22 May 2016

American French Georgian French Toast

After the Orthodox New Year and Epiphany in January, I had begun the case for extending my six-month assignment with the Tbilisi Urban Area Development Program at World Vision Georgia into a nine-month gig to maintain continuity. The students started the school year with me, so why wouldn't they finish with me? Right? It took a five-page request with a letter of support to convince the Peace Corps.

In May, then, under unreachable blue skies instead of four low-hanging light bulbs, surrounded by timid fir trees instead of chipped walls of lackluster colors, in the school's neglected athletic field that bore flowering weeds for handmade head wreaths, my Wednesday afternoon class and I played bomba, balibuli, and es burti es burti, that is, in English, monkey in the middle, dodge ball, and spud, respectively. We also played a few innings of baseball and several rounds of G-rated spin the bottle and truth or dare on warped bleachers baring rusty nails.

My black dress shoes, clinical obesity, and AARP-qualifying age put me at a slight competitive disadvantage against 10-to-12 year olds, but I was more engaged (and, subsequently, breathing more heavily) than the P.E. teachers who came out with their classes and sat on a rock.

Spud - I had not heard it or seen it for more than 40 years, let alone played it. Did it come from Georgia? How did it get to Temka? I wondered exactly the same thing when, one evening, my host grandmother served "French toast", or, well, sliced bread dipped in egg yolks and fried on both sides. Should we be calling it "Georgian toast"? Back in 1998 in Tartu, Estonia, my host father fried sliced bread in the grease left in a pan sitting on top of the stove. (He also boiled day-old coffee for breakfast.)  

Who first lathered fried bread with butter and then poured corn syrup on it? Or, perhaps more importantly, why do we make fried bread so sweet? Does every American eat "French toast" for breakfast? The beauty of living in another culture is contemplating that neither we Americans nor French ever invented French toast but that we borrowed what existed and adapted it to our (sweet) tastes and resources (inexpensive high fructose corn syrup).