Why Frogs Love Frogs' Legs

A few years ago, my French husband Maxime and I went on holiday in the Dombes region of France, in the Ain. 

On the second day of the trip, we were driving to the restaurant Maxime had selected for lunch when Maxime announced, 'This is a gastronomic region!' and his eyes gleamed.

I looked at him, puzzled. 'I thought all of France was a gastronomic region.'

'No!' he said. 'The only true gastronomic regions are Alsace [of course, Alsace is Maxime’s home region], around Lyon [i.e., where we currently were] and the South West.'

‘What about Paris?’

‘Pffff!’ Maxime pffffed.

‘And what about all those I dunno, cheeses in the north of France, and Normandy's Isère butter and Champagne’s…um, champagne and – '

‘No no. In true gastronomic regions, the food and wine are accessible, affordable - enjoyed by everyone – it’s democratic food.’

I thought about this for a while. 'OK ... so what’s this wonderful gastronomic region were in now famous for, then?'

'Frogs.'

'Oh.' 

I felt a little crestfallen. Not truffles or brie then. Not even something edible.

Maxime explained that the whole region was full of man-made ponds, and was hence famous for frogs' legs. The Dombes was frog central.

‘Well, quite frankly, I don’t think I’ll mind if the Dombes people don’t want to democratically share their frogs with me.’

But Maxime said, ‘I can’t wait to eat some!’ and his eyes shone even brighter.

He was getting inordinately excited about frogs' legs, I thought. But it can be amazing what foodstuffs can rouse the passions of Europeans. They don’t just celebrate the births and ressurections of deities but also hold fetes where they can worship snails, asparagus and particular varieties of onion.

'But there’s so little meat on frogs,' I said. 'I mean why do you bother? Why not just eat chicken?'

'Because frogs' legs are thin,' Maxime said. 'When you fry them, you get this caramelised juice that you get at the surface of a chicken wing. It’s like the chicken wing surface without any of the boring stuff underneath.'

'Hmm,' I said, unconvinced.

At lunch, of course, Maxime ordered legs. I had actually seen frogs' legs before, at a gastronomic restaurant in Alsace. In that case, people were served a little leg with sauce. You could have almost pretended it was little bit of quail or something, and that’s what I was expecting Maxime would be served now. But what the waiter brought out to us was a metal platter piled high with stiff-looking V shapes. I leaned forward for a closer look. And then I recoiled with a cry. The V shapes were whole cut-in-half frogs.

'Oh, that’s appalling!' I exclaimed, trying and failing to not imagine someone cutting all the little frogs in half. 'You can’t eat those! They’re too … froggy looking.'

Not to mention the fact that in this case, Maxime'd be eating not just the legs but the frog’s rude bits too.

No amount of caramelisation could lull me into forgetting that I was eating a demi-frog, but Maxime just said ‘mmmm’.

And it wasn’t just Maxime who loved frogs' legs. An Alsatian friend of mine who liked to educate me in the culinary ways of Alsace talked once of the fabulousness of frogs’ legs:

'They're delicious,' Patrice said. 'Although in my Grandma’s day, the legs were better.'

‘They were more shapely back then?’ I smiled.

‘No, no!’ said Patrice, serious because it was a serious topic. ‘They were smaller - more concentrated in flavour.'

I was doubtful that strong frog flavour was a good thing, just quietly. But if you ever find yourself in a suitably ‘democratic’ region of France, you can judge for yourself.

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!

Behind The Scenes Of A Crowdfunding Campaign - A Frog's Eye View

I feel like I owe my regular readership – or perhaps, what was my regular readership – this apologist post. Even though food and wine and Frenchness may not feature (much). 

I had to take a break from blogging in recent weeks because my intellectual and emotional resources were all-consumed by the crowdfunding project I was involved in. In fact, my French husband Maxime also found himself being sucked into the crowdfunding vortex with me, despite the fact that only one of us had been hired to do it and he had a day job. Nevertheless, every day for two months, he'd monitor the campaign page to see how much we’d raised and give me ‘help’, Maxime style.

It all started when I was contacted by some local Melbourne innovators some months ago. They were not social media savvy and needed help to promote a campaign to fund a clinical trial of a new potential therapy for chronic tinnitus. My first response was, ‘what on earth is chronic tinnitus?’ Then, when it was explained to me, I thought about the temporary ringing in the ears we all experience from time to time and thought: but what if that ringing never STOPS? If you can never escape it? And the penny dropped – it must be terrible. I mean, even our three year old stops crying sometimes. So I got on board with the project.

What’s more, once I began to talk about it, heaps of friends and family began to ‘come out’ and confess that they suffered from tinnitus. I was almost hurt. ‘But you never TOLD me!’ I would say to them. I felt as if they’d been keeping a huge secret from me - as if they had a secret identity and were in fact a goat.

And so I learnt about tinnitus and beavered away on Twitter, Facebook and traditional media. I even created a flyer for the campaign in French, to be pinned up at various places in France which we would be visiting. We weren't going to France for the campaign (the sort of campaign that can afford that doesn't need crowdfunding), it was because Maxime had to go to Paris for business, and the kids and I tagged along to visit the French family and friends we left behind when me moved to Australia almost two years ago. Maxime was dubious about approaching the French for crowdfuning help, however. They would be way too suspicious of something so new as crowdfunding! But despite Maxime's warnings about the French resistance to newness, I thought sticking up flyers couldn’t hurt. (Besides, didn't the French invent the term avant-garde?)

I soon came to regret making a flyer in French though. I did my best, looking up the French for tinnitus (les acouphènes, would you believe), and asked Maxime to print off a few copies while I went to check the dinner.

'You mean print a few copies and correct it,' came Maxime's reply. 'Who wrote this? The French is a catastrophie.'

'Uh ... me,' I said.

He threw up his hands as if to say ‘but of course’. Maxime then sat at the computer for the next hour, composing an impossibly wordy but probably quite beautiful version of the French flyer.

'People have about three seconds to read this, Maxime,' I said to him. 'This is a flyer. We can’t give them something the length of a novel by Proust, no matter how well-crafted the French.'

This is not to say that writing the English version of the flyer was any easier. 

'You can’t talk about 'feedback loops',' said Maxime. 'It’s got to be understandable by simple people - like real estate agents.'

I don’t know what Maxime has against real estate agents. But I insisted on keeping some science-y stuff – people like to feel they’re helping advance science, I thought (although apparently they don’t generally like it enough to actually go to their computer, look up your website and enter a really long credit card number).

For all his criticism, constructive and otherwise, Maxime did write to people on behalf of the campaign, and the French ended up being the second largest group of supporters after the Australians. You see, Maxime, having the Frenchman’s seemingly inborn knowledge that he’s absolutely terrific, had no issues with writing to people to ask for contributions. But for me, writing and sending emails to contacts asking for help was the mental equivalent of a really long Chinese burn. For some reason, I was afraid people would write back and say ‘I hate you forever for asking me to give money’. I was actually surprised (and hey, relieved) when instead of ‘bugger off’, people replied ‘OK’. Of course, Maxime could have pointed out how silly I was being about all this. Which is why I didn’t tell him.

And, unlike Maxime, I didn’t feel I could ask people for help without giving something in return. The only carrot I had was to invite people a party where I would could place before them my traditional buffet of Too Much Food. As an added bonus, they would get to drink Maxime’s wine (another thing on my list of stuff not to mention to him).

In the end, we raised over 5000 dollars, which, although short of the target, is apparently not TOO bad when you have nothing to sell and contributions aren’t tax deductable. I'd seen that

not even Maxime's flowery French would get us to our target when it was clear that tinnitus organisations wouldn’t help out, not even with a measly re-tweet or two, (though wishing us well), since this was not a not-for-profit exercise. At that point, I realised we were pushing a rather large amount of faeces up a very large hill. Now, other avenues must be explored to fund the tinnitus trial. Or, as Maxime pointed out, we could run the campaign again, and do it properly this time (i.e., listen to him more).

At least the crowdfunding campaign gave me an excuse to have a party. And, after the hordes had left the party and the empties had been put in the recycling, Maxime had an excuse to go out and buy more wine.

Is it Possible to Have a Buddhist Holiday in France?

You would think that my French husband Maxime would be overjoyed to be going back to France. Three weeks revelling in Bordeaux wines, truffled foie gras and other froggy delights! But in fact, he's a bit nervous.

Since he took up his new health regime, Maxime has replaced his formerly favourite breakfast of chocolate sandwich (yes, really - chocolate in bread - instant croissant au chocolat!) with ... rice bran smoothies. He has shunned wine in favour of filtered water or cider on special occasions. He used to say he lived to eat, and now he trots out pseudo-Buddhist maxims about keeping things in balance. I feel like I'm living with a yogi. Or maybe Yogi Bear.

But in France, such temperance - ça ne va pas!

'My friends are used to me living a little differently,' he told Mum ruefully the other day. 

That is, opening champagne at 10 in the morning, ordering steak for dessert and dancing with his glass of wine instead of me at weddings.

'I'm not sure what will happen to my weight,' he said.

Hmm, I think I could have a stab at that one.

So which Maxime will our French friends great when we get off the plane tomorrow? The low-alcohol Amazing Ciderman or the Wine Lord? My money's on the latter - the temptation of ripe brie and baguette, pommes de terre sautés, confit de canard, a glass or five of Vieux Telegraphe ... not even Buddha could say no!

Let's wait and see. The next post from Alsace, France!

Lunch is No Déjeuner Downunder

One of the prickliest issues between my French husband and Maxime and I is … lunch.

What do YOU have for lunch? Perhaps it’s leftovers from home heated up in the company microwave? A souvlaki from the takeaway round the corner? A sandwich? As a student at uni, before I left for Europe, I used to have a Vegemite sandwich for lunch each day. (Vegemite, for those who don’t know, is a black lunch spread made from the leftovers of beer-making). I thought my sandwiches were quite acceptable and savoured every salty morsel.

But …

Maxime grew up in France, where kids have a cooked three course meal, starring such ingredients as foie gras and duck confit, served to them at school each day. At home, lunch is cooked as well. At work as an adult in France, Maxime enjoyed three course lunches at the work canteen, or a restaurant outing perhaps. A bottle of wine might also be consumed, to celebrate the special occasion of it being lunchtime.

When I first took Maxime on a visit to Australia, we stayed with my parents, and ate with them. We had roast lamb on Saturday nights - all good. Barbeques in the Dandenongs were fine too (well, except that Maxime insisted in peeling the slightly singed skin off his sausages). But Maxime’s eyes popped in disbelief when at 12 each day, my parents would begin assembling pre-sliced bread, Vegemite, peanut butter and margarine. And it didn’t help that he believes margarine is poisonous. ‘But where’s the lunch?’ he’d say.

'Maxime's used to a cooked lunch,' I would explain. I guess I could have offered him toast.

Now that we live in Australia, people become very anxious whenever they are put in a position of needing to provide Maxime with anything to eat. So you can imagine that the cat was really set among the pigeons when I announced that instead of just coming alone as planned, I'd be bringing Maxime along for lunch at my parents' house. My parents had already ensured they had something in stock for me to eat - these days, I have a salad for lunch.

‘We have a pile of leaves for you,' said Mum when I phoned her with the alarming news, 'but what on earth will Maxime eat? We're just having sandwiches.'

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘he’s in Australia now – he has to adapt!’

Then I remembered that so far, Maxime 'adapting' to lunch in Australia had involved either me cooking or (preferably) a restaurant. Nary a sandwich had passed his lips.

At 11 o’clock on the day of the lunch visit, I took Maxime aside.

‘Lunch will powerfully affect your sensibilities,’ I said. ‘You will be asked to make sandwiches for yourself for lunch using brown and black pastes, which are unlikely to be presented as sculpted pyramids and or garnished with truffles.’

I told him I would take to his private parts with a cheesegrater if he breathed so much as a syllable.

And so we arrived at 12 to find Dad setting out the spreads and breads. He’d anticipated Maxime’s reaction.

‘You need adulterated food to keep your immune system in shape,’ he smiled.

‘Hmm,’ said Maxime, surveying the table doubtfully.

He opted for things that bore some resemblance to what he calls food – ham and cheese, even though the ham was suspiciously uniform in colour and texture and the cheese was hard and didn’t smell of sock like his preferred French fromages.

I winced and waited for Maxime to trot out his usual lines about the cheese ‘not being cheese’. But in the end I was proud of him, because he was good enough to wait until we were in the car on the way home to ask if I thought there may have been asbestos filaments in his cheese.

'It had this stringy texture,' he explained.

Of all the things he could have said about supermarket cheese, a resemblance to asbestos is not one I saw coming.

'But was it good?' I asked.

'No.'

'Oh.'

But in the end, Maxime still got a cooked lunch. In a moment of inspired genius, Dad boiled him an egg!

Blog-i-day

Dear readers,

The whole family have some sort of bug so I'm taking a short holiday/blog-i-day.

The Frog has the man flu which is bad enough, but I have the woman flu, which is worse - because you can't lie on the couch like a corpse - you have to keep on keeping on (and besides, the kids will jump on you).

Wishing you all a great weekend et à bientot!

Kate.

What Sort of Wine Deserves a Medal?

When we lived in France, I did a wine course, as I recounted in an earlier post. Not only that, but I topped the wine exam at the end, beating all the frogs – a fact which is a constant source of satisfaction to me, especially the fact that I did better than my French wine-expert husband Maxime. 

But the story doesn’t end there: having done well in the exam, I was invited to go to Colmar to be a judge at of the latest Alsace vintage. It was to be one of those events where they award those little medal stickers you see on some bottles in the supermarket. How exciting! I thought. But I was too shy to ring up and accept the invitation in French. I decided to make Maxime do it for me.

Of course, he had no problem making the call for me. In fact, he seemed strangely eager to do it. 

After Maxime made the call, he got off the phone and said, ‘Yes, it’s fine – you’ll be judging Riesling and I’ll be judging Crémant.’

‘What do you mean you’ll be judging Crémant? YOU didn’t get invited!’ I said indignantly. 

What’s more Crémant was MY favourite wine! How come Maxime got to be the Crémant judge?

‘I asked if I could be a judge too, since I also did that course. And they said yes.’

No wonder he’d been so keen to do the call. ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ I said.

Actually I could. Maxime has more front than Myers. This is a man who talked his way into a private tasting with Didier Dagenau (when he was still alive) and inveigled himself into being invited to Vinexpo.

Awarding a medal to my nightly drop

The judging day began at 9 in the morning, in a great barn-like exhibition building in Colmar, capital of South Alsace. An old wine official bloke began proceedings by giving the assembled judges (there were actually dozens of us) a briefing. We were meant to award wines that reflect what is typical of Alsace, and of the grape variety, so that the consumer would get an idea of what ‘Alsace’ should taste like. To some winemakers, this is an anathema. What should be celebrated is the individual terroir (that mystical term encompassing climate, soil, topography etc. of an area of land) and the variety of taste you can have thanks to each terroir’s uniqueness. You should not be trying to produce some sort of common denominator wine! As one Alsatian winemaker complained to me once ‘they want us to make wine which is typical. But which typical is that?!’

It seemed I was going to work for the Dark Side of the Force.

After being given our instructions, we went to our tables. I sat at the ‘Riesling table’ with two other judges, who were both Alsatian winemakers. It made my head spin to think that when I’d first come to France, I didn’t even know that Riesling was grown in Alsace. My knowledge of Riesling back then had been based on encounters with four litre cardboard casks of ‘Rhine’ Rieslings back in Australia, labelled Kaiserstühl or some such. Now I was to judge real Riesling from out of a bottle instead of a cardboard box (and the real Kaiserstühl was just up the road). 

The two winemakers and I had nine Rieslings from the year before to rank and one reference wine that was meant to illustrate what the powers that be deemed to be ‘typical’ Alsace Riesling taste. The samples are tasted very young – as the tasting went on, it began to feel as though the acid was stripping all the skin off my lips and my teeth felt strangely furry. It did not at all turn out to be as much fun as I thought it would be. Especially since only some winemakers submit their wines for medal awards and the top winemakers tend not to. They don’t need a little medal sticker to sell their wine. My fellow judges and I sipped our wine tentatively, and the winemakers looked at one another in dismay and made ‘pfff’ sounds. They didn’t want to give a medal to any of the wines. But award we must.

Maxime, on the other hand, seemed to be having a fine old time on the Crémant table. He and the others at his table were laughing and rosy-cheeked.

‘This is actually quite good – taste this,’ Maxime said, handing me a glass as I approached.

Bastard! I thought. He not only bloody muscles in on my wine judging debut and scores a spot on the Crémant table but he gets decent wine!

Of course, Maxime didn’t really need to be appointed a wine judge. He is one naturally. And no one is safe from his pronouncements. Now that we live in Australia, not even the Australian Prime Minister is safe. Upon reading an article on the contents of Mr. Abbott’s wine cellar, Maxime adjudged it to be ‘the cellar of a yobbo’. And as I’ve said before, wine rules Maxime’s politics. So the PM should be thankful that he can’t vote in Australia! 

Yet. 

Maxime plans to get citizenship ASAP so he can vote for someone who appreciates Clonakilla Shiraz Vigonier.

Mind you, Aussie wine critic Jeremy Oliver can dish it out almost as harshly as Maxime. I particularly love the bit in the article where he says that in the PM’s cellar, ‘the only Riesling listed is from Margaret River, where it should be classified as a weed.’ 

Can you imagine having dinner with a pair of wine critics like that!? Actually, it’s probably better not to.