PART THREE 
The Delight and Dread of Eating
“I HAVE EATEN / the plums / that were in / the icebox,” confesses William Carlos Williams in one of the twentieth century’s most influential verses, explaining “they were . . . / so sweet / and so cold.” The poem’s fame derives in large part from its apparent prosiness and casualness: it takes the form of a late night note written by an erring husband to his provident wife. But its intensity comes, too, from its focus on the delight of eating, the deliciousness of the “so sweet and so cold” stolen fruit. As such a celebration of gustatory pleasure, this tiny text can serve as a model for countless other works produced over centuries of literary wining and dining. In this section of our anthology alone we encounter not just William’s plums but Seamus Heaney’s oysters that taste of “the salty Pleiades,” along with Julia Child’s famously life-altering sole meunière, Walter Benjamin’s seductive figs, Robert Capon’s mystical onion, and even, more obscurely, the great avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein’s enigmatic “Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam.”
Like Proust’s madeleine, these delicacies contain and sustain history, both personal (the sole meunière) and public (the oysters) while also embodying the variousness and strangeness of the cosmos itself (the onion). At the same time, in their lusciousness they hint at a danger always implicit in appetite: excess. Benjamin’s feelings of “satiety and revulsion” after gobbling half a pound of figs point to the perils of gluttony, omnipresent at the laden table. (For other examples of this problem, from the perspective not of the diner but of the observer, see our selections from Petronius, Rabelais, and Douglass, in Part I.) More radical, and perverse, feelings of revulsion mark the practices of anorexics and bulimics, most often young women who try to control their weight through extreme dieting or even (as in the case of the late Princess Diana) by inducing vomiting or using laxatives.
But the psychological conditions of anorexia and bulimia aren’t the only manifestations of gastronomic revulsion. Cross-culturally, as we’ve seen in Part I, food taboos are almost universal. In our society, we don’t generally braise Fido the pup or Felix the cat, as Francine Prose points out, nor do we find the eating of rats, as engaged in by the Chinese and explored by Peter Hessler, in the least appetizing. And as Jeffrey Steingarten notes, we all harbor our own, private food aversions; he writes winningly of how, in order to become a restaurant critic, he had to battle his personal distaste for anchovies, Greek cuisine, and a range of other delicacies. At the same time, and more paradoxically, the very taboo nature of certain foods may give them a culinary glamour that transforms them from poisonous to precious, banned to beloved. Consider, after all, the simultaneously repellent and compelling sea urchin about which Chang-rae Lee writes so elegantly. Or think of the illegal ortolans on whom François Mitterand, the late president of France, feasted for his last earthly meal, or, for that matter, the prized fugu, a potentially deadly fish prepared by skilled chefs at popular restaurants throughout Japan: Michael Paterniti narrates the bizarre story of the ortolan, and Diane Ackerman the (sometimes literally) unnerving tale of the fugu.
In the midst of this often problematic plenty, though, we shouldn’t forget that even while voluptuaries indulge at table to the point of indigestion or worse, there are 870 million people worldwide (or one out of every eight) who go hungry every day, and in the United States alone nearly 50 million people (or one out of six) are what is called “food insecure.” Campbell McGrath brings us up to date on one sad way that some contemporary Americans appease their hunger—on a steady diet of burritos and Slurpees, at the 7-Eleven. But one of the most severe episodes of starvation in recent history killed countless inmates of the horrifying concentration camps built by the Nazis during the Second World War, and among many prisoners such extreme hunger gave rise to culinary memories and visions of the sort recorded by some women at Theresienstadt and later published in a collection edited by Cara de Silva. We include portions of her introduction to At Memory’s Table to help dramatize their story, along with one of the centerpiece recipes from the book, Wilhelmina Pächter’s almost surrealistically appetizing and extravagant “Cold Stuffed Eggs Pächter,” scribbled on a scrap of paper in a cell from which she would only escape through death. Her poignant exclamation—“Let fantasy run free!”—should remind us that even in the most dreadful circumstances, human beings keep on thinking and writing about food.
RAISED IN OAKLAND, California (of which she famously remarked “There’s no there there”), Stein settled in Paris as a young woman, living first with her brother Leo and then with her life partner Alice B. Toklas. Her dazzling art collection and brilliant salons at the rue de Fleurus soon made her one of the most famous and influential American expatriates. Always defining herself as a genius, she experimented with radical modes of writing. Though her first book, Three Lives, was relatively conventional, as was her best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her Tender Buttons, from which our selections are drawn, is playful, punning, and enigmatic, but curiously focused on food, with pieces that make it seem almost like a daily menu (“Milk,” “Eggs,” “Apple,” “Roast Beef,” “Asparagus”) or, as the critic Susan Gubar has put it, like “a mad Mrs. Beeton’s.” Serendipitously, Stein and Toklas summered for many years in Bilignin par Belley, the hometown of the great gastronome Brillat-Savarin, and, confided Toklas, “enjoyed using the furniture from his house.”
A WHITE egg and a colored pan and a cabbage showing settlement, a constant increase.
A cold in a nose, a single cold nose makes an excuse. Two are more necessary.
All the goods are stolen, all the blisters are in the cup.
Cooking, cooking is the recognition between sudden and nearly sudden very little and all large holes.
A real pint, one that is open and closed and in the middle is so bad.
Tender colds, seen eye holders, all work, the best of change, the meaning, the dark red, all this and bitten, really bitten.
Guessing again and golfing again and the best men, the very best men.
APPLE plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece please.
A little piece please. Cane again to the presupposed and ready eucalyptus tree, count out sherry and ripe plates and little corners of a kind of ham. This is use.
A MAJOR AMERICAN modernist, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Award, Stevens was a lawyer for a Hartford insurance company who wrote verse in his spare time. His poetry is known for its sensuous surface and its highly aestheticized perspective on human experience. Stevens often seems like a connoisseur perceiving elegance in the world around us, even as he writes poetic meditations on seemingly abstract subjects, such as the status of the imagination and the nature of beauty. In his enigmatic “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” a down-home ice cream social appears to take place at a woman’s funeral, as if the worldly pleasure of the dessert were a momentary compensation for death. The muscular roller of cigars, who whips up the “concupiscent curds” of ice cream, becomes an impresario of sweetness and hedonism in the face of inevitable decay.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
A LIFELONG RESIDENT of New Jersey and family physician, Williams was also a major modernist poet, experimenting with imagist techniques and innovative prosody. “No ideas but in things,” he proclaimed early and often in his career, emphasizing his commitment to specific details and to realistic, sometimes interestingly photographic representations of the quotidian American life that fascinated him. “The pure products of America go crazy,” he wrote in one poem, but in another he celebrated the shine of raindrops on a red wheelbarrow. His influential conversational verse “This Is Just To Say” presents itself as (and may really have been) a midnight note scrawled to his young wife Flossie. Yet because of its simplicity of diction and its careful line breaks it has been widely acclaimed and often studied. The plums in the icebox, wrote Williams wistfully, are “so sweet / and so cold”—a line that evokes both the joy and the sorrow of delicious fruit even while it modestly describes a midnight snack.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
ONE OF THE great political and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Benjamin was associated with the Frankfurt School in Germany which set forth Marxist theories of literature, society, and culture. A major influence on such important thinkers as the playwright Berthold Brecht, the composer Kurt Weill, and the philosopher Theodor Adorno, Benjamin would seem an unlikely person to be writing on food. But like the French philosopher-theorist Roland Barthes, who also wrote occasional culinary essays, Benjamin saw food as an index of culture. For him each item of food yields lessons in human happiness, despair, and sorrow. As Benjamin regards the subject, culinary illuminations are often as powerful as philosophical revelations.
NO one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion from the straight and narrow road of the appetite which leads to the primeval forest of greed. For in gluttony two things coincide: the boundlessness of desire and the uniformity of the food that sates it. Gourmandizing means above all else to devour one thing to the last crumb. There is no doubt that it enters more deeply into what you eat than mere enjoyment. For example, when you bite into mortadella as if it were bread, or bury your face in a melon as if it were a pillow, or gorge yourself on caviar out of crackling paper, or, when confronted with the sight of a round Edam cheese, find that the existence of every other food simply vanishes from your mind.—How did I first learn all this? It happened just before I had to make a very difficult decision. A letter had to be posted or torn up. I had carried it around in my pocket for two days, but had not given it a thought for some hours. I then took the noisy narrow-gauge railway up to Secondigliano through the sun-parched landscape. The village lay in still solemnity in the weekday peace and quiet. The only traces of the excitement of the previous Sunday were the poles on which Catherine wheels and rockets had been ignited. Now they stood there bare. Some of them still displayed a sign halfway up with the figure of a saint from Naples or an animal. Women sat in the open barns husking corn. I was walking along in a daze, when I noticed a cart with figs standing in the shade. It was sheer idleness that made me go up to them, sheer extravagance that I bought half a pound for a few soldi. The woman gave me a generous measure. But when the black, blue, bright green, violet, and brown fruit lay in the bowl of the scales, it turned out that she had no paper to wrap them in. The housewives of Secondigliano bring their baskets with them, and she was unprepared for globetrotters. For my part, I was ashamed to abandon the fruit. So I left her with figs stuffed in my trouser pockets and in my jacket, figs in both of my outstretched hands, and figs in my mouth. I couldn’t stop eating them and was forced to get rid of the mass of plump fruits as quickly as possible. But that could not be described as eating; it was more like a bath, so powerful was the smell of resin that penetrated all my belongings, clung to my hands and impregnated the air through which I carried my burden. And then, after satiety and revulsion—the final bends in the path—had been surmounted, came the ultimate mountain peak of taste. A vista over an unsuspected landscape of the palate spread out before my eyes—an insipid, undifferentiated, greenish flood of greed that could distinguish nothing but the stringy, fibrous waves of the flesh of the open fruit, the utter transformation of enjoyment into habit, of habit into vice. A hatred of those figs welled up inside me; I was desperate to finish with them, to liberate myself, to rid myself of all this overripe, bursting fruit. I ate it to destroy it. Biting had rediscovered its most ancient purpose. When I pulled the last fig from the depths of my pocket, the letter was stuck to it. Its fate was sealed; it, too, had to succumb to the great purification. I took it and tore it into a thousand pieces.
IT starts by spreading a mask of steam over your features. Long before your tongue touches the spoon, your eyes have started to water and your nose is dripping with borscht. Long before your insides have gone on the alert and your blood has become a single wave that courses through your body with the foaming aroma, your eyes have drunk in the red abundance in your bowl. They are now blind to everything that is not borscht, or its reflection in the eyes of your table companion. It’s sour cream, you think, that gives this soup its rich texture. Perhaps. But I have eaten it in the Moscow winter, and I know one thing: it contains snow, molten red flakes, food from the clouds that is akin to the manna that also fell from the sky one day. And doesn’t the warm flow soften the pieces of meat, so that it lies inside you like a ploughed field from which you can easily dig up the weed Sadness by the root? Just leave the vodka next to it, untouched; do not start to cut up the piroshkis. It is then that you will discover the secret of the soup that alone among foods has the ability to satisfy you gently. It gradually pervades you entirely, while with other foods a sudden cry of “Enough!” abruptly causes a shudder to pass through your entire body.
SHE had been the Capri village cocotte, and was now the sixty-year-old mother of little Gennaro, whom she beat when she was drunk. She lived in the ocher-colored house in a vineyard on the steep mountainside. I came looking for my girlfriend, to whom she was renting the house. From Capri came the sound of the clock striking twelve. There was no one to be seen; the garden was empty. I reclimbed the steps I had just come down. Suddenly I could hear the old woman close behind me. She stood in the kitchen doorway dressed in a skirt and blouse, discolored items of clothing which you’d have searched in vain for any stains, so evenly, so uniformly was the dirt spread over them. “Voi cercate la signora. E partita colla piccola.” And she was due back shortly. But this was just the start: it was followed by a flood of inviting words uttered in her shrill, high-pitched voice, accompanied by rhythmic movements of her imperious head, which decades previously must have had provocative power. I would have had to be an accomplished gentleman to decline her offer, and I was not even able to express myself in Italian. So much was comprehensible: it was an invitation to share her midday meal. I now caught sight of her wretched husband inside the cottage, taking something out of a dish with a spoon. She now went up to this dish. Immediately afterward, she reappeared in the doorway with a plate, which she held out to me without interrupting her flow of speech. I found myself bereft of the remnants of my ability to understand Italian. I felt instantly that it was too late for me to take my leave. From amid a cloud of garlic, beans, mutton fat, tomatoes, and onions, there appeared the domineering hand from which I took a tin spoon. I am sure you are thinking that I would have choked on this nauseating swill and that my sole thought would be to vomit it all up again as quickly as possible. How little you would understand of the magic of this food, and how little I understood it myself up to the moment I am describing now. To taste it was of no importance. It was nothing but the decisive yet imperceptible transition between two moments: first between the moment of smelling it, and then of being overwhelmed, utterly bowled over and kneaded, by this food, gripped by it, as if by the hands of the old whore, squeezed, and having the juice rubbed into me—whether the juice of the food or of the woman, I am no longer able to say. The obligation of politeness was satisfied and so was the witch’s desire, and I went on up the mountain enriched by the knowledge of Odysseus when he saw his companions transformed into swine.
HEMINGWAY WON THE Nobel Prize in 1954 for his novels and short stories, which are among the most important in the history of American literature. But one of his most beloved works is A Moveable Feast, the nonfiction account of his life in Paris as a young expatriate writer in the 1920s, including his friendship with such luminaries as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Among the highlights of the work are Hemingway’s descriptions of the bars, cafés, and restaurants he frequented, places for long hours of scribbling as well as for eating and drinking. But this author’s passionate allegiance to what he called “the romance of food” can be traced back to his earliest writings, like the article we include here, produced for the Toronto Star where he worked in his twenties. To readers of other early Hemingway writings—notably the Nick Adams stories, especially “Big Two-Hearted River”—the hunger for simple camping-out fare so central here will be very familiar.
When You Camp Out, Do It Right
THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE will go into the bush this summer to cut the high cost of living. A man who gets his two weeks’ salary while he is on vacation should be able to put those two weeks in fishing and camping and be able to save one week’s salary clear. He ought to be able to sleep comfortably every night, to eat well every day, and to return to the city rested and in good condition.
But if he goes into the woods with a frying pan, an ignorance of black flies and mosquitoes, and a great and abiding lack of knowledge about cookery, the chances are that his return will be very different. He will come back with enough mosquito bites to make the back of his neck look like a relief map of the Caucasus. His digestion will be wrecked after a valiant battle to assimilate half-cooked or charred grub. And he won’t have had a decent night’s sleep while he has been gone.
He will solemnly raise his right hand and inform you that he has joined the grand army of never-agains. The call of the wild may be all right, but it’s a dog’s life. He’s heard the call of the tame with both ears. Waiter, bring him an order of milk toast.
In the first place, he overlooked the insects. Black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, gnats, and mosquitoes were instituted by the devil to force people to live in cities where he could get at them better. If it weren’t for them, everybody would live in the bush, and he would be out of work. It was a rather successful invention.
But there are lots of dopes that will counteract the pests. The simplest perhaps is oil of citronella. Two bits’ worth of this oil purchased at any pharmacist’s will be enough to last for two weeks in the worst fly- and mosquito-ridden country. Rub a little on the back of your neck, your forehead, and your wrists before you start fishing, and the blacks and skeeters will shun you. The odor of citronella is not offensive to people. It smells like gun oil. But the bugs do hate it.
Oil of pennyroyal and eucalyptol are also much hated by mosquitoes, and with citronella they form the basis for many proprietary preparations. But it is cheaper and better to buy the straight citronella. Put a little on the mosquito netting that covers the front of your pup tent or canoe tent at night, and you won’t be bothered.
To be really rested and get any benefit out of a vacation, a man must get a good night’s sleep every night. The first requisite for this is to have plenty of cover. It is twice as cold as you expect it will be in the bush four nights out of five, and a good plan is to take just double the bedding that you think you will need. An old quilt that you can wrap up in is as warm as two blankets.
Nearly all outdoor writers rhapsodize over the browse bed. It is all right for the man who knows how to make one and has plenty of time. But in a succession of one-night camps on a canoe trip, all you need is level ground for your tent floor, and you will sleep all right if you have plenty of covers under you. Take twice as much cover as you think that you will need, and then put two-thirds of it under you. You will sleep warm and get your rest.
When it is clear weather, you don’t need to pitch your tent if you are only stopping for the night. Drive four stakes at the head of your made-up bed, and drape your mosquito bar over that; then you can sleep like a log and laugh at the mosquitoes.
Outside of insects and bum sleeping, the rock that wrecks most camping trips is cooking. The average tyro’s idea of cooking is to fry everything and fry it good and plenty. Now, a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.
A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered, and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and a bad way of frying them. The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire; the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder, and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them, and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks, he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.
The proper way to cook is over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half-cooked, lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in cornmeal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout, and it will baste the fish as they slowly cook.
The coffee can be boiling at the same time, and in a smaller skillet, pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout. With the prepared pancake flours, you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour, and as soon as the lumps are out, the batter is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot, and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in, and as soon as it is done on one side, loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup, or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.
While the crowd has taken the edge from its appetite with flapjacks, the trout have been cooked, and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside, and the bacon is well done—but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination, the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.
The stew kettle will cook your dried apricots when they have resumed their pre-dried plumpness after a night of soaking; it will serve to concoct a mulligan in, and it will cook macaroni. When you are not using it, it should be boiling water for the dishes.
In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that Mother used to make. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife can.
All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard, and cold water. That combination will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partners’ eyes. Mix the salt with the flour; work the lard into the flour, and make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough, and then slosh a little flour and roll it up. Then roll it out again with the bottle.
Cut out a piece of the rolled-out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough, and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet, and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.
Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes, and then take it out. If your pals are Frenchmen, they will kiss you. The penalty for knowing how to cook is that the others will make you do all the cooking.
It is all right to talk about roughing it in the woods. But the real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush.
ONE OF THE most important American cookbook writers and food personalities, Child revolutionized the way American women regarded French cuisine with her enormously influential, coauthored work, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She helped demystify the subject with her detailed, lucid, step-by-step instructions, and she followed the book with a highly successful TV cooking show, The French Chef. Eventually, the tall, singsongy-voiced Child became a beloved presence and such an icon that after her death her Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen was removed in its entirety to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Probably no other figure in the American food world has been so revered and lauded. But this brilliant Francophile knew little or nothing about French cuisine until her thirties, and this selection shows her ecstatic introduction to that food via one of its great dishes, sole meunière. It is charming to read her saying, at her first meal in France, “What’s a shallot?” Well, we all have to start somewhere.
from My Life in France: Sole Meunière
THE NORMAN COUNTRYSIDE struck me as quintessentially French, in an indefinable way. The real sights and sounds and smells of this place were so much more particular and interesting than a movie montage or a magazine spread about “France” could ever be. Each little town had a distinct character, though some of them, like Yvetot, were still scarred by gaping bomb holes and knots of barbed wire. We saw hardly any other cars, but there were hundreds of bicyclists, old men driving horses-and-buggies, ladies dressed in black, and little boys in wooden shoes. The telephone poles were of a different size and shape from those in America. The fields were intensely cultivated. There were no billboards. And the occasional pink-and-white stucco villa set at the end of a formal allée of trees was both silly and charming. Quite unexpectedly, something about the earthy-smoky smells, the curve of the landscape, and the bright greenness of the cabbage fields reminded us both of China.
Oh, la belle France—without knowing it, I was already falling in love!
AT twelve-thirty we flashed into Rouen. We passed the city’s ancient and beautiful clock tower, and then its famous cathedral, still pockmarked from battle but magnificent with its stained-glass windows. We rolled to a stop in la Place du Vieux Marché, the square where Joan of Arc had met her fiery fate. There the Guide Michelin directed us to Restaurant La Couronne (“The Crown”), which had been built in 1345 in a medieval quarter-timbered house. Paul strode ahead, full of anticipation, but I hung back, concerned that I didn’t look chic enough, that I wouldn’t be able to communicate, and that the waiters would look down their long Gallic noses at us Yankee tourists.
It was warm inside, and the dining room was a comfortably old-fashioned brown-and-white space, neither humble nor luxurious. At the far end was an enormous fireplace with a rotary spit, on which something was cooking that sent out heavenly aromas. We were greeted by the maître d’hôtel, a slim middle-aged man with dark hair who carried himself with an air of gentle seriousness. Paul spoke to him, and the maître d’ smiled and said something back in a familiar way, as if they were old friends. Then he led us to a nice table not far from the fireplace. The other customers were all French, and I noticed that they were treated with exactly the same courtesy as we were. Nobody rolled their eyes at us or stuck their nose in the air. Actually, the staff seemed happy to see us.
As we sat down, I heard two businessmen in gray suits at the next table asking questions of their waiter, an older, dignified man who gesticulated with a menu and answered them at length.
“What are they talking about?” I whispered to Paul.
“The waiter is telling them about the chicken they ordered,” he whispered back. “How it was raised, how it will be cooked, what side dishes they can have with it, and which wines would go with it best.”
“Wine?” I said. “At lunch?” I had never drunk much wine other than some $1.19 California Burgundy, and certainly not in the middle of the day.
In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. “The trick is moderation,” he said.
Suddenly the dining room filled with wonderfully intermixing aromas that I sort of recognized but couldn’t name. The first smell was something oniony—“shallots,” Paul identified it, “being sautéed in fresh butter.” (“What’s a shallot?” I asked, sheepishly. “You’ll see,” he said.) Then came a warm and winy fragrance from the kitchen, which was probably a delicious sauce being reduced on the stove. This was followed by a whiff of something astringent: the salad being tossed in a big ceramic bowl with lemon, wine vinegar, olive oil, and a few shakes of salt and pepper.
My stomach gurgled with hunger.
I couldn’t help noticing that the waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended. One of them glided up to my elbow. Glancing at the menu, Paul asked him questions in rapid-fire French. The waiter seemed to enjoy the back-and-forth with my husband. Oh, how I itched to be in on their conversation! Instead, I smiled and nodded uncomprehendingly, although I tried to absorb all that was going on around me.
We began our lunch with a half-dozen oysters on the half-shell. I was used to bland oysters from Washington and Massachusetts, which I had never cared much for. But this platter of portugaises had a sensational briny flavor and a smooth texture that was entirely new and surprising. The oysters were served with rounds of pain de seigle, a pale rye bread, with a spread of unsalted butter. Paul explained that, as with wine, the French have “crus” of butter, special regions that produce individually flavored butters. Beurre de Charentes is a full-bodied butter, usually recommended for pastry dough or general cooking; beurre d’lsigny is a fine, light table butter. It was that delicious Isigny that we spread on our rounds of rye.
Rouen is famous for its duck dishes, but after consulting the waiter Paul had decided to order sole meunière. It arrived whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top. The waiter carefully placed the platter in front of us, stepped back, and said: “Bon appétit!”
I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume. Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly. The flesh of the sole was delicate, with a light but distinct taste of the ocean that blended marvelously with the browned butter. I chewed slowly and swallowed. It was a morsel of perfection.
In Pasadena, we used to have broiled mackerel for Friday dinners, codfish balls with egg sauce, “boiled” (poached) salmon on the Fourth of July, and the occasional pan-fried trout when camping in the Sierras. But at La Couronne I experienced fish, and a dining experience, of a higher order than any I’d ever had before.
Along with our meal, we happily downed a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, a wonderfully crisp white wine from the Loire Valley. Another revelation!
Then came salade verte laced with a lightly acidic vinaigrette. And I tasted my first real baguette—a crisp brown crust giving way to a slightly chewy, rather loosely textured pale-yellow interior, with a faint reminder of wheat and yeast in the odor and taste. Yum!
We followed our meal with a leisurely dessert of fromage blanc, and ended with a strong, dark café filtre. The waiter placed before us a cup topped with a metal canister, which contained coffee grounds and boiling water. With some urging by us impatient drinkers, the water eventually filtered down into the cup below. It was fun, and it provided a distinctive dark brew.
Paul paid the bill and chatted with the maître d’, telling him how much he looked forward to going back to Paris for the first time in eighteen years. The maître d’ smiled as he scribbled something on the back of a card. “Tiens,” he said, handing it to me. The Dorin family, who owned La Couronne, also owned a restaurant in Paris, called La Truite, he explained, while Paul translated. On the card he had scribbled a note of introduction for us.
“Mairci, monsoor,” I said, with a flash of courage and an accent that sounded bad even to my own ear. The waiter nodded as if it were nothing, and moved off to greet some new customers.
Paul and I floated out the door into the brilliant sunshine and cool air. Our first lunch together in France had been absolute perfection. It was the most exciting meal of my life.
Robert Farrar Capon (1925–2013)
AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST and the author of twenty-seven books, most of them theological but some also memoiristic, Capon gained fame with the publication of his third volume, The Supper of the Lamb, from which we draw his lyrical and mystical meditation on the nature of the humble onion. In 1977, after a divorce of which his church superiors disapproved, Capon left the ministry to devote himself to full-time writing, but in his later years served again as a priest and a theologian while continuing to contribute columns on food and wine to The New York Times and Newsday. But as his discussion of the onion reveals, Capon’s culinary writing is also itself religious. About his most celebrated book, the novelist and Christian commentator Frederick Buechner declared that merely “to call The Supper of the Lamb a cookbook would be like calling Moby Dick a whaling manual.”
from The Supper of the Lamb: On the Onion
I MUST TEACH you first how to deal with onions.
Select three or four medium-size onions—I have in mind the common, or yellow, onion normally available in the supermarket. The first movement of my recipe is simply a stew; small white onions, while more delicate as a vegetable in their own right, are a nuisance to cut up for inclusion in something else. The labor of peeling is enlarged beyond reason, and the attempt to slice up the small slippery balls you are left with can be painful.
Next take one of the onions (preferably the best-looking), a paring knife, and a cutting board and sit down at the kitchen table. Do not attempt to stand at a counter through these opening measures. In fact, to do it justice, you should arrange to have sixty minutes or so free for this part of the exercise. Admittedly, spending an hour in the society of an onion may be something you have never done before. You feel, perhaps, a certain resistance to the project. Please don’t. As I shall show later, a number of highly profitable members of the race have undertaken it before you. Onions are excellent company.
Once you are seated, the first order of business is to address yourself to the onion at hand. (You must firmly resist the temptation to feel silly. If necessary, close the doors so no one will see you; but do not give up out of embarrassment.) You will note, to begin with, that the onion is a thing, a being, just as you are. Savor that for a moment. The two of you sit here in mutual confrontation. Together with knife, board, table, and chair, you are the constituents of a place in the highest sense of the word. This is a Session, a meeting, a society of things.
You have, you see, already discovered something: The uniqueness, the placiness, of place derives not from abstractions like location, but from confrontations like man-onion. Erring theologians have strayed to their graves without learning what you have come upon. They have insisted, for example, that heaven is no place because it could not be defined in terms of spatial co-ordinates. They have written off man’s eternal habitation as a “state of mind.” But look what your onion has done for you: It has given you back the possibility of heaven as a place without encumbering you with the irrelevancy of location.
This meeting between the two of you could be moved to a thousand different latitudes and longitudes and still remain the session it started out to be. Indeed, by the motions of the earth, the solar systems, the galaxy, and the universe (if that can be defined), every place—every meeting of matter—becomes a kind of cosmic floating crap game: Location is accidental to its deepest meaning. What really matters is not where we are, but who-what real beings—are with us. In that sense, heaven, where we see God face to face through the risen flesh of Jesus, may well be the placiest of all places, as it is the most gloriously material of all meetings. Here, perhaps, we do indeed see only through a glass darkly; we mistake one of the earthly husks of place for the heart of its mattering.
But back to the onion itself. As nearly as possible now, try to look at it as if you had never seen an onion before. Try, in other words, to meet it on its own terms, not to dictate yours to it. You are convinced, of course, that you know what an onion is. You think perhaps that it is a brownish yellow vegetable, basically spherical in shape, composed of fundamentally similar layers. All such prejudices should be abandoned. It is what it is, and your work here is to find it out.
For a start, therefore, notice that your onion has two ends: a lower, now marked only by the blackish gray spot from which the root filaments descended into the earth; and an upper, which terminates (unless your onions are over the hill, or have begun to sprout because you store them under a leaky sink trap) in a withered peak of onion paper. Note once again what you have discovered: an onion is not a sphere in repose. It is a linear thing, a bloom of vectors thrusting upward from base to tip. Stand your onion, therefore, root end down upon the board and see it as the paradigm of life that it is—as one member of the vast living, gravity-defying troop that, across the face of the earth, moves light-and airward as long as the world lasts.
Only now have you the perspective needed to enter the onion itself. Begin with the outermost layer of paper, or onionskin. Be careful. In the ordinary processes of cooking, the outer skin of a sound onion is removed by peeling away the immediately underlying layers of flesh with it. It is a legitimate short cut; the working cook cannot afford the time it takes to loosen only the paper. Here, however, it is not time that matters, but the onion. Work gently then, lifting the skin with the point of your knife so as not to cut or puncture the flesh with it. It is harder than you may have thought. Old onion skins give up easily, but new ones can be stubborn.
Look now at the fall of stripped and flaked skin before you. It is dry. It is, all things considered, one of the driest things is the world. Not dusty dry like potatoes, but smoothly and thinly dry, suggesting not accidental dessication, not the withering due to age or external circumstance, but a fresh and essential dryness. Dryness as an achievement, not as a failure. Elegant dryness. Deliberate dryness. More than that, onion paper is, like the onion itself, directional, vectored, ribbed. (It will, oddly, split as easily across its striations as with them: Its grain has been reduced by dryness to a merely visual quality.) Best of all, though, it is of two colors: the outside, a brownish yellow of no particular brightness; but the inside a soft, burnished, coppery gold, ribbed—especially near the upper end—with an exquisiteness only hinted at on the outside. Accordingly, when you have removed all the paper, turn the fragments inside-up on the board. They are elegant company.
For with their understated display of wealth, they bring you to one of the oldest and most secret things of the world: the sight of what no one but you has ever seen. This quiet gold, and the subtly flattened sheen of greenish yellow white onion that now stands exposed, are virgin land. Like the incredible fit of twin almonds in a shell, they present themselves to you as the animals to Adam: as nameless till seen by man, to be met, known and christened into the city of being. They come as deputies of all the hiddennesses of the world, of all the silent competencies endlessly at work deep down things. And they come to you—to you as their priest and voice, for oblation by your heart’s astonishment at their great glory.
Only now are you ready for the first cut. Holding the onion vertically, slice it cleanly in half right down the center line, and look at what you have done. You have opened the floodgates of being. First, as to the innards. The mental diagram of sphere within sphere is abolished immediately. Structurally, the onion is not a ball, but a nested set of fingers within fingers, each thrust up from the base through the center of the one before it. The outer digits are indeed swollen to roundness by the pressure of the inner, but their sphericity is incidental to the linear motion of flame inthrusting flame.
Next, the colors, The cross-section of each several flame follows a rule: On its inner edge it is white, on its outer, pigmented; the color varying from the palest greenish yellow in the middle flames, to more recognizable onion shades as you proceed outward. The centermost flames of all are frankly and startlingly green; it is they which will finally thrust upward into light. Thus the spectrum of the onion: green through white to green again, and ending all in the brown skin you have peeled away. Life inside death. The forces of being storming the walls of the void. Freshness in the face of the burning, oxidizing world which maderizes all life at last to the color of cut apples and old Sherry.
Next, pressure. Look at the cut surface: moisture. The incredible, utter wetness of onions, of course, you cannot know yet: This is only the first hinted pressing of juice. But the sea within all life has tipped its hand. You have cut open no inanimate thing, but a living tumescent being—a whole that is, as all life is, smaller, simpler than its parts; which holds, as all life does, the pieces of its being in compression. To prove it, try to fit the two halves of the onion back together. It cannot be done. The faces which began as two plane surfaces drawn by a straight blade are now mutually convex, and rock against each other. Put them together on one side and the opposite shows a gap of more than two minutes on a clock face.
Again, pressure. But now pressure toward you. The smell of onion, released by the flowing of its juices. Hardly a discovery, of course—even the boor knows his onions to that degree. But pause still. Reflect how little smell there is to a whole onion—how well the noble reek was contained till now by the encompassing dryness. Reflect, too, how it is the humors and sauces of being that give the world flavor, how all life came from the sea, and how, without water, nothing can hold a soul. Reflect finally what a soul the onion must have, if it boasts such juices. Your eyes will not yet have begun to water, nor the membranes of your nose to recoil. The onion has only, if you will, whispered to you. Yet you have not mistaken a syllable of its voice, not strained after a single word. How will you stop your senses when it raises this stage whisper to a shout?
Now, however, the two halves of the onion lie, cut face up, before you. With the point of your paring knife, carefully remove the base, or bottom (or heart) much as you would do to free the leaves of an artichoke or of a head of lettuce. Take away only as much as will make it possible to lift out, one by one, the several layers. Then gently pry them out in order, working from the center to the outside. Arrange them in a line as you do, with matching parts from the separate halves laid next to each other, making them ascend thus by twos from the smallest green fingers, through white flames, up to the outer shells which sit like paired Russian church spires.
Then look. The myth of sphericity is finally dead. The onion, as now displayed, is plainly all vectors, rissers and thrusts. Tongues of fire. But the pentecost they mark is that of nature, not grace: the Spirit’s first brooding on the face of the waters. Lift one of the flames; feel its lightness and rigidity, its crispness and strength. Make proof of its membranes. The inner: thin, translucent, easily removed; the outer, however, thinner, almost transparent—and so tightly bonded to the flesh that it protests audibly against separation. (You will probably have to break the flesh to free even a small piece.) The membranes, when in place, give the onion its fire, its sheen, soft within and brighter without. But when they are removed, the flesh is revealed in a new light. Given a minute to dry, it acquires a pale crystalline flatness like nothing on earth. Eggshell is the only word for it; but by comparison to the stripped flesh of an onion, an eggshell is only as delicate as poured concrete.
Set aside your broken flame now and pick up a fresh one. Clear a little space on the board. Lay it down on its cut face and slice it lengthwise into several strips. (You will want to tap it lightly with the edge of the knife first. There is a hollow crisp sound to be gotten that way—something between a tock and a tunk. It is the sound of health and youth, the audible response of cellularity when it is properly addressed. Neither solid nor soft, it is the voice of life itself.)
Next take one of the slivers and press it. Here you will need firmness. If you have strong nails, use the back of the one on your middle finger; if not, steamroller the slice with a round pencil. Press and roll it until it yields all the water it will. You have reached the deepest revelation of all.
First, and obviously, the onion is now part of you. It will be for days. For the next two mornings at least, when you wash your hands and face, your meetings with it will be reconvened in more than memory. It has spoken a word with power, and even the echo is not in vain.
But, second, the onion itself is all but gone. The flesh, so crisp and solid, turns out to have been an aqueous house of cards. If you have done pressing well, the little scraps of membrane and cell wall are nearly nonexistent. The whole infolded nest of flames was a blaze of water, a burning bush grown from the soil of the primeval oceans. All life is from the sea.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly. . . . And God saw that it was good. This juice, this liquor, this rough-and-ready cordial, runs freely now on board and hands and knife. Salt, sweet, and yet so much itself as to speak for no other, it enters the city of being. What you have seen, to be sure, is only the smallest part of its singularity, the merest hint of the stunning act of being that it is, but it is enough perhaps to enable you to proceed, if not with safety, then with caution.
For somehow, beneath this gorgeous paradigm of unnecessary being, lies the Act by which it exists. You have just now reduced it to its parts, shivered it into echoes, and pressed it to a memory, but you have also caught the hint that a thing is more than the sum of all the insubstantialities that comprise it. Hopefully, you will never again argue that the solidities of the world are mere matters of accident, creatures of air and darkness, temporary and meaningless shapes out of nothing. Perhaps now you have seen at least dimly that the uniquenesses of creation are the result of continuous creative support, of effective regard by no mean lover. He likes onions, therefore they are. The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the lines, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight—His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect. With Peter, the onion says, Lord, it is good for us to be here. Yes, says God. Tov. Very good.
Fair enough then. All life is from sea. It takes water to hold a soul. Living beings are full of juices.
But watch out.
THE WINNER OF the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995 and the unquestioned heir of that other great Irish Nobel Prize winner, William Butler Yeats, Heaney was born in Northern Ireland, the son of a farmer and cattle dealer, and throughout his career wrote incisively and poignantly of the “troubles” that characterized his native region: the battles between Protestant and Catholic, the oppression the British dealt to their Irish subjects, and the long history of such oppression, dating back to the Viking invasions centuries ago. But the soil of his country, its geography and topography, preoccupied Heaney as much as its history. In more than twenty volumes of verse and prose he dissected the roots of memory, elegy, and pastoral, dramatizing the life of his land and his time with urgent eloquence. A worldwide audience responded to his words with passion; his collections of poetry sold briskly and, in addition to the Nobel, he won countless prizes, professorships, and other honors. His passion for language becomes clear in our selection here, where as he contemplates the apparently ordinary act of eating oysters, he prays that the sea tang of these humble mollusks will “quicken” him into “verb, pure verb.”
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to the coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from the sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
THE FEMINIST NOVELIST Erica Jong gained renown from the best-selling Fear of Flying, an account of the adventures of one Isabella Wing in which she famously coined the phrase “zipless fuck.” But before she produced this and numerous other works of fiction, Jong was a poet, whose first collection, Fruits & Vegetables, evocatively meditates on apples, bananas, carrots, borscht, and—as here—onions. The brio of this volume predicted the charisma that has marked her other writings. “If a woman wants to be a poet,” she noted dryly in one of her early verses, “She must dwell in the house of the tomato.”
from Fruits & Vegetables:
“I Am Thinking of the Onion”
I AM THINKING of the onion again, with its two O mouths, like the gaping holes in nobody. Of the outer skin, pinkish brown, peeled to reveal a greenish sphere, bald as a dead planet, glib as glass, & an odor almost animal. I consider its ability to draw tears, its capacity for self-scrutiny, flaying itself away, layer on layer, in search of its heart which is simply another region of skin, but deeper & greener. I remember Peer Gynt: I consider its sometimes double heart. Then I think of despair when the onion searches its soul & finds only its various skins; & I think of the dried tuft of roots leading nowhere & the parched umbilicus, lopped off in the garden. Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like lake ripples. I consider it the eternal outsider, the middle child, the sad analysand of the vegetable kingdom. Glorified only in France (otherwise silent sustainer of soups and stews), unloved for itself alone—no wonder it draws our tears! Then I think again how the outer peel resembles paper, how soul & skin merge into one, how each peeling strips bare a heart which in turn turns skin.
ON THE WITTY jacket of Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything it appears as if a bite-sized hunk of the paper has been chewed out, exposing the cloth boards underneath. But in our selection from that work Steingarten confesses that in fact he once harbored unlikely food phobias he had to overcome in order to arrive at the promise of the book’s title. Steingarten has been a food writer at Vogue for many years, writing for the women’s fashion magazine on food both in and out of fashion. His essays are about cooking, food in traveling, ingredients and recipes, dietary fads, and even the science of gastronomy. An accomplished home cook, he writes as easily about frying potatoes in horse fat as he does about tasting the hand-massaged Japanese beef known as wagyu. The French government made him a Chevalier in the Order of Merit for his writing on French food, but Steingarten is equally adept at discoursing on the lowly hot dog, confirming that he is indeed a man who at least aspires to eat everything.
from The Man Who Ate Everything
STEP ONE was to compose an annotated list.
My Food Phobias
1. Foods I wouldn’t touch even if I were starving on a desert island:
None, except maybe insects. Many cultures find insects highly nutritious and love their crunchy texture. The pre-Hispanic Aztecs roasted worms in a variety of ways and made pressed caviar from mosquito eggs. This proves that no innate human programming keeps me from eating them, too. Objectively, I must look as foolish as those Kalahari Bushmen who face famine every few years because they refuse to eat three-quarters of the 223 animal species around them. I will deal with this phobia when I have polished off the easy ones.
2. Foods I wouldn’t touch even if I were starving on a desert island until absolutely everything else runs out:
Kimchi, the national pickle of Korea. Cabbage, ginger, garlic, and red peppers—I love them all, but not when they are fermented together for many months to become kimchi. Nearly forty-one million South Koreans eat kimchi three times a day. They say “kimchi” instead of “cheese” when someone is taking their picture. I say, “Hold the kimchi.”
Anything featuring dill. What could be more benign than dill?
Swordfish. This is a favorite among the feed-to-succeed set, who like it grilled to the consistency of running shoes and believe it is good for them. A friend of mine eats swordfish five times a week and denies that he has any food phobias. Who’s kidding whom? Returning obsessively to a few foods is the same as being phobic toward all the rest. This may explain the Comfort Food Craze. But the goal of the arts, culinary or otherwise, is not to increase our comfort. That is the goal of an easy chair.
During my own praline period, which lasted for three years, I would order any dessert on the menu containing caramelized hazelnuts and ignore the rest. I grew so obsessive that I almost missed out on the crème brûlée fixation, from which I forcibly wrenched myself only six months ago.
Anchovies. I met my first anchovy on a pizza in 1962, and it was seven years before I mustered the courage to go near another. I am known to cross the street whenever I see an anchovy coming. Why would anybody consciously choose to eat a tiny, oil-soaked, leathery maroon strip of rank and briny flesh?
Lard. The very word causes my throat to constrict and beads of sweat to appear on my forehead.
Desserts in Indian restaurants. The taste and texture of face creams belong in the boudoir, not on the plate. See above.
Also: miso, mocha, chutney, raw sea urchins, and falafel (those hard, dry, fried little balls of ground chickpeas unaccountably enjoyed in Middle Eastern countries).
3. Foods I might eat if I were starving on a desert island but only if the refrigerator were filled with nothing but chutney, sea urchins, and falafel:
Greek food. I have always considered “Greek cuisine” an oxymoron. Nations are like people. Some are good at cooking while others have a talent for music or baseball or manufacturing memory chips. The Greeks are really good at both pre-Socratic philosophy and white statues. They have not been good cooks since the fifth century B.C., when Siracusa on Sicily was the gastronomic capital of the world. Typical of modern-day Greek cuisine are feta cheese and retsina wine. Any country that pickles its national cheese in brine and adulterates its national wine with pine pitch should order dinner at the local Chinese place and save its energies for other things. The British go to Greece just for the food, which says volumes to me. You would probably think twice before buying an Algerian or Russian television set. I thought for ten years before buying my last Greek meal.
Clams. I feel a mild horror about what goes on in the wet darkness between the shells of all bivalves, but clams are the only ones I dislike. Is it their rubbery consistency or their rank subterranean taste, or is the horror deeper than I know?
Blue food (not counting plums and berries). This may be a rational aversion, because I am fairly sure that God meant the color blue mainly for food that has gone bad.
Also: cranberries, kidneys, okra, millet, coffee ice cream, refried beans, and many forms of yogurt.
This had to stop.
STEP TWO was to immerse myself in the scientific literature on human food selection.
By design and by destiny, humans are omnivores. Our teeth and digestive systems are all-purpose and ready for anything. Our genes do not dictate what foods we should find tasty or repulsive. We come into the world with a yen for sweets (newborns can even distinguish among glucose, fructose, lactose, and sucrose) and a weak aversion to bitterness, and after four months develop a fondness for salt. Some people are born particularly sensitive to one taste or odor; others have trouble digesting milk sugar or wheat gluten. A tiny fraction of adults, between 1 and 2 percent, have true (and truly dangerous) food allergies. All human cultures consider fur, paper, and hair inappropriate as food.
And that’s about it. Everything else is learned. Newborns are not repelled even by the sight and smell of putrefied meat crawling with maggots.
The nifty thing about being omnivores is that we can take nourishment from an endless variety of flora and fauna and easily adapt to a changing world—crop failures, droughts, herd migrations, restaurant closings, and the like. Lions and tigers will starve in a salad bar, as will cows in a steak house, but not us. Unlike cows, who remain well nourished eating only grass, humans need a great diversity of foods to stay healthy.
Yet by the age of twelve, we all suffer from a haphazard collection of food aversions ranging from revulsion to indifference. The tricky part about being omnivores is that we are always in danger of poisoning ourselves. Catfish have taste buds on their whiskers, but we are not so lucky. Instead, we are born with a cautious ambivalence toward novel foods, a precarious balance between neophilia and neophobia. Just one bad stomach ache or attack of nausea after dinner is enough to form a potent aversion—even if the food we ate did not actually cause the problem and even if we know it didn’t. Hives or rashes may lead us rationally to avoid the food that caused them, but only an upset stomach and nausea will result in a lasting, irrational, lifelong sense of disgust. Otherwise, psychologists know very little about the host of powerful likes and dislikes—let us lump them all under the term “food phobias”—that children carry into adulthood.
By closing ourselves off from the bounties of nature, we become failed omnivores. We let down the omnivore team. God tells us in the Book of Genesis, right after Noah’s flood, to eat everything under the sun. Those who ignore his instructions are no better than godless heathens.
The more I contemplated food phobias, the more I became convinced that people who habitually avoid certifiably delicious foods are at least as troubled as people who avoid sex, or take no pleasure from it, except that the latter will probably seek psychiatric help, while food phobics rationalize their problem in the name of genetic inheritance, allergy, vegetarianism, matters of taste, nutrition, food safety, obesity, or a sensitive nature. The varieties of neurotic food avoidance would fill several volumes, but milk is a good place to start.
Overnight, everybody you meet has become lactose intolerant. It is the chic food fear of the moment. But the truth is that very, very few of us are so seriously afflicted that we cannot drink even a whole glass of milk a day without ill effects. I know several people who have given up cheese to avoid lactose. But fermented cheeses contain no lactose! Lactose is the sugar found in milk; 98 percent of it is drained off with the whey (cheese is made from the curds), and the other 2 percent is quickly consumed by lactic-acid bacteria in the act of fermentation.
Three more examples: People rid their diet of salt (and their food of flavor) to avoid high blood pressure and countless imagined ills. But no more than 8 percent of the population is sensitive to salt. Only saturated fat, mainly from animals, has ever been shown to cause heart disease or cancer, yet nutrition writers and Nabisco get rich pandering to the fear of eating any fat at all. The hyperactivity syndrome supposedly caused by white sugar has never, ever, been verified—and not for lack of trying. In the famous New Haven study, it was the presence of the parents, not the presence of white sugar, that was causing the problem; most of the kids calmed down when their parents left the room.
I cannot figure out why, but the atmosphere in America today rewards this sort of self-deception. Fear and suspicion of food have become the norm. Convivial dinners have nearly disappeared and with them the sense of festivity and exchange, of community and sacrament. People should be deeply ashamed of the irrational food phobias that keep them from sharing food with each other. Instead, they have become proud and isolated, arrogant and aggressively misinformed.
But not me.
STEP THREE was to choose my weapon. Food phobias can be extinguished in five ways. Which one would work best for me?
Brain surgery. Bilateral lesions made in the basolateral region of the amygdala seem to do the trick in rats and, I think, monkeys—eliminating old aversions, preventing the formation of new ones, and increasing the animals’ acceptance of novel foods. But the literature does not report whether having a brain operation also diminishes their ability to, say, follow a recipe. If these experimental animals could talk, would they still be able to? Any volunteers?
Starvation. As Aristotle claimed and modern science has confirmed, any food tastes better the hungrier you are. But as I recently confessed to my doctor, who warned me to take some pill only on an empty stomach, the last time I had an empty stomach was in 1978. He scribbled “hyperphagia” on my chart, your doctor’s name for making a spectacle of yourself at the table. He is a jogger.
Bonbons. Why not reward myself with a delectable little chocolate every time I successfully polish off an anchovy, a dish of kimchi, or a bowl of miso soup? Parents have used rewards ever since spinach was discovered. Offering children more playtime for eating dark leafy greens may temporarily work. But offering children an extra Milky Way bar in return for eating more spinach has perverse results: the spinach grows more repellent and the Milky Way more desired.
Drug dependence. Finicky laboratory animals find new foods more palatable after a dose of chlordiazepoxide. According to an old Physicians’ Desk Reference, this is nothing but Librium, the once-popular tranquilizer, also bottled as Reposans and Sereen.
The label warns you about nausea, depression, and operating heavy machinery. I just said no.
Exposure, plain and simple. Scientists tell us that aversions fade away when we eat moderate doses of the hated foods at moderate intervals, especially if the food is complex and new to us. (Don’t try this with allergies, but don’t cheat either: few of us have genuine food allergies.) Exposure works by overcoming our innate neophobia, the omnivore’s fear of new foods that balances the biological urge to explore for them. Did you know that babies who are breast-fed will later have less trouble with novel foods than those who are given formula? The variety of flavors that make their way into breast milk from the mother’s diet prepares the infant for the culinary surprises that lie ahead. Most parents give up trying novel foods on their weanlings after two or three attempts and then complain to the pediatrician; this may be the most common cause of fussy eaters and finicky adults—of omnivores manqués. Most babies will accept nearly anything after eight or ten tries.
Clearly, mere exposure was the only hope for me.
STEP FOUR was to make eight or ten reservations at Korean restaurants, purchase eight or ten anchovies, search the Zagat guide for eight or ten places with the names Parthenon or Olympia (which I believe are required by statute for Greek restaurants), and bring a pot of water to the boil for cooking eight or ten chickpeas. My plan was simplicity itself: every day for the next six months I would eat at least one food that I detested.
Here are some of the results:
Kimchi. After repeatedly sampling ten of the sixty varieties of kimchi, the national pickle of Korea, kimchi has become my national pickle, too.
Anchovies. I began relating to anchovies a few months ago in northern Italy, where I ordered bagna caôda every day—a sauce of garlic, butter, olive oil, and minced anchovies served piping hot over sweet red and yellow peppers as an antipasto in Piemonte. My phobia crumpled when I understood that the anchovies living in American pizza parlors bear no relation to the sweet, tender anchovies of Spain and Italy, cured in dry sea salt and a bit of pepper. Soon I could tell a good bagna caôda from a terrific one. On my next trip to Italy I will seek out those fresh charcoal-grilled anchovies of the Adriatic you always hear about.
Clams. My first assault on clams was at a diner called Lunch near the end of Long Island, where I consumed an order of fried bellies and an order of fried strips. My aversion increased sharply.
Eight clams and a few weeks later it was capellini in white clam sauce at an excellent southern Italian restaurant around the corner from my house. As I would do so often in the future, even at the expense of my popularity, I urged my companions to cast off their food phobias by ordering at least one dish they expected to detest. If they would go along my experiment, I would agree to order nothing I liked.
All but one agreed, a slim and lovely dancer who protested that her body tells her precisely what to eat and that I am the last person in the universe fit to interfere with those sacred messages. I replied that the innate wisdom of the body is a complete fiction when it comes to omnivores. Soon I had certain proof that my friend was a major closet food phobic when she spent five minutes painstakingly separating her appetizer into two piles. The pile composed of grilled peppers, fennel, and eggplant sat lonely on the plate until her mortified husband and I polished it off. She was so disoriented by either the meal or my unsparing advice that she ate a large handful of potpourri as we waited for our coats.
As for me, the evening was an unqualified success. The white clam sauce was fresh with herbs and lemon and fresh salt air, and my clam phobia was banished in the twinkling of an eye. There is a lot of banal pasta with clam sauce going around these days. If you have a clam phobia, here are two surefire solutions: Order eight to ten white clam pizzas at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut, perhaps the single best pizza in the United States and certainly the best thing of any kind in New Haven, Connecticut. Or try the wonderful recipe for linguine with clams and gremolata in the Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza & Calzone Cookbook (Random House) once a week for eight consecutive weeks. It is guaranteed to work miracles.
Greek food. My wife, who considers herself Greek-food-deprived, was on cloud nine when I invited her to our neighborhood Greek restaurant, widely reviewed as the best in the city. As we walked along the street, she hugged me tight like those women in the TV commercials who have just been given a large diamond “for just being you” and launched into a recitation of the only classical Greek she knows, something about the wrath of Achilles. My own mood brightened when I saw that only one retsina befouled the wine list: the other wines were made from aboriginal Greek grapes in Attica or Macedonia or Samos but fermented in the manner of France or California. The dreaded egg-and-lemon soup was nowhere to be seen, and feta was kept mainly in the closet.
We ordered a multitude of appetizers and three main courses. Only the gluey squid, a tough grape leaf that lodged between my teeth, and the Liquid Smoke with which somebody had drenched the roasted eggplant threatened to arouse my slumbering phobia. The rest, most of it simply grilled with lemon and olive oil, was delicious, and as an added bonus I was launched on what still feels like an endless journey toward the acceptance of okra.
Later that evening, my lovely wife was kept up by an upset stomach, and I was kept up by my wife. She swore never to eat Greek food again.
Lard. Paula Wolfert’s magnificent The Cooking of South-West France (Dial Press) beguiled me into loving lard with her recipe for confit de porc—half-pound chunks of fresh pork shoulder flavored with thyme, garlic, cloves, and pepper, poached for three hours in a half gallon of barely simmering lard, and mellowed in crocks of congealed lard for up to four months. When you bring the pork back to life and brown it gently in its own fat, the result is completely delicious, savory and aromatic. I had never made the dish myself because, following Wolfert’s advice, I had always avoided using commercial lard, those one-pound blocks of slightly rank, preservative-filled fat in your butcher’s freezer.
Then, one snowy afternoon, I found myself alone in a room with four pounds of pork, an equal amount of pure white pig’s fat, and a few hours to spare. Following Wolfert’s simple instructions for rendering lard, I chopped up the fat, put it in a deep pot with a little water and some cloves and cinnamon sticks, popped it into a 225-degree oven, and woke up three hours later. After straining out the solids and spices, I was left with a rich, clear golden elixir that perfumed my kitchen, as it will henceforth perfume my life.
Desserts in Indian restaurants. Eight Indian dinners taught me that not every Indian dessert has the texture and taste of face cream. Far from it. Some have the texture and taste of tennis balls. These are named gulab jamun, which the menu described as a “light pastry made with dry milk and honey.” Rasmalai have the texture of day-old bubble gum and refuse to yield to the action of the teeth. On the brighter side, I often finished my kulfi, the traditional Indian ice cream, and would love to revisit carrot halva, all caramelized and spicy. But I may already have traveled down this road as far as justice requires.
STEP FIVE, final exam and graduation ceremony.
In just six months, I succeeded in purging myself of nearly all repulsions and preferences, in becoming a more perfect omnivore. This became apparent one day in Paris, France—a city to which my arduous professional duties frequently take me. I was trying a nice new restaurant, and when the waiter brought the menu, I found myself in a state unlike any I had ever attained—call it Zen-like if you wish. Everything on the menu, every appetizer, hot and cold, every salad, every fish and bird and piece of meat, was terrifically alluring, but none more than the others. I had absolutely no way of choosing. Though blissful at the prospect of eating, I was unable to order dinner. I was reminded of the medieval church parable of the ass equidistant between two bales of hay, who, because animals lack free will, starves to death. A man, supposedly, would not.
The Catholic Church was dead wrong. I would have starved—if my companion had not saved the day by ordering for both of us. I believe I ate a composed salad with slivers of foie gras, a perfect sole meuniére, and sweetbreads. Everything was delicious.
STEP SIX, relearning humility. Just because you have become a perfect omnivore does not mean that you must flaunt it. Intoxicated with my own accomplishment, I began to misbehave, especially at dinner parties. When seated next to an especially finicky eater, I would often amuse myself by going straight for the jugular. Sometimes I began slyly by staring slightly too long at the food remaining on her plate and then inquiring whether she would like to borrow my fork. Sometimes I launched a direct assault by asking how long she had had her terror of bread. Sometimes I tricked her by striking up an abstract conversation about allergies. And then I would sit back and complacently listen to her neurotic jumble of excuses and explanations: advice from a personal trainer, intolerance to wheat gluten, a pathetic faith in Dean Ornish, the exquisite—even painful—sensitivity of her taste buds, hints of childhood abuse. And then I would tell her the truth.
I believe that it is the height of compassion and generosity to practice this brand of tough love on dinner-party neighbors who are less omnivorous than oneself. But the perfect omnivore must always keep in mind that, for one to remain omnivorous, it is an absolute necessity to get invited back.
NOVELIST AND ESSAYIST Francine Prose has published more than twenty books of fiction along with such nonfiction works as Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife; Reading Like a Writer, and especially pertinent here, the brief but incisive Gluttony, in which she dissects one of the seven deadly sins by analyzing appetite, hunger, and body image. A former president of PEN American Center, she has taught writing and literature at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In our selection, she turns her attention from gastronomic excess to forbidden foods—how and why we make the decision not to eat this meat or that fish. If you’ve watched either Anthony Bourdain’s or Andrew Zimmern’s gastronomic travel shows (No Reservations and Bizarre Foods), you’ve probably seen those intrepid travelers scarf down piranhas, crickets, and suckling pig brains. Even while she meditates on such exotic fare, Prose wittily notes that for a contemporary American gourmet a taboo meal is more likely to be bologna and Velveeta on Wonder Bread.
from Cocktail Hour at the Snake Blood Bar:
On the Persistence of Taboo
NOT LONG AGO, at a dinner party, the conversation turned to the subject of why we generally don’t eat household pets or our near-neighbors on the food chain. It was a warm summer evening; we were eating vitello tonnato and a tomato-arugula salad.
Almost everyone had heard the story of the formal, diplomatic dinner at which the raw, pulsing brain of a monkey was served from the still-warm monkey skull. And everyone knew of some Chinese restaurant, somewhere, suspected of serving cat meat.
A friend said that there are Cambodian restaurants in Washington, D.C., at which you can order dog meat.
He said that you have to know the code. You must ask for “traditional food.”
THE best beef I ever tasted was, perhaps needless to say, in Bombay, at a restaurant gleaming with chrome, chandeliers, and mirrored walls, not far from the central market where cows, in their capacity as manifestations of the divine, were permitted to roam freely and graze at the produce stalls.
The beef on my plate at the G. Restaurant had been considerably less lucky.
Or was it actually buffalo? The menu called it steak. Steak Honolulu, Steak Milan, Steak Peking, Steak Paris, steak prepared in the imagined, unimaginable style of a dozen distant cities where cows were not allowed to wander through the streets, and it was perfectly normal to eat them.
It was not at all normal in India in 1976, where from time to time one read accounts of Muslim butchers lynched by Hindu mobs on the suspicion of selling beef. Beef (or buffalo) was expensive, not illegal, but hard to get, except at the famous G. Restaurant, which drew a chic crowd of Anglo-Indians, Parsis, Goan Christians, liberated Hindus, and especially Bombay film stars.
Always there were a few tourists present, but fewer than one might have expected, considering that every travel guidebook enthusiastically recommended the G. Restaurant as a welcome break from vegetable curry for homesick carnivores. Perhaps most tourists suspected—wrongly, as it turned out—that the guides were describing a cultural rather than a culinary experience.
In fact it was both, and I have never again had a steak as tender and sweet as the G. Restaurant’s Steak Marseilles, a plump little pillow of beef done rare and topped with a pleasantly briny sauce that claimed to be anchovies and French butter, but was probably ghee (clarified butter) and the omnipresent, desiccated tiny fish oddly named Bombay duck.
Of course it’s impossible to gauge how much the atmosphere contributed to the deliciousness of the food: for all the place’s glitter and brittle display, the mood of the patrons at the G. Restaurant was furtive and intense, and an aura of the forbidden floated over every banquette. People studied one another in mirrors, their faces bright, flushed, and slightly strained—you would have thought everyone there was engaged in some adulterous tryst.
IT used to be that we knew who we were by the foods we refused to eat, and perhaps some species memory is behind the vehemence with which infants assert their autonomy by flinging dinner across the room, the righteousness with which every sentient American child goes through a phase of vegetarianism.
Claude Lévi-Strauss helped us see food preparation as a profound form of social expression, and Margaret Visser’s recent book, The Rituals of Eating, makes it clear that even cannibalistic rites were not the stumbly chaotic bloodfeasts out of Night of the Living Dead that we might have imagined. Strict rules governed whose flesh you ate, and how and when you consumed it, mostly depending on your emotional, familial, and tribal ties to the taboo or edible dead.
For centuries, Orthodox Jews and Muslims haven’t eaten pork, Christians did eat pork but didn’t eat meat on Friday, upper-caste Hindus and some Buddhists ate no meat, especially not beef, and Jains didn’t eat anything that had ever possessed a living soul, a category that for some reason included onions and garlic. It may be that food taboos affirm special covenants with God, but they also affirm the covenant with like-minded avoidants and (perhaps most importantly) an essential, unbridgeable distance from the food tastes of the Other.
Not only does the Other blithely and greedily consume what we know is unclean; they would like nothing better than to defile us by making us eat it, too. During the early, horrific wars between Indian Sikhs and Muslims, Sikhs were said to ritually wash down mosques with the blood of freshly slaughtered pigs. During the Inquisition, secretly practicing Marrano Jews pretending to have converted were tested on how far they’d progressed by being forced to eat pork; and it seems, sadly, that the fantastic, medieval idea that Jews bake Passover matzos with the blood of Christian children is, even now, not quite so safely dead (or so far from the surface) as one might reasonably suppose. . . .
One needn’t be an anthropologist to make the obvious associations between taboos regarding food and taboos about the body and about sex—specifically about (as they say) exogamous relations with the Other who dines on the forbidden and assimilates the unclean flesh into his or her own body.
If, as they say, we are what we eat, then the same must be true of the Other; our flesh, we imagine, is unlike their flesh, made of different stuff, characterized by different colors, tastes, and smells. I remember reading a story about a girl who grew up in China and, on first encountering a crowd of white people, nearly became sick, so repulsed was she by the sour-milk odor of people whose diet included dairy.
Our ideas about the Other’s diet are allied with ideas of exotic sex, with the sexual prowess (or lack of it) of some untrustworthy group or race or tribe. Americans are curious and (in the case of environmentalists) enraged by the Chinese belief in the aphrodisiacal properties of various powdered horns and tusks.
There is a grade-Z exploitation movie currently available in the sleazier and more politically incorrect video stores, a low-budget pseudo-documentary purporting to report on the shocking sexual customs practiced in today’s “Orient”: a Japanese brothel in which businessmen dress up in diapers and pretend to be infants, the sex-change-operation mill in Sri Lanka, etc. The movie is deeply frightening, though not at all in the way it intends. In one scene, a group of worried (indeed, almost stricken-looking) Taiwanese businessmen are shown quaffing the house drink at a Taipei snake blood bar: vampirizing hapless reptiles to render themselves more amorous. The camera lingers lovingly on the nasty serpentine kris with which the bartender makes an incision just below the snake’s head, then focuses on his rather hammy fist, squeezing out the blood—drip, drip, not a single drop wasted—into a glass. The bartender is all business, he shows neither pleasure nor disgust; for all the emotion on his face, he could be pulling draft beer from a tap.
Then the camera zooms in on the customer’s faces, as if to catch some dreamy, abstracted expression; perhaps they are musing on the pleasure that the snake blood is meant to enhance? The customers (or are they actors?) nervously eye the lens; one gets the impression that this is not where they stop off on their way home to their wives. Meanwhile the sonorous voice-over narration drones solemnly on and on: these men, we hear, share the belief that the blood of certain rare vipers can prolong a single act of intercourse for upwards of seven hours.
A friend told me that he and his wife were taken to such a bar on a business trip to Taipei. Determined to be polite, and also frankly intrigued, my friend drank a shot glass of snake blood. Then the company employee assigned to shepherd him around the city asked him if, now that he was properly fortified, he would like to visit a brothel full of fresh country girls, all fourteen years old or younger.
IT is necessary for us to think that such things happen only in faraway places, where the poor and benighted still observe their arcane food tastes and taboos. If we tolerate food superstitions at all, we insist they be benevolent: we like hearing about the good-luck dishes various ethnic groups cook on New Year’s Day.
We do know that there are otherwise apparently sensible Muslims and Jews who still atavistically persist in not eating pork, Hindu friends we would never invite for a steak dinner. But most of us in the “rational” West consider ourselves light-years beyond all that. As some strictly macrobiotic neighbors once said disapprovingly of my family: They eat everything.
Though, naturally, there are limits.
At the dinner at which our friend explained about “traditional food,” another guest said that he knew a Venezuelan artist who for a mere four hundred dollars could arrange to have a cube of fresh human flesh shipped, on ice, direct from Caracas to Manhattan. He waited. There were no takers. Was it because of the expense? The guest with the Venezuelan friend said, Wasn’t it interesting that no one wanted to try it? He said that the desire to partake of human flesh is the only desire in human history that civilization has ever successfully eradicated.
But civilization (so-called) has apparently been more widely successful at eradicating other food taboos. Aside from obvious exceptions, like the ban on cannibalism, we have (or we flatter ourselves that we have) evolved beyond the forbidden. We no longer really need diet to affirm our group identity or to encourage us to despise those whose diets are different from our own—we have so many neater ways to set ourselves apart (nationalism, for example), careful methods of differentiation that don’t muck about in those fuzzy, gray areas involving individual food preferences and unclean forms of animal life.
No longer deemed politically or spiritually necessary, and finally, just an inconvenience, the Church’s ban on eating meat on Fridays has been lifted during our lifetimes. Few of my friends are (in any traditional sense) religious, and, though I realize that many do exist, I myself know few Jews of my generation who, were it not for the taboo on cholesterol, wouldn’t happily and guiltlessly dine daily on prosciutto and Canadian bacon.
MY paternal grandparents read a Socialist newspaper and kept a kosher kitchen. My mother’s parents ran a small restaurant near the docks in lower Manhattan and served ham and pork to stevedores but never once (that they admitted) tasted it themselves. Their children, my parents, ate lobster, shrimp, and bacon, but never ham and pork; and my brother and I, their children, were clearly made to understand that these distinctions were all about health and not at all about religion.
My father, who was a pathologist, informed us about trichinosis, and seemed to take an almost uncanny pleasure in describing the larvae—or were they worms?—who migrated through your bloodstream and, if they didn’t kill you right away, took up residence in your brain and rendered you a helpless, jumping mass of uncontrolled tics and twitches.
Yet no one appeared to worry when my brother and I went through a phase of preferring our bacon underdone, pearly and translucent. Our parents might conceivably have let us eat raw bacon if it meant we at least went off to school with something in our stomachs. No one ever suggested that undercooked bacon could harm us—as opposed to, say, dangerous Chinese-restaurant pork, fried till it was closer in texture to cellulose than protein.
During those years, it seemed, Jews who no longer believed in God learned to believe in trichinosis; fear of parasites supplanted the fear of God and the prohibitions in Leviticus. And now we have even lost our religious faith in the punishment-by-parasite for disobeying the God of our Fathers. We know about meat inspection and how the FDA, inefficient as it is, has rendered the incidence of meat contamination statistically insignificant.
Yet the spirit, if not the letter, of the dietary laws remains. The awful little secret of many mixed marriages is that the Jewish member of the couple is always accusing the Other of lethally undercooking the pork, of not roasting or broiling or frying it, until, as the prudent cookbooks say, it “loses its pink color.”
IF taboos no longer speak to our spiritual lives, they do still address issues of longevity and health. Perhaps now that we no longer believe in God or in an afterlife, now that we no longer expect the strict observation of dietary restrictions to assure us a berth in heaven, we must endeavor to do the next best thing—that is, live forever.
It’s too drearily familiar to track the changing fortunes of various foods that, through no fault of their own, have lost their reputation as elixirs and been identified as poisons. Many of us hope wanly for the day when butter, cream, and cheese will be discovered to be better for us than their pale and ascetic low-fat equivalents.
Those who have any doubt about the extent to which health concerns and taboos have edged out simple good manners should try serving, at a dinner, anything that includes a minimal, detectable trace of animal fat. Many hosts have had the dismaying experience of seeing perfectly healthy guests (those who have not yet been warned by their doctors that overindulgence may prove fatal) push offending, suspect, or high-cholesterol items off to the edge of their plates, or conceal them under the parsley.
Such guests might do well to meditate on the example of the vegetarian Zen monk who, when asked why he’d unprotestingly eaten beef at a dinner party, replied that the cow was already dead—but his hostess wasn’t.
THE AUTHOR OF such ambitious works as A Natural History of Love, An Alchemy of Mind, and A Natural History of the Senses, from which our selection is drawn, Diane Ackerman is a poet and essayist who has become a major contemporary science writer. Inevitably, when she discusses taste, she puts food at the center of her investigation of its qualities. In her book, she includes a thorough study of such topics as food and sex, the craving for chocolate, and human taste buds. For Ackerman eating is always a multifaceted business, and her argument is that the more we’re aware of the numerous elements that go into the simple act of putting food in our mouths, the greater our understanding of human behavior—indeed of humanity itself—will be. Her notes on the semi-toxic Japanese fish fugu are less sensuous than her other culinary descriptions, perhaps because she does not tell us if she herself ever risked its apparently sensuous delights; but she does see the temptation to eat the potentially fatal fugu liver as a metaphor for our flirtation with anxiety, horror, and even near-death experiences.
from A Natural History of the Senses:
Et Fugu, Brute?
A NATION OF sensation-addicts might dine as chic urbanites do, on rhubarb and raspberry tortes, smoked lobster, and hibiscus-wrapped monkfish, wiped with raspberry butter, baked in a clay oven, and then elevated briefly in mesquite smoke. When I was in college, I didn’t eat goldfish or cram into Volkswagens, or chug whole bottles of vodka, but others did, in a neo–Roaring Twenties ennui. Shocking the bourgeoisie has always been the unstated encyclical of college students and artists, and sometimes that includes grossing out society in a display of bizarre eating habits. One of the classic Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketches shows a chocolate manufacturer being cross-examined by policemen for selling chocolate-covered baby frogs, bones and all (“without the bones, they wouldn’t be crunchy!” he whines), as well as insects, and other taboo animals sure to appal western taste buds. I’ve met field scientists of many persuasions who have eaten native foods like grasshoppers, leeches, or bats stewed in coconut milk, in part to be mannerly, in part out of curiosity, and I think in part to provide a good anecdote when they returned to the States. However, these are just nutritious foods that fall beyond our usual sphere of habit and custom.
We don’t always eat foods for their taste, but sometimes for their feel. I once ate a popular duck dish in Amazonian Brazil, pato no tucupi (Portuguese for pato, “duck” + no, “within” + tucupi, “extracted juice of manioc”) whose main attraction is that it’s anesthetic: It makes your mouth as tingly numb as Benzedrine. The numbing ingredient is jambu (in Latin, Spilanthes), a yellow daisy that grows throughout Brazil and is sometimes used as a cold remedy. The effect was startling—it was as if my lips and whole mouth were vibrating. But many cultures have physically startling foods. I adore hot peppers and other spicy foods, ones that sandblast the mouth. We say “taste,” when we describe such a food to someone else, but what we’re really talking about is a combination of touch, taste, and the absence of discomfort when the deadening or sandblasting finally stops. The thinnest line divides Szechwan hot-pepper sauce from being thrilling (causing your lips to tingle even after the meal is over), and being sulfurically hot enough to cause a gag response as you eat it. A less extreme example is our liking for crunchy or crisp foods, like carrots, which have little taste but lots of noise and mouth action. One of the most successful foods on earth is Coca-Cola, a combination of intense sweetness, caffeine, and a prickly feeling against the nose that we find refreshing. It was first marketed as a mouthwash in 1888, and at that time contained cocaine, a serious refresher—an ingredient that was dropped in 1903. It is still flavored with extract of coca leaves, but minus the cocaine. Coffee, tea, tobacco, and other stimulants all came into use in the western world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and quickly percolated around Europe. Fashionable and addictive, they offered diners a real nervous-system jolt, either of narcotic calm or caffeine rush, and, unlike normal foods, they could be taken in doses, depending on how high one wished to get or how addicted one already was.
In Japan, specially licensed chefs prepare the rarest sashimi delicacy: the white flesh of the puffer fish, served raw and arranged in elaborate floral patterns on a platter. Diners pay large sums of money for the carefully prepared dish, which has a light, faintly sweet taste, like raw pompano. It had better be carefully prepared, because, unlike pompano, puffer fish is ferociously poisonous. You wouldn’t think a puffer fish would need such chemical armor, since its main form of defense is to swallow great gulps of water and become so bloated it is too large for most predators to swallow. And yet its skin, ovaries, liver, and intestines contain tetrodotoxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals in the world, hundreds of times more lethal than strychnine or cyanide. A shred small enough to fit under one’s fingernail could kill an entire family. Unless the poison is completely removed by a deft, experienced chef, the diner will die midmeal. That’s the appeal of the dish: eating the possibility of death, a fright your lips spell out as you dine. Yet preparing it is a traditional art form in Japan, with widespread aficionados. The most highly respected fugu chefs are the ones who manage to leave in the barest touch of the poison, just enough for the diner’s lips to tingle from his brush with mortality but not enough to actually kill him. Of course, a certain number of diners do die every year from eating fugu, but that doesn’t stop intrepid fugu-fanciers. The ultimate fugu connoisseur orders chiri, puffer flesh lightly cooked in a broth made of the poisonous livers and intestines. It’s not that diners don’t understand the bizarre danger of puffer-fish toxin. Ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, and other cultures all describe fugu poisoning in excruciating detail: It first produces dizziness, numbness of the mouth and lips, breathing trouble, cramps, blue lips, a desperate itchiness as of insects crawling all over one’s body, vomiting, dilated pupils and then a zombielike sleep, really a kind of neurological paralysis during which the victims are often aware of what’s going on around them, and from which they die. But sometimes they wake. If a Japanese man or woman dies of fugu poison, the family waits a few days before burying them, just in case they wake up. Every now and then someone poisoned by fugu is nearly buried alive, coming to at the last moment to describe in horrifying detail their own funeral and burial, during which, although they desperately tried to cry out or signal that they were still alive, they simply couldn’t move.
Though it has a certain Russian-roulette quality to it, eating fugu is considered a highly aesthetic experience. That makes one wonder about the condition that we, in chauvinistic shorthand, refer to as “human.” Creatures who will one day vanish from the earth in that ultimate subtraction of sensuality that we call death, we spend our lives courting death, fomenting wars, watching sickening horror movies in which maniacs slash and torture their victims, hurrying our own death in fast cars, cigarette smoking, suicide. Death obsesses us, as well it might, but our response to it is so strange. Faced with tornadoes chewing up homes, with dust storms ruining crops, with floods and earthquakes swallowing up whole cities, with ghostly diseases that gnaw at one’s bone marrow, cripple, or craze—rampant miseries that need no special bidding, but come freely, giving their horror like alms—you’d think human beings would hold out against the forces of Nature, combine their efforts and become allies, and not create devastations of their own, not add to one another’s miseries. Death does such fine work without us. How strange that people, whole countries sometimes, wish to be its willing accomplices.
Our horror films say so much about us and our food obsessions. I don’t mean the ones in which maniacal men carting chain saws and razors punish single women for living alone or taking jobs—although those are certainly alarming. I don’t mean ghost stories, in which we exhale loudly as order falls from chaos in the closing scenes. And I don’t mean scary whodunits, at the end of which the universe seems temporarily less random, violent, and inexplicable. Our real passion, by far, is for the juiciest of horror films in which vile, loathsome beasts, gifted with ferocious strength and cunning, stalk human beings and eat them. It doesn’t matter much if the beast is a fast-living “Killer Shrew” or a sullen “Cat People” or an abstract “Wolfen” or a nameless, acid-drooling “Alien.” The pattern is always the same. They dominate the genre. We are greedy for their brand of terror.
The plain truth is that we don’t seem to have gotten used to being at the top of our food chain. It must bother us a great deal, or we wouldn’t keep making movies, generation after generation, with exactly the same scare tactics: The tables are turned and we become fodder. All right, so we may be comfortable at the top of the chain as we walk around Manhattan, but suppose—oh, ultimate horror!—that on other planets we’re at the bottom of their food chain? Then you have the diabolically scary “Aliens,” who capture human beings, use them as hosts for their maggotlike young, and actually hang them up on slime gallows in a pantry.
We rush obsessively to movie theaters, sit in the cavelike dark, and confront the horror. We make contact with the beasts and live through it. The next week, or the next summer, we’ll do it all over again. And, on the way home, we keep listening for the sound of claws on the pavement, a supernatural panting, a vampiric flutter. We spent our formative years as a technologyless species scared with good reason about lions and bears and snakes and sharks and wolves that could, and frequently did, pursue us. You’d think we’d have gotten over that by now. One look at the cozy slabs of cow in a supermarket case, neatly cut, inked, and wrapped, should tell us to relax. But civilization is a more recent phenomenon than we like to think. Are horror films our version of the magic drawings on cave walls that our ancestors confronted? Are we still confronting them?
Fugu might not seem to have much to do with nuclear disarmament or world peace, but it’s a small indicator of our psyches. We find the threat of death arousing. Not all of us, and not all the time. But enough do often enough to keep the rest of us peace-loving sorts on our toes when we’d rather be sitting down calmly to a sumptuous meal with friends.
A FOOD JOURNALIST, historian of gastronomy, and regular author of a travel column called “A Fork in the Road,” de Silva edited the poignant cookbook In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes recorded by some starving inhabitants of Terezín (Theresienstadt), a concentration camp in which the women were imprisoned during the Holocaust. A supposedly “model” camp, Terezín was often defined by its Nazi masters as an example of the generosity with which they treated the Jewish inmates: there were concerts, plays, lectures—and even a propaganda film claiming that “The Führer Gives the Jews a Town.” But in reality, the prisoners lived (and starved) on watery soup and moldy bread. Reviewing the cookbook Wilhelmina Pächter and her friends compiled in these bitter circumstances, the writer Lore Dickstein declared that the work is itself “an act of defiance and resistance, a means of identification in a dehumanized world [and] a life force in the face of death.” But the book is also a poignant compendium of Proustian memories. We include here, along with de Silva’s introduction, Pächter’s own recipe for her beloved cold stuffed eggs.
NO MATTER HOW many times Anny told the story, its power to affect her and her listeners never diminished. She was not a person who cried easily; yet even before she began to speak, her lively brown eyes would be brimful of tears.
“I remember so well the day the call came,” she would say as she brushed the dampness from her timeworn cheeks, “because it was my past at the other end of the line. ‘Is this Anny Stern?’ the woman on the phone asked me, and when I answered yes, she said, ‘Then I have a package for you from your mother.’”
With those words, a quarter-century-long journey from the Czechoslovak ghetto/concentration camp of Terezín to an apartment building on Manhattan’s East Side came to an end.
Inside the package was a picture taken in 1939 of Anny’s mother, Mina Pächter, and Anny’s son, Peter (now called David). His arms are around her neck, her beautiful gray hair is swept back, and they are both smiling—but dark circles ring Mina’s eyes. There were letters, too—“Every evening I kiss your picture . . . please, Petřičku, do not forget me,” Mina had written to her grandson. But it was a fragile, hand-sewn copy book that made up the bulk of the package, its cracked and crumbling pages covered with recipes in a variety of faltering scripts.
Born out of the abyss, it is a document that can be comprehended only at the farthest reaches of the mind. Did setting down recipes bring comfort amid chaos and brutality? Did it bring hope for a future in which someone might prepare a meal from them again? We cannot know. But certainly the creation of such a cookbook was an act of psychological resistance, forceful testimony to the power of food to sustain us, not just physically but spiritually.
Food is who we are in the deepest sense, and not because it is transformed into blood and bone. Our personal gastronomic traditions—what we eat, the foods and foodways we associate with the rituals of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, moments around the table, celebrations—are critical components of our identities. To recall them in desperate circumstances is to reinforce a sense of self and to assist us in our struggle to preserve it. “My mother was already in her seventies at this time,” said Anny, “yet this book shows that even in adversity her spirit fought on.” And so, too, did the spirits of her friends.
Among their weapons were Heu und Stroh, fried noodles topped with raisins, cinnamon, and vanilla cream; Leberknödel, liver dumplings with a touch of ginger; Kletzenbrot, a rich fruit bread; and Zenichovy Dort, or Groom’s Cake. There were Erdäpfel Dalken, or potato doughnuts; and Badener Caramell Bonbons, caramels from Baden Baden—about eighty recipes in all. Some were hallmarks of Central European cookery. A few, like Billige Echte Jüdische Bobe, cheap real Jewish coffee cake, were specifically Jewish. And one, written down by Mina, is particularly poignant. For Gefüllte Eier, stuffed eggs with a variety of garnishes, the recipe instructs the cook to “Let fantasy run free.”
“When first I opened the copybook and saw the handwriting of my mother, I had to close it,” said Anny of the day she received the package. “I put it away and only much later did I have the courage to look. My husband and I, we were afraid of it. It was something holy. After all those years, it was like her hand was reaching out to me from long ago.”
In a way, it was. Just before Mina died in Theresienstadt, she entrusted the package to a friend, Arthur Buxbaum, an antiques dealer, and asked him to get it to her daughter in Palestine. But because most of Anny’s letters hadn’t reached Mina during the war, she couldn’t provide him with an address.
Unable to honor his friend’s deathbed wish, Buxbaum simply kept the package. Then one day in 1960, a cousin told him she was leaving for Israel. Still mindful of his promise, he asked her to take the manuscript along, but by the time she got news of Anny and her husband, George Stern, they had moved to the United States to be near their son.
No one knows exactly what happened after that. A letter found in the package and written in 1960 indicates that just as it had been entrusted first to Buxbaum and then to his cousin, so it was entrusted to someone else to carry to New York. Yet according to Anny, it didn’t arrive until almost a decade later.
It was then that a stranger from Ohio arrived at a Manhattan gathering of Czechs and asked if anyone there knew the Sterns. “Yes, I have heard of them,” responded one woman. A moment later he had produced the parcel and she had become its final custodian. At last, Mina’s deathbed gift to her daughter, her startling kochbuch, was to be delivered.
Its contents, written in the elliptical style characteristic of European cookery books, are evidence that the inmates of Terezín thought constantly about eating. “Food, memories of it, missing it, craving it, dreaming of it, in short, the obsession with food colours all the Theresienstadt memoirs,” writes Ruth Schwertfeger in Women of Theresienstadt, Voices from a Concentration Camp.
Bianca Steiner Brown, the translator of the recipes in this book and herself a former inmate of Terezín, explains it this way: “In order to survive, you had to have an imagination. Fantasies about food were like a fantasy that you have about how the outside is if you are inside. You imagine it not only the way it really is but much stronger than it really is. I was, for instance, a nurse, and I worked at night and I looked out at night—Terezín was a town surrounded by walls, a garrison town. So I looked out at all the beds where the children were, and out of that window I could look into freedom. And you were imagining things, like how it would be to run around in the meadow outside. You knew how it was, but you imagined it even better than it was, and that’s how it was with food, also. Talking about it helped you.”
Most of us can understand that. Far more disquieting is the idea that people who were undernourished, even starving, not only reminisced about favorite foods but also had discussions, even arguments, about the correct way to prepare dishes they might never be able to eat again.
In fact, such behavior was frequent. Brown remembers women sharing recipes in their bunks late at night. “They would say, ‘Do you know such and such a cake?’” she recounts. “‘I did it in such and such a way.’”
“The hunger was so enormous that one constantly ‘cooked’ something that was an unattainable ideal and maybe somehow it was a certain help to survive it all,” wrote Jaroslav Budlovsky on a death march from Schwarz heide to Terezín in 1943.
And Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina and a survivor of Terezín and Auschwitz, describes people in both places as speaking of food so much that there was a camp expression for it. “We called it ‘cooking with the mouth,’” she says. “Everybody did it. And people got very upset if they thought you made a dish the wrong way or had the wrong recipe for it.” . . .
To a degree that may be unfathomable to Americans at the end of the twentieth century, cooking, both doing it and talking about it, was central to the societies from which many of the women of Terezín, and most European women of the period, came. It was also among the chief activities that defined them as wives and mothers.
Some cooked even in the ghetto, albeit in a limited way. “Theresienstadt really happened after May ’42, when all civilians were out and we could move freely and women would try to make some kind of meal while putting rations together,” says Cernyak-Spatz.
But a cookbook, even if only imaginatively, offered possibilities for “preparing” foods that were more culturally and psychologically meaningful. While written recipes might not feed the hungers of the body, they might temporarily quell the hungers of the soul.
Possibly, even the book’s familiar form brought its authors solace. “It used to be the custom in Europe to make your own written cookbooks,” notes Brown. “Probably if I had stayed in Prague and lived the life I left, I would also have started a manuscript cookbook exactly like this one.” And the Czech Wilma Iggers, a retired professor of German literature and a Jewish social historian, speaks, too, of the handwritten cookbooks she has from her relatives, from her own Bohemian Jewish background. “It was common,” she says. Perhaps the writers of the Terezín cookbook were attempting to preserve this tradition. Perhaps getting the copybook to Anny was important to Mina because it resembled a family manuscript that she might once have given her herself.
But whatever its explicit or implicit functions, Mina’s cookbook—and the others—make it clear that half a century after the Holocaust, when we thought we were familiar with all the creative ways in which human beings expressed themselves during the long years of the horror, at least one small genre, the making of cookbooks, has gone largely unnoticed.
In the case of Mina’s manuscript—a product of Terezín, where cultural ferment was constant—such a demonstration of the domestic arts must also be seen as part of a larger artistic whole.
This surrealistic camp, positioned by the Nazis as a model ghetto, evidence of the Reich’s benevolence toward the Jews, was the ultimate publicity ploy. Designed to distract the world from the final solution and all that preceded it, it was in fact a way station to the killing centers of the East and itself a place where many died.
Paradoxically, Terezín was also a crucible of creativity. Among the multitude of Central Europeans whom the Reich sent to this “Paradise Ghetto” were painters, writers, musicians, intellectuals, composers, designers, and others who were too well known for their removal to less deceptive places to go unremarked.
Many contrived ways to continue their work—because cultural activities fostered the illusion of a model camp, the Nazis generally turned a blind eye to such endeavors. As a consequence, there flourished in this bizarre environment an artistic and intellectual life so fierce, so determined, so vibrant, so fertile as to be almost unimaginable.
Despite overcrowding that created pestilent conditions, and in defiance of raging infections, a high death toll, and hunger—all as constant a presence as fear of the transports—here the flower of Central European Jewry participated in what those at Beit Theresienstadt have called “a revolt of the spirit.”
They gave well-attended lectures (Mina Pächter, an art historian, was among the speakers); put on opera performances; composed music; performed cabaret; drew; painted; and attended to the education of the young with a fervor born of determination to keep Jewish life alive (and, for some, of determination to ready the young for a future they hoped they still might have in Palestine). “It was heroic, superhuman, the care given the children,” says Cernyak-Spatz. “In the face of death, with the SS looking on, these people tried to persist intellectually and artistically.”
The resulting juxtapositions overwhelm the mind. “Today, the milk froze in the pot,” wrote Gonda Redlich, who kept a diary throughout his stay in Theresienstadt. “The cold is very dangerous. The children don’t undress, and so there are a lot of lice in their quarters. Today, there was a premier performance of The Bartered Bride. It was the finest I had ever seen in the ghetto.”
This was what some have described as “the special reality” of Terezín, and Mina’s kochbuch, a testament to a lost world and its flavors, was part of it. . . .
Provisions and the means of getting them varied somewhat over the time of Theresienstadt’s existence, but some things appear to have remained more or less constant. Ask a survivor about the fare and you are likely to be told of queuing outdoors for food—often for hours even in inclement weather; of the daily ration of soup, variously described as tasteless to disgusting; of the sauce that some days might have a tiny bit of meat in it; of the loaf of bread that had to last three days; of the margarine, the barley, the turnips; and for the fortunate, the food packages gotten to them by Gentile friends or Jewish organizations on the outside or, earlier on, by family and friends who were still free.
In his memoirs, Norbert Troller, one of the camp’s most famous artists, speaks of salads made from weeds; in general no fruits or vegetables were supplied to the population of Theresienstadt.
Cakes were also clever improvisations. Inge Auerbacher, who was a child during her time in the camp, remembers having a palm-sized birthday cake made of mashed potato and a small amount of sugar. And Troller describes a “ghetto torte,” saying it was particularly well made by a Mrs. Windholz, whose version “tasted almost exactly like the famous Sachertorte. The recipe was secret;” he writes, “its ingredients . . . bread, coffee, saccharine, a trace of margarine, lots of good wishes, and an electric plate. Very impressive and irresistible.”
Though food was sparse and often barely edible, and diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies were a constant problem, to some who went on to Auschwitz, like Chernyak-Spatz or Mina’s step-granddaughter Liesel Laufer, conditions seemed not so bad. The camp’s cultural life, described by Laufer as marvelous, also compensated for a great deal.
Others experienced the camp differently. “Like everyone else,” Troller wrote, “I suffered greatly from hunger, so that I was plagued all through the day with thoughts of the kind of food I had been used to, as compared to the food we received. Until that time I had hardly ever suffered the pangs of hunger—I could fast for one day during Yom Kippur—but here, without any transition, our rations were shortened to such an extent (approximately one-third of the customary calories in their most unappetizing form) that hunger weakened and absorbed (one’s) every thought.”
But while almost all were hungry, some were more hungry than others. In the early days of Theresienstadt (May 1942), it had become clear to the Council of Jewish Elders, the group forced by the Nazis to run the internal affairs of the camp, that the limited food supplies could not be divided equally. They determined that those who labored at the hardest jobs had to be allotted more to eat than those whose work was less arduous and that children, the hope of the future, also had to be fed more than others.
They decided, too, that the fewest calories—and usually the worst accommodations—would have to go those least likely to survive the ordeal of Terezín, namely, the elderly like Mina Pächter, who had been born in 1872 and was 70 when she arrived in the ghetto. Such people were sacrificed so others might live. “For younger people, Theresienstadt was bearable,” says Liesel Laufer. “For older people, it was hell.”
One must suppose that Mina passed many sorrowful nights remembering that despite her daughter’s entreaties, she had refused to accompany Anny when she left for Palestine late in 1939.
After spending nine months struggling to expedite the emigration of Jews at the Prague Palestine Office under Adolf Eichmann and his staff, it had become increasingly clear to Anny that she and her son now had to leave themselves (her husband was already in Palestine). She pleaded with her mother to come, too, but Mina replied, “You don’t move an old tree. Besides, who will do anything to old people?”
She was shortly and tragically to find out who.
How one fared in Theresienstadt depended to a certain extent on how well one could negotiate the system. Norbert Troller, for instance, traded portraits of the cooks and bakers to their subjects for extra food; others schemed to get jobs that permitted them greater access to provisions. But the elderly, writes Zdenek Lederer in Ghetto Theresienstadt, “unlike the young workers, had no access to the food stores of the Ghetto, while their debility prevented them from making clandestine contacts with a view to acquiring some food.
“Starving elderly men and women begged for watery soup made from synthetic lentil or pea powder, and dug for food in the garbage heaps rotting in the courtyard of the barracks,” he writes. “In the morning, at noon, and before nightfall they patiently queued up for their food clutching saucepans, mugs or tins. They were glad to get a few gulps of hot coffee substitute and greedily ate their scanty meals. Then they continued their aimless pilgrimage, dragging along their emaciated bodies, their hands trembling and their clothes soiled.”
“The decision [to reduce their rations] transformed many of the elderly into scavengers and beggars,” writes George Berkley in The Story of Theresienstadt. “They would . . . pounce on any morsel of food such as a pile of potato skins, food considered fit only for pigs.” (This scene was so common that it is frequently depicted by Terezín artists.) As a result of eating the raw peelings, many of the elderly developed severe enteritis and diarrhea, a chronic camp condition but especially common, and especially serious, among the aged.
No one knows for certain to what degree this describes Mina’s life in Theresienstadt, but we do know it was extremely hard. (Her family believes she escaped transportation only because she had been given an order of merit from the German Red Cross for her aid to German soldiers passing through Czechoslovakia during World War I.)
By the time she was found in the fall of 1943 by her step-granddaughter Liesel Laufer, who had been sent to Terezín earlier that year, Mina was suffering from protein deficiency, a condition referred to as hunger edema. “An acquaintance of my parents told me where she was, and she was in living quarters that were very bad,” says Liesel, now a resident of Israel. “When I came, she was really in a poor state. She was suffering very badly from malnutrition. And I saw that she couldn’t take care of herself anymore.”
Because she was a nurse, Liesel was able to get Mina into the hospital, where she was able to look after her a little. Hospitalization also meant that Liesel’s husband, Ernest Reich, a doctor, could include Mina in his study of the effects of protein deficiency. Along with other patients, she was allotted two spoonfuls of white cheese a day (all that was available) to see what effect that small addition to her regular diet would have on her health. It was of little use.
Mina’s fear, expressed in one of her poems, that no good would come to her in Terezín proved warrented. She never got to kiss her grandson again. On Yom Kippur 1944, she died in the ghetto hospital. . . .
“The farther away it is, the worse it seems, this enormous thing that happened to the Jews,” said Anny late one afternoon as she clutched the cookbook in her elegant hands. “When you look in the caldron, you can’t believe what was in it. Yet here is the story of how the inmates of the camp, living on bread and watery soup and dreaming of the cooking habits of the past, found some consolation in the hope that they might be able to use them again in the future. By sharing these recipes, I am honoring the thoughts of my mother and the others that somewhere and somehow, there must be a better world to live in.”
WILHELMINA PÄCHTER,
COLD STUFFED EGGS PÄCHTER
HARD BOIL 10 eggs, cut them in half. Remove yolks and press them through a sieve. Add 5 decagrams butter, 2 anchovies pressed through a sieve, a little mustard, 3–4 drops Maggi [liquid seasoning], 1/8 liter whipped heavy cream, parsley, lemon juice. Now put eggs on a platter. Pour [liquid] aspic over. Before [pouring on the aspic] let fantasy run free and the eggs are garnished with ham, [smoked] salmon, caviar, capers. One can put the eggs into paper cuffs and serve them with hot sliced rolls.
THE WINNER OF a MacArthur “genius” award and numerous other prizes, McGrath has published nine collections of verse, many centered on the kind of social issue he addresses in “Capitalism #5,” our selection here. As one critic has noted, his poetry “thrives on his dissatisfaction with the world,” yet at the same time it is populist, empathic, and accessible. A professor of creative writing at Florida International University and a onetime member of the punk band Men from the Manly Planet, McGrath has compared poems to “little seedlings popping out of the soil,” noting that “some are tomato plants, some are oak trees, and some are weeds.”
I was at the 7-11.
I ate a burrito.
I drank a Slurpee.
I was tired.
It was late, after work washing dishes.
I had another.
I did it every day for a week.
I did it every day for a month.
To cook a burrito you tear off the plastic wrapper.
You push button #3 on the microwave.
Burritos are large, small, or medium.
Red or green chili peppers.
Beef or bean or both.
There are 7-11’s all across the nation.
On the way out I bought a quart of beer for $1.39.
I was aware of social injustice
In only the vaguest possible way.
A FREELANCE JOURNALIST, long time correspondent for the magazine GQ, and multiple nominee for the National Magazine Award, Paterniti is best known for his exploration of a remarkable Spanish cheese—Paramo de Guzmán; his The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese is part loving chronicle of the cheese maker and his extraordinary product, part memoir of an American seduced by the rhythms of rural life and the folks who live by those rhythms. Paterniti has also written Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain, a hilarious true story of a road trip across America with the pathologist who autopsied Einstein in 1955 and removed the great scientist’s brain, keeping it stashed in a Tupperware bowl for forty years. A resident of Portland, Maine, Paterniti has also written for Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine. In our excerpt from his account of French President François Mitterand’s last meal, he imagines himself dining on the same extravagant—indeed, controversial—ingredients.
WHAT BROUGHT ME to France in the first place was a story I’d heard about François Mitterrand, the former French president, who earlier had gorged himself on one last orgiastic feast before he’d died. For his last meal, he’d eaten oysters and foie gras and capon—all in copious quantities—the succulent, tender, sweet tastes flooding his parched mouth. And then there was the meal’s ultimate course: a small, yellow-throated songbird that was illegal to eat. Rare and seductive, the bird—ortolan—supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole—wings, feet, liver, heart. Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn’t witness the barbaric act.
DRIVING south from Paris to Bordeaux, to the region where Mitterland ate his last meal—to re-create it for myself—I wonder what it means to knowingly eat a last meal. It means knowing you’re going die, right? It means that you’ve been living under a long-held delusion that the world is infinite and you are immortal. So it means saying sayonara to everything, including the delusions that sustain you, at the same time that you’ve gained a deeper feeling about those delusions and how you might have lived with more passion and love and generosity.
And then the most difficult part: You must imagine yourself as a memory, laid out and naked and no longer yourself, no longer you, the remarkable Someone who chose a last meal. Rather, you’re just a body full of that meal. So you have to imagine yourself gone—first as a pale figure in the basement of a funeral home, then as the lead in a eulogy about how remarkable you were, and then as a bunch of photographs and stories.
And that’s when you must imagine one more time what you most need to eat, what last taste must rise to meet your hunger and thirst and linger awhile on your tongue even as, before dessert, you’re lowered into the grave.
THE old president asked that the rest of his family and friends be summoned to Latche and that a meal be prepared for New Year’s Eve. He gave a precise account of what would be eaten at the table, a feast for thirty people, for he had decided that afterward, he would not eat again.
“I am fed up with myself,” he told a friend.
I’ve come to a table set with a white cloth. An armada of floating wine goblets, the blinding weaponry of knives and forks and spoons. Two windows, shaded purple, stung by bullets of cold rain, lashed by the hurricane winds of an ocean storm.
The chef is a dark-haired man, fiftyish, with a bowling-ball belly. He stands in front of orange flames in his great stone chimney hung with stewpots, finely orchestrating each octave of taste, occasionally sipping his broths and various chorded concoctions with a miffed expression. In breaking the law to serve ortolan, he gruffly claims that it is his duty, as a Frenchman, to serve the food of his region. He thinks the law against serving ortolan is stupid. And yet he had to call forty of his friends in search of the bird, for there were none to be found and almost everyone feared getting caught, risking fines and possible imprisonment.
But then another man, his forty-first friend, arrived an hour ago with three live ortolans in a small pouch—worth up to a hundred dollars each and each no bigger than a thumb. They’re brown-backed, with pinkish bellies, part of the yellowhammer family, and when they fly, they tend to keep low to the ground and, when the wind is high, swoop crazily for lack of weight. In all the world, they’re really caught only in the pine forests of the southwestern Landes region of France, by about twenty families who lie in wait for the birds each fall as they fly from Europe to Africa. Once caught—they’re literally snatched out of the air in traps called matoles—they’re locked away in a dark room and fattened on millet; to achieve the same effect, French kings and Roman emperors once blinded the bird with a knife so, lost in the darkness, it would eat twenty-four hours a day.
Back at the chimney, the chef reiterates the menu for Mitterand’s last meal, including the last course, as he puts it, “the birdies.”
“It takes a culture of very good to appreciate the very good,” the chef says, nosing the clear juices of the capon rotating in the fire. “And ortolan is beyond even the very good.”
THE president was carried to a reclining chair and table apart from the huge table where the guests sat. He was covered with blankets, seemed gone already. And yet when they brought the oysters—Marennes oysters, his favorite, harvested from the waters of this region—he summoned his energies, rose up in his chair, and begun sucking them, the full flesh of them, from their half shells. He’d habitually eaten a hundred a week throughout his life and had been betrayed by bad oysters before, but, oh no, not these! Hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous—a dozen, two dozen, and then, astonishingly, more. He couldn’t help it, his ravenous attack. It was brain food, and he seemed to slurp them up against the cancer, let the saltwater juices flow to the back of his throat, change champagne-sweet, and then disappear in a flood before he started on the oyster itself. And that was another sublimity. The delicate tearing of a thing so full of ocean. Better than a paper wafer—heaven. When he was done, he lay back in his chair, oblivious to everyone else in the room, and fell fast asleep.
I BEGIN, too, by eating the Marennes oysters—round, fat, luscious oysters split open and peeled back to show their delicate green lungs. Shimmering pendulums of translucent meat, they weigh more than the heavy, carbuncled shells in which they lie. When you lift the shell to your mouth and suck, it’s like the first time your tongue ever touched another tongue. The oysters are cool inside, then warm. Everything becomes heightened and alive. Nibbling turns to hormone-humming mastication. Your mouth swims with sensation: sugary, then salty, then again with Atlantic Ocean sweetness. And you try, as best you can, to prolong it. When they’re gone, you taste the ghost of them.
And then the foie gras, smooth and surprisingly buttery, a light-brown pâté swirled with light greens, pinks, and yellows and glittering slightly, tasting not so much of animal but of earth. Accompanied by fresh, rough-crusted, homemade bread and the sweet sauternes (which itself is made from shriveled grapes of noble rot), the foie gras dissolves with the faint, rich sparkle of fresh-picked corn. It doesn’t matter that it’s fattened goose liver.
The capon is superb—not too gamey or stringy—furiously basted to a high state of tenderness in which the meat falls cleanly from the bone with only the help of gravity. In its mildness, in its hint of olive oil and rosemary, it readies the tongue and its several thousand taste buds for the experience of what’s coming next.
And then the wines. Besides the sauternes (a 1995 Les Remparts de Bastor, a 1995 Doisy Daëne), there are simple, full-bodied reds, for that’s how Mitterrand liked them, simple and full-bodied: a 1900 Château Lestage Simon, a 1994 Château Poujeaux. They are long, old and dark. Complicated potions of flower and fruit. Faint cherry on a tongue tip, the tingle of tannin along the gums. While one bottle is being imbibed, another is being decanted, and all the while there are certain chemical changes taking place between the wine and its new atmosphere and then finally between the changed wine and the atmosphere of your mouth, until it seems to lift from the tongue, vanished.
WITH each course, the president had rallied from sleep, from his oyster dreams, from fever or arctic chill, not daring to miss the next to come: the foie gras slathered over homemade bread or the capon and then, of course, the wines. But what brought him to full attention was a commotion: Some of the guests were confused when a man at last brought in a large platter of tiny, cooked ortolans laid out in rows. The president closely regarded his guests’ dismayed expressions, for it gave him quiet satisfaction—between jabs of pain—to realize that he still had the power to surprise.
The ortolans were offered to the table, but not everyone accepted. Those who did draped large, white cloth napkins over their heads, took the ortolans in their fingertips, and disappeared. The room shortly filled with wet noises and chewing. The bones and intestines turned to paste, swallowed eventually in one gulp. Some reveled in it; others spat it out. When they were through, one by one they reappeared from beneath their hoods, slightly dazed.
The president himself took a long sip of wine, let it play in his mouth. After nearly three dozen oysters and several courses, he seemed insatiable, and there was one bird left. He took the ortolan in his fingers, then dove again beneath the hood, the bony impress of his skull against the white cloth—the guests in silence and the self-pleasing, pornographic slurps of the president filling the room like a dirge.
AFTER the president’s second ortolan—he had appeared from beneath the hood, wide-eyed, ecstatic, staring into a dark corner of the room—the guests approached him in groups of two and three and made brief small talk about the affairs of the country or Zola or the weather. They knew this was adieu, and yet they hid their sadness; they acted as if in a month’s time he would still be among them.
And what about him? There was nothing left to subtract now. What of the white river that flowed through his childhood, the purple attic full of cornhusks? And then his beautiful books—Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Camus? How would the world continue without him in it?
He tried to flail one last time against the proof of his death. But then he had no energy left. Just an unhappy body weighted with grapefruit tumors, curving earthward. Everything moving toward the center and one final point of pain. Soon after, he refused food and medicine; death took eight days.
“I’m eaten up inside,” he said before he was carried from the room.
A YOUNG BOY’S confusion about whether to try something as odd-looking and strange-tasting as a sea urchin becomes even greater when Chang-rae Lee’s mother and father, like the good and bad angels of a morality play whispering temptations and prohibitions in the protagonist’s ears, voice their respective warning and encouragement. Lee, an astute describer of the spiny, globular creature usually eaten raw, is a Korean-American novelist who teaches creative writing at Princeton. His first novel, Native Speaker, is about Korean immigrants to America, while his second, A Gesture Life, centers on a Japanese-American doctor who had treated Korean comfort women during World War II. His characters are frequently torn between their country of origin and their new home, afflicted by problems of assimilation and bifurcated identity. His own ambivalence about cultural assimilation seems to be mirrored by his ambivalence toward a peculiar gastronomic experience.
JULY 1980. I’M about to turn fifteen and our family is in Seoul, the first time since we left, twelve years earlier. I don’t know if it’s different. My parents can’t really say. They just repeat the equivalent of “How in the world?” whenever we venture into another part of the city, or meet one of their old friends. “Look at that—how in the world?” “This hot spell, yes, yes—how in the world?” My younger sister is very quiet in the astounding heat. We all are. It’s the first time I notice how I stink. You can’t help smelling like everything else. And in the heat everything smells of ferment and rot and rankness. In my grandfather’s old neighborhood, where the two- and three-room houses stand barely head-high, the smell is staggering. “What’s that?” I ask. My cousin says, “Shit.”
“Shit? What shit?”
“Yours,” he says, laughing. “Mine.”
On the wide streets near the city center, there are student demonstrations; my cousin says they’re a response to a massacre of citizens by the military down south in Kwangju. After the riot troops clear the avenues, the air is laden with tear gas—“spicy,” in the idiom. Whenever we’re in a taxi moving through there, I open the window and stick out my tongue, trying to taste the poison, the human repellent. My mother wonders what’s wrong with me.
I don’t know what’s wrong. Or maybe I do. I’m bored. Maybe I’m craving a girl. I can’t help staring at them, the ones clearing dishes in their parents’ eateries, the uniformed schoolgirls walking hand in hand, the slim young women who work in the Lotte department store, smelling of fried kimchi and L’Air du Temps. They’re all stunning to me, even with their bad teeth. I let myself drift near them, hoping for the scantest touch.
But there’s nothing. I’m too obviously desperate, utterly hopeless. Instead, it seems, I can eat. I’ve always liked food, but now I’m bent on trying everything. As it is, the days are made up of meals, formal and impromptu, meals between meals and within meals; the streets are a continuous outdoor buffet of braised crabs, cold buckwheat noodles, shaved ice with sweet red beans on top. In Itaewon, the district near the United States Army base, where you can get anything you want, culinary or otherwise, we stop at a seafood stand for dinner. Basically, it’s a tent diner, a long bar with stools, a camp stove and fish tank behind the proprietor, an elderly woman with a low, hoarse voice. The roof is a stretch of blue poly-tarp. My father is excited; it’s like the old days. He wants raw fish, but my mother shakes her head. I can see why: in plastic bins of speckled, bloody ice sit semi-alive cockles, abalones, eels, conches, sea cucumbers, porgies, shrimps. “Get something fried,” she tells him, not caring what the woman might think. “Get something cooked.”
A young couple sitting at the end of the bar order live octopus. The old woman nods and hooks one in the tank. It’s fairly small, the size of a hand. She lays it on the board and quickly slices off the head with her cleaver. She chops the tentacles and gathers them up onto a plate, dressing them with sesame oil and a spicy bean sauce. “You have to be careful,” my father whispers, “or one of the suction cups can stick inside your throat. You could die.” The lovers blithely feed each other the sectioned tentacles, taking sips of soju in between. My mother immediately orders a scallion-and-seafood pancake for us, then a spicy cod-head stew; my father murmurs that he still wants something live, fresh. I point to a bin and say that’s what I want—those split spiny spheres, like cracked-open meteorites, their rusty centers layered with shiny crenellations. I bend down and smell them, and my eyes almost water from the intense ocean tang. “They’re sea urchins,” the woman says to my father. “He won’t like them.” My mother is telling my father he’s crazy, that I’ll get sick from food poisoning, but he nods to the woman, and she picks up a half and cuts out the soft flesh.
What does it taste like? I’m not sure, because I’ve never had anything like it. All I know is that it tastes alive, something alive at the undragged bottom of the sea; it tastes the way flesh would taste if flesh were a mineral. And I’m half gagging, though still chewing; it’s as if I had another tongue in my mouth, this blind, self-satisfied creature. That night I throw up, my mother scolding us, my father chuckling through his concern. The next day, my uncles joke that they’ll take me out for some more, and the suggestion is enough to make me retch again.
But a week later I’m better, and I go back by myself. The woman is there, and so are the sea urchins, glistening in the hot sun. “I know what you want,” she says. I sit, my mouth slick with anticipation and revulsion, not yet knowing why.
EVEN AN OLD China hand like Peter Hessler—who has written three books on that country and received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for reporting on the way China’s rapid changes affect ordinary citizens—can have very mixed feelings about its more exotic dishes. Though Hessler spent many years in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a New Yorker correspondent in Beijing, his plunge into rat cuisine at two restaurants specializing in the rodent provoked a decidedly mixed response. The creatures may not have been urban sewer rats—they were raised in a free-range environment on grass or fruits—but they did not bring unmitigated pleasure to Hessler, though he shows himself to be relatively game. His piece is an amusing account of the Chinese culinary temperament and an arch narrative of Chinese attitudes toward Western diners.
“DO YOU WANT a big rat or a small rat?” the waitress says.
I’m getting used to making difficult decisions in Luogang. It’s a small village in southern China’s Guangdong Province, and I came here on a whim, having heard that Luogang has a famous rat restaurant. Upon arrival, however, I discovered that there are actually two celebrated restaurants—the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City. Both restaurants specialize in rat. They have the same bamboo and wood decor. They are next door to each other, and their owners are named Zhong and Zhong, respectively. Virtually everybody in Luogang village is named Zhong.
The restaurant Zhongs are not related, and the competition between them is keen. As a foreign journalist, I’ve been cajoled to such an extent that, in an effort to please both Zhongs, I agreed to eat two lunches, one at each restaurant. But before the taste test can begin, I have to answer the question that’s been posed by the waitress at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant. Her name is Zhong. In Chinese it means “bell.” She asks the question again: “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?”
“What’s the difference?” I say.
“The big rats eat grass stems, and the small ones eat fruit.”
This piece of information does not help much. I try a more direct tack. “Which tastes better?”
“Both of them taste good.”
“Which do you recommend?”
“Either one.”
I glance at the table next to mine. Two parents, a grandmother, and a little boy are having lunch. The boy is gnawing on a rat drumstick. I can’t tell if the drumstick once belonged to a big rat or a small rat. The boy eats quickly. It’s a warm afternoon. The sun is shining. I make my decision.
“Small rat,” I say.
THE Chinese claim that folks in Guangdong will eat anything. Besides rat, a customer at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant can order turtledove, fox, cat, python, and an assortment of strange-looking local animals whose names do not translate well into English. All of them are kept live in pens at the back of the restaurant, and they are killed only when ordered by a customer. Choosing among them is complicated, and it involves more than exoticism. You do not eat cat simply for the thrill of eating cat. You eat cat because cats have a lively jingshen, or spirit, and thus by eating the animal you will improve your spirits. You eat snake to become stronger. You eat deer penis to improve virility. And you eat rat to improve your—well, to be honest, I never knew that there was a reason for rat-eating until I got to Luogang, where every Zhong was quick to explain the benefits of the local specialty.
“It keeps you from going bald,” said Zhong Shaocong, the daughter of the owner of the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant.
“If you have white hair and eat rat regularly, it will turn black,” said Zhong Qingjiang, who owns the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City. “And if you’re going bald and you eat rat every day your hair will stop falling out. A lot of the parents around here feed rat to a small child who doesn’t have much hair, and the hair grows better.”
Earlier this year, Luogang opened a “Restaurant Street” in the new Luogang Economic Development Zone, which is designed to draw visitors from the nearby city of Guangzhou. The government invested $1.2 million in the project, which enabled the two rat restaurants to move from their old, cramped quarters in a local park. On March 18, the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant began serving customers in a twenty-thousand-square-foot facility that cost $42,000. Six days later, the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City opened, with an investment of $54,000. A third restaurant—a massive, airconditioned facility, which is expected to cost $72,000—will open soon. A fourth is in the planning stages.
“Their investment wasn’t as much as mine,” Deng Ximing, the owner of the third restaurant, told me. “You can see that my place is going to be much nicer. We have air-conditioning, which none of the others have.”
It was early morning, and we were watching the workers lay the cement floor of the new restaurant. Deng was the only local restaurateur with a different family name, but he was married to a Zhong. He was in his mid-forties, and he had the fast-talking confidence of a successful entrepreneur. I also noticed that he had a good head of hair. He took great pride in Luogang Village’s culinary tradition.
“It’s more than a thousand years old,” he said. “And it’s always been rats from the mountain—we’re not eating city rats. The mountain rats are clean, because up there they aren’t eating anything dirty. Mostly they eat fruit—oranges, plums, jackfruit. People from the government hygiene department have been here to examine the rats. They took them to the laboratory and checked them out thoroughly to see if they had any diseases, and they found nothing. Not even the slightest problem.”
Luogang’s Restaurant Street has been a resounding success. Newspapers and television stations have reported extensively on the benefits of the local specialty, and an increasing number of customers are making the half-hour trip from Guangzhou. Both the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City serve, on average, three thousand rats every day on the weekend. “Many people come from faraway places,” Zhong Qingjiang told me. “They come from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macao. One customer came all the way from America with her son. They were visiting relatives in Luogang, and the family brought them here to eat. She said you couldn’t find this kind of food in America.”
In America, you would also be hard-pressed to find twelve thousand fruit-fed rats anywhere on any weekend, but this isn’t a problem in Luogang. On my first morning in the village, I watched dozens of farmers come down from the hills, looking to get a piece of the rat business. They came on mopeds, on bicycles, on foot; and all of them carried squirming burlap sacks full of rats that had been trapped on their farms.
“Last year I sold my oranges for fifteen cents a pound,” a farmer named Zhong Senji told me. “But this year the price has dropped to less than ten cents.” Like many other farmers, Zhong decided that the rat business was a lot better than the orange business. Today he had nine rats in his sack, which was weighed by a worker at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant. The bag shook and squeaked on the scale. It weighed in at just under three pounds, and Zhong received the equivalent in yuan of $1.45 per pound, for a total of $3.87. In Lougang, rats are more expensive than pork or chicken. A pound of rat costs nearly twice as much as a pound of beef.
AT the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, I begin with a dish called Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans. The menu also includes Mountain Rat Soup, Steamed Mountain Rat, Simmered Mountain Rat, Roasted Mountain Rat, Mountain Rat Curry, and Spicy and Salty Mountain Rat. But the waitress enthusiastically recommended the Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans, which arrives in a clay pot.
I eat the beans first. They taste fine. I poke at the rat meat. It’s clearly well done, and it’s attractively garnished with onions, leeks, and ginger. Nestled in a light sauce are skinny rat thighs, short strips of rat flank, and delicate toylike rat ribs. I start with a thigh, put a chunk of it into my mouth, and reach for a glass of beer. The beer helps.
The restaurant’s owner, Zhong Dieqin, comes over and sits down. “What do you think?” she asks.
“I think it tastes good.”
“You know it’s good for your health.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“It’s good for your hair and skin,” she says. “It’s also good for your kidneys.”
Earlier this morning, I met a farmer who told me that my brown hair might turn black if I ate enough rat. Then he thought for a moment and said that he wasn’t certain if eating rat has the same effect on foreigners that it does on the Chinese—it might do something entirely different to me. The possibility seemed to interest him a great deal.
At the table, Zhong Dieqin watches me intently. The audience also includes much of the restaurant staff. “Are you sure you like it?” asks the owner.
“Yes,” I say, tentatively. In fact, it isn’t bad. The meat is lean and white, without a hint of gaminess. There’s no aftertaste. Gradually, my squeamishness fades, and I try to decide what the meat reminds me of, but nothing comes to mind. It simply tastes like rat.
NEXT door, at the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City she asks, “How was the other restaurant?”
“It was fine,” I say.
“What did you eat?”
“Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans.”
“You’ll like ours better,” she says. “Our cook is better, the service is quicker, and the waitresses are more polite.”
I decide to order the Spicy and Salty Mountain Rat. This time, when the waitress asks about size, I respond immediately. “Big rat,” I say, pleased with my boldness.
“Come and choose it.”
“What?”
“Pick out the rat you want.”
In Chinese restaurants, fish and other seafood are traditionally shown live to customers for approval, as a way of guaranteeing freshness. It’s not what I expected with rat, but now that the invitation has been made, it’s too late to back out. I follow one of the kitchen workers to a shed behind the restaurant, where cages are stacked one on top of the other. Each cage contains more than thirty rats. The shed does not smell good. The worker points at a rat.
“How about this one?” he says.
“Um, sure.”
He puts on a leather glove, opens the cage, and picks up the chosen rat. It’s about the size of a softball. The rat is calm, perched on the hand of the worker, who keeps a grip on the tail.
“Is it OK?” asks the worker.
“Yes.”
“Are you certain?”
The rat gazes at me with beady eyes. I have a strong desire to leave the shed.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s fine.”
Before I go, the worker makes a sudden motion. He flips his wrist, keeps a grip on the tail, and swings his arm quickly. The rat makes a neat arc in the air. There is a soft thud when its head strikes the cement floor. There isn’t much blood. The worker grins.
“Oh,” I say.
“You can sit back down now,” says the worker. “We’ll bring it out to you soon.”
Less than fifteen minutes later the dish is at my table. This time the chunks of rat are garnished with carrots and leeks. The chef comes out of the kitchen to join the rest of the audience, which consists of the owner, the floor manager, and a cousin of the owner. I take a bite.
“How is it?” the chef asks.
“Good.”
“Is it too tough?”
“No,” I say. “It’s fine.”
In truth, I’m trying hard not to taste anything. I lost my appetite in the shed, and now I eat quickly, washing every bite down with beer. I do my best to put on a good show, gnawing on the bones as enthusiastically as possible. When I finish, I sit back and manage a smile. The chef and the others nod with approval.
The owner’s cousin says, “Next time you should try the Longfu Soup, because it contains tiger, dragon, and phoenix.”
“What do you mean by ‘tiger, dragon, and phoenix’?” I ask warily. I don’t want to make another trip to the shed.
“It’s not real tigers, dragons, and phoenixes,” he says. “They’re represented by other animals—cat for the tiger, snake for the dragon, and chicken for the phoenix. When you mix them together, there are all kinds of health benefits.” He smiles and says, “They taste good, too.”