Roast turkeys ahead of Thanksgiving
© AFP/File Stan Honda PARIS (AFP) - So as Americans prepared to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner this Thursday, Paris' US embassy gathered a learned panel of food scholars from both sides to mull trans-Atlantic taste-bud tension.
France, the academics agreed, remained the haven of classy cuisine where cooking has been elevated to the rank of art-form.
US cuisine maintained a poor image of tasteless fast food and of waging cultural imperialism by pervading the globe with its own uniform tastes.
After partaking of French-raised turkey with US corn bread and cranberries and Alaskan King crab and French truffles -- and much more -- concocted by the embassy's French chef, the academics pledged to work for culinary harmony.
"Food is more a bare-bones nutritional issue in the United States," said anthropologist Christy Shields-Argeles."It's more about proteins and carbohydrates, eating only what's good for you."
"Pleasure's often viewed as being bad for health," she added. "Slim energetic people are successful people, being overweight denotes failure."
French gastronomic talk was all the contrary, with the accent on the social pleasures of a shared meal, and not on the individual. "Good food is about friendship and about shared identities. You don't eat alone."
But table habits aside, all agreed that without US input, a gamut of succulent fare would never have made it to world palates.
Crossovers, industrial know-how and lifestyle patterns had all played a role.
At the most basic, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate and the Thanksgiving turkey itself all travelled east across the seas to captivate the old world, said geographer Jean-Robert Pitte.
-- In the US, pleasure's often viewed as being bad for health --
But Europeans added chestnuts and truffles to the stuffing of these birds big enough to feed large families that came to replace the geese and capon once favoured by European aristocrats. And Americans came to like this contribution.
Chocolate from the Americas delighted Catholics in Spain and Portugal because the sweet liquid was nourishing and enabled believers not to break their fast. Then the Protestants of Holland and Switzerland turned it into powder and solids.
"But nowadays bars of chocolate are associated with the US," he said.
Another such back-and-forth Atlantic crossover was the tomato, Pitte noted. Used in pizzas in Naples, Americans added sugar and softened up the dough. "These are the kind of pizzas sold across Europe today," he said.
Canned food was a purely US contribution to world food, said academic Julia Csergo, the first of a series of technological advances that offered up frozen foods, chemically-processed sauces, freeze-dried produce and other mass consumption foodstuffs.
"The arrival of cheap, canned US beef in the 20th century gave rise to the idea that Americans possessed a wealth of produce and were huge eaters," she said. "This is when French gourmets began accusing the US of threatening the national cuisine."
But France too left an imprint on US tastebuds, said historian Mary Hyman.
To begin with, the French gave the world restaurant parlance -- hors d'oeuvres and entrees -- as well as the "quiche", the "omelette" and "croissant" though they may not taste the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
And New England's "chowder" in fact is a French dish from western Brittany, a "chaudiere" of fish, mussels and lard. "And where would American cooking be without mayonnaise, a French invention," she said.
To hammer home these messages of culinary melange, next July will see the first ever edition of a Franco-US festival of food and music held in Dijon, heart of the Burgundy wine country, titled "4-14" in celebration of both countries' national days.