French Kids Eat Everything

of meat from lobster claws. Or I might be asked to use a thin metal toothpick to extract slimy things (whose names I couldn’t remember) from slimy shells. And then eat them—gracefully.
So it felt like an exam every time I sat down for a meal with other people, which was made all the more excruciating because the meals could last for two to three hours, or even more. The other thing that I found overwhelming about French meals was that several conversations would be going on at any one time. The French don’t really have a linear approach to dialogue at the dinner table. The only rules seem to be that
(A) more simultaneous conversations are better than fewer; and
(B) clever interruptions—particularly to make a sardonic joke—score you the most points.
The uninhibited interweaving of multiple conversations seemed to contradict the rigidity of the French approach to eating (I realized later that for the French, conversation and food go together like beer and sports do for North Americans). I found it intimidating and often simply couldn’t keep up, much less get a word in edgewise. It didn’t help that my French was far from perfect. I could carry on calm one-on-one conversations, but although I had a good accent, I still sometimes garbled longer sentences and was stumped by translations for complicated words. The pained, confused expressions on people’s faces would bring me to a stumbling halt.
Admittedly, this wasn’t only an anti-French feeling; I felt the same way about fancy meals anywhere. I remember one miserable meal at Oxford very clearly. I had been invited to sit at the High Table with the dons and found myself sitting face to face with one of the world’s top experts in my area of study. He proceeded to grill me about my interests and background while I squirmed in my chair. Almost everything about the setting made me uncomfortable. For starters, there were way more forks, spoons, and knives surrounding my plate than I knew what to do with. Bewildered by the choices, I simply sat still while everyone else started eating. An attentive neighbor must have noticed my lost look; suavely, not missing a beat in the conversation, he reached over and briskly tapped the fork that I was meant to pick up. Grateful yet embarrassed, I started eating.
But my sense of relief didn’t last long. We had been served green peas, my nemesis. My neighbors were deftly maneuvering them onto their forks and eating them without a second thought. I, on the other hand, tried to spear them with what I presumed was mannered delicacy (at home I would have used a spoon). But the peas (undercooked in a way only the British could manage) resisted, and I had to chase them around the plate. One vigorous swipe with my fork, and a particularly large pea gave a mighty jump across the table and landed on the plate of my interrogator, bringing our conversation to an abrupt halt.
Memories like these were hard to erase. So when our first dinner invitation came, I wasn’t at all eager to accept. Virginie and Hugo, Philippe’s old university friends, were organizing a reunion dinner. Half a dozen couples were invited, some of whom Philippe hadn’t seen in years. My first reaction was, predictably, anxiety: passing muster at a dinner with old friends was not something I was looking forward to.
In fact, I knew that I probably wouldn’t pass muster, at least not through engaging in rapid-fire, witty conversations around the dinner table. In desperation, I picked up a book on French etiquette that was intended for Americans living in France. As I read with a sinking feeling in my heart, Polly Platt’s sage advice (based on decades of living in Paris) was to pretend to be a piece of furniture—an elegant chair, to be precise. That way, she advised, you wouldn’t feel the need to speak, you wouldn’t make everyone squirm (listening to your mangled French), and you wouldn’t feel bad when no one spoke to you the entire evening. This is going to be awful, I thought.
To be frank, I was also worried that the dinner would be an occasion for Philippe’s friends to evaluate me rather than befriend me. The question would apply to my children as well. Were they bien éduqué? This upped the ante because I knew that Sophie and Claire were simply not ready to eat the way French children did. Even if I managed to get through a meal without mishap, they probably wouldn’t. They would whine (a serious faux pas), react negatively to the food being served (even worse), or refuse to eat (perhaps the worst offense of all).
My reaction spurred the second big fight of our year in France. I didn’t want to go, and I certainly didn’t want to bring our daughters although all of the other couples were apparently doing so. I didn’t really understand why it was so important that we all go together, but it was clear that it was important to Philippe.
“We could leave the kids with your parents,” I suggested to my husband one evening.
“But all of the other children will be there, and they’ll miss out on the fun!” protested Philippe.
“We won’t start eating until really late, we’ll finish way after midnight, and the kids will be exhausted! You wouldn’t ask them to run a marathon at this age, so why ask them to stay up all night just for a dinner?” I retorted.
“Because!” snapped my husband, fuming. “That is how I was raised! And that is how French children should be raised!”
I realized I didn’t really have an answer to that one. That is how French children are raised. From quite a young age, they accompany their parents through long dinners, which sometimes start very late by North American standards. And in France, get-togethers with family and close friends, especially meals, are often multigenerational affairs. In this case, everyone was not only welcome, but also expected to come. From my