He had not pretended with me or tried to impress me. He knew I liked to eat, so he had cooked for me what he himself enjoyed the most. He remembered hearing somewhere that I liked wine with my meals, so he had bought “the mixings,” as he knew them, because he wanted me to feel gay and relaxed and well thought of, there in his dear woman’s chair, with her radio Still blasting and her stove still hot. I felt truly grateful, and I, too, felt innocent.
J is for juvenile dining…
…and the mistakenness of adults who think that the pappy pabulum stuffed down their children’s gullets is swallowed, when and if it is swallowed, with anything more than weak helplessness and a bitter, if still subconscious, acceptance of the hard fact that they muse eat to survive.
I myself was fascinated witness to the first bite of so-called solid food my elder daughter took.
Quite aside from my innate conviction that she is unusually subtle and sensitive, I considered her at that moment undeniably normal and felt that I was watching a kind of cosmic initiation to what, if I had anything to say about it, would be a lifetime of enjoyment of the pleasures of the table. I was depressed, then, to see such a thorough, bone-shaking, flesh-creeping shudder flash through her wee frame as the spoonful of puréed green beans touched her tongue, as I had known before only in the tragicomic picture of a hungover bindle stiff downing his morning shot of redeye. She shook from top to toe, in a real throe of revulsion. Then she looked at me, and speculation grew in her wide gaze.
I wondered in a kind of panic if gastronomy could be worth the palates it thrived on, and if, perhaps, true papillary bliss lay in a lifetime of bottle-feeding. While the child scared at me, I ate a spoonful of her stuff, not to goad her into taking more of it, but to see if I, too, would shudder. I did; it had a foully metallic taste, even to me whose tongue is perforce much duller than her innocent, uncalloused one.
But she must eat puréed green beans, I thought, if I wanted her to flourish and go on to better things. So I took what was left in her silver porringer and put it in a porcelain bowl, feeling somewhat helplessly that thus I might curb the taste of metal in the beans.
Perhaps I did; I am not sure. I know that when I brought the dish back to my babe she opened her mouth, poker-faced, and ate everything with only a faint sigh to show her resignation.
Since then, over some five years, she has progressed with a mixture of common sense and emotion through several stages of appreciation. She likes things with salt on them, feeling instinctively the Stimulus of that abused flavoring (which I seldom allow her), and this morning when I asked her with clinical interest what she most loved to eat, she told me without hesitation that it was potato chips. Now as far as I know, she has never eaten one in her life. Bur she heard me say how salty they are…and that, combined with the fact that she has also heard me say that I adore them (but don’t eat them because they are hellishly fattening), made her answer like a flash that she adored them too.
She does not want fat things: men much sweet butter on her bread and such. She hates, with a real intensity, pepper; and I suppose she would react in the same clear-cut way to other hot seasonings, like curry.
She does not like whisky or brand for the same instinctively protective reasons, but enjoys an occasional apertif of Dubonnet or white wine with soda water (proportions about one to fifty, I would say), which she clicks against my glass with the proper Salud or Santé or Na Zdarovia.
She has the waistline of an especially slim bee and eats about six minuscule meals a day, for lack of space, I suppose…and almost every day I give her one taste of something from the grownup board, to prepare her, roughen, her, indoctrinate her.
One time it is a nibble of Wisconsin Cheddar as big as a pinhead. She likes it. Another time it is a microscopic smear of Camembert or Liederkranz. She pulls away, shocked by its fine odor of putrescence, too decadent for her simplicity. I let her taste a Coke, knowing fatalistically that she must inevitably absorb them for social reasons. And it is the same with candy bars and grocerystore cakes and all that: I feel that I must harden her to their packaged onslaught rather than shield her from it, since she is to be a good, well-balanced American citizen.
So far, the only thing in this category of preventive nutrition that she yearns is a frozen lollipop, which she was given by a well-meaning ranch hand and which, in retrospect, has acquired all the nostalgic beauty that I “myself remember about a truffled pâté I ate too many years ago during the Foire Gastronomique in Dijon.
As for the Cokes and cookies I use experimentally on her, to get her used to them, she is polite but largely uninterested; she will eat them, but hohum is the word. It is a different thing with “bought” bread. Most of the stuff that comes already sliced and in wax paper she picks up, occasionally smells, and then puts quietly down again, no matter what strength of hunger gnaws at her.
Fortunately I can buy, more often than not, a brand of bread that is not only edible but good. It is brown as the ripe earth, nutty, moist, and inescapably honest. My daughter feels this honesty as she would feel terror at a madman’s leer, with an intuitive knowledge. When she has not known I was watching. I have seen her sniff a crust of this good stuff and smile, unthinking as a puppy but right about it.
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