Being that my Scottish boyfriend is half French, I thought it would be a good idea to enrol in a French class. I’m just about done with my first beginner’s course and I’ve learned that we use a bunch of French words incorrectly in American English, particularly when it comes to food related items. I learned today something that made no sense whatsoever. We were learning vocabulary for clothing and fashion. The phrase à la mode meant in fashion or in style. And I raised my hand to ask (rather stupidly in retrospect) can it also mean with ice cream?? Everyone looked at me confused, including my French teacher, and I had to explain that in the States if you order a dessert, or pudding (as they call it here) à la mode it means they will serve the dessert with a scoop of ice cream. My French teacher didn’t know of anyone using à la mode in that respect and we couldn’t figure out how/why the usage came about. He did mention that you could prepare a meal à la mode de some region in France; it would be prepared specifically to certain standards. So I don’t know, it’s either fashionable to order your dessert with ice cream (not so for dieters ie the entire population) or somehow the idea of preparing a meal to certain standards got lost in translation somewhere. Je ne sais pas.
The other two examples Marc pointed out to me when he came to visit me in Chicago. He thought the entrées on a menu in a normally priced restaurant seemed a bit pricey, and I reassured him it would be worth the money, you could make another meal out of the leftovers. Then he made a comment somewhere along the lines of ‘no wonder you guys are so fat, I can only image the size of your mains.’ To which I replied, ‘it is the main course!’ He burst out laughing and really didn’t believe me until he noticed my blank stare. He then explained that entrée really means ‘starter.’ I was completely befuddled because my whole life I’d only known entrée to mean ‘main dish.’
The last example comes from when Marc encountered his first Italian beef sandwich, a Chicagoan classic. I told him typically you get it with au jus sauce spread on the sandwich. To which he informed me that I was repeating myself. Au jus is the juice from meat. So actually, as a waitress, whenever I asked someone if they wanted their Italian beef with au jus sauce, I was asking if they wanted the juice sauce; basically I was saying sauce sauce. I genuinely thought au jus was a special kind of sauce just for Italian beef…Come to think of it, there really isn’t much Italian about Italian beef; it comes on a Viennese Kaiser roll with au jus. We totally mixed that one up…but that I guess that is the beauty of the US of A. All these different cultures came together, melding their different traditions into what eventually became American traditions. We’ve just had to suffer the losses in translation along the way.
