Bad translation!

Sometime it gets confusing. Eating an “entree” when we already had an appetizer, which in most cases was preceded by… bread... that suppose to be served with food as an accompaniment and palate cleanser while eating.

The simple baguette made of floor, water, salt and yeast has been replaced nearly everywhere in this country by fancy type breads, most full of sugar and pumped up level of glycemic index to a raging level of 95, when it should be in the low 60ies.

Hot bread is also an interesting phenomenon. Warm bread is served warm because it is supposed to be baked in the restaurant and served fairly soon thereafter, not warm because a previously baked and sometime dried up bread got warmed up to pretend being made in the kitchen. That bread is the one we get more often than one wish and has lost its fresh taste to end up dry again as soon as it cools down. Half baked bread that gets their last baking touch in a restaurant, do not see most of the time the right temperature to reach the full crusty texture. Mushy warm bread with a sort of sugary glaze on top is really disgusting. That’s the one that can make the glycemic rating going crazy.

Then, we really start with warm bread, followed by an appetizer and a salad, generally drenched with “your favorite dressing” chosen from the same list we keep asking for to the waitress and waiter and topped with various… things making it a sort of complete meal on its own, to finally have the ordered entree, arriving inexpediently while you are still eating the previous pseudo-meal.

The salad served during a composed meal is used in France to neutralize one’s taste senses after a main course and before cheese and/or dessert. The portion is small and made simply with selected leafs, avoiding the stem, and stirred in a separate bowl in order to quote the leafs with vinaigrette (simple emulsion of vinegar, oil and salt with sometime crushed or chopped garlic and/or shallot).

The common monumental salads we eat here are destined to be a main course and can be quite complex as well in France. The Nicoise salad is particularly known among French salads.

Entrée is a French word meaning starter, appetizer. In this case, we would get a pre-pre-pre-entrée with the bread, a pre-pre-entrée with an appetizer, a pre-entrée with the salad to finally have an entrée. No main course, jumping directly to a dessert.

We did our food choice from what we call a menu, another French name meaning the list of preset meals composed of different courses, which is what French would call a “carte” and is the list of food plates. In a French restaurant, you can ask for “le menu” or “la carte” and compose your own menu with entrée and main course and whatever else one desire. 

I know, we are not in France and we end up eating differently here, which is true and fair to say. Nevertheless, we are using well defined French terms and have changed their meanings, as an inappropriate translation, and we have gradually modified our composed menus a such way that it has lost its healthy balance.

Julia Child, we miss you!