by Kate Christensen | Mar 11, 2012
This morning, we found ourselves awake and up at 6:30, which turned out to be 7:30 because of springing forward. We drank a lot of coffee and read the paper (online of course), and then we drove into town. The best breakfast place in the region is a health-food store called the Local Grocery. They’re a real grocery store, with organic vegetables, local eggs and meat, and things like chickpea miso and frozen tempeh burgers, but they also have a kitchen and a chalkboard menu that offers a large and thrilling variety of breakfast burritos, sandwiches, and wraps, all of which can be gluten-free.
Variety be damned, we always get the same thing. Brendan ordered the breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs, bison sausage, black beans, corn, and Monterey Jack cheese; I got the falafel wrap, and we asked for some of their homemade, excellent hot sauce. We sat at a little wooden table and drank strong organic fair-trade coffee. While we ate, we read, as usual, books from their bookshelf, which contains a lot of White Mountain sightseeing guides along with crackpotty and/or antiquated diet and nutrition and exercise books devoted to such topics as Pilates for pregnant women, how to lose weight with apple-cider vinegar, and how to self-diagnose various food allergies.
We left the store with full stomachs and a box of gluten-free eclairs so good you can’t tell anything’s missing, plus a whole frozen chicken and a frozen leg of lamb, both of which were raised by the owner of the store himself, the same guy who cooked our breakfast. He lives on Hurricane Mountain Road; apparently, when he and his wife bought their house, a lawn mower was included in the purchase and sale agreement. The owner absconded with the lawn mower and sold it out from under them, so they bought three sheep instead. The leg we bought is from one of the sheeps’ descendants, and the chicken we bought is from the flock they added once they realized that they were suited to keeping livestock.
“What was its name?” I asked, having established that he watched “Portlandia.” “Did it have any friends?”
“I don’t name my chickens,” he answered. And then he laughed and made a quick, random stoner kind of remark neither Brendan nor I can recall (maybe we’re the stoners; can you be a stoner if you don’t smoke pot?), something like, “I burned out on Portland long ago.”
On the way home, we stopped at Hannaford. We cracked the windows for Dingo, who waited in the Subaru. I am obsessed with not leaving him in a hot car; it was 45 degrees out, but still, it was sunny; you never know.
While Brendan went off with a cloth reusable shopping bag to gather two bottles of cava (for our usual Sunday mimosas), organic potatoes, and a box of organic antibiotic- and hormone-free local eggs (since the health-food store had none left), I marched to the customer service desk.
“I bought littleneck clams the other day,” I told the very young, very pretty woman on duty. “I brought the receipt back but not the clams. I have a feeling you wouldn’t want to smell them.”
She blinked at me from behind large, beige, but somehow fetching glasses. “Oh no,” she said. “What was wrong with them?”
I didn’t have the heart to describe the smell in the car on the way home from the store.
“They were… rotten,” I said. “I’m hoping to get my money back.”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” she said. She took the receipt from me and blinked at it. “Well,” she said. “Because it’s seafood, you get double your money back. So that’s $23.50.” She counted out the bills and gave them to me. “I’m so sorry!” she said again.
“It is no one’s fault,” I said. “Clams have a way of doing that.”
I caught up with Brendan, who was unloading his basket onto the conveyor belt: two bottles of cava, eggs, and potatoes.
“Can I see both your ID’s?” the cashier asked us.
“I don’t have my wallet,” I said. “I’ll go out to the car and let him buy the cava.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I can’t do that.”
“I’m almost fifty!” I said, squinching up my eyes to show my crows’ feet.
“She’s almost fifty,” Brendan agreed.
“Well, the good news is that you don’t look it,” said the cashier. “The bad news is that I still can’t sell this to you. The liquor store is two miles down the road, you could try them.”
We took our bag out to the car and deliberated for a minute, acknowledging the fact that we had had two bottles of cava yesterday (for our usual Saturday mimosas). We decided that this was a sign. Enough, sadly, was enough.
When we got home, the three of us took our daily walk. Dingo, whose fur is exactly the same beige color as the dirt-and-sand road that runs by the lake, has to wear a neon-orange bib on these walks for his own safety. He bears this with aplomb, but I can tell he’s sheepish about it whenever he encounters other dogs. He’s a former Brooklyn street dog. If he could talk, I imagine that he would tell me, “Get this fuckin’ thing off me, pinche cabron, before I put the hurt on you.” But luckily he can’t, and, since he’s already been hit by a car once and yet continues to be cavalier about running toward approaching vehicles if one sneaks up on us before I can restrain him, I figure it’s like rolling down the windows whenever the temperature goes over 40 degrees – it can’t hurt.
Chicken a la Ding
There are very few things in the world that Dingo loves more than he loves me. (And by loves I mean expresses enthusiasm for; who can know what lurks in the heart of a dog?) One of these things – now that I think about it, maybe the only thing – is chicken. It has occurred to me that if I could magically turn into a chicken, his life would be complete. Given that this is not going to happen, or so I hope, he’ll have to be content with the second-best thing: today I made a chicken stew to add to his kibble, enough for the next four days.
I boiled three large chopped boneless (naturally, organic) chicken breasts with a bag of chopped carrots and a cup of oats. While it simmered, he sat by the stove, rapt and slavering and wide-eyed, his entire being trained on the pot. When everything was cooked and soft, I turned off the flame. While it cooled, I went back to work, sitting at the table. He hovered by my knees, resting his chin on them in a way that had nothing to do with affection; every now and then, his chin tapped my knees noodgily to inform me that he wanted that stew. By the time his dinner hour rolled around, he was in a hair-trigger, quivering state of monomaniacal jonesing.
I stirred a cup of stew into his kibble and gave him his bowl. Less than two minutes later, he had demolished every molecule. I was tempted to laugh about this, as always, but as always, I resisted the urge, because this is exactly what we human members of the household do. Every day, we anticipate our dinner, talk about it, plan it, make it, drool over the cooking smells, load up our plates – and then it’s gone.
by Kate Christensen | Mar 8, 2012
The mania of spring is infecting our hermetic little threesome. Dingo has been bounding around outside all day like a humpy rabbit, barking at snow drip-melting off the roof and fluffing his suddenly-shedding fur in the breeze and sunlight. After an uncharacteristically studious, intent winter of hard work and concentration, Brendan and I have reverted to our punchy and goofy and amorous selves. I’m scattershot and addlepated with unfocused disorganization: what am I working on, again? Eight different things, it turns out.
All night last night, the full moon blazed in through the bedroom window and lit up the long fields of snow and dark, shaggy woods with its silver, dramatic glow. The fact that wild solar flares were hitting Earth made sense; my dreams were absurd and rich with peril, upside-down logic, and Loki hilarity. And this morning, the air had turned suddenly warm, up here in the frozen north.
I woke up very early, let Dingo out into the sunny snow-blind morning, and fed him. While I drank an enormous cup of strong coffee, I sat blinking over my correspondence, unable to write anything coherent to anyone. Later, I made custardy, fluffy French toast — Rudi’s gluten-free multigrain bread soaked in beaten eggs, cinnamon, and light cream, slowly fried in butter till it was crisp and tender, then drenched in puddles of New Hampshire maple syrup.
At 11:00, creatures of clockwork habit, we three took our usual 4-mile fast walk up and down the hilly dirt road, which today was melting, streaming with runoff, muddy. We came home with wet feet; Dingo’s entire undercarriage had to be toweled off. While I rubbed the grit and sand and snowmelt from his stomach and legs and hindquarters, he smiled goofily at me and panted in my ear and leaned against my shoulder in a manner I can only describe as flirtatious. (It has occurred to me to adopt a female dog to be his companion, but that’s as far as I’ve ever gotten with that plan.)
For much of the morning, I went back and forth with a friend who’d sent off a message far and wide that he would mail packages of freshly gathered Cape Cod oysters to anyone who could offer a good trade. Within seconds of seeing this, I leapt, ponying up a signed copy of “The Epicure’s Lament,” since I don’t jar pickles or grow fresh herbs or grind my own sausages. My friend Beau agreed, then added slyly that delicious wild mushrooms grow in the White Mountains. Suddenly part of the bargain were the mushrooms I now evidently intend to gather this spring.
I reclined in the sun on the porch with Brendan and Dingo for a while, then came inside and wrote down all the things I didn’t seem to be working on today. Seeing the list made me feel paradoxically better. With so much work to do, how could I be expected to accomplish any of it? I ask you. It was now 2:00. I looked over my ludicrously long list and recognized that there was nothing for it but to open a cold bottle of pinot grigio and slice some strong white cheddar and call it a day.
Every year when spring comes, I go through a similar period of adjustment. Sometimes it’s traumatic, sometimes it’s euphoric, sometimes a little of both. The best thing to do in these transitional seasons is to give in to animal instinct. This means acquiescing to any and all seductive urges, sleeping a lot, drinking all the wine you want and plenty of water, and going outside into the sunlight in short sleeves and moving around. It’s good to eat lightly but decadently, food that’s good for you (because the change of seasons is a shock to the system) but which also satisfies a sudden intense itch for variety, change, novelty, adventure.
Instead of deeply flavored stews, root vegetables, and potato-based fry-ups, my appetite is suddenly laser-focused on ruffled fresh green lettuces and – it pains me to say this out of compassion for my vegetarian friends – baby lamb. It’s a frank hunger for the sweetness of new life — little leaves shaking off dew and standing upright, the tender savory flesh of very young animals.
Popcorn Cockles with Asparagus with Fenugreek Sauce and Mango Salsa
This is another made-up recipe from “The Great Man” that looked so good on paper, I had to try it in real life. It turned out to be better than I’d imagined. And it is the perfect antidote and accompaniment to spring fever.
Cockles are better than clams for this dish, but very small, tender clams will do if no cockles are available.
Steam 20 young asparagus spears until just soft. Plunge into ice water, remove, and pat dry. Drizzle with the following mixture: 2 tablespoons mayonnaise, 1 tablespoon lime juice, and 1/8 teaspoon ground fenugreek.
Steam 3 dozen very fresh cockles in their shells just until they open. Remove the cockles from their shells (they will be wet with their own liquor) and immediately coat them in finely ground cornmeal. Heat 1 inch of peanut oil in a skillet until it spits when you flick a drop of water at it. In batches that just cover the bottom of the pan, fry the cockles, covered to minimize spatter, for several minutes, till their crusts are golden. Remove and arrange alongside the asparagus. On the other side of the cockles goes a mango salsa:
In a bowl, mix1 ripe mango, chopped small, 1-2 tablespoons finely minced cilantro, 2 tablespoons lime juice, 1 minced medium or large garlic clove, and 1-2 jalapeno peppers (depending on how hot you want it), minced.
This recipe serves 4 as an appetizer, in theory, but has been known to serve 2, just barely.
by Kate Christensen | Mar 6, 2012
When I was 18, after I’d been living in the French countryside for about a month, I was asked to make mincemeat for the family I worked for. “I’ll show you how,” said Vivian, the lady of the house, a tiny Englishwoman in her late 30s with a coppery, loose bun and dark red-brown eyes. “It’s an English tradition. My mother taught me.” In the kitchen, she stood at my elbow while I roasted and chopped beef heart and liver and mixed them with minced apple and dried fruit and spices and nuts, then bound the whole thing together with beef suet and a staggering amount of brandy.
A vegetarian at the time (for wholly experimental reasons), I found this whole exercise disconcerting but exciting. The resulting mixture looked like a psychopath’s murderous aftermath — small, firm chunks of organ meat interspersed with luridly moist nuggets of fruit and fleshy nuts — but it smelled, frankly, amazing. I packed the redolent, dense mess into a large glass vacuum-sealed jar and didn’t see it again until just before Christmas, when I baked it into two pies under the supervision of the indefatigable, perennially amused, cinnamon-colored Vivian, whom I had grown to adore.
The pies, when they came out of the oven, seemed magnificent. I couldn’t eat them, due to my vegetarian status, but I could smell them. I stood over them, filling my nose with the steam that rose through the vents in the top crust, a dark, rich smell that I remember now, 31 years later, as strongly as if those pies were right in front of me: after the heady brandy updraft came a fierce admixture of currants, apples, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon, with pungent meaty bass notes.
Although mincemeat was nothing I’d ever eaten before, and although I couldn’t eat it then, I was comforted by its smell, which, although exotic and decadent, also reminded me (in my state of by then near-hallucinatory homesick longing) of cinnamon-raisin toast, that dessertlike staple of American childhood breakfasts — on winter mornings, I slathered margarine (it was the 1970s) on toasted raisin bread, then reached for the cinnamon-sugar bowl my mother always kept full and sprinkled a teaspoonful, then another teaspoonful, and then another final heaping teaspoonful, onto the hot “buttered” toast. The cinnamon-sugar got dark-wet from the margarine, and it all melted into the hot toast, and as I ate it the sugar crunched between my teeth and the raisins melted into my molars and the earthy, sweet, warm, zingy taste of the cinnamon made me half-crazed with satisfaction.
Cinnamon is the sweetest of all smells, the most innocent and adorable, but also the most vixenish, alluring, and tempting, the Lolita of spices. It goes particularly well – as befits its nymphet status — with booze, meat, and fruit, and is generally associated, warmingly, with various cold-weather holidays and occasions. It fills houses at Christmastime on wafts of mulled wine, elevates Thanksgiving pie to ambrosiacal melt-in-your-mouth debacles of post-feast gluttony, and warms all the various cockles – heart, loins, and psyche – on winter mornings in humble applesauce or oatmeal or muffins.
In Perugia, Italy, I had pears simmered in red wine with cinnamon; by the end of the poaching process, the pears had absorbed so much wine and spice, they had taken on a new identity – that mealy and wholesome fruit was now sluttish, intoxicating, and had become firm in the mouth, muscular as a surfer girl. In Oaxaca, I got sick on mole, I ate so much of it – I glutted myself on tender Mexican chicken bathed in glossy, complex chocolate mud spiked with cinnamon and so many other mysterious things.
Chicken Tagine
I invented this recipe by describing it on the fly in the first chapter of my novel, The Great Man, in which a 74-year-old woman half-seduces a 40-year-old man with food, and then I made it in order to test my imaginative culinary instincts. There is no modest way to say this: the apricots melt into the broth and sweeten it deeply, the olives give it brine, and the almonds and cilantro and lemon bring it to life. And it contains cinnamon; it is, in a word, delicious.
On low heat, saute a chopped red onion and 5-6 minced garlic cloves in lots of butter (or ghee) or oil. Add coriander and cumin, about a tablespoon, yes I said tablespoon, of each (feel free to use already-ground; I like using a mortar and pestle, but some people don’t), a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a lemon’s worth of grated fresh lemon zest, a generous pinch each of saffron and cayenne, a teaspoon of paprika, 2 bay leaves, and a thumb-sized lump of grated fresh ginger. Keep heat low, stir constantly, and make sure nothing burns or sticks; add more ghee or oil if necessary.
When it’s all cooked into a commingled fragrant brown spice puddle, add a red and a yellow pepper, diced, a large carrot or two medium carrots, peeled and chopped small, a generous handful of cracked green olives, a handful of dried Turkish apricots, chopped small, one 15-16 ounce can of well-rinsed chickpeas, a cup of Pomi diced tomatoes, and a cup of hearty chicken broth. Bring to a gentle boil, then right down to a simmer, and cover.
Cut up 5 skinless, boneless chicken thighs and 3 breasts, more than 2 pounds of chicken in all, into big bite-sized pieces, the kind you have to cut in half to really eat, and grill them in a cast-iron skillet in ghee or oil till they’re brown just on the outside and still raw inside, then add them to the stew and stir everything together and gently simmer it, covered, for 4 1/2 hours. Add more chicken broth as necessary.
Saute and slightly brown 1 package or 2 cups couscous or, if you’re gluten-intolerant, quinoa, in 2 tablespoons butter, then cook according to the directions on the packet. Serve with harissa or shug, along with bowls of chopped toasted almonds, lemon slices, and chopped fresh cilantro.
by Kate Christensen | Mar 4, 2012
I always keep several different kinds of hot sauce on hand. At the moment, I have both regular and chipotle Cholula, Tabasco, chili-garlic sauce, Sriracha, Thai hot chili sauce, and a can of chipotle peppers in adobo. I consider this a paltry assortment, and I wish I had more. I need green chile habanero sauce, red chile habanero sauce, West Indian jerk sauce, Jamaican Scotch bonnet sauce, La Victoria, Crystal, harissa, Tapatio salsa picante, a few specialty small-batch hot sauces with names like Butt Twister and Viper and Slap Ya Mama and Pain is Good, Pickapeppa spicy mango sauce, Matouk’s Calypso sauce, Valentina, red chili oil, Sambal Oelek, and more. When the new kitchen gets renovated, I plan to put a Lazy Susan in the middle of the dining room table and stock it with hot sauces and avail myself of any and all of them at every meal.
There are those, I know, who sneer at people who cover their food in hot sauce. They think it wrecks the nuances of the flavors or something. I don’t care. In fact, I disagree. Nuance be damned. Hot sauce is exciting. It releases endorphins and cures colds and peps up blandness and augments deliciousness. It might be an aphrodisiac for all I know. (I suspect very much that it is.) Everything tastes better to me with hot sauce: chicken soup, pea soup, lentil soup, Caesar salad, frittatas, steamed vegetables, steak, shrimp, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, corn fritters, meat loaf – I’ll happily shake big splashes of scorching pepper sauce on any and all of it.
If I had to go to some hypothetical desert island where you’re allowed to have only five things in addition to the most basic necessities, plain food and water and shelter, Tabasco would be in my shipwreck suitcase along with the collected works of Bach, rioja, Tres Generaciones tequila, and a clawfoot bathtub with unlimited hot water. Other, more distinctive hot sauces fill a niche, usually geographical – Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, Southern, and so on — but Tabasco is that versatile accessory that can go with anything, anywhere, uptown or downtown, black-tie or picnic, emeralds or bathrobe or both at once. Tabasco has a vinegary, piquant, clean, robust flavor whose clarity amps up subtler flavors without drowning them. It can go on anything, is what I’m saying, but I like it best on food that’s bland and plain and simple: red beans, scrambled eggs, chicken, polenta, steamed broccoli, boiled potatoes, cooked lentils. It also makes bad food edible, mediocre food good, and good food even better. There’s a good reason it’s the most popular and ubiquitous hot sauce on the planet.
Last fall, when we were in Louisiana, Brendan and I made a pilgrimage to Avery Island. We toured the McIlhenny factory, which meant we got a 10-minute tour of the Tabasco Museum, then we looked through a long plate-glass window at the assembly line, and then at the end we watched a short video about how Tabasco peppers are grown and harvested and packed into oak barrels with vinegar and left to cure, then tapped, bottled, and sent far and wide all over the world. It was a quiet day there, and we were among only a handful of other visitors. After the unintentionally hilarious promotional film, we collected our tiny little bottles of all the varieties of Tabasco – regular, jalapeno, habanero, chili-lime, chipotle, buffalo, garlic-pepper, and sweet & spicy. Then we went over to the gift shop to try the free Tabasco ice cream. It was damn good, but I wouldn’t want to eat it on a regular basis.
After we were done with the factory and gift shop, we took a little hike over the grounds. We wandered through the “jungle garden” (which resembled neither a jungle nor a garden but was rather a sort of bare wild expanse of trees and shrubs) by a bayou and wended our meandering way through little paths to a huge Buddha shrine on a hill, then to a lookout tower over a swamp where in the proper season one can evidently watch a massive group of snowy egrets going about their birdly business. On that overcast, almost-chilly, windless October afternoon, there was not bird one. The only wildlife around were a vast and aggressive population of gigantic mosquitoes who dive-bombed us and bit the hell out of us and a sudden startled pack of deer who sprinted like one being in several long, muscular pulses away from us into deeper cover.
Avery Island, as I recall from the tour and brochure, is an enormous deposit of rock salt. There are salt mines on the island, the oldest and deepest in the country; the salt is used in the production of Tabasco to seal the lids of the oak casks. One McIlhenny brother, the enterprising one (and I’m betting the firstborn), invented the hot sauce and planted the pepper fields and built the factory, and the other, dreamy, artistic, spiritual (I’m betting younger) brother designed and created the gardens, the paths, the Buddha shrine, and the bird-watching tower and sanctuary. Tabasco chiles are harvested when they turn a particular shade of red: when the workers are in doubt, there’s a red stick they use as a gauge, painted the proper shade, a literal baton rouge.
Just before it all closed for the night, we left Avery Island and drove to the nearby town of New Iberia, where Brendan lived for a couple of months in 2007. He was hired to shoot the behind-the-scenes footage, the “making of” In the Electric Mist. He lived with his father, who was the film’s producer, and the editors in a large, airy house on the Bayou Teche. After a driving tour of the town, we had a manifestly unspectacular dinner at a restaurant on the main drag. I took one look at my plate of steak, potatoes, and broccoli, and then I reached for the Tabasco and gave everything a red, savory, hot bath.
Cupboard Jambalaya
The other night, when I thought there was nothing in the house and it was time to rustle up some dinner, I found a package of Andouille and a package of boneless skinless chicken thighs in the freezer, unearthed some wild rice blend and a box of chopped tomatoes from the pantry, and discovered most of a box of chicken broth in the fridge, and then it was obvious what had to be done. (I’m not an enormous fan of shrimp in jamabalaya, so I didn’t care that I had nary a one.)
Saute a Cajun mirepoix in plenty of peanut or sunflower oil: chopped garlic, minced onion, celery, and Bell pepper. Add salt, cayenne, cumin, smoked paprika, a couple of bay leaves, black pepper, oregano, and thyme. Add a dash of Worcestershire sauce, a cup of chopped tomatoes, a cup of wild rice blend, and a package of Andouille sausage, chopped into half-discs. Stir until the rice is well-coated and it all starts to smell really good. Add 1 ½ or 2 (depending on the rice directions) cups of chicken broth and bring to a boil, then cover and lower to a simmer. Meanwhile, run 3 chicken thighs under the broiler in a broiling pan. Broil until just cooked and very tender, then turn and broil the other side. Cut up, reserving juices. Stir the chicken and its juices into the jambalaya. Taste and adjust seasonings. Cover and continue to cook. When the rice is perfectly done and has absorbed all the broth and chicken juices, serve heaping platefuls with a big bottle of Tabasco, and sprinkle it on every bite.
by Kate Christensen | Mar 2, 2012
When I was a kid, I felt as passionately about the food I hated as I did about the food I loved. My mother, who otherwise fed us stuff we liked or even adored, had the occasional sadistic spell during which she dished up the most disgusting things on the planet: smooth but granular chunks of fried calves’ liver that tasted the way cat poop smelled and had, I imagined, a similar texture; frozen okra that she boiled into sluglike tubes with creepily crunchy guts held together by strings of snot; Brussels sprouts both soft and coarse that tasted bitter and gaseous; and wretched heaps of foul, mealy, slimy Lima beans. I could tolerate broccoli and spinach, barely, in a stalwart mood, but otherwise, they made me gag. It was the 1970s, and meat was expensive, so my mother sometimes bought cheap steaks that came with pieces of gristle embedded in them; these likewise caused me to retch and want to spit them out.
These rare but intensely memorable awful meals were the occasion of much subversive drama amongst my sisters and me, silent antics, because we weren’t allowed to complain about our food. We were expected, like most kids, to eat it. So we mastered the near-universal childhood table arts of the wadded-up napkin containing half-chewed bites, the under-the-table palm-off to the cat, the pushing-food-around-the-plate maneuver into patterns that minimized volume. We also all developed our own, other means of avoiding hated food. Emily, the youngest, who unlike Susan and me was given to histrionics and wild displays of rebellion, could always plausibly throw a tantrum and be sent to sit on the hamper in the bathroom (her usual punishment), thus escaping the horrible item in question. Susan, the middle sister and the most sly and resourceful of the three of us, would excuse herself to go to the bathroom and sneak an entire napkinful of liver or okra with her and flush the whole thing away, never to darken her life again.
As the oldest, or, in other words, as the people-pleasing rule-follower, the obedient one, the mama’s girl, I found ways to actually, literally eat whatever food I couldn’t feed to the cat or hide in my napkin. I taught myself to simultaneously disarm my gag reflex and block my sense of smell by lifting my palate up into my adenoids, or something like that. Then I’d fork a gigantic piece of liver or okra or gristly steak into my mouth, barely chew it, keep it off my tongue’s surface taste buds as much as possible, and take three big swallows of milk. And so, while one sister got herself banished to the bathroom and the other one snuck there to throw her dinner into the toilet, I stayed behind and powered through the vile stuff under my own steam. And presto, voila, my plate was clean, and I could have dessert. Revulsion gave me a certain shivery almost-pleasure similar to that of the most terrifying ghost stories. I was proud of my ability to overcome and control it.
As an adult, I learned to love all the things I couldn’t eat as a kid, or at least like them. Because there is nothing I am forced to eat now, revulsion has become a state of mind rather than an actual sensory experience. It still packs a psychological punch, even though the most disgusting things in my present-day life are vicarious, and generally come from books or movies or an account of another culture’s consumption of things that my own does not consider remotely edible — cats, dogs, grubs, worms, insects, monkey brains, horsemeat; reading or hearing about or watching people eat these things can feel as viscerally terrible as those long-ago dinners of childhood disgust.
In the book “Alive,” the true story of a soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes and who then turned to cannibalism in order to survive, there is one particular scene so graphically disturbing, so complexly disgusting/fascinating, I find myself thinking about it still, years after I read the book. It’s as viscerally memorable a scene as any of M.F.K. Fisher’s best food writing, but, in order not to be like the mother who forces her children to eat fried liver, I will refrain from inflicting a description of it on the unsuspecting reader. I imagine that anyone who has read the book might instantly know what it is (hint: it has to do with lungs).
Thinking about this scene, I have to lift my mental palate into my mental adenoids and keep the imagined taste as far from my mind’s taste buds as I can. But in a weird, perverse way, I also find it as interesting as any mouth-watering description of a feast. The things I consider delicious and the things that revolt me are still equally powerful. The shivery pleasure of eating something that could be disgusting but isn’t – like caviar, raw oysters, or sea-urchin sushi – is equal to the horror I feel when I think of something truly disgusting that others might consider edible, or even a delicacy. Apparently, nothing has changed since I was a kid.
Steak tartare
This dish of chopped raw meat and a raw egg is my favorite thing to order in a restaurant; whenever it’s on a menu, I ask for it. I’ve eaten it in various places in Paris, Rome, New York, Seattle, Montreal, and Portland, Maine. It varies in texture and quality as much as any dish. In Paris, I always get a professional, superior concoction. The Italian version is a fat disc of raw hamburger mixed with parsley and capers. In Seattle, the ground meat, egg, and condiments arrived separately in little dishes on a large plate, and I got to mix it all together myself. In Portland, it was very simple and coarse and almost tasteless. In New York, at Balthazar, it is always luscious and sublime, as good as it gets: an alchemy of tender, fine, very fresh, savory beef, a sweet raw quail egg, and just the right additions and flavorings.
I have never made it at home, but if I did, I would buy a pound of the freshest available beef tenderloin and grind it myself, fairly fine, and mix it with a rubber spatula quickly and lightly in a very clean glass bowl with just the right (small) amounts of minced anchovy filets, minced red onion, capers, minced parsley, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, mustard, olive oil, and hot pepper flakes. I would divide this mixture onto 4 plates, mold each with the spatula into a disc, press the back of a spoon into the top to make a depression, and crack a very fresh quail egg onto each.
