FRENCH WOMEN DON’T SNACK
In my teens, you would never find me combing the refrigerator for something to nibble. I wouldn’t dare. The white, double-doored box at the end of the kitchen was forbidden territory. Growing up, it never occurred to me that this was unusual. Not eating between meals was simply obligatory in our home.
In many ways, I had this edict to thank for my 5’10” 119-pound frame. While the mandate for no snacking did keep me lean, it wasn’t for a concern overweight that drove my French mama to hold the line, but an ancestral commandment that in many ways was more ritual than routine—
French Women Don’t Snack.
I didn’t read this in a book. I didn’t have to. The truth of the statement wasn’t based on some outsider’s research of a particular culture but on first-hand experience.
My way of life. A way of thinking and being that in nearly every important way formed my relationship with the Kitchen.
Experts will tell you that we inherit approximately half of our DNA from our mother. So when I tell you that I am French, it is not only a proud proclamation but the genetic truth of being the daughter of Jacqueline Blanche, who was just about as genetically French as she could be.
I am not saying that Jacqueline was “all French” in her DNA. Her daddy, Walter [how I love that name] was a WWI American soldier after all. But when Walter marched into Remirement, France in 1918, along with fighting for an entire country he won the heart of French girl, Blanche Rouselle, who changed her whole world for one man’s love.
You can take the girl out of France but you can’t take France out of the girl. And so her three American daughters were raised French in every possible way. While the other two sisters rebelled against their tiny Maman, her daughter, my mama leaned into her heritage and became French, in spirit and in style.
I can’t remember a time that I didn’t feel French. I adored my mama. And even though, at twelve, I towered over her 5’ 2” frame [DNA from my 6’ 3” daddy], I wanted to be like her…be her…in the way she formed her words, the way she dressed, the way she wore her red French lipstick just so.
She was an original. And though her ways were my “normal”, I was reminded by my friends during their overnight stays just how uncommon so many things were.
Which brings me back to the kitchen. There are thousands of embedded DNA cues that make us who we are today. Like the fact that I can never open the refrigerator without thinking of my mama. I imagine there are a hundred little memories that inform the ‘you’ that you are now.
As with our people, we have relationships with our places…our spaces…that challenge us, soothe us, remind us who we were and who we are.
Like a tiny galaxy all its own, what is discovered when I open that refrigerator door is a foreign and familiar world inhabited simultaneously by remote ascendants I never knew and intimate sojourners whose blood runs through my veins. Foreign and familiar.
These are the stories I tell over a cooktop. Like my primordial ancestors who bragged about the hunt around an open fire, my prized catch are the remnants of the past that show up in real-time, every day…whispering, reminding, coaxing me to value the what was and begging me to make the what is more beautiful.
I remind myself to be careful not to dismiss the little things like refrigerator doors.