Paper Palate

Recently, I was up in Montreal for a film festival, and in between screenings of Canadian zombie films and experimental CGI, my girlfriend and I zipped up to the Marché Jean-Talon to shop for a bit of lunch. The marché is a farmer’s market on steroids, a massive sprawl of produce tables, boulangeries and butchers, where the savory aroma of merguez mixes with the redolent fragrance of a fromagerie to create a heady atmosphere of gastronomic potential. The market is also home to the Librarie Gourmande, a small but airy cookbook shop tucked away near the market’s eastern border on Avenue Henri-Julien.

I dropped into the Librairie Gourmande while my girlfriend went off to the bathroom. I was looking for a cookbook, and I didn’t mind that the store’s wares were all in French. In fact, I kind of hoped that would be the case.

I had recently gotten it into my head that I will travel to France next year to participate in the quadrennial running of the legendary bicycle ride, Paris-Brest-Paris, and aside from training my legs and lungs for a 750 mile endurance ride, I also had to retrain my schoolboy French to the point where I could reasonably hold a conversation with only five hours of sleep in three days. I had a plan for taking classes, but I figured that deciphering a French cookbook could only help.

Specifically, I wanted a North African cookbook. The lazy heat of summer has put me in a mind for food slowly cooked over a low fire, and I wanted a book that could give me ideas for stewy tagines as well as brochettes that would be a welcome variation on the grill. What I wound up getting was Le Grande Livre de la Cuisine Marocaine (The Great Book of Moroccan Cuisine), a gorgeous, thick volume from Fatema Hal, chef-owner of Mansouria, famous for serving the best couscous in Paris.

Though, of course, herein lies one of the first flaws in my cunning plan.

It’s challenging enough to decipher one foreign language into your native tongue. It’s much more complicated to decipher a foreign book that is itself focusing on matters that are alien to both of you, and thus forces you to switch hit on translation duties. Tomates, Coriandre and menthe were easy. Miel, farine and poivre (honey, flour, pepper) I could remember from school and two decades of reading bistro menus. Ras el hanout and smen had me jumping for the glossary — a glossary that was, of course, written in French. This was going to take effort.

It’s also worth noting that I have an academic teenager’s vocabulary in French, which is fine for saying things like “My aunt’s pen is on the table.” but lacks the facility for certain culinary staples like mince, braise or whatever the English translation is for carre de mousseline. (which, on first blush, makes me think they mean a cooking instrument modeled after Mussolini’s head) Yet, rather than try to read the book in one hand, with a French-English dictionary in the other, I’ve been stubbornly trying to infer translation from context.

So, like, a common instruction would be to “Epluchez les oignons et coupez les tres finement. Epluchez et ecrasez l’ail. Lavez et hachez la coriandre.” Which, to me, on first pass is:

“{Do something-something to} the onions and (jibba-jabba) in very finely. (Do something-something again) and (blah-blah) the garlic. Wash and (smiggle-smaggle) the coriander.”

So what do I normally do to both onions and garlic in the beginning of a recipe? Peel? It’s got three letters in common with epluchez so, sure, why not? Peel the onions and I’ll assume that coupez is “cut” because that’s what one usually does to prep peeled onions. Hachez might be “chop” because it sounds like “hatchet”, and I’ll assume that ecrasez is “crush” because that’s what I’d want do to a clove of garlic that I’m adding to some sliced onions and chopped coriander that I’m prepping for a stew.

“Peel the onions and cut them very finely. Peel and crush the garlic. Wash and take a hatchet to the coriander.”

Ok, that works.

So, yeah, guesswork via context. It’s really not that different from reading, say, William Faulkner and trying to figure out whether his characters really are speaking English. There are, of course, certain French terms that don’t map 100% to English. For instance, it took me a few minutes to realize that cuil. a café meant a “teaspoon” and not a “coffee cup”, which was my first impression from seeing café . I was almost about to conclude that a coffee cup was the equivalent of a liquid measure cup before realizing that a cup of paprika would probably be overkill for a lamb tagine. I would’ve probably drawn the connection more quickly if the French drank tea instead of coffee (or, if you’re a Francophone, wishing that the English drank coffee instead of tea and therefore referred to their small measures as coffeespoons) but such is the charming challenge of translation. If anything it made it easier to infer that cuil. a soupe was probably a tablespoon even if it literally translated to a soup spoon.

Curiously, I haven’t seen any instruction to saute anything. One would think that it would be a commonplace instruction, but when the technique is used in the Le Grande Livre…Marocaine it’s a much more prosaic version like, “heat olive oil in a pan until hot, then add stuff and cook.” Maybe sauteing isn’t big in the Maghreb. Maybe it’s because sauté actually means something else besides, “heat a shallow pan and cook ingredients in light amount of oil, while tossing vigorously” and a French cookbook using the word sauté is as borderline ridiculous as an English cookbook saying, “Make your vegetables dance until done.” or “Brown your onions in your dancing pan until golden.”

Though, now that I think about it, every kitchen ought to have a dancing pan.

So, do I honestly think that this exercise will help me in my travels in France? Not really, unless the bill for my meal involves trading some hours in the kitchen. Still, reading through the book is to reacquaint my mind with operating in French, and that is genuinely helpful. Taking advantage of a gorgeous, informative cookbook that has not yet been translated to English is a bonus.