Saturday, September 27, 2008

Comprendez-vous francais?

During Ramadan pretty much every restaurant is closed until evening, which means I've been eating lunch at the office a lot. Thankfully my friend Serdar's wife works somewhere where they have a cafeteria that is still open during the day so Serdar and I went out there for lunch one day. The menu was French cuisine.

Now I studied French for a number of years in school. Not that I wanted to, it was just a requirement of the school system in Canada at the time. Now I wish I had paid more attention as I'm getting more interested in learning other languages. But as it stands my legacy of French knowledge from all those years of schooling is pretty dismal. And a little knowledge can be quite dangerous. Which is why when I saw couple of the items on the menu I was really thrown:

Boeuf a la mode et sa garniture
Poulet cocotte grand mere


What do you think these are?

My rough translation of the first one was "beef in a sauce and a garnish" but it was the second one that really threw me because I thought "cocotte" meant prostitute. I'll leave it to you to try and figure out what the rest of that one is from there.

Thankfully I spoke later to a French colleague who clarified what the real translation was. Just a misunderstanding on my part as there is a second meaning of cocotte.


The beef was really tasty.

But I didn't try the chicken.

1 comment:

Magnus said...

My favourite pasta sauce is called puttanesca, or Pasta alla Puttanesca. The meaning translates as "Pasta the way a whore would make it".
Any whore who could make a sauce like that is welcome to be the mother of my children any day.