Bageless

A food shop near us is selling 2 kg of potatoes from the Ile de Ré in its own wooden box for 6 euros (similar new French potatoes are 1.60 euros a kilo). Can anyone tell me what's so singular about potatoes from this island off the Atlantic coast?

In early January 1973, when I was 15, my family arrived in Menton by train and at the station my parents asked a taxi driver to bring us to any hotel by the beach. My father was taking a year's leave from work in Washington and my parents had decided we should go to France. Someone had recommended Menton so there we were. We stayed at that hotel for a week while my parents hunted for apartment to rent. Each day while they looked for a place for us to live for a few months my younger siblings and I spent hours on the stony beach. It was winter but very mild to us. There were bits and pieces of colored marble tiles washed up on the beach and we built little towns from them. Eventually my parents found an apartment to sublet in a big apartment building on a hill, called the Sospel I think. It had a dome and you could see it from almost anywhere in town. My brother and sister and I were enrolled in school, and on the floors of the classroom I recognized the designs we'd seen on the tile pieces on the beach. We stayed until mid-March but that first week on the beach was the most wonderful period of freedom.

Thanks, everyone. I'll use lardons. While we're on the subject, what would prociutto be? (I hope it's jambon du pays because we've got plenty of that.) I'm in the central Pyrenees, by the way.

I've got a recipe from an American cookbook that calls for pancetta and I'm in France. Does anyone know what the charcuterie equivalent of this Italian meat would be here?

I read some years ago in a British newspaper an explanation for the American habit of switching the fork to the right hand after cutting. In Europe up till about the 17th century people ate with 2 knives, cutting with the right hand while spearing bringing to the mouth with the left. Then someone started producing knives with a couple tines on the end to better hold onto the food. This gradually evolved into the fork. In the American colonies, there were no molds to make forks, but the colonists wanted to follow the new fashion of not using 2 knives, so they used the spoon to hold down the food. Thus they were forced to switch the spoon to the other hand to lift the food. By the time forks were available the habit was entrenched and Americans continued to switch over.

I've lived in Europe for 12 years and hold my knife and fork like they do here, always keeping fork in left hand. On a recent visit to the US the woman opposite me at a big dinner party kept staring at me, her eyes tracking my left hand as it brought the fork to my mouth. She looked kind of alarmed. Is eating that way considered rude there? I had a lot of contact with Europeans while growing up in America so don't remember thinking anything of it. My 2 kids eat that way too of course, and will be going to summer camp in the States for the first time this year. Will other campers think they're weird?

I did try the pumpkin flowers with a recipe in which they are stuffed and chilled but not cooked. (Stuffing was breast of chicken sauteed in olive oil and a couple spoonfuls of cognac, then chopped in food processor and mixed with some whipped up butter and chopped fresh marjoram. Then the stuffed blossoms were chilled in fridge for a couple hours and served with a vinaigrette.) I found the flowers that had opened up had a lot of bugs and were tougher. I ended up going back out to the garden and picking some younger ones. The stuffing was very nice and may use it to stuff something else. The flowers didn't have much taste; maybe I will try the batter recipe given above. This was my first home experiment with squash flowers. I recently had them at a restaurant here (France) stuffed with ground shrimp and other things and they were excellent.

I have a garden of out-of-control pumpkin plants and must pinch off some of the flowers. Do they give the same result as zucchini flowers when stuffed?

Someone mentioned portion size of other courses as a factor. When I visit the US (from Europe) I rarely order dessert unless I can split it with someone because I've already left 1/3 of my food on the plate -- it's just too much!

We are always on the lookout for a new Indian restaurant in Toulouse because none of the ones still operating has been worth a second visit. (We did find one we really liked, run by a Pakistani, but when we went back it was gone.) In one of them we told the waiter to make it hotter than usual because we weren't French. He replied that he'd already noted on the order that we were English -- he said in the kitchen they serve English customers the version the staff eats!