There's a subject I need to address here- one that is not totally original, but if this was hugely ground breaking as far as expat blogs go, I'd be writing it from Soroca instead of Paris. Thus I permit myself to share my most recent experience with the locals and their cheese.
If I have learned anything here, it's not to flinch when you are served a plate of moldy cheese. Where I come from, you buy cheese and it's yours until the mold comes in and claims it as its own. You step back and admit defeat thus tossing Mlle Cheese to live out her life with Mr Mold in the trash. In France, defeat doesn't come so easily. The French hang on to it, acknowledging the mold as an added bonus.
I'm always finicky about buying cheese for dinner parties with guests who are -surprise- French. They know where each one comes from, if the brand I chose is good or not, etc. Sometimes I beat the system by buying Italian cheese when I can find it. (Pecorino Pepato, I adore you.)
We had another couple over the other night. After dinner, I routinely brought out the cheese platter along with the salad and set it on the table telling our friends to dig in. No one did.
Conversation continued until I said again for everyone to help themselves.
"You're supposed to cut the cheese first, as the lady of the house," our friend Alex said.
The lady of the house? This was just a casual dinner at the house, not a formal, traditional dining experience. I look around at my friends and husband who, moments ago were from the same generation as me, but are now glancing expectedly in my direction. Hang on, aren't we all twenty-something, hip hop listening, club going, equal opportunity young adults who at one time or another have tried smoking a doobie? They weren't really going to hold this to me, where they?
It only got more confusing when Alex explained that it's so the guests know which cheese is the best and how it should be cut. Can't we make an exception if the "lady of the house" comes from a land where you can find cheese that comes out of a can? French friends looking to the American as the model of how to handle the cheese- that's like looking to an Amish person for advice on your car engine.
Perhaps I thought it over too much because when I sliced it up, no one gave any (verbal) objection and our soirée continued. Lesson learned: Lady of the house calls the shots. Whether it be moldy or Italian, no one contests to how she cuts the cheese.