Goddam Frogs
May. 25th, 2006 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryWe have a market here that sells only imported packaged foods. It caters to the various expatriate communities. For example it has about two dozen different kinds of British marmalades, costing anything up to $20 a jar, a hundred varieties of Russian candies; Brazilian soda, and so on. For a long time it was the only place where one could find something as essential to life as Nutella.
In the French section I recently saw a package of croissants filled with what purported to be a sort of Ersatz Nutella. I knew that they would not be proper croissants—the kind my wife got everyday at the bakery during her college year in France, and which the French consider to be stale by noon on the day they baked, their samurai-sword-like foldings already loosing their particular nescio quid. The picture—the kind of thing one could not tell whether it were a photo realist painting or a heavily retouched photos—did not seem entirely deceptive—it did not show a croissant, but something that looked more like the pastry shell of an éclair coated in large lumps of raw sugar, with the chocolate paste oozing out melted out from the heat of the microwave. That at least would be edible and would not strain my nerves with preparation after arising at 6:00 each morning with the baby.
But what we found inside the package was an unspeakable horror: the sacramental fare of the cult of Chthulu. My wife described it as a hot-dog bun filled with thickened Hershey’s syrup.
She is convinced that no Frenchman would eat this, that it could not be sold to Frenchmen, that it must be marketed in France only to the Berber community. As much as she hates the French, she cannot imagine them stepping so far out of character as to consume such a thing in the place of their beloved croissants. But is clear to me that this is a sign that French culture is merely becoming as corrupt as that in America, for all their Gallic posturing.
In the French section I recently saw a package of croissants filled with what purported to be a sort of Ersatz Nutella. I knew that they would not be proper croissants—the kind my wife got everyday at the bakery during her college year in France, and which the French consider to be stale by noon on the day they baked, their samurai-sword-like foldings already loosing their particular nescio quid. The picture—the kind of thing one could not tell whether it were a photo realist painting or a heavily retouched photos—did not seem entirely deceptive—it did not show a croissant, but something that looked more like the pastry shell of an éclair coated in large lumps of raw sugar, with the chocolate paste oozing out melted out from the heat of the microwave. That at least would be edible and would not strain my nerves with preparation after arising at 6:00 each morning with the baby.
But what we found inside the package was an unspeakable horror: the sacramental fare of the cult of Chthulu. My wife described it as a hot-dog bun filled with thickened Hershey’s syrup.
She is convinced that no Frenchman would eat this, that it could not be sold to Frenchmen, that it must be marketed in France only to the Berber community. As much as she hates the French, she cannot imagine them stepping so far out of character as to consume such a thing in the place of their beloved croissants. But is clear to me that this is a sign that French culture is merely becoming as corrupt as that in America, for all their Gallic posturing.
