Since the writing of my blog entry Pain with everything, the penny’s dropped on the true rôle of pain in French dining. Or, at least, dining on the farm which I’ve been visiting since 1996. In that blog entry, I’d made the observation that Serge and Jeanette even have pain with my Chinese fried rice, which is stodge on stodge. Fair enough, people who engage in manual work need a carb-rich diet.
On this latest (winter) trip, however, I’ve come up with a new theory. (My brain’s very slow at working things out, as you’ll have gathered by now…)
Unless there are special guests, dining within the family only requires one piece of crockery: a concave plate which works well as a soup bowl too. One generally starts with soup, at the end of which one wipes the plate clean with the pain. Next comes the main course (meat or fish or whatever, which would generally leave some kind of residue, be it fat, gravy or juice). Again, the pain wipes the plate clean. Then the salad, and yet again the pain is there to clean up — in this case, the dressing.
A flatmate (the stammerer in my blog entry Wrong footed) once told me he’d stayed in a French monastery where the diners ate out of hollows in the dining table instead of plates. At the end of the meal, they’d tilt the table upright against the wall, and only needed to chuck buckets of water at the table to wash up because each course would be literally wiped out with the ubiquitous pain, so there wasn’t any scrubbing to do.
So the rôle of pain in the French farm’s, and also that particular monastery’s, style of dining is not only as a “filler” (of the stomach) but also an “emptier” (of the plate). How ecological! No wonder Colette’s always reassuring me that nothing’s ever wasted on the farm.
(France, 2011/2012)
No comments:
Post a Comment