Category: Food & Wine

Santé or à votre santé? Both mean ‘to your health’ but they are not the same. A practical guide to the French toast — what the words mean, when to use each form, and the unwritten rules every visitor to France should know.

Photo by Polina ⠀ on Pexels An 1858 French Navy regulation turned a humble knitted undershirt into a national icon: it set out a blue-and-white striped top for seamen along the Channel and Atlantic coasts, the idea being that a man overboard would show up against grey water far better in stripes than in plain…

Photo by Timothé Durand on Unsplash Every year the warehouses of Cognac lose the equivalent of roughly twenty million bottles of spirit to evaporation — the vapour that seeps through oak barrels, feeding a black fungus called Torula compniacensis that stains the town’s rooftops dark. Locals call the lost liquid la part des anges, the…

Photo: Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash The word verlan is itself a piece of verlan: take l’envers (“the reverse”), flip the syllables, and you get vers-l’en — verlan. That self-describing trick is the whole game, a coded French built by turning ordinary words back to front so that femme becomes meuf and fou becomes…

Photo by Boudewijn Boer on Unsplash Pour two glasses of Chardonnay grown a few hundred metres apart on the slopes of Burgundy and they can taste noticeably different — one leaner and flinty, the other rounder and riper. That difference, and the French conviction that it matters enormously, is the whole idea behind terroir: the…