What Happens When You Transplant a Frenchman into Australia for Christmas? Christmas Conflicts

A few years ago, my French husband Maxime and I were set to travel back to Australia for Christmas, as we did every other year. We had one last lunch with French friends before the flight. They were curious to know what an Australian Christmas was like.

‘And the family in Australia … do you fit in?’ Sebastien asked Maxime as he swirled a glass of Alsace Riesling.

‘Oh yes,’ said Maxime easily.

‘Err … it wasn’t always that way,’ I reminded him.

‘Oh, well, yes. The first Christmas there, I made a few mistakes,’ Maxime confessed, referring to his first ever visit to Australia, when things had gone ... interestingly. Especially where food was concerned. ‘At Christmas,' Maxime continued, 'they have this sort of gummy cake, the Christmas pudding. And they serve it with some sort of amorphous mass.’

The amorphous mass he was referring to was actually brandy butter. My sister’s girlfriend Wendy the Fluorescent (named for her colourful tracksuits) was immensely proud of her contribution to Christmas dinner. She was thought by everyone to have considerable pudding savoir-faire, and had spent the entirety of Christmas morning whipping up a special brandy butter flavoured with Cointreau.

‘When they put it on the table,’ Maxime said, ‘I made a remark about its appearance that wasn’t appreciated.’

‘Um, actually you said it looked like vomit,’ I said.

‘Oh putain!’ laughed Sebastien.

When Maxime had offered this choice observation that first Christmas lunch, there’d been a pause as everyone tried to decide whether or not he had really just described Wendy’s labour of love as vomit. Eventually deciding vomit must be French for lovely or something, people got on with their pudding.

But it wasn’t just brandy butter that got Maxime into hot water that first Christmas in Australia. My family were meeting him for the first time, and were expecting a polished, sophisticated European.  Mum had been vacuuming the house twice a day for weeks in preparation for his visit. To be fair, Maxime CAN do a decent line in polished and sophisticated at home in France. But somehow in Australia, it all unravelled. I suppose it was because all the rules are different here – when there are any.

And prehaps the little gastronomic shocks Maxime had to cope with rattled him. The first in store was when he discovered that at lunchtime, rather than coq au vin, Australians ate square pieces of bread. ('You eat sandwiches? Every day?' he'd said.)  But it was our Australian Christmas Eve that really took the cake (or the presliced bread). The thing is that since Mum would be doing a lot for Christmas dinner the following day, we’d decided to order takeaway pizza for dinner on Christmas Eve. When it arrived, the boxes were arrayed on the kitchen table and Dad got out some tumblers and a bottle of milk.

Maxime had stared at the table in utter horror.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked in concern.

‘It’s December the 24^th!’ Maxime squeaked.

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘But it is Christmas!’

‘No no,’ I said. ‘That’s tomorrow.’

‘No! Christmas is today.’

‘What?’

‘In France, we celebrate Christmas on December the 24^th.’

Oh shit. It was French Christmas Day! Maxime would normally have been feasting on canard à l’orange and champagne and here he was with a bendy slice of pizza and a glass of milk. Maxime nibbled his slice weakly.

After the shock of celebrating French Christmas with takeaway pizza, Maxime was perhaps not in the best frame of mind to celebrate Australian Christmas the next day. He perked up a bit just before lunch when someone offered him a glass of champagne, but sagged again when I was forced to admit that it wasn’t real champagne, it was just a five dollar bottle of Aussie bubbly. By the time he got to the brandy butter, Maxime’s gastronomic expectations had sunken considerably. Although to think he was being served vomit was maybe going a bit far.

Christmas food ...who knew it could be so contentious?

And so our Christmas had continued. After lunch, Mum asked Maxime if he’d like to take a look at our garden. We all knew that the garden was Mum’s pride and joy. Well, all of us except Maxime. We were all waiting for him to say ‘I’d be delighted’ and so we were a bit taken aback when Maxime said, ‘Oh, no thanks’.

Maxime had made the mistake of thinking Mum was asking if he genuinely wanted to walk around and look at her climbing roses. ‘In France, you show respect to your guest by making them comfortable, you fit in with their wishes,’ Maxime explained to me later.

Sadly, Mum just thought that all this was not because he was French, but because he was a philistine.

The failed garden tour was followed by a BBQ on Christmas night. My uncle was doling out drinks. He gave Maxime a glass of sparkling wine which he called champagne. I winced, but Maxime accepted it with reasonable grace and took a sip. Then he promptly spat it out on the lawn. We stared at him aghast.

‘It’s corked,’ Maxime said. Then he saw everyone staring at him open-mouthed. ‘What?’ he said.  

Maxime simply couldn’t understand what everyone was upset about. ‘They get offended as if they made the wine themselves!’ he said.

We left Australia after that Christmas having offended most of my friends and relatives, all of whom urged me to ditch the rude Frog.

But I didn't of course and things are different now. Maxime has leant to feign interest in gardening where appropriate, and my family expect him to do strange things with wine. And nobody forces him to eat takeaway pizza on Christmas Eve. He has fish and chips.

The Victorian State Election: As Seen By a Frog

My French husband Maxime is in self-imposed political exile.

Well, sort of. At any rate, when we lived in France, he announced to friends that if it came down to Hollande versus Sarkozy in the second round of voting for president in 2012, he would emigrate to Australia. And so … he emigrated to Australia. Nor, in his disgust, did he bother to vote in 2012, since in France, voting is optional. Some people think that’s more democratic, but how representative is a government that’s voted in by a measly 30% or so of the population (and zero Maximes)?  Even the ancient Greeks realised that people need a little prod to make democracy work. Well, to the extent that it can.

I voted in the 2012 French presidential second round, however. I’d only just got my new, shiny French citizenship and voting rights, and I wanted a ‘go’ of them! On the sunny voting day morning of the 2012 election, I walked down to our local hall in Alsace to vote. The streets were deserted. The only faces I saw were those on the election posters (I noted with amusement that someone had drawn a Hitler moustache on Sarkozy). It was so quiet at the polling station the only thing missing was a couple of tumbleweeds floating by and a whistling, empty-sounding wind.

Not only was there no queue at the polling station, but voting itself was over in a literal click of a button - a simple click on a computer panel for Sarko or Holloande and Bob’s your president. I have to say, it was a bit dissatisfying. I’d had to wait four years for my French citizenship, fill out around one billion forms, and have the foreign police visit my house to check that I was really married and not in a ‘mariage blanc’ (the Frog’s underwear hanging to dry all over the lounge probably convinced them). After all that effort, I wanted a bit more fanfare as I exercised my rights for the first time. I wanted a few more boxes to tick and people to choose from and a senate paper the length of the Seine like we have in Australia. It was like looking forward to Christmas and then waking up on Christmas morning to find you have only one present. Not that politicians are much like Christmas presents. Maybe it’s like Christmas when all you get is socks.

But what I wanted even more than a smorgasbord of political choice on that French election day was a sausage. I wanted the traditional Aussie post-vote reward of a freshly sizzled snag from a stall outside the polling station run to support a local school or kinder.

How different it was when I voted during last Saturday’s Victorian State election. In the car on the way to the local school, I heard on the radio that there are even websites advising people on what food is available at whichelection station. Even sites that rate the quality of your snag!

Returning home from voting (and sausage consumption), I announced triumphantly to Maxime that I had the answer to France’s abysmal voter turnout issues:

‘You need sausage sizzles in France – you’d improve the voter turnout no end.’

‘Yeah! True!’ agreed Maxime, perking up as usual at the mention of food.

I wondered how come the French of all people haven’t come up with a foodie solution for their voting issues. Maybe if Sarkozy had been out flipping burgers in 2012 he would’ve got over the line (OK, perhaps only if he'd provided foie gras burgers). What’s more, Maxime himself is proof that intelligent use of food would work in French election campaigns: once, he even tried to vote for a sausage - le Chien Saucisse, a sausage-dog running for the seat of Marseille. (Sadly, however, we'd not been in Marseille, but in Alsace, and no sausage-y candiates were running.) Maxime’s estimation of French politicians also correlates suspiciously with their appreciation of wine. Come to think of it, why not have a ‘vin d’honneur’ after voting – a free glass of wine just like they have after wedding ceremonies in France (and after just about any other official occasion except, apparently, voting).

Speaking of Frenchmen and elections, you might be wondering what interest Maxime has shown in the Victorian election. Not being an Australian citizen, he can’t vote, so you mightn't expect him to get too excited about it. Nevertheless, his interest might have been engaged had it not been for the fact that the main issue of debate (apart from federal politics) seemed to have been over Melbourne’s east-west link. (Not only does the link lack interest for Frenchmen, the poor ol’ regional Victorians must be feeling a little under-cherished given the central focus of the election too.)

‘Why don’t they join up that road-in-the-north-whatever-it’s-called to the Eastern road and complete the ring road?’ Maxime asked me. ‘A city the size of Melbourne deserves a ring. The ring might be longer but it must be cheaper than digging up the city. I’m in favour of doing things the proper way, not the shitty way.’

Thus Maxime dealt with the east-west link project with typical French harshness (perhaps the frog smelt a rat!), and after this, he largely lost interest. What he’d REALLY like to see is laws relaxed to allow you to drive at your speed of choice after a seven course lunch with matching wines and possibly coffee and a balloon of Armangac, but no-one seemed to be running on that.

‘And the Melbourne public transport is a joke for a population its size,’ Maxime had added.

‘We’ve got the same make of tram as Alsace,’ I said lamely.

The Frog shrugged.

Regarding Melbourne’s public transport, it’s true that I ‘ve been shocked myself to find that after 13 years away, the Melbourne transport network hasn’t changed even though the city has at least half a million more people in it. In that same period of time in France, Alsace was connected to Paris and Dijon by a super-fast TGV, and our local area in Alsace got a new tram network. And this was all apparently without people even bothering to vote for it.

Ah well. There may be a lack of Aussie candidates at elections proposing Frog-approved infrastructure, but at least here, I get my sausage ‘n’ sauce!

Why DO the French Eat Snails?

‘Did you know Daddy eats snails?’ one of our daughters asked another the other day. ‘That’s disgusting!’

‘Does he eat spiders too?’ asked Elise.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ she asked.

‘Good question,' I said. 'I don’t know.’

I mean, if my French husband Maxime eats something as unappetising (and slimy) as a snail, then why stop there? Why not ingest arachnids and suck on slugs? And so I put the matter to him.

‘Spiders have no meat,’ explained Maxime. ‘Snails are a lean meat with a nice texture.’

‘I think the snails are just a nice excuse to have garlic butter. But why not put the garlic butter on something nice, like chicken?’

‘Non!’ exclaimed Maxime, getting surprisingly agitated. ‘The combination of chicken with garlic sauce would be AWFUL! They don’t compliment one another. You need the snail texture.’

The combination of the snail-y texture with garlic sauce. Quite frankly, the thought of snail texture makes me gag. Mind you, I have eaten snails. The first time was in an Alsatian winstub (a 'wine pub', serving rustic local fare). I’d been dismayed to find the snails were served still in their shells. (It’s one reason I avoid crustaceans – I hate having to dismember something in order to eat it.) Maxime had then shown me how to hold the snail shell with the special snail tongs and prise it out with the special snail-gouging fork (and although it involved no dismembering, I still found the process quite disturbing). As I forced myself to chew the freshly shucked snail, I enjoyed the warm garlic butter sauce but I didn’t have the impression the snail added anything to the experience and more than a piece of rubber would have.

‘Snail has quite a subtle taste,’ Maxime had said, chewing with pleasure, a far-away look in his eyes.

‘Like dirt,’ I said, spoiling the moment somewhat.

‘No!’ Maxime replied, forced yet again to defend his national cuisine against my barbaric cluelessness. 

He raised his hands as if about to expound upon the loveliness of snail, but then let them fall in defeat. I was a hopeless case. (But it did taste like dirt.) I allowed Maxime to finish my snails while I concentrated on the wine he had chosen for the meal: a Riesling. He'd explained you need to pair snails with a dry wine. I imagine it was dry to counterbalance the sliminess.

Then I wondered how people ever came to eat snail. I wondered if during some sort of medieval wartime, the French began to eat them to avoid starvation. They’d sometimes been driven to eat rat in wartime, I knew. But then for some reason in time of peace, they continue to enjoy snails but shun fricassee of rat.

Actually, I read that the French have been eating snails at least since Roman times – as the Romans did too, apparently. Indeed, Maxime and I ate snails on holiday in Rome (I gave them a second chance – it was a two-Michelin-star restaurant. I'd wondered if two star snails would do it for me. Nup. Still tasted like dirt. Expensive dirt in this case.).

I had no more contact with snails after that until another holiday a few years later, this time in Burgundy. We had kids by this time and our five-year-old Chloé had come upon a snail on the hotel terrace. She ‘rescued’ it, putting it in a glass full of ice. I didn’t view being put in an ice bath as being rescued personally, but I left Chloé to it.

‘What are you rescuing the snail from?’ I asked her.

‘From the hunters!’ she replied.

‘Snail hunters? People don’t hunt snail.’ They sort of don't require chasing.

On the other hand, I reflected, maybe people gather them, as they gather mushrooms and things. Maybe that’s a sort of hunting? I decided it was best to keep this upsetting idea from Chloé, the small defender of snail rights. And things went well until lunch the next day when Maxime ordered half a dozen snails as an entrée.

‘Maxime, what are you doing?’ I hissed at him. ‘You know Chloé is attached to snails at the moment!’

What would Chloé do when she saw Papa dining on murdered molluscs?

The answer, to my relief, was nothing. Chloé apparently didn’t connect the need to hunt with the fact that Papa was eating something. Similarly, she’d been terribly upset to find out that her grandfather hunted deer, but didn’t react to people eating venison stew, as we did a lot in autumn in Alsace.

Venison – now there’s an improvement on snail. But as for the French, they eat snail because they really actually like it. There's also the French attraction to frogs' legs - another highly emotive issue. I'll deal with that next time!

Just How Badly Do the French Cope With a Melbourne Winter?

In his spare time, when he’s not looking up restaurants on Urbanspoon, my French husband Maxime is doing something you don’t necessarily associate with Frenchmen. He’s looking up the weather on the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology).

Actually, Maxime used to look up Météo France too, when we lived in France, but that wasn’t half as much fun. It never caused him to throw up his hands in horror and exclaim that the ‘weather is absolute crap’. This is because he considers French weather to be perfectly acceptable. If it was minus 20 and blizzards, he’d say ‘I love snow. It reminds me of my childhood.’

Take, for instance, a particularly cold winter in Alsace. 2006, I think. In February-March, the region was covered in snow for six weeks straight. I was depressed because I was too wary of snow to go outside (I mean, it might be cold!), and I didn’t like having to dress up in so many layers I looked like the Michelin Man in order to do it.

‘What are you complaining about?’ Maxime said one morning. It’s sunny!’

And it was - for once. So to demonstrate to me how perfectly hospitable a metre of snow is, Maxime took a bottle of champagne, went outside and stuck it in the snow. Then he retrieved a couple of glasses and some cheese.

‘We can have a pique-nique,’ he announced.

I ventured outside and moved gingerly towards the champagne. I secured a large glass of it and then retreated inside to have my picnic in front of the fire.

And it wasn’t just me who thought it was cold. When holidaying in the south of France, people would say, ‘it's very cold in Alsace, isn't it?’ and shiver at the very thought of it. Maxime would scowl and say that people in the south of France thought they knew about Alsace based on their preconceived ideas, but really, they had ‘no clue’.

They did have a clue. Winter in Alsace was like living in a chest freezer.

Le Grand Ballon, Alsace

So you can image that one of the things that made it so great to move back home was that in Melbourne, the coldest daytime maximum temperature is 9 or 10 degrees C and not minus 36. Nevertheless, I wondered if Maxime’s neck would be able to make it through our first Melbourne winter. Without me strangling it.

Now that we’re in Melbourne, Maxime takes a rainy day as a sort of personal affront. He’ll protest at the injustice of having his day dampened and wait testily for the clouds to apologise. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to say ‘look, Maxime. It just rains in winter, OK? Get over it!’ And then there's Melbourne's famous changeable weather, or ‘brutal changes of temperature’ upon which Maxime blames all of his colds.

One day he actually said he thought winter was worse in Melbourne than in Alsace. My mouth opened. And then I shut it again. I mean, there are some statements so patently ridiculous you can argue with them.

Maxime’s behaviour put me in mind of a French student I knew back when I was studying at Melbourne Uni. I called him ‘The Sad Grover’, due to his endless complaining and to his resemblance to a certain blue Sesame Street character. He was an avid movie-goer, and I began to relish, in a perverted way, asking him each morning how he liked the film he’d been to the night before. His answer was always the same. ‘It was crrrrap!’ He seemed so perpetually miserable that eventually I took pity on him and invited him to a party. I offered him a cup of cask wine, not realising I may as well have offered him a beaker of horse urine.

‘No thanks,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to lose control.’

Hmm, shame, I thought. And just like Maxime, the temperature was never right for Sad Grover in Melbourne – the restaurants were too cold, he asserted. Why didn’t we take heating seriously? And the girls were also too frigid, Sad Grover thought. Maybe they just didn’t like depressed Muppets.

Our little French kids, at least, have no problem with the weather in Australia. Except that there’s no snow. 'I miss snow’ they would announce over and over last winter.

‘It’s because I was born in the snow,’ Chloé said. (It was snowing in France when she was born.)

'No you weren’t, you were born in a hospital,’ I countered. ‘And anyway, there is snow here. You just have to go to the mountains.'

The kids didn't believe me, and so we took them to Lake Mountain to demonstrate the existence of Australian snow.

Lake Mountain last year. Enough snow if your snowballs aren't too big.

It was - um - not a success. We paid a fortune to enjoy a patch of snow about the size of someone's front lawn, with 500 odd people gamely trying to go sledding on it. 

'It's cold and wet,' remarked Elise.

Well, yes. It's snow.

Maxime and Little Miss I-was-born-in-the-snow were the only ones at ease. Elise was yammering at me about going home, and so we left, after a whole 20 minutes: I had managed to coax Maxime off the mountain with the lure of  lunch in a Yarra Valley winery. Works every time.

And as long as we don't discuss the weather during lunch, everyone's happy.

What Sort of People Take French Wine Tasting Courses?

At first, naïveté makes everything like Christmas - all newness and wonder. But when it comes to wine tasting, after a while you get tired of knowing less about wine than even your glass does.

When we lived in France, every night at dinner, my French husband Maxime would retrieve a bottle of wine from his wine safe. Then he'd hide the label, make me taste the wine and try to guess what it was. These incessant wine tests and my incessant failing of them reached the point where I’d had enough. I didn’t want to stop drinking the lovely French wines, but I did want to stop getting a headache every time I did.

So I came up with a plan:

‘Tonight, I’M choosing the wine,’ I announced to Maxime one evening. ‘I mean, it’s not fair, you get to choose every night!’

And if I chose it, I was certainly not going to test myself on it.

Maxime looked at me dubiously. ‘OK …’

I grinned triumphantly and jumped up to grab a bottle. But um … which one? Oh God, I could feel another headache coming on. I could imagine several things happening:

a     a. I’d inadvertently choose a sweet wine

b     b. I’d inadvertently choose something that wasn’t ready to drink

c     c. I’d inadvertently choose something Maxime was saving for a special occasion

Luckily I had a solution. It was to say ‘oh bugger it!’ and pick a wine at random.

I ferried the random bottle to Maxime, flinching a bit as I handed it over for inspection.

‘This is undrinkable,’ he announced.

Oh. At least that particular answer was unexpected.

‘Well, what are you doing with an undrinkable wine in your fridge?’ I answered back.

‘I was given it by a friend.’

The poor friend, I thought.

‘You can drink this if you want, but I’m not,’ Maxime said, and marched stiffly off back to the wine safe.

I sighed. Here we bloody go again. Then something occurred to me. Maxime couldn’t have been born knowing about wine (although you could certainly be forgiven for thinking so). He must have learnt somehow.

‘How come you know about all these wines?' I asked him. 'How come whenever anyone makes you guess a wine, you always get it right?’ (I can’t tell you how annoying that is. You’re just hanging out for the Wine Lord to take a fall.)

‘I did a wine course.’

Oh. Oh good! I thought. Maxime’s not really a supernatural wine freak. He had to learn like a mere mortal! And … I’m a mere mortal. Maybe I could learn too …?

And so it was that every Friday evening after that, I drove to the Alsatian town of Rouffach on the wine road. I would spend a couple of hours with a room full of others in an building that looked like an old schoolhouse, covered in shaggy stork’s nests, and listen to Alsace’s wine experts hold forth. ‘Apple taste, malic acid, in Sylvaner grape,’ I would write. ‘Chaptalization - adding sugar - what some naughty winemakers do in Alsace.’ After the theory, there was the practice: we students went to our benches, each with a sink for rinsing, and the teacher would pour samples of wine for us to guess and describe. We covered the six Alsace white grapes, learning what makes a good wine, and how to comment on it, judge it and detect a range of defects. Sounds good, right?

Not good. The thing was, the course was in French and the other students all worked in the wine industry. I wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Would Maxime divorce me if I failed a wine exam?

At the end of the course, I went to the Alsace wine headquarters in Colmar for the wine exam. The interior of the building was UFO shaped and laid out like a futuristic parliament. The examiners were seated in the middle on a dais, dressed in official wine robes. They looked like real wine lords, looking down on us with grave faces. No one said a word as the robed ones got up and walked around, silently filling our glasses. With a shaking hand, I took a large sip of the first glass to settle my nerves (that’s the advantage of an exam in wine. I could've done with a big glass of Riesling in year 12 maths. My answers might have gotten a little more creative than is desired for maths, but hey, it would’ve been a lot more fun).

The first task was to identify the grape varieties, and then guess the defects in various wines the examiners had added things to. The finale was a commentary on a mystery wine to be delivered before the examiners. When my turn came for the commentary, I was left in a room by myself to bond with a glass for ten minutes before being summoned before the examiners. I picked up the glass and found myself sniffing and swirling the way I’d seen many a person I’d assumed to be a pretentious git do, and what Maxime does. (But Maxime, when he tastes, doesn’t seem to be out to impress anyone. In fact, it seems that at that moment, he wouldn’t care if he was alone on the planet.)

Having finished my git-like wine swirling routine, I went back into the UFO and stood before the robed examiners. I was to start by giving them a visual description of the wine. We had been taught to begin by saying ‘I am in the presence of a white wine’. But I simply couldn’t bring myself to say something so bloody naff. I said I thought the wine looked dark gold instead. Luckily the wine lords didn’t appear to mind. I moved to the nose, the bouquet.

‘I can smell mushroom,’ I announced. Not very bouquet like, that wine.

‘OK,’ said one of the examiners. ‘And does the wine also taste like mushroom?’

I couldn't taste any mushroom. I panicked. Oh God, should it taste of mushroom? Should it? Maybe he was trying to trick me?

‘No,’ I said finally.

‘Good. It shouldn’t taste like mushroom.’

Phew.

My palms were sweating like two little fountains by the time we finished. Feeling faintly sick after the harrowing session with the mushroom wine (drinking at nine in the morning may also have had something to do with it), I milled about with the other wine students while the examiners marked our papers. Eventually, we were called back into the UFO. The examiners announced who had passed, and who had got the highest mark. Well! Let’s just say the result was a turn up for the books. I came out wearing a smile wide enough to crack my face. I had done EVEN BETTER THAN MAXIME! It was a real David shoves it up Goliath moment.

So Maxime wouldn’t have to divorce me after all. Wait a minute, I thought - Maxime got a lower mark than me, so maybe I should divorce him? Or at least make him do the vacuuming.

GET REGULAR POSTS see ‘subscription by email’ in the sidebar

France versus Australia: Who Will Win the Argument?

I was a bit disappointed with the trip away on the weekend. Me and the Frog (my French husband Maxime) and our kids had travelled far, far away from the bright lights of Melbourne, and more importantly, far from the bright lights of its restaurants. I expected that being out country, we’d have some spectacularly dreadful meals and Maxime would say spectacular things about them, seasoning his sentences with French insults concerning people’s grandmothers in shorts - thereby giving me fantastic material for this blog post. But the food was good, damn it! (We were too close to Daylesford, apparently.)

And so, sadly, there was no parmigiana Parmageddon.  But then on Sunday, we stopped at a winery on the way back home and, oh joy! The winery delivered!

The Wintry Way Home, Warmed by a Winery

 It wasn’t the food or the wine – they were fine. Nevertheless …

Maxime and I had made our workmanlike way through the list of wines on offer. And of course, the ciders, due to the Frog’s rather dubious predilection for them). But at first I was worried: during the tasting, Maxime was calm; polite; complimentary. Don’t tell me everything’s OK?! I thought.

Then afterwards, in the car, it all came out. Not the wine - the French rage.

‘I couldn’t stand that guy!’ fumed Maxime (referring to the man serving us in the wine tasting). ‘He only served borderline acceptable amounts in the glass. And he knew nothing, nothing!’ (The hapless winery bloke had told us, ‘I only pour the wine, I don’t know about it.’ Which I think was a joke. But if you’re French, wine is not the stuff of jokes). ‘AND,’ Maxime went on, ‘after the sweet cider, he didn’t give me a new glass for the dry whites!’

‘Serve you right for drinking lolly water!’ I laughed.

‘So I used the Pinot Grigio to wash my glass out.’ (Which Maxime thinks is as good a use as any for Aussie Pinot Grigios. He prefers the French-spelled ones.)

But here’s the interesting thing - Maxime didn’t actually say anything to the winery bloke’s face.

This is something of a first for Maxime. He has – or at least used to have - the Gallic way of venting when something is bothering him. You just yell. And getting yelled at doesn't bother you, because you know not to take it to heart. In short, the French believe in letting off steam instead of stewing, and there’s something to be said for that. Except if you're not used to French culture and you're on the receiving end. For instance, instead of suggesting that perhaps it might not have been such a good idea to leave the foil on the bottle neck, Maxime would cry ‘what the hell are you doing!? You’re completely deranged!’ Then, having screeched at me for ten minutes, he would put his arm around me and suggest trying the wine. I would look at him in amazement. ‘What?’ he’d say in surprise. ‘Are you upset?’ I’d be almost lost for words.

‘Of course I’m upset! You just said I was deranged!’

‘Oh is that all? Of course I didn’t mean that, I was just angry. Why do you take everything so personally?’

‘You called me deranged! How much more bloody personal can you get?!’

I would stick to my guns and insist that Maxime may not have meant to hurt my feelings but he nonetheless had, and demand an apology. To give the Frenchman his due, he always gave me one. But even when I was furious, I was curious. The French way of seeing things was so different. (Curiosity kills the K, I thought.)

The Anglo-Saxon – French differences in argument style were a problem for Maxime at work too, when we lived in France. Anglo-Saxon colleagues sometimes felt he was too harsh.

‘What exactly did you say?’ I asked Maxime on one such occasion. He told me. ‘OK … you know, there are other, gentler ways of telling people they could do better,’ I suggested. ‘You shouldn’t really say to an Anglo-Saxon things like, “this document is a piece of shit and working with you is a complete nightmare.”’

But now that we’re in Australia, it seems the Frog’s French edges have become softened with Anglo-Saxon restraint. Well, that’s all to the good. I won’t get called deranged anymore! Until I run into another Frenchman perhaps.
IF YOU LIKE THIS POST, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE (see email subscription box in the sidebar)

Why You Should Never Go Wine Tasting With a Frenchman

Now that my French husband Maxime is into a fitness regime, we don’t go wine touring so often. This was making me a little sad … until I reminded myself what wine tasting with the Frog was actually like.

Back in France, we often took visiting friends and family to one of Maxime’s favourite wineries in Alsace – Domaine Marcel Deiss, situated in the half-timbered medieval wine village of Bergheim near Colmar. My uncle and aunt were among the fortunate first to be taken there. And, as often happens in France, we were greeted not by some black-apronned flunky but by the winemaker. Or in this case, Jean-Michel Deiss’s wife. My aunt and uncle traded pidgin French for pidgin English with Mrs. Deiss and things started well.

Especially since she gave us all a glass of crémant (Alsatian sparkling wine), which went down a treat.

‘Ooh, champagne!’ said my Aunt appreciatively.

‘It’s not champagne,’ began Maxime.

‘Don’t you start!’ I warned him.

Then we tasted a wine made of a blend of different Alsatian grape varieties known as Edelzwicker in Alsatian dialect (just trying saying that after a few glasses of Alsatian champagne). Most Edelzwicker, which means noble mixture, is not very edel at all, (one winemaker once let on it was just all the leftovers the Alsatians pass off on the Germans). But Jean-Michel Deiss, relishing tradition, terroir and trend-bucking, went back to the ancient co-planting ways, and worked hard, employing the most fastidious winemaking methods until he was given a big elephant stamp by critics for his Edelzwicker experiments.

In short, these mixture wines were the pride of the Domaine. Presenting us with the flagship wine, Mrs. Jean-Michel waited expectantly to hear how we liked it. And this was when the wine tasting got dangerous. When asked what I thought of a wine, I usually came out with terrible clunkers:

‘It smells like petrol,’ I would announce to a winemaker.

‘No! It’s got great minerality!’ Maxime would hiss in my ear.

‘Oh right. It’s very minerally. Yeah. And it smells a bit like grass.’

 A small groan beside me.

On the way home in the car, Maxime would explain.

‘You don’t say it’s like grass, you say herbaceous or lively,’ he would scold. ‘If you don’t like the wine, then go ahead. But to say the wine tastes like petrol or grass you’re telling the winemaker you think it has a defect!’

I had been also been known to observe that wines smelt like ham, hessian sack or green capsicum. If what Maxime said was true, the maker of the hessian sack wine no doubt went out the back and shot himself.

Now, holding a glass of Mrs. Deiss’s husband’s pride and joy, I felt a few butterflies. What could I say about it that would not cause Madame Deiss to slit her wrists or keel over in a faint? What did Maxime say I should call petrol wines again? I should have written cheat notes on my hand.

Luckily for me, Madame Deiss turned to my unfortunate uncle for feedback. He went red as he tried to think of something to say.

‘It’s nice ... and ... and ... warm,’ he said finally. He brightened, having thought of something to add. ‘Yes. It’s like sherry!’

There was a silence. Jean-Michel’s wife knitted her brows and cocked her head on one side, waiting for my uncle to elaborate. A wine tasting like sherry may be approaching the asymptote of divine for my parents’ generation, but in winespeak, it was more like saying ‘it’s crap’.

Maxime threw his hands up in the air and was about to harangue my uncle when I tugged him by the sleeve.

‘What do you think of this vintage compared to 2003?’ I asked him hurriedly.

Successfully distracted, Maxime now began a rather lengthy monologue about recent vintages in southern Alsace.

With a bit more sleeve-tugging on my part, we managed to negotiate the rest of the wine tasting. I was quite exhausted by the time we left, the car boot loaded up with crémant and sherry-wine.

After the wine tasting, we headed off to an architecture exhibition at the open air Alsatian museum, the Ecomusée. My uncle is an architect himself, so at the architecture exhibition, he would enjoy being the knowledgeable one while Maxime would be the novice. Until we came to the house made of bottles, that is.
IF YOU LIKE THIS POST, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE (see email subscription box in the sidebar)

The MasterChef and the Frog: How Not to Have a French Dinner Party

As I said in my last post, my French husband Maxime often looks over my shoulder when I’m cooking. This, as you can imagine, is bloody annoying – I feel like I’m being judged on MasterChef, Food Network Star or MKR - but what is worse, he’s full of ‘helpful’ comments: ‘The carrot should be cut this way.' 'That’s too thick.' 'Why did you use that cheap wine for the marinade? You must use quality products!’ and so on (and on and on). Being a frog, he just can’t help sticking his nose in where food’s concerned. And then I threaten to apply a cheesegrater to it.

Early in our relationship, when we lived in France, I thought I had had found a solution: Maxime could cook instead!

So one evening when I’d had a gutful of little over the shoulder comments, I said, ‘Right! It’s your bloody turn to cook!’ and stormed from the kitchen.

I even began to feel wistful about my ex. We’d had many arguments, but never over how to cut up a carrot.

But the thing is, as painful as it was to cook for Maxime, I soon deeply regretted suggesting he cook for me. Maxime is such a perfectionist. He spent hours in the kitchen enlarging my vocabulary with French swear words as he fretted over not being able to find the correct spatula. He would cut himself and burn himself, set his nosehairs on fire and hop around the kitchen screaming. It looked more like a Masai tribal dance than cooking. We didn’t eat before ten, and this was only pasta, for crying out loud. But Maxime emerged from the flames all bright eyed and enthusiastic from the experience.

‘I know! Let’s cook together!’ He said. ‘We can cook together every night.’

I looked at him in disbelief. ‘Are you completely insane? I’d knife you after five minutes!’

Most of our discussions about domestic issues and social mores tended to end that way. We weren’t angry so much as speechless with amazement. When speech returned, it took the form of ‘are you mad? What planet are you from?’ Or ‘what the hell are you on about?’ And Maxime’s personal favourite, ‘are you deranged?’ He called me mad more often, because I’m more polite. Or more mad.

‘But why not cook together?’ Maxime persisted, a bit hurt.

I thought about how to explain. ‘Well, let’s take a pumpkin. Would you, or would you not, insist on cutting a pumpkin up into perfectly equally sized cubes?’

‘Of course.’

‘No, not of course!’ (This is another frequent conversional exchange we have).  ‘I wouldn’t. I don’t want to lose time over a bloody pumpkin!’

‘Ah,’ Maxime said, imagining with distress some imperfect pumpkin polygons. ‘I see what you mean.’

But what really made me want to end my life was the thought of cooking for Maximes’s parents, my French in-laws. I had a sinking feeling this was expected of me, and I was pretty sure of not coming up to scratch. Not being French and marrying an only son was a sin I didn’t expect to be forgiven in a hurry.

On the night of my first dinner party with the in-laws, my game-plan was to serve three times the number of dishes so that if two didn’t work, I still had a backup. My first salvo was a tarte flambée, a wafer thin Alsatian pizza with sour cream, bacon and onions.

‘It’s nice,’ Maxime said, ‘but it doesn’t taste like tarte flambée.’

Hmmm. Nice, but different to the traditional version. OK, I was on par. I could live with that. I went on to serve tandoori lamb and coconut rice. They won’t know enough about Asian food to know if I mess it up, I thought.

Wrong.

I overheard Maxime’s mother complaining to his Dad that I’d overcooked the rice, thinking I didn’t understand the French.

‘Ça me derange,’ my mother-in-law said.

It was bad enough when I was deranged, but I had a feeling a deranged mother-in-law was much worse.

To top it off, on my way back to the kitchen, Maxime whispered that I put too much food on people’s plates.

‘My mother was offended,’ he said.

‘She doesn’t have to finish it! What’s the problem?’

‘It’s an insult to the host if you don’t finish your plate,’ Maxime explained.

‘What?’

‘In giving people too much food, you force them to be rude and leave some,’ he said. ‘You should give a small amount to start with and re-serve.’

 But I wanted to put a lot on the plate to make sure everyone had enough. ‘Some people feel shy about asking for more,’ I countered. (Even after Maximes’s explanations, I couldn’t really change. My brain seemed to be hardwired. It just seemed too stingy to put only a little on a plate. In the end, Maxime developed a workaround, which was to warn guests beforehand that they would be getting an ‘Australian portion’).

'Australian portion' of tandoori lamb anyone?

And then there was the presentation.

‘There’s not enough white space on the plates,’ said Maxime. ‘It’s not elegant. It doesn’t look appetising.’

My presentation was not à la Française, it was à la rubbish heap. This was beginning to feel more like a maths exam than a dinner.

The other problem was that in striving to impress, I tended to trip over my own creativity. Maxime urged me to keep it simple, to put the product first, letting it sing the melody instead of drowning it out with a chorus of tandoori spices.

‘It’s a matter of balance,’ he said, yogi-like: ‘spicy/bland, crunchy/mushy, carbs/protein, acid/sugar.’

Right. Then you put a tiny smudge on the plate and sculpt it into a replica of the Pietà. Easy.

At least the cheese course was problem free. I’d made Maxime buy the cheese, because he’d know the ‘right’ shop to buy it from, and let them warm to room temperature before serving to ensure appropriate smelliness. The dessert course went down well too – I had wisely chosen a summer champagne and fruit soup, something not even I could mess up. And the alcohol went down a treat by this time, let me tell you.

After about a year of French dinner party purgatory, I hit upon a marvellous idea to save me from dressing plates and stressing over serving sizes: I began to serve dinners in communal platters, so people could serve themselves as much or as little as they chose. This means that the food isn’t kept warm in the meantime, and I’ve been waiting for some frog to point this out, but no one has. Woo-hoo!

But I still always make too much food. Which leaves me with the issue of leftovers. The bit of Scottish heritage I have from my mother's side is not enough generations distant (and the French heritage several centuries too distant) to allow me to throw out leftovers. But I live in fear and trepidation of serving them to a Frenchman, despite the Auld Alliance. The result is that I have to keep them in the fridge until they are sufficiently inedible for my conscience to allow me to throw them out. The fridge takes on an appearance sadder than Culloden. Hmm. I’ll have to figure out a way to disguise leftovers in a pie or something.

Then I’ll let Maxine cut French sized pieces while I recover from the stress with an Australian sized wine.
IF YOU LIKE THIS POST, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE (see email subscription box in the sidebar)