Let us go one step further in this consideration of a child's desired end as a self-sufficient human being: If, for instance, he has been exposed, in relaxed pleasant company, to the somewhat brutal fact that not all children his age find breakfast cereal essential to their becoming football heroes or even bullfighters, he may astonish his mentors by facing without a whimper some slices of good fresh bread, a pat of sweet butter, and a jar of honey. A jug of milk is good with that.
Once two little American boys came to stay with my girls and me on a remote farm in southern France. There was no milk worth pouring, and we got butter only once a week, and there was no refrigerator within ten miles. Bread came twice a week, so the butter turned rancid unless we ate it the same day it came, and the bread got harder and crustier; the little boys were not yet old enough to substitute too much of the local vin rosé for milk. But cheese was always there, and always good, smuggled or carted from the Savoy mountains.
After a week of affronted misery without their packaged morning comfort, the boys began to get up when the sun rose, break off a rough piece of the drying bread and cut themselves a good slab of the cheese, and walk past the well for a beaker of sweet cool water. They would sit peaceably for an hour or so with their backs against the cypress trees, with the sound of the sheep bells in their ears, and munch and store their various nourishments. I think that at first they felt like refugees, for the first time in their lives, poor thinning victims of a strange lapse in The Right Way. Then they began to realize that bread and cheese and pure water are fine, for breakfast or any time. They became tolerant, receptive, gastronomically at ease—and before much longer they were accepting without a blink or a shudder some flavors and aspects of restaurant eating, when we got into Aix-en-Provence or Marseilles, that would have sent them from the table a few weeks before.
They discovered that wrinkled olives taste better than the firm swollen ones canned at home and, even more important, that a handful of them with a piece of bread is food, not a garnish to be pushed aside—and that anchovies and garlic and minnows and sea urchins are fun to eat. Most important of all, I believe, is that they found that it is not essential to go from California to France or even Istanbul to find such pleasure.
There is always reward in travel: I aim to assault my own clan with as much of it as possible, to keep them malleable to the world's tempers. But a little child can fly from here to Djakarta and then on to Lisbon and not stir one pace from his path of hamburgers-and-Coke, if his parents do not care enough to push him off it. He can live and die.
If a child has grown up to know what honest food is made of, and how it can reassure people and soothe them in a noisy world, he will possess one strong weapon against adversity. Couscous in a cushioned restaurant in Casablanca; hot plum tan in London after a cut-off-the-joint; cracked crab and a sip or two of gray Riesling at the Wharf in San Francisco while the fishing boots wheel in from sea. All these things can add to a child's perception of what he can suck from life. Couscous, plum tart, fresh fish, and always a sip of the wine at home: They are as important …
But the main thing is to be with people who know it too.
This new little citizen must be able to look about him and see that other older ones can sit up straight, keep their elbows off the table and not dribble, and, above all, have a lot of fun eating everything from Great-Gram's recipe for hush puppies to poulet à la mode de Beaune. Then he, and she, will learn to laugh and eat at the same time. The battle will be won.
Pinterest
