Mocking Potential

Saturday night was the AIT/FEU Thanksgiving dinner dance. (Americans In Toulouse/France-Etats Unis) (France-Etats Unis is another club in Toulouse, this one made up of mostly French people who actually want to meet Americans and practice their English on them.)

We haven’t attended an AIT event in a very long time, but since I’m on the board now it seemed like something I should probably attend. Mind, the idea of a ‘traditional’ American Thanksgiving prepared in a French restaurant was just too hard to refuse, I mean think of all the mocking potential.

First of all, I’m not much of a social butterfly, I mean you know me, I love a great conversation with someone who actually has something to say, but socializing just for the sake of meeting people – most of whom I would not actually choose to speak with on a normal day – just not something I enjoy or am good at. So usually when we attend these events we find a nice place to sit in a quiet corner and enjoy our meal, maybe a little dancing and some people watching.

Not so Saturday night, now I don’t want to compare it to a Hollywood entrance or anything, but when word started to circulate that Missy Walters had arrived, people were coming at me from everywhere. Since I’m the membership coordinator, I’m usually one of the first contacts that people have with the club; the first name they hear. New members wanted to introduce themselves face to face, old members wanted to lodge complaints face to face, total strangers wanted to know how to join and discuss what AIT activities they might enjoy and some total strangers just wanted to touch ‘the belly’ and ask when I was due, weirdos. I ended up with a pocket-ful of cards and slips of paper with people’s e-mail addresses and notes about what they wanted.

The French restaurateur I believe was appalled by the fact that the meal would not open with a salad and would not be served in courses. So instead of doing it the American way he tailored the event to make us more civilized. As we sat down (at 9:00 pm, mind we’d been there since 7:30) our aperitif glasses were taken away and a salad was set down before us. It was your typical French salad, greens accompanied by two large slabs of fois gras. We Americans all became very silent and a bit frightened at that point and began to look around for the moron who might actually have asked for fois gras or served it at their Thanksgiving table. But it turned out to be the restaurateurs’ sole idea. Mind I love fois gras, but we all began to wonder what the next ‘course’ would bring; no family style service here. When our actual thanksgiving dinner plates arrived they were arranged in the traditional French artistic style. Two thick slices of turkey breast covered in a thin white sauce that I suppose was meant to be gravy, and several ‘molded’ side items.

There was a perfectly round disk of sliced sweet potato (one disk), a muffin tin sized mold of something that mildly resembled stuffing, except that it was crunchy and dry but not too far off the mark in the taste department, an oblong mold of something white and very light in texture that no one ever identified and a tablespoon sized bit of cranberry sauce.

Cranberry sauce is a very expensive import, you can get it in some of the mega stores, and you get a 4oz glass jar for about $2.50, so it was served sparingly.

There were these very hard and dry bricks of what we all agreed must be cornbread, but served without any honey or butter to un-brick them.

I ate my entire salad and fois gras, fois gras is very filling thank goodness, and so I was able to get away with just nibbling at the turkey course.

The white molded stuff was distinctly flavorless, I thought maybe it was like a mashed potato mousse or something, someone else suggested it was cauliflower, someone else said celery, one man said he knew that it was a regional French vegetable that resembled a beet. Anyway, we all at least tried it, but no one finished it since we were unable to establish what it actually was.

The restaurant owner, unsure what wine to serve with this horrid collection of things, provided us with a nice red and a chilled white and plenty of ice water, which was a real treat. (Ice water is never served in France, even McDonalds only puts two or three little cubes in their cokes, the French don’t do ice.)

The next course was the dessert. The pumpkin pie was served swimming in cream (not whipped) and a slab of chocolate mouse or cake or something. Dessert isn’t dessert without chocolate. The man across from me commented that it was a pie and it was made of pumpkin, but it definitely was NOT pumpkin pie. He was right.

Anyway the evening was completed with a DJ that played nothing but French and/or American Disco all night; you can see what a party it really was. The only true upside was that we didn’t have to endure any football games.