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)