As we enter a new year and resolutions about what not to eat abound, I thought it might be fun to revisit a post where I shared a traumatic encounter with French food traditions, including the sacrosanct: eat everything.
Wishing all good things to you and yours in 2025. Enjoy!
We’d only been living in France for a few months. I was still dealing with culture shock, and my French was nonexistent when we were invited to join a group of twenty or so of my husband’s work friends and their families for a long weekend in the Beaujolais region of France. We would all be staying in one of his colleague's parents' homes—a big old house with bad plumbing and squeaky floors surrounded by dusty vineyards.
At the time, I didn’t know I could say no; it felt obligatory in some secret French way—that if we declined, it would cause irreparable offense, tearing a hole in the Gallic code of social behavior.
So, even though I did not want to go, I went.
Standing out or being noticed is almost physically painful for me, and I will do anything to avoid being seen. Even as early as kindergarten, I understood that following the rules was the best way to avoid unwanted attention from authority figures: be good, and you become invisible.
Too bad for me, as the token foreigner in the group, blending in was not an option. I was the Chunky Campbell’s Beef Stew in an otherwise homogeneous vichyssoise. I couldn’t take cover under a blanket of being good. My French was bad, my cultural education incomplete, I was doomed to stand out like a sore thumb.
I spent the whole awful weekend with a knot in my stomach, waiting for the moment we could wave goodbye and drive away, the moment that would allow me to melt back into my beloved cloak of invisibility.
As the group chatted away in fast, slang-filled French, I felt both ashamed and relieved when the conversation evaded me. I was simultaneously ignored and yet still very much there, visible as a pimple caked with concealer. There was no hiding the oddball (me) in a group of convivial holiday-making French, but I was determined to try.
And then we all went out to dinner.
We were a large group, so the restaurant tucked us off into a private room. Devoid of other dinners, it felt intimate, and not in a good way if you’re me: no hiding allowed. We arranged ourselves at three long, narrow tables. Unable to hold up my side of the conversation, I made sure to sit at one of the far ends to avoid getting stuck in the middle of the dinner banter.
The waiter passed out the menus, and discussions about what to order began in earnest.
Let’s pause here for a moment and take a little side trip down the superhighway of French food rules, shall we?
For context, let us recall that once upon a time, in an effort to give Americans food rules—because we don’t have any—the writer and journalist
studied multiple cultures’ relationship to food and condensed the collective wisdom into three axioms: eat food, mostly plants, not too much. His emphasis, as I recall, was mostly on how to eat a healthy diet, something Americans in our culinary free-for-all missed the memo on, and conversely, something the French, in their purist of pleasure, could not give a shit about. A. Shit.
The word “healthy” doesn’t exist in French—Alain Ducasse
While French food rules forbid gluttony, which is more about the abuse of food, they’re not punitive—it’s not about restriction or health, per se. If the rules exist for one reason, it’s to make food a pleasure.
That is the golden rule of French food culture: food should be enjoyed.
Furthermore, the French don’t need anyone to explain their food culture to them. The rules are engrained from birth, unwritten yet universally understood, unless you are a foreigner (see: me).
What follows is a brief overview of French Food Rules, with assistance from my DFH (Darling French Husband). Who, because he is French, was at first like, “What rules?”
The Rules:
1. Never get drunk, but drink: apéro is a must before the meal, then wine with dinner, and a little digestive at the end—but do not get drunk!
2. Keep your hands visible on the table at all times. Never rest them on your lap (what are you doing under there?!).
3. Cut the wedge of cheese from the long side, not the tip; no hogging the best bits, and thus, the rind is equally distributed amongst all. Égalité!
4. DO NOT eat before someone (usually the cook or host) says, “bon appetit.”
5. You should be able to deftly debone a whole fish and elegantly slurp oysters and escargot.
6. Fold, never cut your lettuce. (This has something to do with the ill effects of vinegar on silver.)
7. Don’t salt before tasting.
8. Enjoy conversing with the sommelier about your wine preferences.
9. Discuss food often: at breakfast, talk about last night’s dinner; at lunch, talk about what you will have for dinner; and at dinner, discuss what’s on your plate. It’s an endless circle with food at the center.
10. Lastly, and we did have a bit of back-and-forth on this, as DFH thinks kids aren’t raised the same way anymore, but when he was a boy, the number one golden rule of French food culture was to try everything. Don't turn up your nose at something unless you’ve tried it, and moreover, understand what you're eating: Where did it come from, and how was it prepared? Respect the food and its preparation. If you do, then you will most assuredly love it.
Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, it was time to order.
My darling French husband, to his eternal credit, tried to save me from myself, but I was dog-paddling so hard trying to blend in that I didn’t take the rope when he tossed it. I only have myself to blame for what came next.
In my defense, I come from two of the world's most atrocious food cultures: New England (boiled dinner, anyone?) on my dad’s side and whatever you would call my mom’s upbringing as a first-generation vegetarian Polish atheist Jew (borsht, maybe?).
I did my best, but it was a swing and an epic miss.
Nothing on the menu was familiar, and my French wasn’t good enough to unpack the particulars of the list of classic dishes, rendering the descriptions meaningless to me. Therefore, I did not know that andouillettes1 were sausages made from pig’s offal, i.e., inside parts of the animal's body such as the intestine or the inside covering of the stomach. Nor did I understand that the innocent-sounding Tête de veau (calf's head) included the brains, simmered in a broth for hours and served with a mustardy sauce.
There was also a classic steak frites (steak and fries), the only thing I recognized on the menu, but I, who had up until recently been a vegetarian and still would have been, if not for near starvation in the decidedly pro-meat France of the time, turned my nose up at a slab of animal protein and went for the more poetically sounding andouillette—like something pink and fluffy, an homage to Marie Antoinette, perhaps?
My DFH watched as I ordered. He looked sad, although I had no idea why. Up until that moment, he had been having a fine old time. I was the one who couldn’t understand what was being said, missed out on the joke, and was generally miserable.
He ordered the aforementioned basic steak and fries, which was not his usual. Maybe this was a regional specialty? But no, that honor had fallen to me.
While down at the fun end of the table, they jointly ordered heaping platers of frog legs—boy, was I glad to have dodged that bullet!
Then they brought out the food.
Set before me was (and I hope I won’t offend) what could only be described as donkey penis. A grey tube of decaying intestines off-gassing in a swamp of brown mustard sauce, looking and smelling like something stuck at the bottom of a toilet. I gaged.
My husband watched as tears filled my eyes.
Wasn’t it enough that I’d come along on this trip? Now I had to eat this missing body part?
I poked at the worm, cutting off a tiny morsel. I dragged it through the sauce to hide the smell, but it did not. I put my fork to my lips and opened. It tasted exactly how it smelled: revolting.
I panicked. There were too many witnesses and the full weight of French food culture bearing down on me. I had to eat it. Not to would be bad, unforgivable. It would draw attention to me, offend the French, and violate rule #10: eat everything.
I tried to swallow without chewing, but my throat closed. I grabbed my tiny glass of rosé to wash it down and disinfect my mouth, but rule #1: don’t get drunk. Wine must be sipped. Too bad! I took a huge gulp and then another, but there wasn’t enough wine in the world to wash the taste away. I was in full-on fight-or-flight mode now. “Be good!” my little voice screamed. But how? I could not force myself to eat it.
And then my husband did a thing that only someone who truly loves you would do. He threw himself in front of the train—the train I ordered even though he had encouraged me not to. The train that was hurtling towards me at a million miles an hour threatening to take me and my will to live with it. He handed me his beautiful plate of familiar, uncomplicated food and slid the alien meat over to him. He had ordered steak because he knew. He knew what was coming. I had married a saint.
Did the man love eating my dinner? No, but he didn’t hate it either. Why? Because he was raised to eat and appreciate (not necessarily love or like) everything. I made a mental note to send a thank-you letter to his mother for forcing him to eat vile things as a boy.
Having dodged that bullet, I tucked into my lovely meal. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see a hunk of beef and fried potatoes in my life.
And then…
From the other end of the table, a head leaned forward and called down to me in English.
“Have you ever tried les cuisses de grenouilles (frog legs)?”
All eyes turned to me; the entire table stopped talking and eating. The room grew dark and still.
I looked at my husband. He stared back, bemused. He was just as curious as I was to see how this played out.
“No, I croaked.” (Sorry, it was just lying there.)
“Ah! Then you MUST!”
Truly, though, must I?
Two unmistakable flippered appendages were plopped onto a bread plate and passed along the entire length of the table until they reached me. The last time I was this close to a frog was in middle school biology, and it reeked of formaldehyde.
Could I pretend to eat it? I looked down the table at the two dozen expectant French faces waiting for me to enjoy their offering. If I refused, then I would be forever branded as the bad American.
All my worst fears were coming true.
How was I even supposed to eat it? Pick it up like finger food? No, that couldn’t be right. The French eat pizza and hamburgers with a knife and fork.
The clock was ticking. Every head was turned towards me—waiting, watching.
I picked up my knife and fork and stabbed at the legs, trying to make a surgical sliver of a cut, but bones! My fork bounced back. The bastard was full of bones. The table observed as I fumbled with the amphibian until I cut off a piece of its thigh.
And that, friend, is where I nearly failed not only my DFH but all of France. At least, that’s how it felt with those twenty expectant French faces watching and waiting for my reaction.
I will not throw up; I will not throw up, I commanded myself.
I put the quivering piece of fatty meat into my mouth and chewed exaggeratedly like Chaplin eating shoe leather in The Little Tramp—which I would have gladly done instead.
Because of the brain’s trauma response, I have no idea what it tasted like, but I am confident it absolutely 100 percent did not taste like chicken.
“Yum... delicious,” I lied.
Mission accomplished, the table nodded in approval and went right back to eating and talking because, of course, it was. One only needed to try.
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I can identify with your experience, and you have my sympathies !
Back in the late 1970s and 1980s I spent a lot of time in Strasbourg and found myself frequently challenged on food issues. The eating of sweetcorn was a recurring topic of discussion--"here we feed it to the pigs" was typical of the comments. Then I'd be served or encouraged to order things that people assumed I would balk at--museau de cheval, lapin, riz de veau, etc. But I discovered the andouillette on my own, ordering it since it was the daily special at a brasserie in Paris. I tried, but I just couldn't--both the taste and the texture were too much for me. And no matter how long I live in France, I don't see any possibility of actually wanting to have that experience again.
Loved your story.