot. Oh, well.
  • Grabbing a quick lunch outside of fast food. Eating in France is an experience all its own. That banquet that we attended provided us with four hours of sequentially presented EIGHT courses! Yoiks! A “quick” lunch will run you about an hour, and many people take two, right out of their work day, to enjoy a leisurely lunch. Of course, if you go to Mickey Ds (McDo) you order from the screen and can leave as soon as you snarf down your food. Question is, for most of us most of the time, why do that? France is the second most popular country for McDonalds, by the way. Also the second biggest consumer of pizza per capita.

Some things you won’t have to miss include Snickers bars, Ben & Jerry’s, Hagen-Daszs, potato chips (not crisps, it says chips right on the bag), pretzels, burgers, hot dogs, pizza of course (Italian style, cooked hot and fast), paper towels, automobiles, freeways, toll roads, DIY stores (Bricos), supermarkets (even hypermarkets), movies (they always have showings of “VO” or version originale, with French subtitles of American films. You can ignore the subtitles.) And there’s more. The similarities, in fact, outweigh the differences.

I’ll do my best not to get the flu again, so I hope you’ll read on in my next post!

AU REVOIR

Categories
Food France

French Food @ Home

Our Local Bakery

We live in the sticks, really. It’s ten kilometers to the nearest town with any normal facilities, such as supermarkets, hospitals, movie theaters, etc, and both towns at that distance are still very small. But, the bakery pictured is two blocks from our house in a commune of 400 people. Bakeries are, I’m saying, common in France, and the bread is very good. The food you buy in France to take home and prepare is all good, actually, so it’s really just a matter of deciding what you’re hungry for this week, or today. You can buy most familiar things in a supermarket in France, if you know what to call them. Most things. However, Molasses is iffy, truly hot sauce can be tricky, refried beans are mostly unheard of, although there are places to get them because some restaurants use them. Without salsa, but still. Powdered sugar, eh, you may need to make your own. Tami did find brown sugar, which is sugar and molasses mixed together. There may be other things that are harder to find (Fritos Original!) but that mostly covers it. Besides those things, which can be worked around, you can buy whatever you need to use at home. And, it will be better than what you buy in the US.

I’ll use wine for a quick example. All French wine for sale is at least good. Maybe not top shelf, but good. This is generally true of anything you find for sale in France. The butter is all good, and some of it is excellent indeed. Meats are fresh and tasty, never having been dosed with antibiotics to fatten them up, yet still fatty good. (French people don’t worry about fats. A quick rule of thumb, if you’re not sure of something you’re cooking, add butter.) There are no factory farms in France, so the chances of contamination with e-coli or other bacteria are considerably lower. Another rule of thumb is that a person weighs ten pounds less in France than in the United States, and this without excessive worry about weight. Hmmm. Legumes (all vegetables) are fresh and seasonal. Right now, for example, cauliflower is over eight Euros per kilogram, which would be outrageous during the harvest season. This is different from the US, although thanks to our Southern neighbors in Spain and Italy one can get pretty much anything pretty much any time.

So, in sum, there are a few frustrations to cooking at home in France, but whatever you cook will be made with high quality ingredients. Not so bad, really.

Categories
Culture Food France

French Food

MENU

  • French Bread
  • French Fries
  • French Dressing
  • French Toast

Joke aside, French Fries are just called “fries” and anyway they’re originally Belgian. This week I’m writing about restaurants. Nothing specific, just in general. You can get fast food here. within an hour of where I sit, ten minutes in the case of McDonalds, you can find McDo (as it’s called locally), Burger King, and KFC. Unfortunately, it’s not a great McDo, as they rarely do the fries right. But I want to discuss “real” restaurants, which are anything but fast.

One thing an American will notice about a French restaurant is that they do not play background music. I believe that originally this was supposed to calm customers, but I think that these days it may serve to help in turnover. That is, it raises the noise level and makes it less pleasant to sit in the dining room. This is true even in upscale restaurants. In France, restaurants are supposed to be quiet enough for a table to converse without raising their voices. With nobody raising voices, this actually works. However, the noisiest restaurant I’ve been to in Paris was made noisy by a table full of drunken Parisians. So, I’m talking general guidelines here, not hard fast rules. As an American visiting France, be aware that we Americans do talk loudly when dining out and, you know, don’t.

There is a rule to remember: Keep Your Hands Visible above the table. This runs counter to American etiquette, so beware. You can even rest on your elbows, but avoid hiding your hands. If your hands aren’t visible, people will wonder what you’re up to. (Insert joke here.)

Nobody will ever hover around making a fuss and asking you if everything is okay. In fact, if you want service, you have to wave down your server. I’ll be honest, I prefer the French method, although it can be frustrating if your server is out of the room, which they sometimes are, of course. You will be seated normally and given menus, and likely asked what you’d like to drink. There’s nothing unusual about the drinks selection, except there aren’t free refills, which has never been a problem for me, but worth remembering. Your server will bring the drinks and ask if you’re ready to order. (So far the same, huh?) Often the Plat du Jour is worth looking at. We’ve had some great meals with the dish of the day. But, order whatever you want. In touristy areas you’ll probably get a menu in English that you may not even have to ask for. Once you’ve ordered, your server will disappear, maybe dropping off some bread. You may get an entree (starter) then other pre-main course items, depending on what you order. But, it may take a while between courses. We had lunch in a nearby village last week and were there almost two hours. But the food was delicious.

Delicious, but not spicy hot. French people prefer subtle flavors to spicy dishes. We had amazingly bland Mexican one time in Paris. Excellent otherwise, but begging for some Pace Picante. (There are some places to get authentic Indian, Mexican (Qudoba no less), and Middle Eastern food.)

Take your time eating. You’ll be left alone to enjoy your meal. Servers in France are considered professionals and paid a living wage. They have no need to grovel for tips. They’re off doing their job serving others at different phases of their meals, and are available to you any time you call them over. Traditionally, a cheese course follows the main course and precedes dessert. It’s a free country, you don’t have to take the cheese, but there are some excellent ones around and, as a tourist, you might want to try a few. For me, I go straight to dessert, which is usually excellent. Most recently I had a créme brulé, which is custard with sugar sprinkled on top which is then scorched with a small blowtorch. You think I’m kidding? Ask your server. They will have pastry, custards, maybe tartes (pies) all in smaller portions than you may be used to, but usually very good.

Speaking of those smaller portions, you will rarely be given too much food. In the US it’s common to have portions dripping off of the plate, which doesn’t happen in France, in my experience. But the food will be delicious. I’ve had excellent steaks, what are scalloped potatoes, vegetables of various sorts, some wonderful desserts, top-notch entrées (appetizers) and, sad to say, occasionally some lousy food, but that’s rare.

The big difference between eating out in the US and in France is that in France, even in a crowded restaurant, one can usually have a conversation using ones “inside” voice. In fact, that’s generally expected. And, the meal is never rushed. You can, of course, eat in a hurry and rush off, but that will surprise everybody. (If perchance you do have to eat in a hurry, tell your server as you’re seated, and you will be accommodated, at least in my experience.) And the portions will be what you can eat, not set up to appear as massive as possible. Contrary to what I’ve read elsewhere, boxes are provided if you can’t finish it all anyway. So, allow a couple of hours (French people do), use a quiet voice, remember to call your server over if you need service (even to get the bill, or addition.) In tourist-frequented areas (Paris for sure) you can probably get a menu in British English (close enough) and the server will probably know at least enough English to do their job in that language.

And, above all, enjoy the food!
If you liked the service, leave a Euro or two on the table. Forget 20%!

Categories
Culture Food France

Pardonnez Moi!

Really. What happened is that our stuff (most of it) arrived and I’ve been busy unpacking and sorting and putting away. Which means France has been looking pretty much like our old place, except that we’re taking things out of boxes instead of putting things into boxes. But, on to something topical.

It’s the holidays in France, and it’s looking a lot like Christmas. In fact, the word Christmas comes up surprisingly often, considering that here the occasion is known as NOEL. As in Joyeaux Noel et bonne année. To top it off, I found a display of Reeses’ Peanut Butter Cup Xmas Trees, the real thing, made in the US of A, in a store that’s a little hard to describe. It carries things like a Big Lots, sort of. Anyway, we also bought some decor there, and the Xmas trees were delicious as always.

France is different, no doubt about it. “Bacon” means cured meat, probably pork porc, which includes smoked pork belly poitrine fumée which, when I have the butcher slice it thin, turns out to be what an American would call bacon. Mmmmmm! Bacon! Homer could maybe survive here. Food differences certainly exist. At a restaurant you have to call for service. Nobody comes around to interrupt your meal and ask if everything is okay. If everything isn’t okay, any French person would complain to their server, so “okay” may be assumed. Also, servers do not live on tips. You can put a Euro or two on the table if you really liked the service, but it’s neither required, nor even expected. It’s just a bonus, and a lot of servers deserve it. But they can live on their salary, and service at a restaurant is considered an honorable profession. How’s that for a difference? On the other hand, while brands may differ, and you need to know what to ask the butcher to do if you want, say, a strip steak, you can generally get the ingredients to make whatever you want to make, including Mexican style food with actual spice in it. (The French don’t believe in spicy food, but prefer delicately prepared, subtly flavored fare.)

In other food news, France consumes more pizza per capita than any country other than the US. They have McDonalds (even in Tahiti, I recently learned.) There is a KFC near Angouleme. It’s different, but it’s not that different. Myself, I make diner style eggs, hash browns, toast, and bacon on Sunday mornings. It isn’t difficult, and I really like that stuff. So, even though it’s different here, I still get to eat my favorite foods, and drink my favorite drinks, and, this may be sad, as my wife pointed out recently, they’re “becoming more like the United States all the time.”

Hmmm. Hopefully not in terms of political discourse. Until next time, Au revoir!

Categories
Food France

Lo Phat?

Due to something I haven’t yet been able to correct, no pictures for a while. Hope that’s okay with everyone!

I want to say some more about food. French, and American. There are plenty of fat people in France, but it’s not the norm, as it is in the US. And, I believe, the American obsession with low fat foods is largely to blame. (I’m stealing ideas left and right here, but they are public domain ideas.) Sometime, I think in the current century even, researchers experimenting with dogs demonstrated that fat has a flavor. If that sounds gross, well, don’t eat this post and you should be fine. I’m pretty sure that is true, and furthermore, fat is a good flavor. And, I suppose that all fat isn’t created equal, I’ll have to grant that. Milkfat (butterfat) buffers the effects of sugar ingestion. At the University of Minnesota in the 80s they were experimenting with foods that cause a sugar rush. Honey was, they said at the time, the best (or worst, if you don’t like sugar rushes.) The food that they could never get anyone’s blood sugar to spike with was ice cream. This was good news for Minnesota’s dairy industry. The reason was good old milkfat. Other fats don’t do that. Crisco and sugar is about as good as sugar for making a sugar rush happen. And, yummy, huh?

Recently (within a few years) it has come out that the US sugar industry paid researchers to find things that made fat bad for us. Some of it may have been real, some of it they actually did make up. But, fat tastes good, and if you take it out of food you lose a lot of good flavor. So, to make the stuff palatable, you add, what else? Sugar! Sugar does taste good. I eat the stuff, but not in the amounts in which I was eating it in the US. Because in France, fat is okay. The main base underneath a lot of French cooking is butter. Not margarine, but butter. Fatty, slippery, gooey, tasty butter! And butter contains what? Contains? It mostly is milkfat. Which is, in fact good for you and tastes good too. French people eat a lot of butter, but they aren’t as frequently obese as Americans, who tend to use low-fat alternatives. Think about that. Whole milk and butter taste really good, they help you stay thinner, and they reduce the need to add sugar to everything.

And added sugar in everything is the problem. Read the ingredients label on the food you buy. Most of it has sugar in it. It can be very difficult to avoid sugar in the US, unless you’re rich enough to afford Whole Foods! In France, the sort of thing Whole Foods sells is just what they sell in most supermarkets. And it isn’t expensive, either.

I’m not trying to preach; I’m just trying to lay out some reality. The rule of thumb is that you weigh ten pounds less in Europe than you do in America. I think I know why that is. Sweets, anyone?