If nothing good had ever happened since I got here, if this whole semester was completely for nothing, what happened to me last night made it worth it. No, really... I’m not kidding. Probably this is the best story I have had to tell since coming to Paris. Last night, it was sometime around 21h00, or 9pm, and I was making dinner in the kitchen. Now, I am leaving this country on Sunday morning, and I am almost out of groceries, so I didn’t want to buy any more... and I didn’t feel like cooking, and honestly, if I see one more quiche, one more tortellini, or one more scrambled egg, I will throw it or myself out the window. My aversion to quiche will not last, I am sure, but the other two? I have eaten those at least 3 meals a week for the last 3 months. I don’t think I can do it anymore.
Back to the story. I didn’t feel like cooking and couldn’t think of anything to make that didn’t involve eggs or pasta, so I bought a demi-baguette and was prepared to eat a demi-baguette with honey for dinner. I am 21, I am totally allowed to do things like that. I may have had a glass of wine with it, who knows? But then, a care package from the US arrived, and the demi-baguette was suddenly much less appetizing. Because in this package, which came from my favorite Deepher ever, was maple syrup. And AirHeads, and Milky Ways, and an Emory newspaper, and a lot of other things that I have not seen in months. But there was maple syrup. And though some of it had leaked out and become maple cement that glued the box together, the rest was still intact, and suddenly I had never been so hungry in my life. But I couldn’t let the demi-baguette go stale... "I know," I thought to myself, "I will make french toast. Oh, this is so ironic, since I am in France." So I sliced the demi-baguette... and realized that I had no idea the exact measurements of french toast batter. But I made a traditional Swedish cake sans recette, and if I can do that, I can do french toast, right? I mean, I speak the language, no big deal. One egg, a splash of milk, and way too much cinnamon later, I was dipping my tiny slices of baguette (real French baguettes are only about the size of... I don’t know, a small roll of tape, so I had a lot of tiny slices. I put them in the pan to fry, and toute de suite, in walked Madame Laudet to make her dinner. So we begin to chat, and I try desperately not to burn the bejeebees out of my dinner, when she leans over my pan and says, with utmost gravity, "qu’est-ce que tu fait?" What are you making? My dad says french toast was named after an American whose last name was French, and thus it is not actually from the country of France. But my dad says a lot of things that are not true, so I never really believed him; who keeps track of those kind of things anyway? But as soon as she asked, it hit me that I have never in this country seen French toast on a menu anywhere. "Grille-pain français?" No. Quite excited that for once I get to explain something to Madame, I grin from ear to ear, flip one slice of baguette over, and say, "Oh, c’est mon dîner. Aux États-Unis, on le mange; en anglais, il est ‘french toast.’" Oh, this is my dinner, it’s an American dish called french toast. "How strange!" she says, "so charming! What is it?" Oh, right, that would be good to explain. "It’s a little bit of egg, milk, and cinnamon," I say, pointing to the bowl of batter. "Oh, so you bake that?" she asks, thinking it must be like a cake. "No..."
"Oh, you pour it over the bread?"
"No..."
"Oh. Well, what are you going to DO with it, then?" I think she had begun to think I made it up. Alas, then it would be called Hurm Toast, which somehow does not have the same ring to it.
"I dip the bread in there, and then put it in the pan to cook. You eat it with... uh..." here I forgot the word for syrup, though I probably never knew it, since they don’t eat it here, at all. But Madame filled in the blank for me.
"Avec des legumes?" "With vegetables?"
"What?! No!" I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice.
"With cheese? Like a sandwich?"
"No, not at all... with syrup, actually."
"Ahh, I love syrup! I never know what to put it on, though." Yeah, that’s because you don’t have pancakes here.
"Do you want to try it?"
"Sure! You eat it for dessert?"
"No, it’s a meal... usually breakfast, but I decided to make it for dinner." So I take out the prettiest, least burned looking morceau, put it on a dessert plate for her, and poured some syrup on it. I assumed she would know that you eat it with a fork, which was a stupid assumption, so she picked it up and ate it with her fingers, but immediately pronounced it delicious.
"This is amazing! I bet kids love this! It tastes like dessert, though, I can’t believe you eat it for a meal!"
And thus a 21-year-old American girl introduced an 81-year-old French woman to the world of egg-coated fried bread, only ironic because all the American world thinks it is a French food anyway.
~Just a few more days,
B