French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Billon (classic english novels txt) 📕

loomed, but I just didn’t have the energy to try again. My mood matched the weather: cold, rainy, miserable. I was terribly lonely and regretted having decided to move our family to France. What had I been thinking? It wasn’t even snowing: we were going to have a wet, rather than white, Christmas. I spent long hours on the phone with my sister in Montreal, who tried in vain to cheer me up.

The only bright spot was the girls’ enthusiasm for their first family Christmas in France. Before we moved, we had never managed to come for Christmas: flights were too expensive, and neither Philippe nor I could get enough time off work. The girls were thrilled at the thought of all their cousins gathered around the table. They wanted to help prepare food for the big dinner that Tante Monique was hosting (our contribution to this seven-course meal was a few hors d’oeuvres) and happily accompanied me on our last-minute market outings. They even came with me on our last pre-Christmas visit to the farm. As usual, they ran to visit the animals as I picked up our baskets of food. Their favorite was Arthur the Pig, who had sadly disappeared (“Gone on a holiday to Canada,” Hubert the farmer told them with a twinkle in his eye).

Even without snow, Christmas did seem magical. Gorgeous lights went up in the village, and the shops were full of intricate, intriguing window displays (watching the girls stick their noses up against the windows made me understand why window-shopping in France is called faire du lèche-vitrine—literally “licking the windows”). The girls even got to visit with Père Noël, who arrived by boat every year a few days before Christmas. The village children waited in a little huddle at the port on the edge of an old stone walkway. As Père Noël rounded the corner in a skiff, they walked down the cobblestoned quay to meet him, confessing their sins and demanding their gifts with wavelets lapping their boots. Then Père Noël sailed off around the rocky headland. Sophie and Claire came back glowing from this encounter, which seemed much more magical than the shopping mall scene back home.

So, when Christmas Eve arrived (the traditional time for family dinners in France), I was feeling slightly (but only slightly) reconciled to being there. But I was still anxious about how the girls would behave, knowing that we’d be up well past midnight in the presence of almost every member of the extended family. Philippe tried his best to gently encourage me as we drove over to his aunt’s house.

“Try to relax,” he said. “If they see you being anxious, they will be too. If they see you trying new foods, they will too. And if they see their friends and family enjoying new foods, it will be that much easier.”

I tried to take his comments to heart. It was easier than we had expected as we arrived at the already-full house, where animated conversations were in full swing. With thirty people there, the obligatory greetings and bises took us at least half an hour, during which I had already lost track of Claire and Sophie, who had been taken under the wing of older cousins and chaperoned to the children’s table. I decided I would not let myself worry too much about what or how they were eating. People didn’t seem to be that focused on it—there were simply too many children to keep track of (another advantage of large families, I decided). Plus, the mises en bouches were already circulating: carpaccio de St. Jacques, smoked salmon (with little morsels cleverly perched in tiny little white ladle-like spoons, surrounded by creamy lemon sauce), and tart verrines aux agrumes (tiny glasses filled with citrus mousse).

In the end, the dinner went more smoothly than I could have hoped. Meals at the cantine and crèche had apparently taught the girls more than I had been able to teach them at home; they proudly sat in their chairs, “just like the big kids,” right through dinner. And although both Claire and Sophie politely refused the foie gras (which I couldn’t bring myself to eat either), they devoured the melt-in-your mouth pintade de Noël (guinea fowl) with gusto. They didn’t eat much else, but nobody seemed to notice.

Just as at Hugo and Virginie’s, the children ran off to play, leaving the adults to enjoy their conversation. After a plateau de fromage worthy of the Ritz (Monique actually wheeled the tray around on a cheese trolley, with a specially made cheese knife), everyone came back together for the bûche de Noël—the traditional Yule log cake, complete with bark (chocolate buttercream), holly leaves and berries (marzipan), and snow (powdered sugar). As the youngest person still awake (the babies having been put to bed), Claire got the first piece—and clearly reveled in every second of the attention she was getting.

In fact, I had expected Claire to break down in a tantrum by 10:00 P.M., but she just kept going. It helped that new things to eat, each more delicious than the last, kept emerging from the kitchen. It also helped that her cousins were behaving as if this was all perfectly normal. By midnight, I was wondering aloud whether I should put her and Sophie to bed. But my apparently Puritanical fanaticism about the girls’ bed-time was firmly overruled several times by the extended family (“Why, you can’t put them to bed now! They would miss all the fun!”).

So Sophie and Claire managed to stay up well past the champagne at midnight (only one sip!) and, in the end, put themselves to bed. One after the other, they curled up (Claire on the sofa, Sophie in a carpeted corner with pillows) and contentedly drifted off to sleep. After sitting at the table for more than five hours, I blearily longed to join them. When it was time to go, after 2:00 A.M., Philippe and I picked them up and put them over