"Chicken and granola bars used to be my favorite food, but then I became a vegetarian, so now it’s just chicken..."

Tonight for dinner with Madame we had artichokes with vinaigrette for dipping, cheese soufflés, fig and nut cheese with baguette, and apricot-pistachio tart for dessert.
No, really.

Meals like that are what I will always remember about France...
That, and Madame’s stories.

I think I have mentioned before my abhorrence of horses. I suppose that’s kind of a strong word, but I really don’t like them much, for a lot of reasons, all of which would offend the myriad group of friends I have, so I will refrain from mentioning all of them except these two: much though I can front like a mountain goat if you put me in a camp t-shirt and camo shorts, the truth is that I would much rather be in black jeans and a concert shirt, which is why I hate riding on horses– one inevitably ends up sweaty, sticky, sore, dirty, itchy, and smelly (like hay and horse poo– people who say barns smell good have obviously never been in one; the hay alone makes my eyes water just thinking about it). And the other reason is that the actual act of riding is so difficult, which means that when you end up on the ground instead, and you are already sticky, all the dust sticks to you, which is sick.

Despite my personal preference against all forms of equitation (the French word again), I still have been summering in Kentucky for long enough that bits (small ones) of the culture have rubbed off on me. Thus I know a lot of useless facts, like the farm where Kenny G’s mom lives in Lexington, and the multi-million dollar sale of the biggest horse farm in the city. And I have this idea in my head that when horses die, they ought to be buried (head and hoofs only, of course, which is really quite weird) in their own cemeteries, because that is how they roll in the LEX.
Now you have the framework through which to view the following anecdote. I don’t like ‘em, but I was also a vegetarian for four+ years, so, I mean, they rank way higher on my list than, like, spiders.

Over our artichokes tonight, we were talking about food in France as opposed to the US, and Madame said, I swear, "Oh, yes, we eat horse pretty often here."

At which point I made the same face I must have made when Beattyville’s own Ellie Mae Clampett told me once that "we ain’t lost no more, I used to come a-coon huntin’ round here when I was little!"

However, if there is anything I have learned in my globetrotting adventures, it is that when things like that happen, the last thing you want to do is be offensive about it, or act like you are totally freaked out, even if you are. (Summers in Beattyville, remember? Paris is not my first experience with culture clash.) So I have perfected this face that is interested and surprised without being shocked or prejudiced, in such a way that it prompts people to give more details without me having to ask. The trick in this situation is to make that face the default one, you can’t let even a shadow of disgust come through first, or it fails, the person clams up, and then you never get to know important details like, for example, how they cook the horse.

And Madame sees my face, which works unfailingly, and says, "Yeah, when I was little, my mom would buy ground horse meat and every Sunday we would eat it..." [wait for it, this is where it gets really good.] "...raw with puree poured over it."
I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

And then the other girl that lives here starts yammering about how weird that is, and how in the US that would never fly, blah blah blah, and undoes all my work of trying to find the details out. So I say, in an effort to let Madame feel the way I felt (which was to say, shocked and amused beyond belief), I say, "Yeah, but in the US we eat..." and then I realized I didn’t know the word I was about to use... so I improvised with "the little gray animals that eat nuts and live in trees and have big tails?"

Madame, who is old enough to not have to worry about making the appropriate face, almost fell out of her chair, and goes, "surely you don’t mean écurueil (squirrels)?!"
They don’t really have squirrels in France, so I guess they feel differently about them than in the US. I nodded, and she said, "Les écurueils... You eat them?" and I am thinking her objection must be that they are too cute to eat, when she says, "But... there’s not really very much meat on them." I laughed, and she said, "You’d have to make four or five per person at a dinner party!"

I considered explaining that the type of occasion when one eats squirrel is not really synonymous with black-tie or even sport coat casual, but thought better of it.
~B

P.S. Cliff is coming to visit! Which is so exciting because, well, he’s crazy. And he’ll be here all weekend to make me crazy, which will be awesome– I need some more mountain in my life.