Piedenfroid

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. And it’s tomorrow! I will be hosting a whopping 9 people. I’ve never hosted before. Yikes!
I do promise a vegetarian T-day recap, but in the meantime, if you are reading this you either have your menu in check, or are digesting a tasty meal. What I am getting to is, who really has time for ANOTHER Thanksgiving recipe? So thank you to Eleanor for suggesting that I feed not your bellies, but your brains.
This week I give you a word. You can use it to spice up your holiday table talk if you are dining with foody wordy nerds like me.
The English language lacks enough words to cover emotions felt in specific instances. We have no equivalent to “schadenfreude”, used to describe delight felt in another’s misfortune. Well, I have taken it upon myself to create a word to descibe a common and unfortunate feeling-one I hope does not describe your Thanksgiving experience. Allow me to introduce you to this soon-to-be linguistic sensation:
PIEDENFROID
You know how sometimes a dessert looks amazing, sounds amazing, perhaps even smells good, and totally tastes lame? Not bad, just…lackluster? So you eat it, but it is not special. You feel tricked, and are filled with remorse, disillusion, dispair, perhaps even denial as you make excuses for the failed dessert(well, the whipped cream seemed real, at least!). You regret that dessert. You are left saddened and still wanting, yet you’ve filled your belly with this useless dessert.
This is piedenfroid. It has it’s word origings in “pie”, the dessert most easily guilty of piedenfroid. So easy for a pie to fail if not in a tasteless cardboard crust, then in a overly dried or too gooey filling.
This word also denotes just a tinge of anger, both at yourself and at the dessert, and the dessert’s source(hopefully not yourself-then you’ve wasted time cooking and ingredients). It does not, however, denote rage. The dessert has to be truly awful for rage. I am working on the word for that.
May your Thanksgiving be plentiful and piedenfroid-free.