Apéro, cargolade and bolas de picoulat

After more than three years of living in this country, I like to think that I’ve assimilated enough of the French culture to no longer feel like “one of them,” even if I nearly never feel like “one of us.” I’m caught between two cultures, but at least I understand them both… so much so, in fact, that I have a hard time when a member of one of my cultures is caught off-guard by something that seems so natural to the other. The perfect example of this? Apéro.

Apéro is something that exists in nearly every Latin culture: to the Spaniards, it’s tapas or pintxos, to the Italians, aperitivo, and to the French, apéro, that perfect time after work and before dinner when everyone gets together around a table and a few bottles, accompanied by saucisson sec and bread and crispy snacks flavored with peanut dust to talk politics and tell jokes and make fun of one another, three of the French national pasttimes.

Apéro doesn’t have much of a place here in Paziols, at least not when the kids are here. The apéro hour is usually spent making dinner (for me and the Sous-Chef) or at the Prade (for everyone else), and when the clock hits eight and we finally sit down to eat, apéro has been forgotten. But there are some days–usually days when, on the way back from an excursion, we’ve stumbled upon a particularly excellent aged goat’s cheese or else some parents arrive with an assortment of saucisson sec that we reach for a bottle of sweet white Maccabeu, sit down and start to talk… and that’s when the questions begin.

“Is this dinner?” one of the kids will always ask, slightly frightened, as they see the group of us counselors sitting down and pouring out glasses, cutting into bread and cheese.

“No… it’s apéro,” I answer, borrowing the French word, because “cocktail hour” doesn’t seem like nearly an adequate translation. For me, apéro makes sense. For them, it’s as foreign as a two-hour lunch break in the middle of the day: I’m constantly reminding them that Proxi Proxi (our local mini-mart) is closed from 1:30 to 4:00 in the afternoon.

To the Marseillaise and the Country Boy, the strangeness of apéro is even stranger: even the Marseillaise, who doesn’t drink, pulls up a chair and a glass of grenadine. It’s not about the wine, we tell them. It’s about apéro.

Some of them get it. Some of them just snatch up as much saucisson as they can get their hands on, convinced they’ll never eat again. At any rate, I look forward to apéro with people who understand it, for whom this special hour that I still love is normal and second-nature, like our neighbors, just over the terrace wall.

It seems that we have developed a tradition of cargolade: like last year, we were invited over to witness the magic of tiny local snails being cooked to perfection with salt, pepper and piment. Accompanied by local wines and homemade aioli, cargolade makes the perfect apéro, and I love to watch Gilbert as he expertly arranges the purple coals to accomodate the apparatus that will serve as both cooking and serving dish.

But whereas last year I made jambalaya to follow up this meal, this year we were treated to yet another local specialty: bolas de picoulat, a Catalan meatball dish served with white beans, mushrooms and green olives.

We dug in as the sweet whites were swapped for reds, and I finally understood what the Country Boy meant when he told me he’s started apéros at seven only to have them last until eleven the next morning: the sun set, but the atmosphere remained the same, as we told stories from all of our cultural backgrounds, Americans, French, Macedonians mixing.

The Tramontagne wind picked up, but we were mostly protected by the high terrace walls, and the half-empty bottles were more than heavy enough to hold down our napkins and the tablecloth, and the gusts just added more ambiance to the evening, as we poured another glass and began to tell our stories, talking over each other and listening at the same time, a feat that I’ve found the French are particularly attuned to.

We heard the story of two months of English lessons producing no more comprehension than the word “double-u,” another about a particularly cold Englishman who refused to explain the announcement broadcast over the Tube loudspeakers. I explained my difficulty with speaking on the phone in French, and we all laughed as our neighbor bemoaned Anne-Marie’s voice travelling over the terrace walls at four in the morning, the morning we had to take the kids to Barcelona.

To these people, apéro may be normal… it’s becoming normal for me. But there will always remain a tinge of magic in this hour, a little bit of foreign bliss that I can revel in as I sip my wine and spear an escargot with a tiny metal prong. I hope that apéro always retains its magic: I may want to be French, but there are some things that will always be foreign, and somehow, that makes them all the more special.