Du pain beurré avec potage? Quelle horreur! (Revisited)

It's a line from a first year French text book, VOUS et MOI, that was used in the New York City Board of Education's public high school in the mid-1970s. Back in the day, the language books had 'typical' dialogues between family, friends, students and teachers, government employees and the public. In this particular dialogue, the family was at the dinner table and the son discussed some of the everyday eating habits of Americans. In one such dialogue, he said that the Americans eat potage (a thick creamed soup) with buttered bread. The sister was repelled by such a combination and uttered, "Du pain beurré avec potage? Quelle horreur!"

As an American, I am quite familiar with the diner culture of having a breadbasket and some easily spread butter nearby (oleo if the home is kosher). What's funny to the English speaker is the use of the partitive.

From the Internet: "Partitive articles are used both in English and in French to express quantities that cannot be counted. While the indefinite article (un, une, des) is used with countable quantities (un oeuf, deux oeufs, etc.), the partitive article is used before nouns that are indivisible or uncountable. In English, we use the article “some” to that end, but it is often omitted."

After years of public school Spanish, I switched to two semesters of French in my senior year. Boy, was that fun and eye opening! It's carried me through life and every now and again I pick up current text books to see what vocabulary is most popular. Mind you, phonograph records that one would hear on the chaîne stéréophonique were all the rage back when The Beatles were cutting albums. Nowadays folks don't even buy or listen to CDs. It's flash drive or thumb drives. I'm not current with the latest technology.

The phrase of repulsion has stayed with me over the decades. I am also an avid soup maker and the thought of having bread or crackers with soup (with or without butter) is of no consequence to me. But, of course, this is from a culture that has normalized the consumption of snails, frogs, and engorged goose liver.

Bon appétit !