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She grew up as the first child of French-Canadian immigrants from Quebec in 1950. Her parents spoke little English but her father was a builder who wanted to design and build homes. He succeeded in his dreams through hard work and persistence. She traveled with her parents to Quebec only once every five years but developed and maintained friendships with her 36 cousins over the decades. Every trip across the border into Quebec was rewarded with the joy of squeaky cheese. Curds du fromage is the raw fresh cheese, similar to fresh mozzarella but so much better. When I first tasted this delicacy, I called it cheese turds as a pun on its French name, but I love anything made from cheese and shared her love affair with that weird, squeaky morsel of flavor.
So her sister just went back to Quebec and brought us a huge bag of cheese turds which had never been refrigerated and were still squeaky and dripping with flavor. OMG!
When I first met the future Mrs. Pessimist, she was proud that she had smuggled two cases of Molson's beer into the US by hiding it under the back seat of her car. Now she pays her sister and any other relative to smuggle fresh cheese turds across the border.
Every thing in life that brings us joy is meant to be revisited.
Discussion (21)
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One of the few words I know in French is “fromage” (cheese). For reasons I cannot explain, the word amuses me. The sound perhaps? It’s like the Spanish word for meatballs which I’ve been taught is “albondigas”. Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? So what English words have this effect for you?
If only all cross-border smugglings were so tasty! :-)
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So rather than relying on memory for the Canadian term for cheese curds, I googled it: Fromage en crottes. I think my wife's relatives pronounced crottes as cruts which easily translates into turds if you are a lazy American such as I. I am sure that cheese turds would be understood by any French Canadian although some might be offended by it.
The pasteurized refrigerated turds (oops, curds) sold from Wisconsin and upstate New York are entirely different.
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I have had some very squeaky cheese curds from here in the US.
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To play your game, I would wonder if habenero in Spanish is the same word as sayonara in Japanese.
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