IAS 380R Raclette Night

Small Cultural Proof

Last night Adèlie invited me to a raclette dinner at her apartment with 8 of her friends. AND for the first time, I was the only non-French person there :) Raclette is a traditional French meal that I once mistakenly tried to prepare for French friends. After now having eaten it the proper way, I can't blame them for not being impressed with my attempt.

To make raclette:

First of all, one needs the traditional raclette cooker.

The one we used looked sort of like this.

You also need baked potato. And raclette cheese, of course, which is stiff and has crust and doesn't taste very good plain. You turn on your cooker and put the cheese in the cute little individual pans and let it melt.

Then, you need toppings. LOTS of toppings. Trays of meat. Ham, sausage (it's more like pepperoni than anything) and lots of other thinly slices meats.

You can also eat it with these mini pickle things that they eat like candy called courgettes. They asked me how to say courgette in English, but I haven't ever seen them before coming to France so I didn't know! I just said mini pickle or cucumber. I guess it literally translates to zucchini. But these were just little guys. Oh well, close enough.

Et après, you just pour the cheese on your potato et voilà! So good.... :)

Dinner involved a lot of conversation, some I understood, a lot I didn't understand. Every once in a while someone would ask me to say something in English or Adèlie would say something directly to me, which I could understand a whole lot better than all their inside jokes and slang. We talked about Christmas for a while. They wanted to know about Santa Clause and if we have a Père Noël and if we have Christmas trees and stockings and leave out milk for Santa. Their Christmas sounds very similar to ours. The only difference we found is that they don't really put their stockings over the fireplace, but at the foot of the bed, if they do stockings at all. They said it varies family to family. And they knew all about us putting them over our fireplace because they've seen it in all the films haha. Just like everything else. I'm always amazed at how prevalent English and American culture is in France. For example, Adèlie gave a late birthday gift to one of the girls. It was a mug that had the words, "Bright and Early Coffee!" written on it's side. I've decided the only thing more chic than something French in the US is something American in France.

After dinner we played a game called "Times up!" Because the title was in English, of course I was supposed to know the game! Alas, I didn't. The cards had the names of famous people written on them. Mostly French famous people, but a few others like Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Taylor, and Buffalo Bill. You had to describe the person and get your team to guess as many cards as you could in 30 seconds. Needless to say, this game was not my strong point. I would definitly specialize in raclette eating before famous French person guessing. It was fun, nonetheless.