I is for innocence …
… and its strangely rewarding chaos, gastronomically.
There is a great difference in my mind between innocence, in this gourmand interpretation, and ignorance. The one presupposes the other, and yet a truly innocent cook or host is never guilty of the great sin of pretension, while many an ignorant one errs hideously in this direction.
Almost any man who is potentially capable of thus cheating with his guests is equally incapable of telling the truth to himself and will sneak a quick look into a primer of wine names, for instance, and then pretend that he knew all along to serve red-wine-with-red-meat, or some such truism. His lie betrays his basic insecurity.
An innocent, on the other hand, will not bother to pretend any knowledge at all. He will, with a child’s bland happiness, do the most god-awful things with his meals and manage by some alchemy of warmth and understanding to make any honest gourmet pleased and easy at his table.
The best example of this that I can think of happened to me a few months ago.
I know a large, greedy, and basically unthinking man who spent all the middle years of his life working hard in a small town and eating in waffle shops and now and then gorging himself at friends’ houses on Christmas Day. Quite late he married a large, greedy, and unthinking woman who introduced him to the dubious joys of whatever she heard about on the radio: Miracle Sponge Delight, Aunt Mabel’s Whipped Cheese Surprise, and all the homogenized, pasteurized, vitalized, dehydratized products which were intrinsic to the preparation of the Delights and the Surprises. My friend was happy.
He worked hard in the shop, and his wife worked hard at the stove, her sinkside portable going full blast, of course, so as not to miss a single culinary hint, and then each night they wedged themselves into their breakfast-bar-dinette and ate and ate and ate. They always meant to take up Canfield…but somehow they felt too sleepy. About a year ago he brought home a little set of dominoes, thinking it would be fun to shove the pieces around in a couple of games of Fives before she cleared the table. But she looked deeply at him, gave a great belch, and was dead.
He was desperately lonely. We all thought he would go back to living in the rooming house near the shop, or take up straight rye whisky, or at least start raising tropical fish.
Instead he stayed home more and more, sitting across from the inadequate little chromiumed chair his wife had died in, eating an almost ceaseless meal. He cooked it himself, very carefully. He listened without pause to her radio, which had, almost literally, not been turned off since her death. He wrote down every cooking tip he heard and “enclosed twenty-five cents in stamps” for countless packages of Whipperoo, Jellebino, and Vita-glugg. He wore her tentike aprons as he bent over the stove and the sink and the solitary table, and friends told me never, never, never to let him invite me to a meal.
But I liked him. And one day when I met him in the Pep Brothers’ Shopping Basket, where occasionally I fought back my claustrophobia-among-the-cans long enough to buy the best frozen fruit in town, he asked me so nicely and straightly to come to supper with him that I said I’d love to. He lumbered off, a look of happy purpose wiping the misery from his big face, like sunlight breaking through smog. I felt a shudder of self-protective worry, which shamed me.
The night came, and I did something I very seldom do when I am to be guest: I drank a sturdy shot of dry vermouth and gin, which I figured from long experience would give me an appetite immune to almost any gastronomical shocks. I was agreeably mellow and uncaring by the time I sat down in the chair across from my great, bewildered friend and heard him subside with a fat man’s alarming puff! into his own seat.
I noticed that he was larger than ever. You like your own cooking, I told him to tease him. He said gravely to me that gastronomy had saved his life and reason, and before I could recover from the shock of such fancy words on his strictly one- to two-syllable tongue, he had jumped up lightly, as only a fat man can, and started opening oven doors and suchlike.
We had a tinned “fruit cup,” predominantly gooseberries and obviously a sop to current health hints on JWRB. Once having disposed of this bit of medical huggermuggery, we surged on happily through one of the ghastliest meals Fever ate in my life. On second thought, I can safely say the ghastliest. There is no point in describing it, and, to tell the truth, a merciful mist has blurred its high points. There was too much spice where there should be none;
There was sogginess where crispness was all-important; there be an artificially whipped and heavily sweetened canned-milk dessert where nothing at all was wanted.
And all through the dinner, in the small, hot, crowded room, we drank lukewarm muscatel, a fortified dessert wine sold locally in gallon jugs, mixed in cheese-spread glasses with equal parts of a popular bottled lemon soda. It is incredible, thank God, but it happened.
I am glad it did. I know now what I may only have surmised theoretically before: There is indeed a gastronomic innocence, more admirable and more enviable than any cunning cognizance of menus and vintages and kitchen subtleties. My gross friend, untroubled by any affectations of knowledge, served forth to me a meal that I was proud to be a part of. If I felt myself at times a kind of sacrificial lamb, stretched on the altar of devotion, I was glad to be that lamb, for never was any goddess in the temple poured nectar with more innocent and trusting enjoyment than was my hideous glass filled with a mixture of citric acid, carbon dioxide, and pure vinous hell. I looked into the little gray, deep eyes of my friend and drank deep and felt the better for it.
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.
(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….