What you are describing is what Chuck’s grandma made for him, cheese pie, which he loves, makes himself and devours regularly.  “Quiche” however, as well as just about any other similarly solid pedestrian and yummy food that its maker feels needs to be dolled up with a french name, is to be avoided (or more correctly, its cook (who would insist on being called a chef) is to be avoided), according to Chuck.

Hmmmm.  I understand the point that Chuck is trying to make, but I still can’t agree with it.  Because I’m at a certain box factory right now, I don’t have to hand my copies of Larousse Gastronomique, The Oxford Companion to Food or The Cambridge World History of Food, and thus cannot trace the development and/or etymology of the quiche/cheese pie.  What I can do is disagree vigorously with the notion that French nomenclature equals effete snobbery.  In France, particularly in northern France, where eggs and dairy are plentiful, quiche is not haute cuisine, but rather la cuisine de la grand-mere—yep, that means Grandma food.  More often than not, if you ask a three-star French chef what his favorite dishes are, he will not speak of the rarefied food he and his peers make, but rather wax poetic about the coq au vin, the boeuf aux carrottes, the roast chicken and buttered spinach, and yes, the quiche, of his mother, his grandmothers, his aunts.

Methinks that Chuck needs to cast off the shackles of his Francophobia.  Calling out snobbery is a fine and laudable thing, but equating French terminology with snobbery is not.  In fact, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if someone *is* using words like “quiche” and “chef” to sound more refined, what you have is not a pretentious Frenchman, but rather a pretentious American, riding the coattails of a grand old cuisine while refusing to do the legwork.

While I’m at it, let me rant a bit about how only pretenders call anybody who can bandy about a knife a chef.  The word chef doesn’t actually translate to “cook,” but rather, “chief.” The French word for cook is cuisinier (or cuisiniere, for female cooks), and any cook worth his/her salt knows the difference between a cuisinier and a chef.

(looks around sheepishly)

Sorry.  As you were.

Touche.  ;)