Pain

Welcome to the Learn French with Alexa podcast, where we present a French word, look at where it comes from, and take a deep dive into the language and culture that surrounds it. Today's episode is all about pain.

So we're here in the Learned French with Alexa Studio. Well it's not really a studio, it's just an office, really. Um I'm here with Alexa.

Bonjour.

Bonjour Alexa and Benedict. And my name's Adam, but are we actually talking about pain?

Of course not. We are talking about the word pun.

Which means

Bread.

So Alexa, what can you tell us about French bread?

Yeah.

The only thing I can tell you about uh French bread is that it it is extremely sacred in France. So bread is very important. It's part of the French culture. Now, in a minute Benedict is g i i i will tell us all about the word, the actual words uh related to pain, the bread. But all I can tell you is how important it is in my household as a French household, you know. My parents live in a little village and they are literally ten yards away from the boulangerie, which is the bacquery.

So bread in French is pain or pain, P A I N, Pa.

That's right.

Uh how do you say baker or bakery?

So bakery would be boulangerie.

Round bread. Yeah.

Yes. We'll come back to that. We're not eating ro well, we we are still eating round bread, but we're far from the baguette.

It's called La Mish, but I'm going to tell you all about the size and the shape of our bread in the

minute. Very important the size. Um yeah, so it came like there's traces of it in books around the twelfth century, something like that. So it's actually coming from a words from the Picardia region.

It's a region in France.

Yeah, so somewhere in the north. Yeah. Um and the word was boulank itself, it's coming from a Dutch word, uh bolet, which means round. you know like i'm not too sure about the pronunciation of that one but

In English, there are a lot of people whose name is Baker.

Mm.

I know Mr Baker.

And I know Mrs. Baker as well.

Yeah, do you know Mr. Butcher? And the candlestick maker.

Okay, okay.

Um Do you have a similar naming convention in France?

Yeah.

Um I think they call it occupational jobs. Um you'll find that there's a lot of people um who have last names that sort of look like boulanger. You will find like boulang boulanger, boulangerie, boulanger. There's loads of words like this and it's the same for a lot of different jobs. So we have the same kind of tradition around it, I'm guessing.

Hm. Can I can I just point out that uh le boulanger is masculine but la boulangère is the feminine version if we want it to be, you know, uh equal.

belonging.

And La Boulanger is the Lady Baker. Yeah. Okay. And la boulangerie that's a feminine word, but it represents the actual show.

It's the shop, yeah.

Donc le boulanger est dans la boulangerie, par exemple.

There is a law. There is you actually you're so serious in France about bread, you actually have a law about it. The bread law.

We have yeah, actually we have multiple different laws around um around bread. There's one that was passed in nineteen ninety three, um about how traditional baggets should only be made in chocolate. and only with four ingredients. So wheat, flour, water, salt and yeast. But that's not the only one. We also had um a law in nineteen twenty where um bakers could only work from a certain type of hours. Um, so it was really difficult to have all the bread ready. by uh the time everyone needed it.

Ah, so I think this is the reason correct me if I'm wrong. Is this the reason why a baguette is the shape that it is? Yes.

Because then it's quicker.

Yeah. And and because you had f less or fewer hours to to bake in, you had to make baguette. Yeah.

I've got I've got a a a great tac an anecdote about uh boulangerie, yes. I'm I'm sure you don't do.

I am.

Well, a long, long time ago and it's still the same now, but bakers or boulangers. uh got up at three o'clock in the morning to make the bread in a French bakery, you know. Um and uh after going to nightclubs when I was a teenager than that. So at four o'clock in the morning, five o'clock in the morning, you wait outside, you have your cinquante centime or whatever they were, uh how much it costs at the time, to have your pain chocolat, your croissant and your fresh baguette.

It's the same nowadays, to be fair. Like'cause most boulangeries are open at six, five thirty, six. And then if you're awake, the first thing you think of is

Croissant.

Cliss on fresh bread.

A fresh the bread must be fresh. Mind you, my father can argue that one. How many times has he served us toasted bread?

Mais pas perdu, oui.

So are are you you you mean you're toasting the baguette or are we talking about sliced bread? No

it toasts it doesn't serve us the the pan hard bread as in rassi we say in french he would certainly serve it really hard and to make it more enjoyable he would put it through the toaster If if you didn't have that slice one morning, he would make sure that you're served the same slice the next day.

So over here, you know, we eat a lot of sliced bread.

Pandemie? Pandemie, absolutely. Yeah. Slice b sliced bread will be the last thing you buy in a supermarket if your local boulangerie was out of bread. That's the last resort. Or if you want to make croque monsieur.

So what about the expression the best thing since sliced bread that we have here in in English? Do you would you have an equivalent expression?

Yes we do actually have

We we have um the fila couple bear, something like that. So that literally the string cutting the butter or something like that. That's not quite the

Is that saying the best invention was the butter Butter string, you know, the string that is cutting the butter.

Do have loads of different explorations uh with bread though. Alexa, do you have uh an example?

Elle ne mange pas de pain. So how would you explain this?

Doesn't eat bread?

She doesn't eat bread and This does not eat bread you know.

It doesn't cost much to do something. So for example, oh um I could try this. It doesn't cost me much to do it.

Well um If you say the uh c'est mon gagneupin, it's it's the way I make my money. So gagnier means to win or to earn and pain means to the bread. So

Oh but that's the same in in English. So we have bread as a slang for money and dough.

As well.

How do you say dough in French?

Lapat, but we wouldn't use that um to represent earning something. But c'est mon gangpin, par exemple Alexa is youtubeuse, it's some gagnepin.

It's how she makes mana.

No child she she makes money.

like crumbs or crumbs and

Нет.

Let me act.

Yeah. And and I've discovered with uh Caroline, one of our um content creators, that the word mi, la mi de pain, does not exist in English.

That's it, huh?

So you have crumbs and you've got the crust but you don't have a word to describe the middle of the bread.

So hang on, how do you say crust? Cruit and then crumbs is lemon.

So Lemiet de Pin, la croûte de Pin si tu veux, but what's the white bit in the middle? And that's very interesting because I had that only this revelation, you learn last week when we did one of the posts on Instagram. And we have a word which is la mi Hence le pain de mi, which is the sliced bread.

Uh.

It's mostly the white, you know.

We even have nowadays we have um um pandemies with a s slice bread without any crust around it and it's called Cent Pour cent.

Could you repeat that please? I don't think I quite heard that correctly. Sliced bread without any crust.

No.

Naked bread.

Yes, naked bread.

I sometimes take a mug.

Put that on top of this slice of bread to cut out a pu uh you know, a perfect circle to make a little burger bun. Okay.

But you can m you you can do it with Nutella as well. Nutella in it and then it's little like you can toast it.

Now over here in the UK

I've been to him too long.

Ha ha.

We do love a sandwich, two m two slices of bread, and I and I believe in Paris or in France you have the same thing, but over there you call it en sandwich.

A sandwich. So so if we decide, my sisters and I, for example, to go on a walk and we stop at the supermarket, we would get our baguette. We'll get our ham and butter and that would be our jambon beur, yeah. The sandwich of jambon beur. This is the classic uh French sandwich.

So tell me about the different types of bread or the the common types that you would find in a French boulanger.

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Well what I can tell you is about uh the different um the different breads but names of breads we have and how different they are from depending on the regions that uh you are. in France, so for example you have uh La Ficelle, which is the thin but firm bread. La baguette, not as thin as la ficelle, but very crispy. Benedict and I had a whole conversation about, you know, la flûte. And let me tell you a little bit about la flûte. La flûte is a little bit bigger than la baguette.

Bye.

That brand. Okay, the group. And then we have La Boule, which is where you started, you know, the podcast about you talked about the boulanger comes from the word boule, which is the round.

Like a round loaf.

Yeah, so la boule is another type of bread and

Is bull is the equivalent to loaf?

We wouldn't really I don't think we'd call it loaf like we don't have a direct equivalent of it, um just because We have so many different types of bread and they all have a name?

Le Pin, I think or Lamish. Le Pin Lamish. Now now let you let me tell you a little bit uh about La Flute. It's all about weight. So a baguette weighs around two hundred fifty grams, you know, and the flute will weigh about five hundred, so it's double the size of that. But le Groupin is nearly a kilogram in weight, it's eight hundred grams. So in my family we tend to go for a group, depending on how many people there are for dinner. And the slices are as as big as a plate.

So when you're sitting let's talk about the the the a little bit about uh bread etiquette. When you're sitting around a French table for lunch or or dinner, are you allowed to kind of rip the bread with your hands or do you or is it n is it nicely sliced?

If you're at home then you do whatever you want. You've probably eaten half of it like coming back from the bakery to be honest. That's the thing. Like you see people coming back with their baguette under their arms and then like half of it is missing.

Sure.

It's usually'cause you can't resist it'cause it's warm and crusty.

And crusty. That's so true. In my uh family we tend to cut it up, you know. Uh I think it's a tradition more than anything, especially if we have a lot of people for dinner. Yeah. It's easier to cut But on my own or with my own family, we

Just ripped it off.

And would you serve bread with every meal?

Yes.

Wait, and that came from the heart.

That was a definitive yes.

Le matin, le midi, le soir, les quatre heures, you know, you've got it.

Good snacks.

So so even uh when you have a snack after

You in the UK? Do you when would you eat bread?

Not necessarily.

Uh well it w I don't think it's automatic to have uh bread with every

But then you okay, you eat bread with pasta, garlic bread with pasta. Yeah. I just cannot wrap my head around it.

Ha ha ha.

How do you say garlic bread in French?

We don't eat it. But we don't really Which is funny'cause we are known for like stuff with

With garlic. Uh but Adam is guilty of eating bread with pasta. I have witnessed that

A pasta sandwich is very nice. Um you know, uh you can talk, but uh I hear that you have bread vending machines.

No we do.

So in France.

It it does help, like sometimes in little villages or like even when um your boulangerie is closed then you can get fresh bread from a vending machine.

So it's fresh bread from a vending machine.

Do you know, uh I've heard of um because the the boulanger are not allowed to trade f seven days in a row um that means that they have to have a day off.

This is another one of those.

That's another one of the law. They they have they cannot work uh and make bread for seven days in a row. And this is why everybody out there, if you go to France and trying to find some bread on a Monday you will find it really hard, you know. And so what my parents do, they usually uh go to another boulangerie from another village, or they will go to the Well, the equivalent of your vending machines. They would go to the French bread depot.

This is like illegal French bread that you can get on a Monday.

Like the bread bath, yeah. Ha ha.

I suppose we've learnt a lot about bread.

Now I've got one little fact that would be very funny, uh, probably to you, is that um there is one thing that you mustn't do with bread on the table. Yeah, it's bad luck. So it is saporte malchance or malheur, sapor malheur uh de mettre le pain à l'envers sur la table. And my dad, if you did that in front of my dad, he he would just go crazy and put it back on the you know, on its front. I don't know if they you know.

That's why it's so much easier just to have a s bit of sliced bread because it looks the same both ways.

But you know why it is? You know why it is the origin of uh it being bad luck is because back in the time uh of centuries ago, the bread in a boulangerie that was turned upside down or face down was the bread for the bourreaux. Executioner, sorry. Executioner. So you knew that the bread that was put aside upside down was for the executioner. Or we call that le burroux. Yeah.

So it's nowadays it brings bad luck to it.

So it has become a thing that's not a good thing.

It really is though, like it's passed from generation to generation.

But do you think it really brings back to the other?

But like the idea of of turning the bread is still there. Like I didn't know like before researching for this podcast, I didn't know why it was that we were doing that. But my mom was doing it, I'm doing it.

Yeah, I've seen my phone.

If I end up having children that will probably do it as well. You know, it's one of these things.

So tell me, I've got one last question. I have learned a lot about French bread today, a lot of interesting, curious facts. But I have one burning question that I probably a lot of the listeners will be thinking as well. How do you say a chip butty in French?

You don't

What? And we've won butty.

Sandwich. No, what why? No, I have another question. Why do you do this to yourself? Well it's it's like it it no.

Okay. So it's a it's a sandwich of chips.

A sandwich of chips. A chip sandwich. It's one of the finest English delicacies there is.

To the fish finger sandwich.

Fish finger and chips and

I tell you what, I think that back in the eighties, nineties, we had a uh a little uh corner shop next to our high school, uh college, and uh the person that owned that um that little restaurant. was uh from Holland. And he used to serve baguette frit. Yeah. The frit baguette with the baguette frit. So it was a massive baguette on inside. You had full of chips. So this is your version of the chip butty, but he was not French. But we loved it.

Called L'American, but you would have meat in it as well with it.

With the chips as well. frites

It's called the American.

I don't think there's there's pr there's not much that you can't put in, you know, between two s two slices of bread, to be honest.

You know, it's not because you can that you should.

Well on that bombshell, I think we've reached the end of the episode.

Now remember that you can have access to all the words that we have uh we have put together today in a podcast. All the French words, all the expressions will be available to you on the Yeah.

You can contact us at podcast at learnfrench dot com should you choose to do so. Uh that's it for me. Au revoir.

Un bisou bisou.