Stuffed chicken thigh with date, fig, and prune sauce, curried chicken, homemade vegetable soup, meat and caramel sauce, tripe, scallion and cheese quiche, apple tart, crepes, macaroons. This is a just a sampling of the foods I have eaten over the past two weeks. My family has this horribly wonderful habit of serving five different dishes for dinner each night to satisfy everyone. From an honest desire to be polite and a selfish love of food, I have been trying everything that appears on the table. My family is very encouraging with this habit and keeps offering me more and more food. I try to keep my portions small, but they don’t really have an understanding of this and continually berate me to “Mange! Mange!” (Eat! Eat!). So, it quickly became evident that I needed to learn a polite way to express that I was stuffed! After gesturing to my stomach when night and saying, “I can’t” one evening, my host mother provided just the phrase. “Ah,” she said, “you are rassasié.” Rassasié, she explained, is a more polite and posh way of saying that you just cannot eat another bite. The traditional, “Je suis plein” which is a direct translation of “I am full,” is not as chic as rassasié. This new expression has served me well over the past weeks. Waiters at restaurants are always pleasantly surprised to hear such a Parisian phrase coming out of an American mouth and when I am invited to other French homes it usually wins me laugh. In a country where eating is truly an art form and even the fast food takes a half an hour, rassasié is one of the most useful words I have yet to encounter.
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