Bread, Vinaigrette and Cousins

Bread
At the BELL (Beaumont English Language Library) celebration mentioned previously, chatting with one of the participants, I mentioned the difficulty of translating “terroir”. She was English but had lived in France a long while and spoke very good French. At first, she couldn't see my point; as she pointed out, several English words will serve. But she eventually agreed that the connotations posed a problem. It's somewhat the same way with bread. It's easily translated as “pain” but the cultural implications are then not apparent since the English don't use bread in the way that the French do. In much the same way, we don't even have to translate pasta from the Italian since we use the same word but the cultural implications are different.

For instance, my friend Daniel is totally incapable of eating a meal without bread. Serve him a stew with potatoes and dumplings and he'll still want bread. And, if a small village or hamlet in France has only one shop it will be a bakers. Fresh bread each day is a paramount requirement and the price of a basic loaf is still regulated. It reminds me of a story told me by a friend of Irish descent (yet another culture) about a dinner he cooked for his father. He cooked a spaghetti Bolognese and, on seeing the dish in front of him, his father said: “Where are the potatoes then?”

I don't think there is a solution to the problem of translating the connotations.

Vinaigrette
Vinaigrette is a similar case in point. In England I hardly ever made vinaigrette; like most other people I knew, I used salad cream. By contrast, vinaigrette is ubiquitous in France and I have yet to meet any French friends who use a ready-made variety out of a bottle; they all make their own. However, when I or others I knew in England did make vinaigrette we were far more adventurous than any of the French I have met. The vinaigrette everyone seems to make here comprises mustard, olive oil, salt, pepper and vinegar, the taste differing only according to the proportions of each. I usually add some garlic and sometimes substitute walnut oil for olive oil. Balsamic vinegar is widely available but seldom used. It seems strange to me that everyone here takes the trouble to make their own vinaigrette but no one seems to want to experiment.

Cousins
A consequence of my being part of the successful boules team was that people have been saying, kindly, that I am now a real Mollanais. Except that................I must have a cousin in Mollans to be a true Mollanais since all true Mollanais do. And what follows is some (generally ribald) banter as to who could possibly be my cousin. The point is that all true Mollanais really do seem to have a cousin (or indeed many) in the village. This, it would seem, is a consequence of a specific attitude to liaisons in the past. On the one hand it was very restrictive: keep it in the village. On the other hand, it was very free: as long as it is in the village, you can play around as much as you want.