au bon pain

Back to the French stereotypes. Let's look at bread, or more generally, food and eating. They really do love bread! Walk around the streets of Rouen between 4pm and 7pm and you'll see dozens of Frenchmen and women on their way home from work with a baguette (or two or three) tucked under their arm. Boulangeries (bakeries) are everywhere - they're more ubiquitous than Dunkin Donuts' in New England. One of the little pleasures of living in France is paying a visit to the boulangerie/patisserie (pastry shop, sometimes the two are separate but more often together). I particularly like how they take very special care of your order by wrapping up everything - no paper bags like at Dunkin Donuts. Instead, they very carefully wrap your eclair or tarte aux pommes or whatever in paper and tape it securely like it's a Christmas present. They wrap up the bread too, putting a little paper around the center of the baguette. Then when you get home...it's like it's your birthday. You unwrap your present, and - tada! - there's an eclair inside. The French have a good thing going with their eclairs. Instead of filling them with yellow custard, they put chocolate mousse inside! Yum. I've also seen pistachio and coffee flavored, but when there's chocolate, why try anything else?

The French do take eating seriously and they like to maintain a certain eating ritual. They don't snack very much. One of my collegues at school visited America last summer and said that she really liked the food there, but that "Americans just eat whenever!" For a nation that puts a lot of stock in the quality of what they eat, it probably comes as a shock to the French that Americans would just shovel down food without giving it the proper setting of a table and the proper time of a set meal. The French like their 3 meals a day...and that's sufficient (probably a big part of why they don't have the obesity problem we do). When they eat, they take their time. We have almost 2 hours for lunch at the primary schools. At Silver Lake High School, where I subbed last fall, we got 18 minutes. They like to eat their courses in succession, starting with salad, then an "entree" - usually pate or veggies or something like that, then the main dish, then some cheese (just by itself, and it's plenty good on its own), and finally dessert (sometimes real dessert and sometimes fruit). This tendency to eat in stages even carries over to how they eat fast food. At McDonalds I saw many eating their fries first (with a fork!) before starting in on the burger.

I've found that eating in France is not just a means by which we fill up our tanks to get through the day, but rather something to be enjoyed and savored - in moderation - with friends and family. It is rare to see someone eating alone, or eating with haste, or eating while multi-tasking. Food is serious in France, and it deserves all of your attention.