Speaking Franglais

I’ve spent much of my day today studying for this term’s written exam, scheduled for a week from tomorrow. 

In my experience, cramming the night and hours before a test doesn’t work – it may squeeze one or two new facts in, but just as many fall out the other side of my brain – basic things like my email password, ability to do long division, and, on one occasion I was so burnt out after an Administrative Law exam in university that I was unable to tell a cab driver my exact street address.

A major component of our written test in Basic Cuisine was remembering French terminology, and we can expect more of the same on this term’s test.  What’s the difference between “blanc de cuisson” and “glacer a blanc”?  A sautoir and a sauteuse?  Sauter, étuver, poêler? 

It’s a lot of terminology to remember, but what’s rather funny is how the words sneak into conversation between students:

“Can I borrow your chinois?”

“That needs to go in a bain marie or it will burn.”

“Who clogged up the robocoupe?”

It gets even funnier when you realize that the verbs we’ve learned are all in the infinitive, but we just dump them in the conversation anyway:

“Hey, could you écumer my stock for me?"

“Chef wants the mushrooms caneller’d”

My standard line is that I do speak French, but the truth is that while I understand almost everything, I am a bit self-conscious about speaking.  A few years of French Immersion, a few classes in university and three levels of Rosetta Stone do give me some advantage, however.  I do feel for the folks at school who don’t have English as their first language.  I can only imagine that learning French via English would for me be a bit like learning Polish through an Italian class.

Other than terminology and definitions, I expect a good bit of the exam will be about the regions and regional specialties of France.  With a few trips to France behind me as well as an elementary knowledge of geography I don’t expect this part to be too hard.  If I were to write that olive oil was a specialty of Calais, or that oysters were common in the Rhône-Alps, I would not only expect to be wrong, but perhaps taken out behind the building and flogged.

A few dozen pages a day, a few new words a day, and with some luck I’ll sail right past this test.  After that, I’ve got bigger bunnies to braiser – the practical test is only a few weeks away.