Oct 13 2008
French Gastronomy Resonates With Me….
I love the French way of eating. It’s something that resonates with how I like to eat. I’ve always been a slow eater. I constantly put my fork down while I’m eating. I get annoyed at restaurants because people will try to take my plate away. Telling them I’m not finished doesn’t seem to help my rising anxiety. Why are they clearing plates on the table before everyone is finished, anyway?
I like the European way of leaving you completely alone while eating. When we lived in Germany, it took us a few times of dining out to realize we needed to get their attention when we wanted to order, get another drink, get the check, etc. Otherwise they don’t come over. They don’t bother you.
The French way makes sense. As a culture, they get excited about food. The moderate their portions. They don’t mix flavors together. Yesterday I prepared a sandwich and tried to eat it with my soup. My taste buds were confused because I didn’t enjoy my meal as I should have. I got a stomach ache from the confusion.
As a child, I always preferred to eat this way. It drove my family crazy. I wanted my chicken in one plate. My mashed potatoes in another. I always needed a different fork for my salad. And for the longest time I had been eating my salad last. Unheard of in the US, we eat the salad first.
It wasn’t until I started learning about French gastronomy that I realized that someone (or a whole culture of people) gets it. No, I am not French by ancestry. I’m Greek and a lot of the principals are similar. But I truly am having a blast learning about French food culture because it just agrees with how I’ve always been. Suddenly, I am not a strange, “picky”, slow eater. I fit in somewhere.
As a Brit I find two things about American eating habits strange (as they probably find the same things strange about UK habits!) and these are:
1. In the UK we have our knife in one hand and our fork in the other and we hold them both as we eat. In the US people seem to eat with a fork, put it down and pick up their knife with the same hand when then want to cut something, and then replace the knife on the table and pick up the fork again too eat.
2. Putting the salad on a side dish. In the UK if you serve a salad it’s usually part of the meal and therefore on the same plate just as broccoli or carrots would be.
In Canada I was once served a hot beef sandwich that had gravy poured over coleslaw …now that was really strange!