sanglier, gaulois, dol de bretagne

I’m afraid that I may not have been entirely frank with you, friends. You see, as I reread past posts about my life here in France, you get all of the good stories. The funny encounters. The moments that have people writing me, telling me that they wish they could just move here, too. And while those moments exist — I may be a fiction writer, but I don’t lie — there are a whole bunch of other moments buried underneath, moments that I definitely don’t evoke when people ask me, “So… you love it here?” I just stand there, nodding and grinning, extolling France’s virtues.

The thing is, most days, I do think about France’s virtues. I don’t spend a lot of time mulling over the parts of my life here that are difficult, and I especially don’t spend all that much time thinking about my first months here, back in 2001. There was no way I would ever have admitted it to my fourteen-year-old self, but I’ve come a long way since then. I can be honest now: I was pretty miserable.

I don’t think it’s really possible to go through the sort of challenge I faced when I first came here and not have a small amount of misery… at least not if you want the outcome I so dearly wanted. When I came here, I was convinced that three months would be enough time to make me fluent. I was also convinced that being the best student in my middle school French class would make becoming fluent a piece of cake. I was wrong on two counts. It’s not that my French didn’t get better; it did. It’s just that there’s a whole lot of space between knowing a handful of vocabulary words and some verb tenses and actually being fluent in a language. Even today, I find myself staring at Facebook statuses (the universal equalizer), trying to come up with a witty response in French that will actually make sense. I generally answer, instead, in English, which has the joint result of making me look intelligent and a little bit like an ass. There’s speaking a language, and then there’s speaking a language; the second level is the one that’s always just a little bit better than what you actually speak.

When I first got to France, I thought I understood a lot of French. I watched movies every evening with my host family, sat around the dinner table with them and told them about my day. I tried to relay stories of American culture to my friends at school, but mostly I just stayed silent and nodded a lot. I surrounded myself with people all the time, something that isn’t natural for me; I’ve always liked being alone. But I knew that none of this would be worth it if I didn’t learn something, and I could feel my French getting stronger every day the more I spoke. Still, I relished my time alone, which came once a day, during foreign language classes: French students learn two foreign languages, English and either Spanish or German, and while I attended English, I was exempted from the second. Instead, I found myself in the school’s CDI — kind of like a library and computer center rolled into one — with the entirety of the Astérix and Obélix comic book collection.

I could get completely lost in the books, devouring one and sometimes two every hour. I loved learning about the cultural stereotypes the French had for other European nationalities, and I loved, finally, being able to read something aside from the four novels I had brought with me from the States (the fact that, ten years later, I still remember which novels they were is a testament to how frequently they were read.) To discover stories that, I would later learn, were firmly rooted in the childhoods of my French peers, was something that would allow me to become closer to these same peers later in life; it’s strange, the day you realize that most French people have never heard of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street.

Astérix and Obélix taught me a certain amount of useful French, but mostly I just got a feel for reading in a foreign language and accumulated a pile of words I would probably never need, words like Roman legionaries, druid, magic potion and menhir. Still, there’s something to be said for knowledge that, if I had moved back to the States, I might have never used: this summer, when I visited Dol de Bretagne and saw this, I knew immediately what it was.

The more time I spend with French people, the more I realize how not-French I am. Still, I’m learning every day, and there’s something to be said for still finding delight in things that are commonplace to others. I have been wanting to try sanglier for ten years, ever since I saw it in Astérix et Obélix. While my version may not be roasted, at least it’s not boiled, like that of the Bretons.

Oh, and another fun and slightly unrelated tidbit: this sanglier was actually purchased at Picard, the frozen food store that sells everything from macarons to sushi. Plainly on the label, it says that it comes from Australia. The Country Boy remembered this and told his family; they all had a chuckle, because you see, while wild boar may be foreign for this American girl, in France, you’re more likely to hit a sanglier than a deer on the autoroute.

Civet de Sanglier

1 kilo frozen or fresh wild boar, cut into 2 inch cubes
1/2 bottle red wine
a few sprigs of thyme
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 small onion
1 Tbsp. flour
salt and pepper to taste

Place the boar, frozen or fresh, in a plastic container. Cover with the red wine. Add the thyme and garlic. Mix and cover the container. Refrigerate overnight.

In a large Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over high heat. Drain the sanglier, reserving the marinade. Add the cubes of sanglier, a few at a time, to the pot. Brown on all sides and remove to a plate. Cover to keep warm.

Mince the onion and add to the pot. Sauté until translucent and slightly browned. Sprinkle the flour over the onion and stir for about a minute. Slowly add about a half-cup of the wine and stir to deglaze the bottom of the pan. Add the rest of the wine and bring to a simmer. Cook about 10-15 minutes, until the sauce has thickened. Add the sanglier.

Cover the pot and cook over low heat for about an hour and a half (this can also be done in the oven at about 250 degrees F). Season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve with mashed potatoes.