or: Sometimes It Is Socially Acceptable To Play With Your Food

Remember when you were younger and you sat at the dinner table with your family and were served meat and three veg followed, if you were good, it was the right day, and you were also very, very lucky, by some ice-cream with topping?

Remember how you mashed your already mashed potato with some tomato sauce until it went a shade of pink that is not natural for food and then you added in the peas after first placing two as eyes to your newly created mashed potato-man. You then mixed it all in together until it was a pink potato mess with green measles.

Remember how you then took your ice-cream, added the topping and then waited a little bit before mashing that down into a creamy mess of light brown or pale pink sweet goodness?

Remember how if you were caught doing any of these things you would get into a lot of trouble for playing with your food yet your parents couldn’t confiscate it since they are also the ones who told yo to finish what was on your plate and not to be wasteful?

I have now found a dish where, when eaten in company, this kind of behaviour is not only socially acceptable, it is encouraged.

I would like to take this opportunity for the French people I dined with last night for introducing me to this experience and demonstrating what I was meant to do. I caught on quite quickly as my inner child took over having missed this activity for a long time.

Yet another upside to experiencing another culture.

It starts with some raw ground beef. The butcher has done the first part of the exercise. Each person is given a slightly larger than hamburger-sized portion onto their plate. It has been molded to look like a pattie. On the top, an egg sits.

The edges of the plate are decorated with chopped onion, some capers, mustard blobs, some tomato sauce and various herbs and spices.

On the table are other seasonings and also a bowl of homemade, thick-cut fries and some seasoned lettuce.

Then the fun begins.

You take a fork, puncture the yolk and watch it drizzle down the sides of the pattie. Take the various seasonings and mix them into the pattie mix. Add some Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauch and any additional seasonings. Continue mashing it all with an occasional taste test so you can add anything else that you think would enhance the flavour.

Continue mashing it together because it’s fun and it’s hard to stop to then eat it.

Don’t worry about it because everyone is doing the same though I’m not sure they are having quite as much fun as I was / do. Here I am mashing and not getting into any trouble!

Eat.

* Thanks to Infectecd Muchsroom for the title to this post.