French Toast Read Online Free PDF Page B

in my apron to the local
boulangerie
just before the cheese course. The evening lurched from one catastrophe to another, until I was convinced that I would never, never entertain again.
    I did, of course, and elaborated the Rochefort Rule: To save an evening, serve plenty of wine. If the guests are relaxed enough, they won’t notice the minor errors. I mastered the major challenges: Don’t forget the bread, follow the order of courses, don’t put the cheese in the fridge, and don’t serve anything on the list of no-no foods, such as squid, oysters, and, yes, even snails or offal. Before I knew this, I prepared a meal with squid—yummy, yummy—and one of my guests almost threw up before asking if she could please have some ham. So much for squid, unless, of course, you poll your guests before dinner: “Do you eat squid, intestines of pigs, et cetera?” My husband and I eat all these disgusting animal parts—brains, ears, tongues, feet, you name it, so I have to remind myself that many people, even French ones, find them revolting.
    Of course, I wouldn’t make nearly as many mistakes now as I made then, either in terms of food or social codes. In the early days of my marriage, my husband’s boss called unexpectedly from the airport to inform usthat he was in town. I would have let it go by saying, “great, nice to talk to you,” but my husband interpreted the underlying meaning of the call for my innocent foreign ears. This was not a casual hello. It meant, COME AND GET ME AT THE AIRPORT AND INVITE ME TO DINNER. Not being a good French housewife, I had literally next to nothing on hand. We had also just moved into our house, and barely had any furniture, let alone any foie gras. The boss ended up perched at my kitchen table in front of an improvised omelette. There was no bread (the bakery had long since closed), no cheese, and no salad, although there was a terrible dessert. The wine was not up to par. He hated the whole experience.
    This disaster did, however, teach me that it is indispensable to have decent food on hand at all times. Unfortunately, to have food, you have to shop, and to shop for staples, you have to go to the supermarket, which is way down the line of relaxing experiences one can have in France. Every time I grocery-shop in this country, which is once a week on the average, I get an acute case of the supermarket blues. In the store, you are jostled, shoved, hit from behind, and squished. It’s normal: If you can fit France into Texas—and France has roughly seven times more people—it’s logical that there are more people and less space in the supermarket.
    I thought I was alone in my dislike of the supermarket, but after polling my friends, I found I had a lot of company. “It makes me break out in hives just to thinkabout the weekly shopping expedition,” one friend told me. Outdoor markets are much more fun and I go to them often—but when shopping for a family, one is condemned to paying regular visits to the supermarket for the basics.
    The general complaint: There’s no one to bag the stuff! So the whole scene looks like Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times
with the reel speeding up and speeding up until everything falls apart. First, you are on one end of the line, getting out all your yogurt, milk, soap, and so on, then the checkout person is passing it through, and then, even before you’ve finished unloading the cart, you are suddenly on the other end of the counter, desperately stuffing it into flimsy tiny plastic bags.
    In your haste, you see a shadow, a line of fidgety people behind you who watch as you stuff and stuff and can’t quite get everything in. You still have to get in the lettuce and Q-tips and Pampers and figure out how you will get all this to the car without breaking the eggs, when you realize that the person at the cash register has finished checking it through and you have to pay.
    As I bag in a