December days: Favourite food memory
Dec. 3rd, 2014 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo far I seem to be giving out food related prompts. (I like talking about food, I guess.) So a favorite food memory?
forestofglory said:
When I was 17 I had a couple of weeks of work experience in Lille in the north of France. The 'work' part of it was very nominal, I turned up at a small accountancy firm and tried not to get underfoot too much, though I managed to befriend the firm's lawyer through attempting to discuss, in my schoolgirl French, the differences between French and English financial law. The experience part was the experience of living in France for a couple of weeks, not being a tourist but being a houseguest with French families. I have no doubt at all it was good for my language skills, especially the bit where I started getting attuned to Chtimi accents rather than the very normative Parisian I'd learned at school.
We were supposed to be matched up with French exchange students, but for some reason I didn't have a partner and ended up boarding with the maths teacher whose kids were a few years older me and had left home. I got on well with him and was very sad to hear of his death a few years later. I remember a discussion in which I discovered that in France, logarithms are introduced as part of integration, starting with natural logs, and the idea about base 10 logs or inverting exponentials is considered esoteric and advanced. The good thing about this was that I ended up being rather more independent than might have been expected for a sheltered 17-year-old French exchange student. During the time I wasn't "at work" I was pretty much free to wander around on my own, and avoided the gaggles of exchange students showing off to eachother. A few times I went out with the teacher's kids and their friends, university students who seemed unimaginably grown-up and sophisticated to me. We ate Alsace-style pizza (which is not called pizza, I can't remember the name of the dish though) and talked about the kinds of things students talk about, and they tried to goad me about religion and were a little bit impressed when the tag-along kid was able to hold her own, and backed me up when I argued with the waiter over being mildly racist towards an ethnically Arab member of the group.
Because I was a lodger rather than an exchange student, I had a daily budget for food instead of my hosts being expected to make me packed lunches. So I figured I could live on bread and cheese for a couple of weeks (which was a treat in its own right, nice French bread and cheese that to me seemed exotic, anything beyond brie and camembert being available in supermarkets was amazing), and save up most of my lunch budget for a really awesome meal on the last day. I've always been about the delayed gratification.
My idea at the time of a really awesome meal was the crêperie I'd identified close to the accountants' offices. And I'd saved up about three quarters of my subsistence money for two weeks, so I could afford to eat as many crêpes as I wanted. And sure, crêpes are more traditionally a Brittany thing than a north-east thing, but north-eastern cuisine is all about pork and involves putting lardons on everything including salad, so crêpes were my best chance of a decent vegetarian meal. I can't remember what I had exactly, probably the obvious standards like a galette with spinach, goats cheese and mushrooms, leaving plenty of room for sweet crêpes for dessert. I think I had something with blackberries and crème Chantilly, and a second fairly simple sweet crêpe just because I had money and a tiny space in my stomach still left at the end. And Bréton cider in a little china cup, because in France it's normal for teenagers to drink.
The food was nice, if you've ever had good authentic crêpes you can probably imagine it pretty well. But the memory is my favourite because it was such a clear moment of really believing I could survive as an adult, there was going to be a life beyond turning up at school and doing what my parents and teachers expected. I could get public transport to a place of work, even in a foreign country. I could have interesting conversations beyond polite small talk with adults, which previously I'd only really experienced at Hengrave. And I could, if I wanted to, live on bread and cheese for a while and save up money to buy myself a meal mainly made out of dessert, I didn't necessarily have to eat what my mother would have considered sensible. It was one of the first times I had money not exactly my own, but that I had discretion over spending. I remember clearly feeling like a real person, a person who could walk into a restaurant and ask for a table and order whatever I felt like from the menu, and nobody would raise an eyebrow that I was making my own decisions and not deferring to parents or other adults.
Blackberries and crème Chantilly are very delicious things, but mainly that meal tasted of independence.
[December Days masterpost]
forestofglory said: So far I seem to be giving out food related prompts. (I like talking about food, I guess.) So a favorite food memory?
When I was 17 I had a couple of weeks of work experience in Lille in the north of France. The 'work' part of it was very nominal, I turned up at a small accountancy firm and tried not to get underfoot too much, though I managed to befriend the firm's lawyer through attempting to discuss, in my schoolgirl French, the differences between French and English financial law. The experience part was the experience of living in France for a couple of weeks, not being a tourist but being a houseguest with French families. I have no doubt at all it was good for my language skills, especially the bit where I started getting attuned to Chtimi accents rather than the very normative Parisian I'd learned at school.
We were supposed to be matched up with French exchange students, but for some reason I didn't have a partner and ended up boarding with the maths teacher whose kids were a few years older me and had left home. I got on well with him and was very sad to hear of his death a few years later. I remember a discussion in which I discovered that in France, logarithms are introduced as part of integration, starting with natural logs, and the idea about base 10 logs or inverting exponentials is considered esoteric and advanced. The good thing about this was that I ended up being rather more independent than might have been expected for a sheltered 17-year-old French exchange student. During the time I wasn't "at work" I was pretty much free to wander around on my own, and avoided the gaggles of exchange students showing off to eachother. A few times I went out with the teacher's kids and their friends, university students who seemed unimaginably grown-up and sophisticated to me. We ate Alsace-style pizza (which is not called pizza, I can't remember the name of the dish though) and talked about the kinds of things students talk about, and they tried to goad me about religion and were a little bit impressed when the tag-along kid was able to hold her own, and backed me up when I argued with the waiter over being mildly racist towards an ethnically Arab member of the group.
Because I was a lodger rather than an exchange student, I had a daily budget for food instead of my hosts being expected to make me packed lunches. So I figured I could live on bread and cheese for a couple of weeks (which was a treat in its own right, nice French bread and cheese that to me seemed exotic, anything beyond brie and camembert being available in supermarkets was amazing), and save up most of my lunch budget for a really awesome meal on the last day. I've always been about the delayed gratification.
My idea at the time of a really awesome meal was the crêperie I'd identified close to the accountants' offices. And I'd saved up about three quarters of my subsistence money for two weeks, so I could afford to eat as many crêpes as I wanted. And sure, crêpes are more traditionally a Brittany thing than a north-east thing, but north-eastern cuisine is all about pork and involves putting lardons on everything including salad, so crêpes were my best chance of a decent vegetarian meal. I can't remember what I had exactly, probably the obvious standards like a galette with spinach, goats cheese and mushrooms, leaving plenty of room for sweet crêpes for dessert. I think I had something with blackberries and crème Chantilly, and a second fairly simple sweet crêpe just because I had money and a tiny space in my stomach still left at the end. And Bréton cider in a little china cup, because in France it's normal for teenagers to drink.
The food was nice, if you've ever had good authentic crêpes you can probably imagine it pretty well. But the memory is my favourite because it was such a clear moment of really believing I could survive as an adult, there was going to be a life beyond turning up at school and doing what my parents and teachers expected. I could get public transport to a place of work, even in a foreign country. I could have interesting conversations beyond polite small talk with adults, which previously I'd only really experienced at Hengrave. And I could, if I wanted to, live on bread and cheese for a while and save up money to buy myself a meal mainly made out of dessert, I didn't necessarily have to eat what my mother would have considered sensible. It was one of the first times I had money not exactly my own, but that I had discretion over spending. I remember clearly feeling like a real person, a person who could walk into a restaurant and ask for a table and order whatever I felt like from the menu, and nobody would raise an eyebrow that I was making my own decisions and not deferring to parents or other adults.
Blackberries and crème Chantilly are very delicious things, but mainly that meal tasted of independence.
[December Days masterpost]
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(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-03 02:00 pm (UTC)I enjoyed reading this - thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-03 02:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-03 03:40 pm (UTC)*smile*
Date: 2014-12-03 04:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-03 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-03 11:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-04 05:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-04 06:32 pm (UTC)(And I have had that pizza-equivalent! When staying in Alsace, in fact, briefly when I was 14. I still have a half-memory of it. Glorious stuff.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-04 06:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-04 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-04 08:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-05 02:03 pm (UTC)