‘Would you like some Horse Doovers?’ My friend thrust a platter at her visiting French boss, intent on impressing him.
The boss blinked, then asked if they were a traditional Indian sweet.
‘No, that’s French,’ my perplexed friend said.
The boss declined, saying he was uncomfortable eating any part of a horse, and its doovers sounded particularly suspect. He embarked on an emotional rant about how French delicacies sometimes included snails and frog’s legs, but he loved horses and couldn’t bear the thought of eating any.
My friend was turning green at his culinary explanations, especially because she wasn’t offering any part of a horse. Her hors d’oeuvres were all, unless an ant had fallen in, strictly vegetarian.
‘Oh, dear’, my friend told me later was the correct, though bewildering, French pronunciation. ‘Would you like some — Oh, dear,’ she said from then on, whenever uncovering her appetisers. However, that created its own misunderstandings, with other wives reassuring her, ‘Please don’t worry, they’re only slightly burnt.’ And other husbands wondering if it was a term of endearment, and what the acceptable response should be.
Upward mobility is measured in appetisers. What and how you serve is the message in the doovers.
On your first job-first move from small town to big city, you start with ‘snakes’. Maggi or chips are perfectly acceptable ‘snakes’. Soon, you’re calling them starters, appetisers, even entrées (you heard that on MasterChef).
The watershed moment is when a society hostess brings out carrot sticks. Thankfully though, she also serves nuts. Nuts! That’s what you need to win friends and influence people — nuts.
Every salary hike demands a graduation, from one nut to the next, first from peanuts to cashew nuts. Proud of your posh hosting, you happen to visit a colleague who serves almonds. Almonds, really? Has he been promoted on the sly?
Each time you’ve splurged on some nut, a new foreign nut makes its appearance. Keeping up with the Joshis requires hazelnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts… None of them taste half as good to you as masala peanuts, but you keep them in designer jars to pour into designer platters for designer guests. Once, you discover, to your horror, that one of your kids has emptied the foreign-nut jar, and you have only three pecans left for the guest. The kid loudly denies eating the nuts but confesses to feeding them to the dog, who has been strictly prohibited by the vet from eating any nuts, and is beginning to show the after-effects.
‘Oh, dear,’ you sigh. And this time, it’s not French.
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After, talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks