Name: Common ENGLISH VOCABULARY & EXPRESSIONS from French cooking
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T10:01:46.000Z
Duration: 9 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In today's video, I want to look at ten words and expressions from the French culinary world.

These are French culinary words; means they're talking about cooking, and eating, etc.

But the reason that I chose these ten is because they are very commonly used in everyday English,

and not only to talk about food; they have very different contexts... excuse me.

So, we're going to look at "� la carte".

Oh, and by the way, for the French speakers watching this video, if I butcher the language,

"� la carte", "piquant", "prix fixe", "savour/savor".

Now, we have with the "u" and without the "u", so British Canadian spelling, American

"Du jour", "� la mode", "pi�ce de r�sistance", "caf�", and "cuisine".

Now, we're going to go one by one, and I'll show you in what other contexts they can be

Now, "� la carte" basically means according to the menu, but what it does is it allows

you to order things individually as opposed to a set or a package.

So, if you go to a restaurant, they have a meal plan, like a set meal; all these things

For example, you have appetizer, main course, dessert.

You can also order other items on the menu individually and pay for them separately.

In the set, in the dinner set, for example, comes with it.

If you want to add anything, you order it separately and pay for it on top of the meal

But we also use this to talk about any package deal.

So, for example, you go buy a smartphone, a mobile phone and the company offers you

a full package with all the features that are available for this phone.

For example, if you don't need all these features, you can buy a basic plan and then choose your...

So, we don't only use it for food; we use it for any situation where you can pick individual

"Piquant" means spicy, but not spicy like burn your head off; spicy in a good way, like,

just enough of a sting on the tongue to make it enjoyable.

We can also use "piquant" to talk about a person.

You could say: "The woman is dressed in a piquant way."

Or somebody speaks with a little bit of a piquant attitude.

Basically, he means with a little bit of attitude; a little bit risky, a little bit racy, but

It has a little bit of flavour, even though you're talking about a person or something

"Prix fixe", so again, let's go back to the restaurant.

You go to a restaurant and they have a prix fixe - means they have a set price.

It means fixed price and you pay this much...

You pay $50 and these are all the things you get.

You can't add anything; there's no � la carte menu.

There's one set, one price - that's what you pay.

Again, going back to the mobile phone, you can buy a package and it's a fixed price;

you can't make any changes to it, no substitutions, no add-ons, no extra features, etc.

Or you can just buy the � la carte items as you need them.

Now, "savour" basically means to really feel or really enjoy the flavour of something.

And when you talk about "savour" as a noun, it has that special flavour that makes a dish

You can have, like, a savoury crepe or a sweet crepe.

"Savoury" means more of the salty flavour.

You can savour the sunset, you can savour a book, you can savour a good wine or food,

It means you take the time to really, really enjoy it, and appreciate everything that it

Well, most people know "menu", but "menu" is not only in a restaurant.

You can go into a store and you want to buy something, and you want to know all the products

they have available - they show you a menu of items.

So, basically, a "menu" is just a list of available products for purchase, or available

So, many companies just use the word "menu" because everybody understands it; they know

it's a list of available things to buy, and you choose your items.

Some of you may have seen my older video about foreign words commonly used in English, and

I already spoke about "du jour", but again, it's very relevant to this lesson, but you

can also watch that lesson to get other foreign words that are used in English.