In France, the holidays, or la période des fêtes, are about family, friends and especially feasting. This applies to le Reveillon (New Year’s Eve) in particular. It is common to spend several hours enjoying un dîner de reveillon (New Year’s Eve dinner) complete with oysters, smoked salmon, chestnuts, truffles, mushrooms,foie gras, duck, and all manner of other French delicacies. (Click here for a previous posting on French holiday tastes.)
A beautiful French table set for “le dîner de reveillon”
Our recent French Cookbook Club gathering got a wonderful preview of French holiday dishes as we celebrated Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of Southwest France: Recipes from France’s Magnificent Rustic Cuisine. If you haven’t spent time with southwestern French cooking, it’s all about the foods that appear en masse on the French holiday dining table—seafood, foie gras, mushrooms, game birds, beef and more. While our entire multi-course meal was worth making again, a real holiday stand-out was the “Chestnut and Mushroom Soup with Walnuts” – merci, Betty! You’ll want to make it just as the recipe says with French cêpes / Italian porcini mushrooms all the way to the finishing of a touch of a bit of walnut oil and a splash of lemon juice. This dish transports you to France—immediately!
Of course, no dîner de reveillon would be complete without toasts and good wishes for le Nouvel An (the New Year). The most basic is “Bonne année!” (pronounced buh nah-nay), i.e. “Happy New Year!” Or one can get more elaborate with the following: “Que cette nouvelle année vous apporte bonheur, santé et réussite,” meaning “May this new year bring you happiness, health and success.” Quite nice, don’t you think?
If you were in Paris for New Year’s, you could follow your dinner and toasts by going out on the town. You could join the crowds thronging the Champs-Elysées. Or you could head to the Eiffel Tower to watch the fireworks going off at midnight. Or you could watch the French President Nicolas Sarkozy on television sending his meilleurs voeux 2012 (best wishes for 2012) to the citizens of France.
On the subject of French New Year’s wishes, it is interesting to note that the French typically send New Year’s cards rather than Christmas cards to their loved ones. Greetings for the New Year in this format are often a little more formal. Here are a few examples as only the French can do them:
Meilleurs voeux pour 2012! (Best wishes for 2012!)
Nous vous souhaitons une très bonne année 2012! (We wish you a very happy 2012!)
Paix, amour, joie, prospérité, santé, bonheur… Que cette nouvelle année soit exceptionnelle! (Peace, love, joy, prosperity, health, happiness…May this New Year be exceptional!)
And then there is this lovely New Year’s wish I received from a good French friend last year:
Que cette nouvelle année déborde de bonheur, de paix et de prosperité. (May this New Year overflow with happiness, peace and prosperity.)
On that note, I’d like to wish you a wonderful 2012 full of all good things—and mais oui, full of things French!
Bonne année à toutes et à tous!
(Happy New Year to all!)
