A French Family Thanksgiving

Friends of ours who are French, but who lived for many years in the United States, invited us over for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday night. Here's how the cross-cultural menu went.

We started with cucumbers topped with creme fraiche, followed by pate de campagne:


After this the turkey came out, accompanied by chestnut stuffing, mashed potatoes and roasted sweet potatoes (not casseroled, and certainly not with marshmallows, something I don't believe the French even have a word for):


Here's how the whole meal looked, with the turkey already carved (it was served buffet-style because this family has just moved to a new apartment and hasn't yet furnished it, not because it's a particularly French tradition):


There was, of course, bread:


And three types of wine:


Dessert was a pumpkin tart, made with canned pumpkin that an American cousin smuggled over in her suitcase. (You can actually get fresh pumpkins here if you look hard enough, but it's enough of a pain to turn them into pie that even most American cooks prefer to use canned.) Served with champagne.



How was it? Excellent. The turkey in particular was remarkable, smaller but much more flavorful than American turkeys. I think the French treat their turkeys the same way they treat their chickens: with reverence for the breed and a free-range upbringing.

One more difference from the American version of Thanksgiving: we didn't start eating till around 9:30 p.m. It was a workday, after all, and the French never sit down to dinner till well after 8 anyway. By the time we got done, close to 1 a.m., the Metro had closed for the night.