Predicting correct match of French to English food descriptions
As you suspected, the best approach would be to take a massive multilingual pretrained language model and make use of the information about French and English that it has already learned. You can read about some good options here.

The basic idea is to train a new, lightweight network to make predictions based on the output from the pretrained model; its usual to just have a single layer feed forward network for this “fine-tuning”. Some implementations will already have this conveniently coded up for you, so check the documentation for whatever you decide to use!

Your problem is specifically a sentence pair classification problem, and there is a tutorial for that here. Pay close attention to the data processing phase of the tutorial. Overall, the differences you need to apply to what the tutorial describes are


You need to use multilingual BERT
You need to prepare your data exactly as the tutorial says about how to set up your data, but use your own snippets in place of the sentence pairs