Splitting
Y’all, this newsletter has gotten out of hand. I can’t go five minutes without writing down another thing I want to tell you about. And last week’s episode was so long, I got a warning that Gmail would truncate it. Sorry about that. Being a visual person, it also bothers me that I can’t fit more photos in the episodes (another thing earning me a naughty notice from Gmail). I also wonder if y’all have time to read all that great information before the next episode arrives. My solution is to break the episodes up into two parts, sending one out on Mondays (as I have been) which will include Les Courses, Parlez-vous? and a couple of new segments—Tiny Annoying Differences and Weird French Sh!t. The other half will go out on Thursdays and will include all things jojdom and just ask joj.
Les Courses
At some point in my early childhood, I latched on to all things French as the utmost of worth and sophistication.
Cheese was the one exception.
When Meg Ryan in the movie French Kiss says, “Did you know there are four hundred and fifty-two government cheeses in this country? Don’t you think that’s incredible? To come up with four hundred and fifty-two ways to classify what is basically a bacterial process?” I just shrugged. I didn’t understand the hype.
When I was growing up, cheese was a condiment. Sometimes it was generic “cheese food product” my grandma would mix with canned chili tomatoes to make a viscous yellow liquid with chunks of red used for nacho dip at church potlucks. Sometimes, cheese was a rectangular block of tasteless orange we got free from the government that we shredded and mixed into things to give them color (tacos) or make them sticky (peas). Very often, it was individually wrapped slices of unmeltable yellow plastic. On a few occasions, my mother bought special cheese just for her— white slices with cartoon holes that, the one time I snuck a bite, tasted like rotten milk.
The only incarnation of cheese I liked was the powdered kind that when combined with the right ingredients could be delicious. Being a capable gas stove cook by second grade, I made a lot of mac and cheese. Like I said, when we had the right ingredients—butter and milk—mac and cheese could be nutty and creamy. But half the time, “milk” meant reconstituted government-issue powdered milk. “Butter” was most often generic margarine. When we were out of real or powdered milk, I could always mix water with non-dairy coffee creamer (a staple).
Cheese wasn’t a food. It was a sauce you could make with yellow powder, coffee creamer and margarine.
When I got to France, I just didn’t get why there were several grocery store aisles associated to cheese. And why was there a whole OTHER section of unwrapped cheeses in the back where people stood in long lines to have the cheese dude cut them hunks from the ginormous wheels? There were little wooden plateaux of white goat or sheep cheeses in every stage of dryness. Every cheese seemed different in size, shape, color and texture. And the smell! It was pretty to look at but looking distance was close enough for me. If I bought cheese, I got mild Dutch cheeses like Edam or Gouda and even that was just for melting into my peas.
In April of 1999, I met The Hairy One and fell flat on my face in love. He told me he was from Haute Savoie like I knew what that meant. He said words like “raclette” and “tartiflette” and “fondue,” and I smiled and nodded, adoring and ignorant. A few weeks into our adventure, he drove me to Haute Savoie, to visit his parents’ home in the foothills of the Alps near the Swiss border. “My dad is going to love you. I bet he’s harvested a whole meal of things from his garden. He’s probably prepared a special plateau of local cheeses just for you,” he said.
“I’m not really a cheese person,” I said.
He looked away from the road to check my face, to see if I was joking. He did this several times, each time his face paling more. I could see in his eyes he was recalculating, wondering if this was a mistake.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Well, just don’t say anything to my father.”
Everything started out fine, there was great chemistry, his dad showed me around the property, proud of all his gardening projects—his postcard quality vegetables, his finely manicured hedges, a cedar arch on which he was training roses. I was charmed. And when dinner was served, I got to eat peas and potatoes from his garden, then a delicious steak, a salad from his coldframe and homemade vinaigrette! When he brought out the cheese plateau, his chest puffed up like he was presenting me a golden egg, I steeled myself. I was ready to do my duty to try all the cheeses in the name of love.
THO smiled nervously. “Elle n’aime pas trop le fromage,” he said. Outing me for not liking cheese.
His father seemed confused. “Comment ça, elle n’aime pas?” He was obviously flabbergasted. How could someone as cool as I, with obviously good taste in everything else like vegetable gardens, manicured hedges and his youngest progeny, not like cheese?
I had no idea then that Haute Savoie is known for its cheeses. That some cheeses and their recipes are hundreds of (in some case over a thousand) years old. That those recipes are protected by region* and have strict requirements in terms of aging and weight. That even the diet of the cow and the time of year can affect the fat content of the milk and thus the taste and texture of the cheese. In Haute Savoie, there are meals like “raclette” and “fondue” where cheese is the main dish! The French come from all over the rest of the Hexagon and the maritime territories to Haute Savoie (and Savoie) to ski and eat cheese.
“It’s okay,” I said to THO in English. “J’aimerais bien gouter,” I told my future father-in-law, letting him know I was eager to try. It was all lies, but again, I wasn’t going to let a bacterial process stand between me and impressing the man who had created the love of my life.
THO cut me a piece that resembled a French fry in size and color, trimming the orange crust off the ends.
“Abondance,” his father said, nodding, as if knowing the name of the cheese would comfort me. Like I might suddenly recognize it and say, “Oh, Abondance!”
I sniffed it. It smelled like mac and cheese that had gone a little sour. I bit into it. The first bite was okay, a little sharp. I chewed, swirled it around in my mouth, swallowed. I took a sip of my red Côtes du Rhone. It wasn’t horrible. I did the whole thing again—bit, swirled, sipped. By the third bite, I finally understood!
Cheese was good!
I asked him to cut me pieces of the other cheeses. That night I tried Tomme de Savoie—a light cheese with a semi-soft texture and lots of little elliptical holes, and another cheese similar to Abondance called Comté that was a little less nutty and closer to the Swiss my mother used to eat, and a soft cheese called Reblochon that had the contradictory quality of smelling like ass and feet and bellybutton lint while it sat on my plate but tasted delicious spread on a chunk of bread.
It was an epiphany. I liked cheese! This realization made me wonder just how many other foods I had been avoiding all my life I might actually enjoy. It is thanks to learning I love cheese that I went on to try sushi (love it), mussels (love ‘em), horse meat (love it), haggis (love), black pudding (YUM!), fried crickets (delicious!), raw oysters (hate ‘em but at least I tried!) and why I’m still open to trying just about anything, once.
In the years since that night, I have probably tasted a quarter of the four hundred and fifty-two different government cheese and there is not one I do not like. I get why there are two full aisles of industrially-packaged cheeses. I get standing in line to buy a fresh hunk off a big wheel. A walk up into our village to get Raclette from our local cheesemonger is well worth the effort!
* There are two designations for cheese, AOC (Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée) and AOP (Appellation d’Origine Protegé) HERE (IN ENGLISH) explains what all that means (and everything else you might need to know about cheese).
Here’s a little movie of the aisles of cheeses in our market and a few our faves:
For more information about the cheeses mentioned in the video:
Emmental: HERE (IN ENGLISH)
Le Provençal: HERE (IN FRENCH)
Banon: HERE (IN ENGLISH)
The Banon cheeserie makes Banon, the Tommette de Chevre aux Baies and the Tome de Provence and Tome Fraiche: (IN FRENCH)
Saint-Félicien: HERE (IN ENGLISH)
Etorki: HERE (IN ENGLISH)
Corsica: HERE (IN FRENCH)
Parlez-vous?
Have you ever heard of Verlan? It’s something you should absolutely know about if you plan to spend any longer than a vacation here in France. I definitely wished someone had told me about it before I arrived here in back in the late 90s—I might not have felt so bad about not understanding half of what the French youth around me were saying. Verlan is “backwards” backwards. Let me try that again… Verlan is “l’envers” (which means backwards) backwards: LEN-VER (pronounced lon-vair) becomes VER-LEN (vair-lon). As you can see, it’s a language formed by turning the word sounds around (or in the case of multisyllabic words, putting the last syllable first).
Verlan is an argot that was used by the youth, especially those who used to live on the fringes of French society (those of African and North African Arab origin and those who otherwise felt unaccepted by the white mainstream) as a way to be subversive. According to this NYT article on it from 2002, (IN ENGLISH) Verlan started out in the 19th century as a code for criminals but was picked up and used so much that many Verlan words have found their way into the French dictionary and if you know much about the Académie Française, the government body who regulates which words make it into the official French canon of vocabulary, you’ll understand what a feat that is! (If you don’t know about the Académie Française, HERE (IN FRENCH) and HERE (IN ENGLISH) is more information).
This Wikipedia entry (IN ENGLISH) gives some great examples of Verlan words that have been assimilated into every day speech and writing but what’s interesting to me is that words that were ALREADY slang, like “flic” (cop) and “clope” (cigarette) were further argot-ized (is that a word? Does it matter?) by being turned around in Verlan to be “keuf” (the backwards of “flic” for cop) and “peclot” (the backwards of “clope” for cigarette). There are words I learned my first few months I didn’t even KNOW were Verlan like “meuf” (the backwards of “femme” for woman) and “barjot” (backwards for “jobard” for crazy) and “ripou” (the backwards of “pourri” for corrupt). I thought those were just French words.
Here (IN ENGLISH) is a Libération (the French newspaper) article from 2007 about Verlan, its speakers and its uses. There are also a bunch of books about Verlan that are worth a Google (some are in the “References” section of the Wikipedia page I linked). If you want to at least understand (and maybe BE better understood) while in France, you should familiarize yourself with this phenomenon and a few of its more popular words. I was in my twenties when I got to France but people my age (40s) still use these words and you might not find them in your French textbook.
Tiny Annoying Differences
This is a new segment in which I will discuss little things about living in France that make things frustrating compared to living in the States. A lot of people will tell you that culture shock is about big differences like being expected to kiss (pre-covid) people the first time you’re introduced and every time you meet thereafter. But, I tell you, it’s the Tiny Annoying Differences that add up to make living here (or anywhere outside your “home”)…difficult. (I want to add the caveat that this all goes the other way, too… Once you’ve lived in France for a while and get used to it—even start to LIKE certain elements of it, there are little things you’ll start to hate about your home country.)
I’d like to dedicate the maiden event of this segment to electric plugs. As you Americans know, electric plugs set into walls in homes in the States are usually a rectangle of plastic with two roundish forms into which are set two vertical equal signs (and some have a third frowning-mouth-shaped hole for larger appliances) where you can plug things in, yes? Some rooms where you expect to use a lot of electronics have even bigger squares where you can plug in up to six different machines! You can buy long surge protectors with up to ten (more?) plugs that fit somewhat neatly into small spaces—I used to complain about these and the mess that all the wires made. That was before France.
Here, most plugs are single plugs, inconveniently spread around the house. Newer homes (probably built by people who visited the States and thought, “Holy shit, having more than one plug per wall mount is pure GENIUS!”) have double plug mounts but I’ve never lived in one. France is an old country and some places were built before electricity, so it’s not uncommon to live in places where the electrical conduits are affixed to the OUTSIDE of interior walls and hidden either behind a cache or a thick coat (or six) of paint. Because of codes, there are rooms that are not allowed to have any electrical plugs at all depending on whether or not there is a water pipe in the same wall.
Here (IN ENGLISH) is more information all about French electricity.
The one good thing about French plugs is that they are recessed, making it impossible to get shocked. There is no part of a French plug that is touchable unless you are trying to get electrocuted and even then, it takes an exercise in being nimble.
Multi-plug surge-protector-like strips are unsightly and inconvenient and never seem to have enough plugs in them. On top of that, because they’re usually on the floor and because they’re so deep, they collect dirt and dust very easily and are almost always discolored and a pain in the ass to clean.
Don’t get me started on how thick and bulky the cords themselves are.
Here (IN ENGLISH) is a website on French plugs.
Weird French Sh!t
There are things I never saw before coming to France. Maybe it’s because I grew up poor in the Ozarks, but it might be because there are things in France we just don’t really use in the States (not saying they don’t exist there, just saying I never saw them before coming to France).
In keeping with this week’s cheese theme, I’d like to introduce you to the cheese plateau. Maybe you won’t think this is weird, but it’s something I never saw before coming to France but now that I’ve had it, I can’t do without it. As you’ll remember from Les Courses, cheese is now my thang. Some of the fresher and softer cheeses need to be kept in the fridge (now, this depends on how fast you eat them and what time of year it is—we only keep things in the fridge until we open them, but once opened all cheeses disappear, even fresh goat and sheep cheeses) but hard and semi-soft cheeses are best kept at room temperature.
This site and this one from Epicurious (BOTH IN ENGLISH) explain the whys of room temperature cheese storage. HERE (IN FRENCH) is information that might refute or better explain the other site, lol.
Every cheese is different. But they all contain fat which holds a lot of the unique flavour. When Cheese is cold it’s much harder to determine flavour. When brought up to room temperature approximately 20–22 °C (68–72 °F) the fats warm up and release strong, and flavourful aromas that cannot be released when the cheese is cold.
Simultaneously, the texture of the cheese begins to change, becoming softer and and more creamy. The warm aromas allow the mouth and nose to do their job, whilst the softer texture means the tastebuds in the mouth have access to the full range of flavour.
Merci.
So, there you have it, folks. Merci for reading me and make sure and share me with your friends (ew, you know what I mean, you perv!). Tune in Thursday where I’ll finally tell you about my new damn workout (including yoga for those of us on the fluffy side), a French quirk that really irks me and I’ll answer a just ask joj question about the medical use of pot in France!