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la_rainette and I have a habit of talking about food when we chat, because she's a good cook and I aspire to be one, particularly in the area of pastry. Shut up, I'm allowed to like pastry.

Anyway, she frequently links me to recipes in French because she speaks French as her native language and because mostly she just wants to show me pictures of things she has made or intends to make. One time I decided to google-translate a recipe for Madeleines just to see what it said. Ever since then, I make a habit of it because it is so funny to read translated recipes. Our favourite phrase to date is "bottoms of hens" which we still can't figure out because it came from a recipe for, if I remember correctly, some kind of buttery cookie.

Today we went on an adventure through http://gastronomie.philagora.org which itself translates in Google as "Greedy Space". We started wth Tarte aux pommes à l’alsacienne or, in Googlish, "Apple Tart with Alsatian".

And it gets better.

In English, the first section (dough) is headed Paste; apparently the component parts of Apple Tart with Alsatian are Paste, Fruits, and Blank (flan). Before baking the paste, by the way, you must "Lubricate the mould. To sink tart carefully, to grip the edges as regularly as possible." After which the apples are laid out in good ordinance and the entire thing is placed in a very hot furnace before being topped with blank and sugar freezes, a common topping in Googlish.

If you follow "pastry makings and pastes with cake" you discover the flux for glazing of the cakes, which says that when cooking with the net, you put at fire moderated to melt sugar gently, then wash the walls with a clean small item of linen. Adopted perfume (chosen flavour, I imagine) is added at some point.

Of course, one of the uses of the flux for glazing of the cakes is on the Log of Christmas, a rolled biscuit also known as buche de noel (in english as a Yule Log). This involves such things as muslin with syrup, sparkling cream, and three egg whites beaten in snow. As Rainette observed, apparently this is why it is made at Christmas only; they need the snow to beat the egg whites in. This serves, by the way, eight greedy people.

If you prefer 12th Night King Cake, you can find it under "Laminated Wafer of the Kings" which requires a little milk to gild the paste. Or you could always go with the Bread of Embarrassments (pain de genes) or Laminated Slippers, which are a form of apple turnover. If you're looking for something a little more protien-laden, may I recommend chicken in pellets sauce, which requires poultry bubble for flavouring (in which, I am sure, may be found bottoms of hens).