When Remy tries a piece of cheese together with a strawberry, he doesn’t simply eat it, he experiences it, noticing every separate flavour as it appears, combines, and changes. This is the perfect place to start, because English has four basic taste words: sweet, like strawberries or sugar, salty, like crisps or seawater, bitter, like strong black coffee, and sour, like a fresh lemon. There’s also a very useful fifth word, savoury, which describes food that is full of flavour but not sweet, like cheese, soup, or roasted vegetables.

For Remy, though, taste is only half of the story, because food also has texture. The cheese he loves is creamy, and a good baguette is crunchy. “Creamy” and “crunchy” are texture words: they describe how food feels in your mouth, rather than how it tastes. A thick mushroom soup is creamy, a fresh apple is crunchy, and English speakers use texture words constantly, often more than taste words themselves.

There, Remy watches a clumsy, nervous young kitchen worker called Alfredo Linguini accidentally ruin the evening’s soup. By the time Linguini has finished throwing in ingredients at random, the soup has turned completely bland. “Bland” is one of the most useful food words in English: it describes food with very little flavour, food that tastes of almost nothing. If a friend calls your cooking bland, they are politely telling you it needs more seasoning.

Remy cannot help himself. Risking his life, he quietly fixes the soup, adding herbs and adjusting spices until the flavour becomes rich and perfectly balanced. “Rich” describes food with a deep, strong, satisfying flavour, and we use it most often for sauces, chocolate desserts, and creamy dishes. Be a little careful with it, though: rich food can sometimes be too heavy, which is why English speakers also say things like “it was delicious, but a little too rich for me.”

A sharp, talented young chef named Colette is ordered to train Linguini properly, and she takes that job very seriously. One of her most important lessons is that some flavours are delicate. When Linguini nervously adds far too much garlic to one of her sauces, he learns this the hard way. “Delicate” describes a light, gentle flavour that stronger ingredients can easily destroy, and we often use it for fish, fresh herbs, and carefully made sauces.

Word of the food begins to spread across Paris, and returning customers start describing the new dishes as mouth-watering. “Mouth-watering” describes food that looks or smells so good that your mouth literally starts to water, and the lovely thing about this word is that you can use it before you’ve taken a single bite.

Then comes the news the whole kitchen fears: Anton Ego, the most feared food critic in all of Paris, announces he will return to review the restaurant, the very same critic whose scathing review once destroyed Gusteau’s reputation. Ego is a wonderful character for English learners, because he speaks and writes in long, formal, extremely bookish sentences. A word like exquisite, meaning beautiful and almost perfect, belongs in Ego’s written reviews, but in everyday conversation, an English speaker would simply say the food was “really tasty” or “absolutely delicious.” Knowing which words belong in writing, and which belong in speech, is exactly what stops your English from sounding like a textbook.

For Ego’s visit, Remy makes a brave and surprising choice. Instead of something expensive and complicated, he cooks ratatouille, a simple, hearty vegetable dish from the French countryside. “Hearty” describes simple, filling, comforting food, the kind of meal that warms you up and leaves you completely satisfied, like a thick stew or a big bowl of vegetable soup.

One taste, and something remarkable happens: Ego is transported straight back to his childhood, to his mother’s kitchen, where a warm plate of this exact dish once comforted him after a very bad day. It’s the film’s beautiful way of showing what English speakers call comfort food: simple, familiar food that makes you feel warm, safe, and happy, and every country in the world has its own version of it.

The vegetables themselves are cooked so perfectly that they seem to melt in your mouth. “Melts in your mouth” is one of the most common food phrases in English: it describes food so soft, tender, and perfectly prepared that it seems to disappear the moment you taste it.

Critically, the response was overwhelmingly positive, with the film holding an extremely high score with critics, and many reviewers calling it one of the finest animated films ever made. It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and received four further Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Screenplay, an unusually high number for an animated film at the time. Audiences responded warmly too, helping it earn well over six hundred million dollars worldwide.