A dear friend lent his favorite French menu translation pocketbook to us for our trip to Paris. Sadly, we accidentally left it somewhere. Now I'm in the quest for a replacement, hopefully better than the one we lost.

I'm turning to you fodorites for help. Do you have a favorite?

TIA.

If you can get a copy of either of the Patrica Wells books --Food Lover's Guide to France and Food Lover's Guide to Paris--even if they're second hand, buy them and tell your friend to teat out the glossary at the back. I've almost never drawn a blank when using that for translation.

The Patricia Wells food dictionary can be downloaded for free from her web site:

http://www.patriciawells.com/glossary/atoz/atoz.htm

Click on the link, "Click here for a downloadable version of the French/English food glossary", and then you can download a version in either Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format. I carried two printed books and another food glossary from the web, and consistently found the free Patricia Wells food glossary to be the best of the lot. I recommend it. I haven't seen her printed books, but I'll bet they're also good.

You can print out the downloadable one, and carry it with you, but that would be pretty heavy. In my case, I loaded the Word file onto my Pocket PC (a PDA), and carried it that way. That allowed me to look up words using the "Find" feature of Pocket Word, without having to scan down through the pages (one problem with a pocket computer is that the screen is much smaller than a printed page.

There's an old thread with a discussion of this at:

http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34534230

I also like "Eating & Drinking in Paris: French Menu Reader and Restaurant Guide, 2nd Edition", by Andy Herbach and Michael Dillon. You can find it on Amazon. 76 of the 123 pages are menu translations.

I'm not that fond of the "Marling Menu-Master for France", because it lists the food by category (hors d'oevres, entrées, etc.), so that if you see something on a menu, but don't have a rough idea what it is, it can be hard to find things.

- Larry

Oops. I ought to know how to spell <i>hors d'oeuvres</i>. Or maybe we can get fancy, and write <i>hors d'œuvres</i>.

- Larry

On our trips to France, we've used the &quot;Marling Menu Master&quot;.

It's small enough to fit easily in a man's jacket pocket. We used ours constantly, and found it saved us from making mistakes several times.

We like this one because it used terms that were on the menu and explained how it was cooked and what all the ingredients would be.

Here is the link to Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Marling-Menu-M...ref=pd_sim_b_1

Good luck, have a great trip.

Or perhaps we can get it right and write hors d'oeuvre: no final s.

My favorite menu book is &quot;What Kind of Food Am I?&quot;for France. Very witty and informative.

I have and like Bon Appetit: French English Menu Dictionary by Judith White. It is small and portable. The problem with the Marling Menu Master is if you are dining in a place that doesn't cook traditional French cuisine it is not very helpful.

See also: <u>The Hungry Traveler: France</u>. Very compact and everything's in alphabetical order.

I agree with Larry. Patricia wells is very good. A few years ago someone posted where to get the Free food glossary and wine guide put out by Intimate France out of Ca. It's an 8x5 but thin so doesn't take up much space.

Thanks for all the recommendations thus far. I have the &quot;Marling Menu-Master for France&quot; myself but my friend's was much better. Unfortunately I don't recall the title. I'd really like to get him a pocket size one, and than, perhaps one of Patrica Wells books for apology.

hi all,

i just downloaded the patricia wells glossary (Word doc). I was able to shrink the document down to 20 pages ... Arial 8pt font, 0.25&quot; margins, six columns, landscape. double sided printing lets me tote around only 10 pages ... which isn't great but better than the original 42 page document!

Do you know about PDAs? You can reduce your entire travel library to a 3 oz. package that also retrieves your email and locates your exact position.

Paper is so 2nd century.

hi robespierre,

unfortunately, my CDMA blackberry will be quite useless to me in france. so paper it is.

Not a menu translator, but if you ever get to Brussels, sit at an inside table in Au Vieux St. Martin on the Sablon or Canterbury's by the Ixelles ponds. Free at every table (you can take it with you) is a fantastic little dietary guide to a huge array of continental dishes with the ugly secrets of fat, calories, carbs and salt content for all those tasty treats.

What? Isn't a Blackberry a computer?

If not, why do people even bother with them?

The best guide we've found is The A-Z of French food. Out of print for a while, but now available.

http://www.amazon.com/French-English...1894709&sr=8-1

Small, complete, easy to carry. And mostly accurate.

I still prefer Patricia Wells. The address where you can find it has changed since my last mention in this thread (there's another thread running on the same topic now, 3/16/12). The new Patricia Wells URL, where you can get it for free in either Word or PDA form, is on the page:

http://www.patriciawells.com/glossary/

Scroll down a bit - bottom middle of the page.

But if you can't carry a file on your PDA or smart phone, and prefer a small book, here are three of them, with links to them in Amazon:

<i>Eating and Drinking in France</i>:
http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Drinkin.../dp/0884964426

<i>Eating Out in Five Languages</i>:
(English - French - Spanish - Italian - German)
Not as detailed, but good if you travel to multiple countries.
http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Five-La.../dp/1904970052

<i>Marling Menu-Master for France</i>
I don't like this one as much, because it's arranged by type of food: <i>Hors d'oevres, potages, poissons,</i> etc. Hey, I'm looking it up because I <i>don't</i> know what it is.
http://www.amazon.com/Marling-Menu-M.../dp/0912818034

- Larry