Crème Fraiche Verrines

I've written before about some of my language adventures at the supermarket in our town. I told you about the preservatives and the cuisses de canard. But I haven't yet told you about the incident of the crème fraiche. When we first moved here, I went to the supermarket one day looking for whipping cream. All I could find was crème fraiche. Everywhere I looked—crème fraiche. I didn't want thickened, cultured cream, I wanted whipping cream. And there was none to be seen. 

LANGUAGE LESSONS: Logical Consequences

NOTE: We're still on holiday. This is a re-write of an early post about the problems of trying to solve linguistic challenges using logic. Enjoy.

One of the interesting things about living in Belgium is that we are exposed to different languages every day. Everything we buy has two or three languages on it: French, Dutch, and often German as well.

Our daily language is French. When we leave our house we're in a world where very few people speak English. Consequently, our French is very good today. When we first came here we thought our French was pretty good but we quickly found out that what passes for 'good' in DC doesn't work so well here. There are accents. There are idiomatic expressions. There's all that vocabulary and advanced grammar that we didn't need in DC, like "if you had done what you promised we wouldn't have this problem today". Come to think of it, that would have come in handy in DC too. In any case when we first moved to Belgium we had a lot of language learning to do.

Some lessons came from professional teachers. Most came from innocent bystanders. Some of those work in my local supermarket. Shortly after I arrived here, I approached the manager with a can of chickpeas in my hand. I wanted to know if they were organic, and I hadn't yet learned the word bio (which seems to be the western European word for organic). But I figured I could approach it logically and use the fancy English word with French pronunciation (it works surprisingly often!). So I screwed up my nerve and in my very best and most polite French asked the poor man if there were any preservatifs in the can.

He was stunned by my question. He got up on a veryvery high horse and wanted to know why I'd ask him that kind of question? What kind of place did I think that was? He also said a lot of other things that I didn't really understand, but thankfully the words 'get out' and 'never come back' didn't seem to be there. At first I thought it must be an organic supermarket and he was very proud of that fact. But even that wouldn't really explain his reaction...

I was perplexed until I went home and got out my trusty dictionary to discover that the word I wanted was conservateur. In French, a preservatif is a condom. Oh. Well. At least now I know that there are no condoms in the chickpeas here. That's a relief.

It's not only in French that we made mistakes. I should say MAKE mistakes, because we still do. On one of our early jaunts to explore our region we went to Aachen, which although it's in Germany, is only about 25 km from here. We had no German at that point beyond Ich bin kein warmduscher (I am not a sissy). While this is kind of fun to say, it doesn't get you very far. Not even to the tourist office, as it happens...

In the end we managed to find the tourist office and asked for all the tourist information in French so that we could practice, and we dutifully followed the tourist trail reading all about somebody they called by his German name: Karl der Grosse. We read that Karl der Grosse had founded the city in the late 700's. All the history of Aachen seemed to be bound up with Karl der Grosse. We didn't really know who he was, but decided that we could use logic to figure it out. Our logic went like this: in French, grosse means 'fat', so he must have been fat...that didn't really help much, but we continued to follow the tourist trail where we saw Fat Karl's house (hmmm....he was rich) and Fat Karl's cathedral (hmmm....he was holy) and Fat Karl's crown (hmmm....he was royal). We were beginning to think that maybe we should know who he was when we finally stumbled on a statue of Fat Karl.

You know what? HE WASN'T FAT AT ALL! However, he was veryvery tall. That's when we realized that French and logic were no help in Germany. Grosse doesn't mean 'fat' in German. It means 'tall' and 'big' and ....'great'. That's when I remembered having seen a statue somewhere with the name 'Carolus Magnus' on it. Oh, no. It wasn't Fat Karl at all. It was Charlemagne.

When we travel now we make sure that all of our papers are in order and that we have a good dictionary with us. 'Cause you never know.

I will admit, though, that I still think of Charlamagne as Fat Karl.

CUISSES DE CANARD. CONFIT.

One of the wonderful things that we discovered after we’d moved to Belgium is duck confit. In French, it’s called cuisses de canard confit. Cuisses de canard means duck thighs. Confit is a word that doesn’t translate well into English. Prepared? Pickled? Preserved? Not exactly the same thing, but in that family of ideas.

Here’s how they’re made: duck thighs are packed in a mixture of salt and herbs for a day or so to draw out the moisture, and then they’re cooked gently in goose fat (or duck fat) for a few hours. This produces a meat that has a very special texture and a wonderful flavor. Cooled and packed in the goose or duck fat, they keep about six months. Making them, though, is a complicated process, so we just buy them.

Finding them at the supermarket, though, is not without its problems. The first time I went looking for them in my supermarket, I went to the aisle I thought was the appropriate one, and found a (very nice looking) young man stocking the shelves.

In my very best French, I asked him if he had ‘cuisses de canard’, duck thighs. You can see what’s coming, can’t you? No, actually, it was worse than that. In French, the word canard means ‘duck’. It’s pronounced KAH-nahr. Being a native English speaker, I tend to be a little sloppy with my vowels. What I actually asked him was if he had cuisses de KUH-nahr. Not really hard to understand, given my (ahem) slight accent.

The problem is that there’s another word that’s close to that one--connard. Pronounced KOH-nahr. It’s a word that Sister Mary Francis didn’t teach us in French I. Or even French IV. It’s extremely rude.

So when I asked this young man if he had cuisses de KUH-nahr, he looked down at his own thighs and said, “I hope not, Madame.” Oh, man. What could I do? I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Confit, Monsieur. Confit.” At which point he laughed and showed me where they were. Since then I’ve been veryvery careful with my vowels when discussing cuisses de canard confit. I’d advise you to do the same thing.

Normally I find cuisses de canard in cans or glass jars. However, the ones I bought most recently came vacuum packed in plastic. To prepare them, you put them in a pan in a moderate oven for about 10 minutes. The idea is just to melt all the goose fat around them so that you can get the gorgeous meat.

When they’ve cooled, you still have to remove the skin and the gristle and the bones. You’re left with shreds of duck meat that is deeply flavorful, with a texture sort of like prosciutto. It can be used in many ways. One of my favorite is in a salad of greens with a blue cheese vinaigrette. This is a really nice dish for this time of the year--the meat is hearty and the salad is light.

If you're like me, you'll have made more of this than you eat at one time, because you LOVE leftovers. Here's an idea for how to use leftover duck.

Salade de Cuisses de Canard Confit

2-3 cuisses de canard

approx 3 Tablespoons mild vinegar

1/2 teaspoon mild mustard

3-6 Tablespoons Olive oil

approx 50 g / 2 oz blue cheese

Lettuce--your favorite mixture

• Pre-heat the oven to 160 C / 350 F
• Free the duck thighs from their packaging (can, jar, plastic). Put them in an oven-safe pan in the oven for about 10 minutes or until the fat that they’re packed in is melted.
• Remove the pan from the oven and take the duck thighs out of the fat. Drain on paper towels, and leave till cool enough to handle.
• Put the vinegar in a large salad bowl. Add the mustard. I use Dijon mustard for this. It really doesn’t matter too much, because the mustard is mostly only there to make the oil and vinegar emulsify. Whisk the mustard and the vinegar together till combined well.
• Add olive oil slowly, whisking constantly to form an emulsion. You want this to be a runny vinaigrette, so you’ll use about the same amount of oil as you had vinegar, maybe a little more.
• Crumble the blue cheese into the vinaigrette, and let sit while you wait for the duck to cool.
• When the duck is cooled, remove the fatty skin and bones and gristle from the meat. Shred it into pieces as large or small as you want and set aside.
• Wash and dry the lettuce, tear it into the salad bowl. Toss gently until the dressing is thoroughly mixed with the greens.
• Put on your prettiest plates and top with the duck confit.
• Practice your French pronunciation: KAH-nahr. KAH-nahr. OK, now you can eat.

Serves 4 if they like it and 10 if they don’t.

NOTES:

• Traditionally, after the duck thighs are removed from the fat, they’re fried (skin side down) to make a crispy skin and served like that. That’s a wonderful way to eat this, but for me it’s a little too fatty. I like to take the skin off and just eat the meat.
• After you’ve used the meat, the fat that it’s packed in is wonderful for cooking. Traditionally, it’s the fat that’s used to cook potatoes or to fry anything that needs flavor added. It keeps for a long time in the fridge.
• If you can’t find cuisses de canard confit in your area, here’s a recipe for making them at home. Here’s a video from Gourmet Test Kitchens that shows it too. I encourage you to look for them, though. It can be fun. Just be sure to specify that you want them confit. And watch your vowels...

LANGUAGE LESSONS: Bon Voyage

Our bags are packed, we’re ready to go...

We’re off for two weeks in nearby Germany, to improve our German. We’ll be in Bamberg, taking German lessons in the mornings and photos in the afternoons. I have several posts saved and with luck they’ll show up while I’m gone, so come back! I don’t know yet about internet availability where we’ll be staying, but as soon as I can I’ll check in to read and answer your comments. So leave me some, ok?

And I hope you wish me a Bon Voyage in French, 'cause you can't say it in German without making me laugh. I'll tell you why another time.

LANGUAGE LESSONS: False Friends

No, I don’t mean the kind of false friends that you had in the third grade who were your BFFs for about a day and a half. I mean words that you see in another language and you think you know what they mean (like preservative) and then you find out that you don’t, because somewhere between French 2 and the supermarket they changed their meaning.

English is an interesting language. We borrow words from other languages, and forget to give them back. Normally, we keep the same meaning, or almost. This can be a big help in learning a language--words like gouvernement, and sauté, communication and pardonnez-moi are relatively easy for the French student to learn.

Sometimes, though, just to be sneaky, we steal a word and change the meaning. A little. Or a LOT. For example, take the word 'deception'. In French, deception means disappointment. Wait! That’s not what it means in English! Right. We changed it. Linguists call these words 'false friends', because we think they’ll help us and they end up causing problems. Sort of like that BFF in third grade.

Some false friends cause relatively little trouble. They can even be funny. For example, in French, crier means 'to shout'. So if you say that you cry when you see a sad movie, you’re not likely to be invited to the cinema.

Then there’s 'eventually'. In English, it means 'in the end', 'finally'. In French, eventuellement means 'perhaps', 'maybe'. This one can cause incredible problems in negotiations. I don’t even use it when talking with French speakers, because I don’t know if the person I’m speaking to uses it in the French sense or the English sense. I just avoid this one. It’s a bomb waiting to go off.

In French, an issue can be an 'exit from a building' or it can be an 'outcome', a solution. In English, an 'issue' can mean a problem. (Yeah, as in “Houston, we have an issue”.)

Most false friends are readily recognizable from the context. If a grandmother tells you that she wiped her adored grandson’s face with his doodoo, you KNOW it means something else*. But some false friends don’t give you a red flag. Sensible is one of these. In French, it means means sensitive. A mini-bomb, in some situations.

I think my all time favorite false friend is a word that in French means to stamp a letter. It’s a sort of official, bureaucratic word, like ‘franking’ in English (which also means to stamp a letter, even though it’s not the word we use most). The French word that means ‘franking’ is.... are you ready? ....are you sure? Obliterer. Yep, you read that right--'obliterate'. You have to wonder about the path that this word had to follow to get from stamping a letter to total destruction. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Needless to say, my business students need to learn these false friends. I can imagine, for example, a meeting following a day of fairly unsuccessful negotiations. A hapless Belgian tries to make a friendly overture. In his best English:

"Please be sure that we are prepared to be sensible about your deception yesterday. We are sure that eventually we’ll find an issue, so we plan to obliterate the contract."

People often ask me what it takes to live in another country and to speak another language. I think that the most important thing is the willingness to make mistakes and to laugh at yourself. I tell my students that if they're not making mistakes, they're not learning. Me, I learn a LOT.


*In Belgian French, a child's doodoo is his 'blankey'. You don't want to know how I discovered that.

LANGUAGE LESSONS

One of the interesting things about living in Belgium is that we are exposed to different languages every day. Everything we buy has two or three languages on it: French, Dutch, and often German as well.

Our daily language is French. When we leave our house we're in a world where very few people speak English. Consequently, our French is very good today. When we first came here we thought our French was pretty good but we quickly found out that what passes for 'good' in DC doesn't work so well here. There are accents. There are idiomatic expressions. There's all that vocabulary and advanced grammar that we didnt' need in DC, like "if you had done what you promised we wouldn't have this problem today". Come to think of it, that would have come in handy in DC too. In any case when we first moved to Belgium we had a lot of language learning to do.

Some lessons came from professional teachers. Most came from innocent bystanders. Some of those work in my local supermarket. Shortly after I arrived here, I approached the manager with a can of chickpeas in my hand. I wanted to know if they were organic, and I hadn't yet learned the word bio (which seems to be the western European word for organic). But I figured I could approach it logically and use the fancy English word with French pronunciation (it works surprisingly often!) I screwed up my nerve and in my very best and most polite French asked the poor man if there were any preservatifs in the can. He was stunned by my question. He got up on a veryvery high horse and wanted to know why I'd want to ask him that kind of question? What kind of place did I think that was? He also said a lot of other things that I didn't really understand, but thankfully the words 'get out' and 'never come back' didn't seem to be there. At first I thought it must be an organic supermarket and he was very proud of that fact. But even that wouldn't really explain his reaction... I was perplexed until I went home and got out my trusty dictionary to discover that the word I wanted was conservateur and in French, a preservatif is a condom. Oh. Well. Now I know that there are no condoms in the chickpeas here. That's a relief.

It's not only in French that we made mistakes. I should say make mistakes, because we still do. On one of our early jaunts to explore our region we went to Aachen, which although it's in Germany, is only about 25 km from here. We had no German at that point beyond Ich bin kein warmduscher (I am not a sissy). While this is kind of fun to say, it doesn't get you very far. Not even to the tourist office, as it happens. But in the end we managed to find the tourist office and asked for all the tourist information in French so that we could practice, and we dutifully followed the tourist trail reading all about somebody they called by his German name: Karl der Grosse. We read that Karl der Grosse had founded the city in the late 700's. All the history of Aachen seemed to be bound up with Karl der Grosse. We didn't really know who he was, but decided that we could use logic to figure it out. In French, grosse means 'fat', so we thought he must have been fat...that didn't really help much, but we continued to follow the tourist trail where we saw Fat Karl's house (hmmm....he was rich) and Fat Karl's cathedral (hmmm....he was holy) and Fat Karl's crown (hmmm....he was royal). We were beginning to think that maybe we should know who he was when we finally stumbled on a statue of Fat Karl. You know what? HE WASN'T FAT AT ALL! However, he was veryvery tall. That's when we realized that our French was no help in Germany. Grosse doesn't mean 'fat'. It means 'tall' and 'big' and ....'great'. That's when I remembered having seen a statue somewhere with the name 'Carolus Magnus' on it. Oh, no. It wasn't Fat Karl at all. It was Charlemagne.

When we travel now we make sure that all of our papers are in order and that we have a good dictionary with us. 'Cause you never know.

I will admit, though, that I still think of Charlamagne as Fat Karl.