Dusoulier Clotilde - Edible French: tasty expressions and cultural bites

The seed of an idea was planted, and two weeks later I started a series of posts on my food blog, Chocolate & Zucchini, to shed light on what I dubbed the edible idioms of the French language. Ive always loved the idiosyncrasies of languages and what they tell us about a culture, and it is certainly striking to see the French love of food and the importance meals have in daily life translate so richly in the fabric of the language. Matters of the table are considered with such care and attention that whenever the French mind searches for an expression to illustrate a situation, it is likely to come up with a food-related metaphor or simile, one that has to do with bread or cheese or wine. Researching those expressions was as much a treat for me as for my readers; this series soon became one of my most popular, and I was often asked whether I had plans to publish them as a book. The spark for that came four years later, when Mlina Josserand first contacted me. A French watercolor artist living in London, she was a fan of those posts and was volunteering to illustrate them.

I was instantly smitten with the playfulness of her work and her eye for color, and after collaborating on a few posts and hitting it off like wed known each other all our lives, we decided to turn my words and her brushstrokes into the book you are now holding in your hands. In it youll find fifty of the most delicious expressions of the French language, some of them favorites from the blog series, some of them all new, with example sentences and Mlinas gorgeous illustrations. Youll also find cultural notes, fun quizzes, and a few very easy but very tasty recipes inspired by some of these idioms. We hope you enjoy this colorful window onto the French language and that youll make your honey out of it.

It is a self-deprecatingly funny phrase to use on yourself but becomes unkind if youre referring to others: It implies that the person has tried to dress with elegance but lacks the class or figure to pull it off. This expression is chiefly applied to women. A more masculine, though seldom-used equivalent is a lui va comme des gutres un lapin. (It suits him like gaiters on a rabbit.) Example