"Tu te sens ça, Julian? Ça c'est l'arôme de Thanksgiving."

"Do you smell that, Julian?  That's the smell of Thanksgiving," I stated as I proudly stirred the cranberries (okay, cranberries plus un mélange de fruits rouges - a mix of red fruits).

This is my second Thanksgiving in France, but my first attempt at co-cooking the meal (with Elyse)...and both of our first attempts at cooking the meal in general.  We decided to have our Thanksgiving meal the Saturday before at Elyse and Lisa's house for a group of ten.  There were many lessons to be learned, as well as many French mots du jour.

Lesson One:  Finding the ingredients
une dinde - a turkey
I started my search early, questioning as many French people as possible at the beginning of November.  I explained the situation to Lise and Christophe when I visited them; they explained that turkeys are common here for Christmas (as well as huitres and foie gras), so "tu dois pouvoir la trouver" - "you should be able to find one".  I asked around among the teachers au collège too; they said the same.  I then made the tour around la Roche-sur-Yon: to every supermarket and every single volailleur (poultry vendor) in town.  It seems you can only get a whole turkey starting in the month of December.

la sauce aux canneberges - cranberry sauce
They don't have cranberries, either.  Not until Christmas.  And definitely not before Christmas markets.  A very helpful man at an épicerie pointed me in the direction of a small shop called the Quatre Saisons, where he heard that they sold dried cranberries.  He was right; I added them to my mix of frozen fruits...and it worked: the first Thanksgiving miracle.

la tarte aux citrouilles - pumpkin pie
This really doesn't exist at all in France.  When studying in Cannes, this was the one piece of the meal that was not up to par; they didn't completely understand the pumpkin purée.  But I insisted.  I spent three hours in the grocery store studying the various options; finally, I settled on cooking a frozen pumpkin cube mix as a base for the filling.  Elyse, Lisa, Laura, Kate, and I labored over the creation for several hours the night before, even making our own pie crust.  It turned out spectacularly: the second Thanksgiving miracle.

les patates douces - sweet potatoes
I also insisted on sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top.  The strange thing is that you can't find plain white mini marshmallows: they're all jumbo marshmallow mixes of white and pink.  While it tasted the same, it looked a little like the Easter bunny showed up and threw up on the top of the dish.  But, bonus points for finding sweet potatoes from the USA.

Lesson Two:  Shopping
Here's just a handful of vocabulary that we gleaned from our initial visit to the grocery store:

le sucre - sugar
la cassonade - brown sugar
le bouillon de dinde - turkey stock
les guimauves - marshmallows
sans gluten - gluten free
le chantilly - whipped cream
la farce au pain de maïs - cornbread stuffing

So you can probably imagine at this point how our initial shopping trip felt.  Having no idea what many of our ingredients should look like in the U.S., we truly had no idea what they should look like in France.

Lesson Three:  Cooking 
Somehow - and I'm not sure how - we did really well.  We started bit by bit, making the cranberries and substituting the substitutes for the stuffing and pumpkin pie.  Our only real glitch was the stuffing: we tried to make cornbread stuffing, but there was a problem with the ingredient maïzena - which is the translation we found for both "corn flour" and "corn starch" - and we discovered that it is actually corn starch.  So we ended up creating some substance that resembled a middle school science project (neither liquid nor solid), which Lisa miraculously turned into pudding.  Wild rice is also not a thing here, so our stuffing was a mishmash of white rice and whatever happened to be in the kitchen at the moment, but it turned out decently.

You can make fun of us for les poulets (chickens; for all you West Wingnuts, we had three named Eric, Troy, and Gail - the chickens C. J. couldn't pardon because they're French and not turkeys), but that's about it; we managed rice stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, salad, bread, pudding, and pumpkin pie, all gluten-free.  Best of all, we gave American food a good name and proved that we eat more than hamburgers and buffalo wings.