Thanksgiving, I am convinced, is best celebrated abroad.
Okay, there are a few disadvantages, even beyond the obvious absence of family and friends. Canned pumpkin, for example, is almost impossible to find beyond our borders except in world capitals boasting a large American expat community, and even then it’s a brutish Hobbesian struggle to get your hands on any before limited supplies vanish. Ditto cranberry sauce. And then there’s the stubborn refusal of foreign governments to recognize our four-day weekend – unless you’re self-employed, you have to take a vacation day in order to wallow in the overstuffed hung-over bliss of the Friday after.
But the advantages far outweigh the shortcomings. For a start, living abroad means there are no expectations, apart from calling your mother. Don’t like those candied yams? Does anyone? No matter. Don’t like Aunt Margery? She’s thousands of miles away. Daunted by spending a week picking over leftover dried out turkey meat and battling the supposedly mythological but all-too-real L-tryptophan induced stupor? No worries. As long as you don’t invite any other Americans, you can just roast a chicken. No one will know the difference. Celebrating Thanksgiving abroad means you can honor the traditions as selectively as you like. You can even make up a few, although from personal experience I would advise against trying to convince your six-year-old that Santa Claus has a less-talented brother known as Turkey Claus. Being ridiculed by a six-year-old is not pretty.
So, unshackled from the burden of tradition and constrained by Sebastian’s school schedule, we had our Thanksgiving Thursday dinner last Sunday at lunchtime. Since one of the other pleasures of celebrating the holiday abroad is initiating foreign friends into the tradition (or such bits of it that you choose to observe), we invited David and Claire over with their children, Chloe and Theo.
Having French people over for a meal is not always easy. Most of our neighbors are old-fashioned rural French, and are uncomfortable with being invited over for a meal with someone they aren’t related to and haven’t known for at least 30 years. For an aperitif, maybe after a few years of saying “bonjour” at the bakery, but even that is a stretch.
And then there is the food issue. The French, for all their love of great cuisine, are not terribly open-minded when it comes to foreign food. To vary the ingredients of a traditional dish is heresy, and to serve something outside the accepted French canon is for many, well, beyond the pale. Start waving marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes at them and they are likely to run away screaming. As, quite frankly, they should.
But Davie and Claire are both grew up in more cosmopolitan parts of France and are mercifully flexible. While the kids played and the chickens roasted, we sat down for a drink and I explained to them exactly what Thanksgiving is about. I ran through the history, aided in large part by having watched the Peanuts TV special so many times, and proudly described how it is perhaps the one holiday almost totally unspoiled by commercialism. And if I am guilty of having sidelining some of the darker details – the subsequent war and genocide against the Native Americans, the grotesque spectacle of shoppers throttling each other in the Friday sales – let’s just say that this holiday is about being thankful for the good, not dwelling on the evil. It’s already enough that they braved the succotash.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
"Flavor Week," French style
It’s so much fun to stereotype the French. The berets, the baguettes, the Pythonesque outraaaaaageous accents, it all begs for satire. Many of our preconceptions are, as one might expect, outdated, purely regional or just plain nonsense. Frogs legs, for instance. Yes, the dish exists, but after three years I have yet to see it on a menu. And berets, despite many Americans’ vague association of them with leftist European intellectuals, tend to be worn only by old French farmers, and even then they are not so common a sight anymore. And as far as I am aware monkeys, even here, do not eat cheese.
But this week I have been reminded that the legendary French obsession with food is, if anything, understated. The French are totally indifferent to breakfast, often sending their children to school on empty stomachs (which, when I think back to the Frosted Flakes of my youth, may not be such a bad thing). But the idea of a simple sandweeeesh for lunch is considered barbaric. So our village school has the luxury - deemed a necessity and sacred right in this blessedly civilized place – of its own kitchen for supplying the children with hot three-course lunches.
The things that come out of this kitchen are not quite what you’d find kids eating across the suburbs of America. The first course is generally soup, salad or cold cuts. Then meat and a vegetable side dish. We’re not talking turkey dogs and fries here: recent offerings have included duck breast, confit de canard (a traditional farmer’s dish of duck leg preserved in its own fat), veal ragout, quiche and courgettes gratinées, often followed by a cheese course. And then, yes, the occasional hamburger (the French way, no bun and blood rare).
But this masks the more important side of the Gallic food fixation. While it’s important what makes it onto the plate, more crucial is that the food be eaten from a plate, at a table, with others, and slowly. Food is not only about eating, it is about tradition, culture, a way of life. Process is as important as product. Montcabrier’s elementary school students – all 31 of them – sit down at table and eat their three course long lunches like little ladies and gentlemen. Comme il faut.
To shake things up a bit, this week Sebastian’s school is having its Semaine de Gout, badly translated as Flavor Week, intended to introduce the children to more exotic foods. In a country where they eat snails and reeking unpasteurized cheeses, that seemed to me like an ambitious goal, especially for first graders. But there I was losing track of the bigger picture. The French generally have little interest in foreign food – even in Paris you’re hard pressed to find much more than the occasional Vietnamese or North African restaurant as a nod to France’s colonial past. In a farming community like this one, where locally produced tripe and paté are the norm, Italian food counts as a cultural experience.
So Sebastian’s foray into international cuisine has included pizza, sauerkraut, and an unidentified meat in sauce which was meant to represent that most exotic of cultures – France. After all that excitement, I’m sure he’s relieved to come home every evening to his familiar old standbys like Thai green curry, and next week for the school menu to return to the comforting norm of duck confit.
But this week I have been reminded that the legendary French obsession with food is, if anything, understated. The French are totally indifferent to breakfast, often sending their children to school on empty stomachs (which, when I think back to the Frosted Flakes of my youth, may not be such a bad thing). But the idea of a simple sandweeeesh for lunch is considered barbaric. So our village school has the luxury - deemed a necessity and sacred right in this blessedly civilized place – of its own kitchen for supplying the children with hot three-course lunches.
The things that come out of this kitchen are not quite what you’d find kids eating across the suburbs of America. The first course is generally soup, salad or cold cuts. Then meat and a vegetable side dish. We’re not talking turkey dogs and fries here: recent offerings have included duck breast, confit de canard (a traditional farmer’s dish of duck leg preserved in its own fat), veal ragout, quiche and courgettes gratinées, often followed by a cheese course. And then, yes, the occasional hamburger (the French way, no bun and blood rare).
But this masks the more important side of the Gallic food fixation. While it’s important what makes it onto the plate, more crucial is that the food be eaten from a plate, at a table, with others, and slowly. Food is not only about eating, it is about tradition, culture, a way of life. Process is as important as product. Montcabrier’s elementary school students – all 31 of them – sit down at table and eat their three course long lunches like little ladies and gentlemen. Comme il faut.
To shake things up a bit, this week Sebastian’s school is having its Semaine de Gout, badly translated as Flavor Week, intended to introduce the children to more exotic foods. In a country where they eat snails and reeking unpasteurized cheeses, that seemed to me like an ambitious goal, especially for first graders. But there I was losing track of the bigger picture. The French generally have little interest in foreign food – even in Paris you’re hard pressed to find much more than the occasional Vietnamese or North African restaurant as a nod to France’s colonial past. In a farming community like this one, where locally produced tripe and paté are the norm, Italian food counts as a cultural experience.
So Sebastian’s foray into international cuisine has included pizza, sauerkraut, and an unidentified meat in sauce which was meant to represent that most exotic of cultures – France. After all that excitement, I’m sure he’s relieved to come home every evening to his familiar old standbys like Thai green curry, and next week for the school menu to return to the comforting norm of duck confit.
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