Bastille Day
dish up hot cooked snails
and frog’s legs
I think it was Year 9. School cooking lesson just happened to land on
Bastille Day, so what did we get to cook? Snails. Predictably, we all turned up
our noses and made a variety of objectionable noises to show our displeasure at
having this particular item of French cuisine foisted on a bunch of meat and
three veg peasants.
Baguettes and croissants were one thing, but our unadventurous palates turned
the whole ordeal into a dare as to who was going to be brave enough to actually
eat them once cooked. Learning the art of extracting them from the shell was
enough to put me off, though I did have a nibble. I think they were a bit
rubbery, but I have no memory as to how they were cooked, and if you gave me
some now I still wouldn’t know what to do with them. With no recipe, I’d
probably do what the French are known for, tossing them in lashings of butter
with a generous amount of garlic thrown in for good measure, accompanied by
something a lot stronger than a glass of water to wash it all down.
It’s funny how we long to travel and experience other cultures, until
they butt up against our own accepted norms and ways of doing things. France
from a distance was and still is, a somewhat romantic place, the Eiffel Tower
and the Louvre, the Champs Elysees and Arc de Triomphe, walks by the Seine and
over its bridges under miles of fairy lights, chic French fashion, sparkling
city sights, cafes in cobbled stone lanes and charming mountain villages.
We can travel to and through a place, see the sights, pick and choose
what we expose ourselves to, or we can allow another culture, as foreign as it
might seem, make its way through us, letting it infiltrate, giving in to what it
can teach us, not only about its own people, but about us.
No comments:
Post a Comment