Epice

Eating a cheese sandwich at eleven o'clock at night at the kitchen table of the man I'm now married to. It was our first date, and we were both so busy falling in love with one another that we couldn't break off the magic long enough to decide where to go for dinner. Finally it came down to what was in the kitchen, which was Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese and Pepperidge Farm dinner rolls. With carrot and celery sticks on the side. They were what put me over the edge--at that moment I felt there was no more tender, clever, enchantingly romantic thing in the world a man could do than make me carrot sticks. (As I said, I was falling in love.)

I remember that piece, and I remember sitting down to read it in hope that it would reveal to me how to conquer my parsley problem. It did not. I did not. I have eaten raw parsley at a conservative guess a thousand times in my lifetime, and it still tastes godawful to me. Alas.

I've eaten out by myself all over the place, high end and low, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and almost never have I felt that I was treated less pleasantly as a single diner than I would have been had I been in the company of others. Paris stands out, though, as the most welcoming city, I imagine because there's no perceived onus at all to dining solo. If anything, I seemed to get better taken care of when I was alone there. But even in England, where I was sometimes ushered to out-of-the-way tables, I generally felt it was out of solicitousness for my assumed discomfort at being alone. When I asked for a different table, front and center, I was always instantly and smilingly seated there.

I'll tell you my reason. There is exactly one thing I hate, and it's parsley. I have no problem with it in cooked foods--in fact I grow it and use it--or even uncooked in an Italian salsa verde, where the flavor is actually transformed, not just muted, by the process of turning the leaves into a paste in the presence of garlic and anchovies and so forth. But put parsley in a salad, or sprinkle it over new potatoes, or anything like that, and I can't stand it. Oh, I can get whatever it's in/on down without nausea, but it's ruined for me. Even I think this is odd. I can understand disliking the strong flavors of many of the foods I love--olives, anchovies, rosemary, liver, kidneys--but to most palates parsley is not a strong flavor. In fact, most people must experience it as practically neutral, since they strew it over pretty much anything. But to me the flavor is powerful, intrusive, and as unpleasant as hell. Would you want to go through life hating something as common as parsley? And aside from the impracticality of that, I think of being a picky eater as childish, which I don't want to believe myself to be. And so for years and years and years I've been trying to acquire a taste for raw parsley. I did it with cilantro, which I started out loathing. But parsley has defied all my efforts to come to terms with it. I'll never give up trying. I just can't believe that I can't do it, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

I was drinking a cup of Turkish coffee at the end of lunch in a long-departed restaurant on Third Ave. in NYC when I realized that there was something in my mouth that wasn't coffee. I spit it out. It was a dead roach. I screamed. The very alarmed-looking waiter came rushing over to find out what was wrong. When I showed him, he looked relieved, and explained to me that it was really hard for them to notice when the roaches had got into the ground coffee, since the coffee and the roaches were pretty much the same color. It was the relieved look on his face--"Oh, thank goodness it's just another one of those pesky coffee roaches!"--that made me call the Board of Health as soon as I got back to my office. The restaurant was shut down for multiple sanitary violations a couple of days later. Leaving aside that a roach in my mouth is non-negotiably NOT ALL RIGHT, the presence of one generally means the presence of a whole lotta others.

Grape Koolaid powder and cinnamon, approximately equal quantities, mixed to a paste with water and eaten out of a glass eyewash cup from the bathroom medicine cabinet. Only once.

Except for oversalting--which renders food totally, irredeemably, permanently inedible. I like salt. I just don't like to have my lips instantly shriveled by what passes between them.

Hmmmmm.....I didn't grow up with this one, but a friend taught me to always make a wish on the point of a pie, which should be your first bite, before you cut and eat it.