Cole Porter, isn't it? Though I don't think that he mentioned carrots. Mes amis français too can be ambivalent on the subject of vegetables, or to be precise, vegetarians.
The French have no particular dislike for veggies; they just find it very difficult to fathom why anyone would want to be one. It isn't really something they do.
This is all causing a bit of head-scratching chez girlfriend Claire just at the mo. Her school is expecting an exchange party of Irish girls in a month or two, and a couple of them are listed as vegetarians (strict).
For a start, they're all a bit hazy at this end as to what strict vegetarian means. Said girls are going to be staying with French families and it's a bit worrying wondering what they're going to be able to eat.
I must admit that any pauvre maman française faced with having to cook up a solid week's worth of pure veganism, without previous experience on the frontline, has my deepest sympathy. I'm no anti-veggie myself (I came up with a chickpea, lemon and fresh coriander salad at the weekend that was profoundly wicked), but anyone giving me chapter and verse over the rights and wrongs of lesser-spotted rennet while I'm trying to cook, is likely to end up wearing their dinner . . .
Actually there's nothing really to worry about. We have all the right vegetables here; just not necessarily, as Eric Morecambe famously said, in the right order. Girlfriend Claire wouldn't dream of making a meal without a good salad and some choice spuds. But equally she wouldn't do it without the meat. It is meet and right so to do. Yea verily.
Coincidentally les têtes d'oeuf chez France Culture were having a good go on animal rights this very morning. They were deeply clever and philosophical, throwing in all manner of cultural allusions for good measure. They also opined that it was fairly safe, medically speaking, to be a veggie.
But in the end, they continued to be frankly baffled, deciding that the best big, hairy, macho blerk français way of keeping animals in their place was still . . . to eat them.
Evidently the Glorious Path of Meatness is where your Frenchman feels most at home. And it has to be said that les français would have made a much better job of tackling The Great Ruddy Duck Menace than the massed hapless plonks of the British Government.
The Ruddy Duck, apparently, is a great swaggering, bonktastic, American slappeur of a duck. It is steadily wiping out the native British White-headed Duck, which is uterly wet and a weed (molesworth), crap in a scrap and positively panda-esque in its relative prissiness.
Deciding that the only effective way to put a Ruddy Duck off its stroke is to shoot it, ever-efficient Whitehall employed a team of highly professional marksmen. This has so far, saith The Observer, cost a magnificent £4.6million, c'est à dire, £742 per duck . . .
Les français would simply have let the valiant pastis-swilling members of la chasse loose on les Yanquis volants and probably made more than a few bob charging for licences. You can bet that they would have converted the lot into magret de canard quicker than you can say Donald.
Probably they would also have shot one or two of each other in the process, mais tant pis, it's all par for the course and you can solve most things over a glass of Ricard.
mardi 9 février 2010
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