Here's a thing - there is something I have no opinion on - barbecues. Not the kind where you go and eat slightly charred meat in your friend's garden whilst another friend sets fire to her hair and yet another arrives not having eaten all day and the first friend, who really really knows what she's talking about, you can trust me on this says to the third friend,
'Don't smoke that dope because you always always go white and pass out,' and he does anyway, goes white and looks like he might faint and then the first friend who really really knows what she's talking about tries to get him to eat a sweet and he refuses and then throws up in the street. No, not that kind of barbecue at all, I mean the apparatus that you cook on.
A couple of years back I used to have an opinion on barbecues. My opinion was that they should hold charcoal. The British barbecue is about the charcoal and the summer and the messing around in the garden for the whole afternoon and the smoke getting in the eyes until you've had so much to drink it doesn't matter anymore. Yes, the first time you smell those charcoals, that's summer.
When I first ate barbecue here I didn't get it. What, I wondered, was the point of having a barbecue without the fuss and the charcoal flavour. I imagine I wondered this loud enough for everyone to hear, that has been known to happen.
The answer is that it's a very good method of cooking and one that Canadians indulge in all year round. And then I got totally used to that and I don't think of it as being one versus the other, I see them as two separate activities.
So now we need a new barbecue. This isn't as simple as buying a disposable table top one from Sainsburys.
We went to Rona (like Homebase) and looked at a number of them. They have different levels and add-on bits, extra burners, shelves, cutting boards, covers. Fortunately, I don't need to have an opinion, I can leave that to Kevin who is going to do the cooking on it anyway and who knows what is good and what ain't.
Whilst I was in Rona, I learned a new French word. Not because there are wandering jongleurs who hang out in DIY shops feeding you a word for the day, not even stray voyageurs, no, simply everything in Canada has to be labelled in both languages. Thus I discovered when looking for sandpaper that the French word for sanding is ponçage. I haven't even bothered to check whether this is just the Québecois word for it, nope, I have just taken this word into my vocabulary. Fancy a bit of ponçage? Doing it yourself? Why not try ponçage? Rough or smooth ponçage? Oh my goodness, in this case, a word is worth a thousand words. I wonder if you can barbecue and do a bit of ponçage at the same time. In Rona though, you do at least get free popcorn with your ponçage. Hot and salty.
What a good thing for the French that whilst I have no opinion on barbecues, I am willing to take time out from my busy schedule to evaluate words in their language, and be most proactive about promoting them.
Ponçage - I wonder if M. Chirac does it, what he wears and where he does it.
4 comments:
well, first of all there's the spelling, yeah, the British re the Canadian spelling. Barbecue is something I have never spelled. I would say barbeque. When they came into fashion, whenever that was -- the seventies, maybe, they were always barbeques, whether they had brickettes or not.
secondly I'l like to mention that certainly not all Canadians do barbeques all year. Only on the West Coast, my dear. Difficult to barbeque in six feet of snow and right now everywhere in Canada, EXCEPT the West Coast, there are piles of snow and very cold temperatures where you would freeze your proverbial ass if you decided you wanted to barbeque on the sundeck or the back yard or whatever.
I have many memories of my father grilling ribs in nearly 6 feet of snow, after I had been put to work clearing a path of course. Those were the days of the natural gas push in Ontario. You would get a discount in service if you had three things changed to gas. Number 3 was the BBQ (just to throw in the american simplistic spelling).
-kevin
Thanks for your comment, Kevin. Naturally, there were fanatics everywhere. But I left Ontario in 1970, when BBQ's (I agree with that spelling incidentally) were not as big as they became later on. So I was not able to see what people in the East did in winter with regard to BBQs. So I shouldn't have been so eager to blare my trumpet. Sorry.
We have indoor barbies! (going for the Aussie spelling)Disposable things from the garage, stick them in the fireplace and the smoke goes up the chimney. Blinding! Although hair burning, falling through tables or heirloom hydrangeas, inappropriate drug use and vomiting are pretty much traditional here.
Simmi
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