in my local village.
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| The menu-board |
for the highly-regarded restaurant in the village where I live.
Every restaurant in the region offers greasy minced duck
(raised in unpleasant conditions). It often comes in jars.
Bits of beef on a skewer require no skill to make.
A châteaubriand steak (thick, with a wine-based sauce, invented in 1824) is an appropriate dish for burly, civilising he-men of the Foreign Legion and Riot Police.
Scallops are just scallops, probably pillaged from Irish coasts.
Sandre is a fish known in English as zander or pike-perch: hmm.
Sauce vierge is a concoction of tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil to overcome the tastelessness of the fish.
The desserts are all bought in.
Apparently there is an impressive cheese trolley for the obese.
The French learned nothing culinary (or, indeed, cultural) from their extensive colonies in North Africa, the Levant and Indo-China.
This 'traditional' menu could date from 1924...or 1874.
4 comments:
Have you visited Paris again after all these years? I have a memory of a blog entry in which you promulgated that you'd never visit a city that large again - and I feel awful for pointing this out.
To quote Konrad Adenauer: "Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern."
Also I tried to figure out how to best translate the idiom "Jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen", but to no avail, despite the internet full with translation aids. Would a literal translation be acceptable?
And to continue with Geschwätz: I was oblivious to French cuisine being bland! I thought that was the prerogative of the English! I have fond memories of the galettes I had in Bretagne in 2017 - sadly, I do not remember what else I ate there.
Yours,
the Unholy and Aimlessly Rambling Inquisition of the Bloginafog
Martin
Adenauer: I have no interest in old gossip about me.
'Jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen' might be Weighing every word carefully.
Old cliches die hard. The British Isles now offer the most varied and exciting menus outside Jerusalem, due to the successive arrival of West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians, Greek Cypriots, Spaniards, Portuguese...Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Poles, etc. Unlike France, the British Isles never sought to homogenise immigrants, so they cheerfully made their own food in their own semi-ghettos, and opened ethnic restaurants even more varied than those of Amsterdam.
The French don't like spices and (contrary to myth) don't really like garlic. Ask a Korean, who will cheerfully put a whole clove of garlic into one dish.
Ethnic restaurants are few and far between outside Paris and Marseille. Most of them 'tone down' their cuisine for bland and restricted French tastes. Cuisine in France is largely series of rules. Vegetarian cuisine is quite alien.
I'm talking about dinner dishes, not the over-sweet pastries which I find largely inedible, (except for the excellent local Jésuites) - but so also are most sweet pastries in the world.
The old delicious French soups have gone out of fashion. They were made from old bones and left-overs - but EU legislation has put paid to that.
I'm also talking about food on modest incomes. In very expensive restaurants there can be quite exciting food. But generally speaking, the French have learned almost nothing about food since Catherine de Medici's time. They also have rigid attitudes to wine, and won't even consider drinking wine from other countries. (I could tell you a story about the Malbec grape and its success in Chile...)
They still peel potatoes...
Since I'm an insufferable pedant today: I think the Adenauer quote translates to: "I don't care about my palaver of yesterday."
Grateful for having been brought up-to-date by you!
Yours regressively,
Martin, who mainly is still being fed by his mother's cooking
'Palaver' is a fairly rare word which implies lengthy and over-wordy statement or conversation. Like negotiations in Brussels. More colloquially one would say 'I don't care what I said yesterday'. So the 'gossip' translation is quite wrong...
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