I think the funniest one is sausage. They’ve just got a sausage box. Literally a wooden box to put your sausage in (dried cured sausage, not like…straight out of the meat grinder sausage.)
Want some sausage? Just find the sausage box, pull out your sausage, throw it on top of the box, cut a couple slices off, then put it back on the box.
Butter is obvious, but butter is sold in 250g blocks which are about double the size of an American stick of butter, so that’s a fucking lot of butter to just leave sitting out. So you can just do like a quarter a time and leave it in a covered butter dish on the counter with the rest in the fridge.
Cheese can get disgusting. Especially if it already starts out smelling like moldy feet. Even covered in a cheese bell, you can get some horrendous smells permeating the house.
A general European one is eggs. In the US we wash eggs after they are laid to help prevent salmonella. This washes the natural protective coating off so bacteria can get into them easier, so refrigerating them helps slow that bacteria growth which makes them go bad. In Europe they vaccinate the chickens instead. Eggs are sold unrefrigerated and are usually shelf stable for 3 or more weeks.
But I don’t really make fun of them for that one.
Sausages outside a refrigerator are pretty normal in most of Europe I think. In butcher shops most sausage types are stored in boxes or on hooks at room temperature. I hang my dry sausages on a hook at home. Once you start cutting them up and then not eat them all at once, most are best stored cooled though.
Cheese should be stored in a cool + dark + ventilated spot imo, like a cellar or a non heated room in pre global warming France ;). But if you don’t have such a spot, then most cheese should really be put in a refrigerator imo. It would really surprise me if this was a taboo in France.
The first three are the preserved form, he’s obviously buying items with recipes that predate refrigeration. I don’t keep butter in the fridge either.
Its completely sensible. Don’t get me wrong. Sausage was how you preserved extra meat, cheese and butter were how you preserved extra milk. But post-war kitchen appliance obsessed germaphobe America basically refrigerates everything, so to answer the question I thought it was fun to put a spin on it and instead of saying what they put in the fridge I’d talk about what gets left out.