While I was in the US for Christmas, my aunt asked me if I had been forced to eat anything really gross since coming to Europe. The worst thing I could think of was the Croque Monsieur I had once ordered by accident. All that is changed now. Tonight Madame invited me to have dinner with her (and her 8-year-old granddaughter). I of course accepted, since I hadn’t been to the grocery store yet. So I walk into the kitchen and she has made paella. Or perhaps she ordered it from somewhere, but the point is, she puts it on the table and it is full of whole shrimp (still looking at me– maybe they were crawfish or something because they were huge. And their antennae had come off and were all through the bowl of rice. And their heads and legs and shells were all still attached.), whole cracked oysters (with shells), and... I kid you not, as though the shrimp were not bad enough, miniature whole octopi. That is, more than one octopus. Or squid, I don’t know. But they had these yellowish round heads the size of a cherry tomato and then eight short little legs (either they were babies or a very small species of octopus. Either way I am NOT okay with that). And what are you supposed to do about that? One has no choice but to eat it, so I took mine in big bites with lots of saffron rice, chewing only as much as necessary and then swallowing quickly.
For dessert we had a galette de roi (King’s Pancake), which is of course not a pancake at all but this large round flaky pastry thing that the French eat from January 7 to the 31st to commemorate the gifts brought to Jesus by the wisemen. Somewhere in the cake, there is hidden a feve, a tiny present for whoever bites down on it first. So you have to eat the cake all in one sitting, and in order to prevent cheating by the server, the youngest person at the table climbs under the table, and the oldest person serves it. As the server cuts each piece, she asks the kid under the table who to give that piece to, and since the child can’t see, it is all fair. So tonight Camille is under the table and Madame is serving, and I am just sitting there confused until I bite onto something porcelain and pull from my bite a tiny Egyptian painting. That is what the prize was, a scene of three Egyptian people making papyrus, painted on porcelain. How cute of a party, though! Madame asked, "Are you Catholic, or Protestant?" as though those were the only two options, and when I said Protestant, she asked, "Oh, well then do you know the story of the Magi?" And I do, but not nearly as in depth as Catholic French people, apparently (I thought, according to tradition, they arrived at the manger on January 6, Epiphany on our calendar. But Madame said they only eat Galettes de Roi from January 7 onwards because that is when they arrived.) And I also only knew the name of one of them– Balthasar. 8-year-old Camille knew all three.)
I think I must have eaten five or six of Ariel’s friends, and I can never call myself a vegetarian again... I ate an octopus.
~B