(And I have thought sadly how far we have come from our forefathers in Latvia or Sicily or Cornwall who once so honored bread that if they dropped a piece of it upon the floor, they begged its pardon…In our country now it is in a sorry, wax-bound servitude, so weak that it must be reinforced with chemicals in order even to be so named, so tricked-out that a hungry dog or cat will not eat the puffy stuff, unless he is actually starving…)
My child likes a kind of pattern to her meals: I put raisins in rows on a slice of buttered toast, instead of willy-nilly, or rounds of banana in an X or an A over the top of her applesauce. A is for Anne, and X is, but naturally, for X-citing! Now and then, pure gastronomical fillip, there is a taint dash of cinnamon, a couch of nutmeg….
In five years she has been sick only one time, in the good old English sense of the word, and that was psychosomatic rather than digestive, when a brush fire threatened.
She seems to have a constant and lively speculation about taste, a truly “curious nose,” which reassures me when I remember her first instinctive shudder, and which keeps me watching, trying, casting, and always using my wits to avoid havoc. I want her to have a keen palate, investigatory but never tyrannical. I want her to be able to eat at least one taste of anything in the world, from Beluga caviar or porcupine grilled with locusts.
I want her to shun such gluttonous excesses as those of two small boys we know who wait with an unhealthy intensity for the aftermath of their parents cocktail parties and then drain every glass and strip the messed hors d’oeuvre trays of every crumb of shriveled anchovy and withered olive.
I want her, on the other hand, to avoid such affected, back-to-the-earth gourmandism as is betrayed by earnest addicts who make a fetish of trivia.
I am doing all I can to turn Anne into a sentient, intelligent, voluptuously restrained gastronomer, with a clear recognition of the odds of modern “improvements”: pasteurization, dehydration, et al; with firm resolves never to make her eat anything, from oatmeal gruel to escargots à la mode de Bourgogne, and never to hurry her; and with a constant excitement and a growing conviction that I am giving her something more precious than Great-Aunt Jennie’s topaz parure….
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