Learning French: enhance your language and cooking skills with TV shows

One area of the French language that we did not cover in detail at school was cookery. We learned all the main dishes to order at a restaurant – standard crowd-pleasers like steak-frites, crêpes, boeuf bourguignon, etc – but when it came to la gastronomie, there were never lessons devoted to cookery techniques and key phrases. 

Perhaps this is was because cookery played a lesser lifestyle role in daily existence in the UK than in France – I am sure that most French children of the period (1980s) grew up with a far greater basic culinary knowledge thanks to tips passed on by mamie (Granny) or from watching cookery programmes on the television.

Watching the myriad TV cookery shows today in French is a great way to expand your vocabulary as well as your recipe repertoire. Recently I was enjoying a five-minute recipe slot before the méteo came on, and the chef was imploring viewers to ensure that no ‘grumeaux’ were left in the sauce he was making – it had to be perfectly smooth.

As is so often the case when fortuitously finding inspiration for this column, the word grumeaux intrigued me, so off I went down an etymological rabbit hole. 

It means ‘lumps’ and comes from the latin grumulus, which in turn stemmed from grumus meaning little heap or mound, usually referring to a small heap of earth.

In cooking, it is mainly used to refer to floury lumps in a sauce – you can avoid them by initially sifting the flour properly (tamiser la farine). 

A tamis (sieve) derives from the medieval Latin tamisium and Old High German zamissa.

Every day is a school day in France!