French Kids Eat Everything

sprang to life: fresh baguettes tucked under arms, cobblestone streets, church bells, café courtyards in the sun, ivy trailing up the stone walls of our house. It was the height of the local farm festival season (complete with pig roasts and cornfield mazes for the kids); between farm visits and family visits, we spent our days wandering the local countryside.
Just below the house was the beach: a glorious expanse of smooth white sand running a mile wide and half a mile deep at low tide, ringed by rocky cliffs and turquoise water. I knew that so much sand could only be produced by storm-driven waves, and I was well aware of Brittany’s reputation as an incessantly rainy place, but as July turned into August, the weather was mostly balmy. The girls played for hours in the sand while we read books, lounged, and dozed (me) or sailed, windsurfed, and kayaked (Philippe).
Le paradis!
Gradually, we began meeting our neighbors. Early one rainy morning, I glanced out the window to see a man suspiciously clad in a large garbage bag, which he had fashioned like a cape by poking a hole through the end. He was standing amidst the bushes that separated our house from his, searching carefully through the leaves, popping things too small for me to see into another large garbage bag he was holding in his hands.
“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Philippe.
“Collecting snails,” he replied, after a quick look out the window.
“To eat?” was my astonished response.
“If you’re really nice, maybe he’ll share!” teased my husband.
The neighbor did invite us over the next day to sample some of his harvest, which I politely declined (although Philippe happily went to eat a plateful of baked snails with garlic and came back two hours later looking highly satisfied).
Thankfully, Mr. Snail (as I took to calling him) was not our only visitor. In fact, a stream of family and friends came by to welcome us. Philippe was one of the first members of his family to leave the region, and many of his relatives hadn’t strayed far from home. His mother and her two sisters—talkative, stylish, domineering matriarchs—now lived less than five miles from where they had grown up in a small farming hamlet. They typically visited in a pack—aunts, uncles, and cousins in tow—and would take over the kitchen for hours, cooking family meals, endlessly telling stories, filling the house to the brim.
Although I would often half-heartedly offer to help out with cooking, I was usually shooed away. My reputation as a cooking novice had been established soon after meeting Philippe’s family, with a memorable culinary disaster. My sister-in-law, Véronique, had just met her future husband, Benoît, and they had traveled down from Paris to introduce him to the family. This being Benoît’s first visit, Philippe and I had made the trip over on the ferry from England. When we arrived, my mother-in-law, Janine, was fussing over the arrangements for the meal. Boldly asserting that I could make a great apple pie, complete with a homemade crust, I proudly rolled up my sleeves and did indeed produce a lovely looking tarte aux pommes—with pastry so hard that it was impossible to cut. When enough force was applied, the crust shattered into tiny pieces. I had apparently come up with a great recipe for flour-based cement. After that, I was pretty much banned from cooking, which suited me just fine. I would do the dishes, or just sit and enjoy the endless bantering, yet affectionate, conversations.
Listening to Philippe’s family talking to my daughters, I began to learn the endearments that the French reserve for small children. Many of them revolve around food. Janine’s favorite was ma cocotte (mon coco for boys), literally, “my little chick.” Much to his discomfort, she still occasionally called my husband mon petit chou (my little cabbage). I soon learned some of my own endearments and would tease Philippe by calling him mon trognon de pomme (my apple core). Jo, Philippe’s normally reserved father, would call his grandchildren mon lapin (my rabbit), which is, of course, an edible animal for the French.
Food was even a theme of the children’s songs that our daughters learned from their cousins: “Savez-vous planter les choux” (Do you know how to plant cabbages?), “Dame tartine” (Bread-and-butter lady), “Les temps des cerises” (Cherry season), and my personal favorite, “Oh l’escargot” (an ode to snails that sounds wonderful in two-part harmony). Food, it was clear, was an important part of how French families interacted with their children. But before we moved to France I didn’t really understand the central role that food plays in formal French education.
That all changed when Claire started day care in mid-August. The plan was that she would be settled before Sophie started school in September. But she wasn’t settling in well at all. And eating, in particular, wasn’t going well. Claire was expected (like all French children) to eat the freshly prepared three-course lunch prepared on site by one of the staff. But Claire’s diet at the time was like that of many North American toddlers: made up largely of cereals (in her case, buttered toast and crackers), complemented by largely symbolic attempts at feeding her the standard vegetables (carrots, peas), most of which she simply refused to chew. This was normal, I thought. But, as I soon found out, that’s not what the day-care staff thought.
It all started with beet puree, in an episode that was the first of my many culinary faux pas. In the last week of August, we were invited to a meeting at the day care: an information session, or so I thought, remembering the equivalent back home, where we had discussed hand-washing hygiene with a public nurse and toured the facilities. My expectations were wrong. When we dutifully arrived at 4:30 in the afternoon, no nurse or antiseptic hand wipes were to be seen. The smiling staff welcomed us with elegant amuse-bouches (a term for cocktail nibbles that literally means “entertain the mouth”). On