The Eating Experience

A mes lecteurs françaises - si vous trouvez c'est pas juste, faites des commentaires!

Dessert is eaten with a spoon. No matter what is being served, the only acceptable implement is the spoon, no matter how maladapted to the task.
Ice cream? Spoon. Good choice.
Cake? Spoon. Many different utensils work well with cake; the French choose the spoon. (But working well with utensils is a feature of cakes, not any particular versatility on the part of the utensils.)
Blueberry tart with a really hard crust? Spoon. And be careful about bite-sized bits of crust suddenly shooting across the table. No, you may not have a knife. If you suspect that a hard-crust tart is in the offing, discretely hide your cheese knife under a napkin or somewhere in order to remain properly armed.
Bunch of grapes? Spoon. Alright, most people do in fact leave the spoon on the table to eat their grapes. But you still get one.

Coffee. Coffee is served in demitasse cups. A single mug of coffee the size that certain friends of mine have for breakfast in the States, or a Grande at Starbucks, is enough to fill a half dozen of these little jokes. Mind you, there may be about the same amount of ground coffee involved in making these various cups - the french version is just squeezed into the smallest possible volume.
Another of the myriad coffee rules is that coffee at the end of dinner cannot be served with dessert. Verboten. I've been to some restaurants where, if you say so very clearly when ordering dessert that you want your coffee at the same time, they'll shake their heads in dismay over the sad American and serve it the way you want. But that's exceptional. Most places, even if you order coffee with dessert, they will serve your lemon tart with its spoon and bedrock crust, make the coffee, keep it there behind the counter until you have finished every last crumb of your tart, and then serve the now-cold coffee. If you try to trick them by pushing your tart to the side in the hopes they will bring your coffee after all, they will either not do it, or they'll forcibly take your tart away (often by scooping up the plate and placing it in a stack of used dishes such that you don't really want it back after all; if there's the whole table to clear they just do it by stacking your friend's dessert plate on top of yours), before setting down the coffee. You are in a dessert phase, or a coffee phase, but never both. You may keep your glass of wine come what may.

Beer. Beer shalt not be taken with a meal. No. You may have a beer, and you may have dinner, but a beer with dinner is just not done. Not even with sausages and fries, or pizza. Finish your beer and turn to a nice glass of wine with your meal.

The beer for dinner thing reminds me of being asked a few years ago if it was ok for teenagers to have a glass of wine at a restaurant dinner. Yes, young people are included in wine-drinking as part of the family dining experience, and that extends to restaurants (though you don't see many youngsters actually imbibing). In fact, I couldn't think of what the drinking age was in France. Turns out, there wasn't one. Any person of any age could purchase the alcoholic beverage of his or her choice at any supermarket. It's just that kids don't, usually, at least until recently. Just this year they passed a law saying you have to be at least 16 to buy booze.

That's enough on food. On to more serious issues. Maybe.

Foods of the Gods

I'm still messing around with the idea of "what's different here?", and the food is the easiest thing to get a handle on. So here's about some of the edibles. There's a lot more to say, of course, but I have to go home now and feed the cats.

Stuff which is just regular here but you have to make an effort in the States (I won't say there's anything you can't get in the States. I've lived in LA and I know you can get Everything. Even if it isn't allowed. I personally know a determined soul who risked the $40,000 fine at LAX to bring home an entire St. Nectaire cheese. She got pretty pale when she was chosen to have her bag searched, and with the cheese actually in sight its dirty-sock smell apparently said "nothing but bad laundry here", and the guard gave up & let her through. I tried that with some Bleu d'Auvergne going through Toronto once, but chickened out and ended up scarfing an unhealthy amount cheese at the customs window. If only I'd had a baguette handy.) These are my Top-4 of the moment:

Nutella. Oooohhh. I love nutella. I adore it. I eat it straight out of the jar. Sometimes when I have toast for dinner it's just an excuse to have someplace to put a lot of nutella. Every time I pass through the kitchen to let the cats in/out, it seems I stop for just a little, teeny spoonful of chocolate-hazelnut spread heaven. I know I'm not the only one, too. There are signs of serious nutella consumption right at work, where all the jars we use to hold stocks of eppendorf tubes are in fact used nutella jars.

Unpasteurized cheese. Yeah I know you can get unpasturized cheese in the states, but it isn't 'regular' cheese. Cheese dies when you pasturize it. It remains more or less cheesy, but the soul is gone. Thus any cheese worth buying here is raw-milk cheese with a whole panoply of microorganisms in it that together make the complex textures and flavors of french cheeses. And there is absolutely no health problem with that at all. The process from start to finish is tightly controlled to eliminate bugs that may make you sick. If there's a problem, there's a recall, just like in the USA, and I remember only one in the past 12 years.

Whole nutmeg. What's hard to find is ground nutmeg. What you do is buy whole nutmegs and a little scraper device that holds it and scrapes off just the amount of fresh nutmeg that you need. Definitely worth it - like the difference between freshly ground pepper and pepper that's been in a shaker can for two years.

Nearly raw steak. They call it "blue". Barely warm in the middle. If you're someplace where you know the beef is top-notch, a real delicacy. I've had steak Tartare several places, and I've learned you have to ask how they serve it. The classic has raw egg, onions, chopped pickles and such on the side. This one bar&restaurant I like for its other dishes and its Saturday afternoon rugby watching serves Tartare with the pickles and onions already mixed in. Ech. Didn't they know I always leave the pickles alone?

Stuff you can't get in the store here in Clermont-Ferrand (admittedly, Clermont is a backwater. You can get a lot of this stuff in Paris if you're willing to pay the price. Think 4 to 6 times what you'd pay Stateside.)
Poptarts. Yes, we could in fact tour the whole junkfood section of your average american grocery store and list every third item (just a few years ago it was every fifth item - they're catching up fast). But once in a while a Frosted Cinnamon poptart, hot from the toaster, is exactly what you need for breakfast. And in those hermetically sealed aluminum packets, you can keep them around for ages, until you need a little taste of home. Then, having eaten a pair, you remember, and you don't need another one for months.

Sour cream. In the rare mexican restaurants around, they put a dollop of fresh cream wherever you would normally use sour cream. Nooooo!!!!!! It's not so bad, sometimes, once you get used to it, depending on the dish. But they miss the point that sour cream is supposed to bring a touch of sourness to the dish. Random semi-liquid dairy products are no substitute. Try yogurt, or just leave this secondary condiment off altogether.

Hot Tamales ("A fat-free candy" essential to human life). They haven't even thought of Hot Tamales here. Cinnamon in candy? Cinnamon that is candy? When I pass my tin of Cinnamon Altoids around the lab, I do that with the assurance that exactly one person out of 15 will want one.

Pitted olives. Even on pizza, beware of pits. Although, since there are only three to five olives on any pizza said to come with olives, they are so special you will hardly fail to notice them and forget. Pitted cherries are missing too. They actually make cherry pie with whole cherries. I think I can attribute two of my broken teeth to french cherry pie. On the cherry end, they are learning. You can get cherry pitters, meant for making jam, really (could you imagine - leaving the pits in jam?), but catching on for other cherry delights. A pit or two escaped me when I made cherry jam this summer, alas, and I didn't realize until the blender started making odd noises and jerks. Most of the bits were successfully fished out, but enough little ones remain that I can't make gifts of cherry jam this year, and have to eat it myself rather carefully...

That's it for Cultural Differences today. Other subjects, such as universal heath care, free university access, direct voting, and the wearing of biking costumes (not just the shorts), may or may not be addressed in the future.

Expat, year 12

An interesting thing about living abroad is the different attitude people around you have to the Amerian presidential campaigns. The news coverage is pretty extensive for an election almost nobody here can vote in. I find the French are very pro-democrat. They liked Bill Clinton and didn't care about his sex life. They liked Al Gore, then John Kerry. They liked Barak better than Hillary, and don't get stuck at all on the 'first woman' or 'first black' nonsense. They definitely like Obama better than McCain, though the latter has his points and the former his faults.
There's not much they can do but like a candidate and wait around to see how it turns out.

This election looked like a contest between two reasonable candidates. Until the nomination of Sarah Palin for VP. Now it looks like McCain's Straight-Talking, Independent-Minded, Maverick façade has worn through, showing the Usual Republican underneath. She's up there on the ticket because she has a vagina. I guess the Republican party thought we'd all be so impressed with that that we wouldn't notice her utter lack of qualifications for the job. They thought the knee-jerk reaction among women would be to vote for 'one of our own'. (Not that Obama isn't a Usual Democrat after all, to be fair.)

Vote for someone (from his party) who has no idea what George Bush's doctrine on terrorism is? Vote for someone who wants to roll back women's rights over their bodies to the Victorian age? Vote for someone who claims credit for shutting down the 'Bridge to Nowhere', when in fact she was in favor of it up until the **** hit the fan, and even then simply rerouted the money to other projects in her state with no more utility?

Okay. I think we can all see where I stand on this one. Just go over to http://womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com/ if you want to spend the rest of the day reading more in that vein.

And as happens every four years, I'm once again the local source for information on all things American. I'm called upon to explain what the Electoral College is (easy enough), then why we keep it (um... inertia?), and finally why the votes from a state have to all go together when that isn't the popular vote at all (got me...).

Darn it; I hate being called on to defend stuff I disagree with. Let's get back to the use of cloves in sweet foods, pumpkin as a dessert, and the joys of flavored coffees served to go. In fact, coffee to go, period. And coffee at meetings. Meetings here, you're lucky to get a bottle of water. Meetings with donuts or bagels are absolutely unheard of. A meeting where people bring their lunch and eat it at the table??? Let me tell you about being American...

In fact, in my first month here I gave an informal talk to my labmates, and since the meeting was at 8:30 in the morning, naturally I made a pot of coffee for everyone. I brought the coffee and the trayful of cups into the meeting room, served myself after inviting everyone to do the same, and set up my slides. Not a single person poured him or herself a cup of coffee, in spite of many of them being confirmed addicts of the 10 am pause. They just looked at it, and at me, like, huh? Nobody said anything. They just listened to the talk, during which I used my oh-so-handy cup of joe as a tool to slow my overly rapid english down to something understandable. At 10 the now-cold coffee was thrown out and a new pot brewed and happily downed by the very people who would not touch it earlier with a 10-meter pole. Plus some of them spent the afternoon complaining how I'd made the conference room reek of coffee. Alright, there's a cultural adjustment to make right away. I never even considered teaching them the time-honored academic tradition of the bring-your-lunch meeting.

It's true: this post has no particular story to it. I am learning to "blog", for better or for worse. Essays in my journal have a beginning, middle, end. They have a point. Blogging is just whatever is on today, finished or not. I'm horrified at the thought of a person like Sarah Palin being in charge of America should anything happen to McCain. I represent America to everyone around me, like it or not. There are myriad little cultural differences, even between relatively similar countries. All of these things I want to explore, somehow, together. I'll try to work on it and get back to you.

In the meantime, feel free to post comments. What do you want to know about?