France This Way...the blog!!

From time to time I am invited, with Mrs Boris and the children, to go for dinner with French friends who live in the region. Well, really Mrs Boris is invited, because she is attractive, intelligent and interesting, and I tag along behind, but it amounts to the same thing. So I thought it might be useful if I explain the formalities of such an occasion, to help you avoid making terrible and humiliating mistakes yourself.

The first issue to arise is the greeting. Every member of each family must kiss each member of every other family. So if three families each with two children are present, that makes for a about half an hour of entertainment, blocked doorways, squeezing passed each other and so on. By which time whatever was cooking is spoiled and it is almost time to set off home again.The next issue is alcohol. You may think the French have a reputation as great consumers of wine. Well if they are, they hide it well from us. Almost always a bottle of wine will be opened, with great fanfare about wine vintages, soil conditions, early frosts and old oak barrels. A small amount is then poured out for each person to taste and admire as necessary.

You or I will, of course, finish this third of a glass of wine in about two minutes flat, and sit expectantly with an empty glass. This is a mistake. As often as not that small amount is intended to last half the evening. If things are going well, another half glass may be offered a good while later, but that will probably be your lot. So all those arguments about who is going to refrain from drinking so they can safely drive home afterwards will have been a waste of time.

The alternative possibility is that everyone believes, rightly or wrongly, that I am an alcoholic. It is not even impossible that Mrs Boris tells people in advance that I have a drink problem, in an effort to stop me getting falling down drunk and making a fool of mysef. Still, a good stiff drink when I get home usually puts things to rights.

The last big issue (I’ll leave language issues and cultural misunderstandings for another day) is the food. As with the wine, each item brought to the table is accompanied with an elaborate descrition of its provenance. Cheese is not from the supermarket, it is from a small farm in the Pyrenees, accessble only by walking two miles along a muddy track. The duck is hand-reared by a farmer in the Dordogne under the most exacting conditions, practically with this very dinner in mind. Through to the vegetables (“I go to the market in Brantome, although it is a four hour drive each way, because the carrots there are unbeatable”) and every other ingredient.

This does not make it easy to invite people back to our own home. UK style, we are more given to making a supermarket dash on a Saturday morning to get the whole unpleasant business out of the way as quickly as possible, and to be honest I am not sure our food experience suffers horribly as a result. Perhaps my taste buds have been dulled by a lifetime of alcoholic excesses?