An artist friend once gave me a book called “Thermal Delight in Architecture” which argues that architects should allow different parts of a building to have slightly different temperatures because people love to feel the air change on their skin. It was a new idea to me, but once I’d read the book, I found myself noticing the pleasure of walking from a cool, dark space to a warm, bright one. Just like that, I’d found a new source of enjoyment, free for just paying attention.
I thought of that book the other day when my wife the wine dork was getting excited about some article she’d found in the Journal of Wine Research. (I am not making this up.) “Check this out—some scientist in Canada has developed a formal vocabulary and protocol to quantify the texture of white wines. He’s got definitions for all kinds of terms—‘mouthwater’ ‘talc,’ and ‘emory.’ And the title is great: ‘The white wine mouthfeel wheel.’ Hey, what are you grinning about?”
I was thinking that, when we talk about the pleasures of food, we talk about flavor, and sometimes aroma, and once in a while about how beautiful a dish looks, but almost never about how it feels in our fingers and in our mouth. And yet texture is a great delight.
Okay, really, I was thinking about a sandwich. When I moved to Washington, D.C. years ago the only person I knew was my childhood friend, Julia, and I’d go over and hang out with her and her husband and baby daughter once a week or so and eat dinner. Julia is sort of slapdash in the kitchen but she makes brilliant food, including something I’ve always thought of as The Perfect Fried Fish Sandwich. Rinse a few leaves of the freshest, crispest romaine you can find. Make a spicy mayonnaise. Grill or toast thick slices of crusty bread. Then dredge a fillet of some neutral fish—farmed tilapia is about right—in flour and salt and pepper, then eggs, then breadcrumbs, and fry it hard, so the outside is crunchy but the inside is still flaky. Quick, smear the mayo on the grilled bread, then make a sandwich with the fried fish and lettuce. Now bite down. The bread goes crunch; the lettuce goes crunch, too, but it’s a wet, sweet crunch; then the outside of the fish goes crunch before it melts into warm, soft flakes that mix with the tingling-hot mayonnaise. “It’s got good flavor, Bobby P.,” Julia would say, “but it’s really all about the mouthfeel.”
Julia’s a high-flying policy honcho these days, but she still remembers that sandwich. The funny thing is that we remember it differently. I could swear we used to mix “wasabi” powder and Hellman’s. Not so, according to Julia. “It was plain mayo on the toast. The key ingredient was that canned Thai green curry paste. I sautéed the fish with some of that and squeezed in some lime juice at the end. We did use romaine but also occasionally quick-cooked scallions, cut on the bias, green and white parts, not too soft.” I have a vivid memory of a different sandwich, but mine must be the result of some imperceptible culinary drift. Julia’s version sounds good—it might be time to make it again.
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