The Squeamish American, by Tom Perrotta
We all know one of those extreme eaters, the friend who travels to exotic
places and performs the gastronomic equivalent of running with the bulls.
These people live for the goat's eye, the snake's heart, the putrefying
cheese. I'd like to be one of them, but it's not gonna happen.
I am, I'm sorry to say, a very timid eater. These days I'm resigned to my
limitations. When I was in college, though, I really did try to do better.
This project came to a head one summer when I travelled to Europe for the
first time.
I arrived in Paris wide-eyed and full of optimism. I had arranged to spend
that first night with my friend Greg, who informed me that he'd spent his
last franc on some eggs so that he could whip up a big omelette for our
dinner.
Did I mention that eggs are a problem for me? I object to them so strenuously
that I don't eat eggplant simply because it contains the word “egg” in its
name. My first night in Paris, and I spent it with half an omelette in my
pocket.
It was a serious setback, and it established the tone for the rest of my trip.
I went to the famous museums and walked down the legendary streets, but I
remained stubbornly untransformed.
Hoping to shake things up, I went to East Berlin. I decided to stop for a beer
and was escorted to a table occupied by two uniformed East German soldiers
and a civilian. I asked them if there was anything on the menu they might
recommend, something local and authentic. All three immediately agreed - I
should try the Hackepeter, a dish made of raw beef and chopped onions.
The waiter brought my meal, and I stared down at it in dismay - there was the
meat, there was the chopped onion, and there, floating on top, was a raw
egg. I poked my fork into the sloppy mixture and took a tentative bite.
My new friends toasted my courage, and we proceeded to get quite drunk. When
the soldiers left, the civilian, Klaus, grew sombre and confessed to me that
he was a dissident who'd been jailed several times for his political views.
He took me to the wall and instructed me to take some pictures from the
Western side that he could use to plan his escape.
A few days later, over a meal of hamburgers and hot dogs with an American army
officer, I described my troubling adventure with Klaus. He listened with
increasing alarm and then told me I needed to go to the United States
consulate. At the consulate, I was informed that I might be vulnerable to
arrest by the East German authorities. It was strongly recommended that I
leave the country in a sealed military train. I slipped out like a spook,
missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the amenities of
the East German penal system.
It was all because of the Hackepeter, and believe me, I learned my lesson. I
don't eat raw meat any more, nor do I ask the locals what they'd recommend.
The rest of you can dine as adventurously as you like. I'm going to stay
home and open this can of soup.
Tom Perrotta is the author of Little Children and Election.
His most recent novel is The Abstinence Teacher
Expatriate Games, by John Burnham Schwartz
When I moved to Paris in 1989, I hadn't seen Alex in 20 years. He had thick,
ink-black, curly hair, and he wore a hat, a cool, slightly insouciant number
that went nicely with his patterned waistcoats and the long key chain that
looped out of his pants pocket.
He had come to Paris to study at the Ritz cooking school, then landed an
apprenticeship at Taillevent, one of the world's most celebrated
restaurants. Yet in no time, fed up with chopping onions ten hours a day, he
quit Taillevent. Quit Taillevent! But that was to be expected. It was the
feeding of friends he believed in.
I introduced him to my circle of twentysomething American friends. No one in
my gang had ever met anyone quite like Alex. He said that he cooked, but we
didn't know what that meant until the night he invited all of us for dinner.
He was renting a draughty artist's studio. The kitchen was primitive. None of
the dining chairs matched. The silverware had been stolen from cafés, and
the glasses were shirt-cleaned.
That night Alex cracked open fat cloves of garlic and rubbed them, with the
best virgin olive oil, over thick slices of peasant bread. Next he served us
a slow-cooked Bolognese sauce of such earthy sweetness and meaty depth that
it seemed at once ancient and new.
From that night onward, Sunday dinner at Alex's became our weekly ritual.
Sunday morning would roll around, and each of us would receive a mumbled
phone call from a very hungover Alex: You, bring bread! You, haricots verts!
You, fresh sage!
The meal's centrepiece - the lamb shoulder, the Cornish hens, the poulet de
Bresse - our chef would trust to no one but himself. That evening we would
arrive on his doorstep with our packages. An apron, folded in half and tied
at his waist, a dish towel draped over his left shoulder: the calm before
the storm.
He was one of those insane people, a renegade magician, insufferable to live
with but impossible to look away from, who could spin culinary gold out of
the dross of a few dried herbs and a handful of grain. He finished Cornish
game hens in the toaster oven, using a sable-hair paintbrush to glaze them.
On Thanksgiving, he peeled back the skin of a turkey, stuffed it with
truffles, then sewed it back together again. He sautéed Brussels sprouts
with cubes of pancetta and stood poached pears upright in a frangipane tart
dusted with crushed almonds.
Sixteen years later, our old Paris group remains in close touch. Everyone
except Alex, that is. We talk about him the way you talk about a bungee jump
once made from a very high, very beautiful cliff: How vivid the colours
were! How alive we felt! How pathetically safe not to have him now in our
mature, ordered lives!
Yet one day without warning - I simply feel it - he will come back to us, his
knives sharp as ever, his pots and pans filled with music.
John Burnham Schwartz is the author of four novels, including The
Commoner and Reservation Road, which was made into a feature film
Eau God, by Henry Alford
I once cooked away a bad memory. I'd just been through a difficult break-up
with my boyfriend. During our ten years together, he'd given me the gift of
travel and now, to show my fiery, postdivorce mettle, I'd decided to take
myself some place he'd never been. Morocco.
My guidebook said that, when sightseeing in Morocco, never hire an unofficial
guide. But the first thing I did was to hire an unofficial guide, Mohammed.
We walked to the spice market, a labyrinthine jumble of open-air stalls and
dark corners. I bought Cellophane sleeves of turmeric and cumin, thinking of
the fabulous tagines I would make when I got home. When a grim-looking
vendor had me smell a tiny vial of orange blossom oil, or neroli, I had a
spasm of near-synesthesia - I could almost see orange blossoms. Not knowing
what the oil was used for, I bought the vial for about $12.
Mohammed next took me to the Majorelle Gardens. He said that I should go in
and he'd meet me at the entrance at 12.30. But at 12.30 there was no sign of
Mohammed. I grew uneasy. Then I looked at the spices and the oil. Suddenly
my unease metastasized into panic. Oh, my God, I thought, the spices are
drugs! Maybe it's Mohammed's M.O. to plant drugs on tourists and then extort
money from them! The chain of illogic and anxiety kept ramping up,
threatening to burst from my head like the elevator in Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory.
I grabbed the spices and the oil, and walked to a canister-style ashtray.
Biting the packets to open them, I dumped their contents into the ashy sand.
When I opened the vial of orange blossom oil, though, I smelt it again and
thought, No, I cannot throw this away. It smelt like the gift soap in
heaven. I put it back in my pocket.
I did run into, and pay, Mohammed the next morning - it turned out that he'd
been arrested outside the gardens for unofficial guiding.
Ten days after the Spice Incident, having sniffed the oil with a frequency
bordering on the abject, I spirited it into my luggage for my flight home.
The most redolent thing I'd ever smelled in my life was now synaptically
connected to one of the more embarrassing moments in my life.
Back home, I made a lot of madeleines using The Joy of Cooking's recipe and
adding ten drops of the oil. I have gradually realised that there is
consolation to be found in any baked good that call for more than one stick
of butter. Indeed, the more madeleines I made, the more I associated the
fragrant oil with crispy, shell-shaped deliciousness instead of the Spice
Incident. In Remembrance of Things Past, madeleines are celebrated for their
ability to induce memory, but I have used them to erase memory; I am the
anti-Proust, and my fountain pen flows with butter.
Henry Alford's book about the wisdom of old people, How to Live, is
out now.
Copyright The New York Times. Extracts taken from Eat,
Memory: Great Writers at the Table, a Collection of Essays from The New York
Times (WW Norton, £18.99). Available from Times BooksFirst for £17.09
with free p&p (0870 1608080; www.
timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst)
