mags

I also had interesting food experiences in college, with the person I refer to as My Swedish Roomate. One day, Micke and I went to the market, and bought several pounds of fresh mussels. Coming home, I found a phone message telling me I had to leave for New York immediately. "What should I do with the mussels?" Micke asked. "Uhhhh......cook chopped-up garlic in some oil, throw in the mussels and a little wine, cover the pot, they're done when they open, eat'em up yum yum," I tossed over my shoulder, packing frantically. Came back three days later. "How were the mussels?" "They tasted funny." "Hmmm," I said. "That's too bad. Maybe they had gone off." Later that night, as I was cleaning the kitchen, I opened the cabinet where we kept oil. I saw olive oil, corn oil, sesame oil.....lemon oil furniture polish. "Micke," I called out. "What's this doing here? Why isn't it under the sink with the rest of the.........oh my god. You didn't." But of course, he had. Then there was the chicken. I had bought a chicken, cooked it into soup, turned bits of the meat into chicken salad, and thrown the bones into the garbage, where they soon got covered with coffee grounds (actually, Micke tended to re-use them; he called this "Cambodian Coffee"), eggshells, and other delectibles. Went to class and rehearsal, came back late, and sniffed the air. "Oooooh, somebody's made DINNER!" I said happily -- and with some surprise, since I tended to be the roomate what cooked. "Yes," Micke said proudly. "I made chicken stew." Fab. We sat down, and he ladled out portions of very thick red stuff with lumps in it. I poked my fork into a likely-looking lump, assuming it was a piece of chicken. But no. It was a piece of, yes, banana. Apparently, Micke had grown up in a part of Sweden where bananas cost about eight jillion dollars a pound. Entranced by cheap bananas at the local market in Boston, he had bought a bunch and brought them home. But what to do, what to do? Inspiration had struck! He fished the chicken bones out of the garbage, carefully washed them off (in retrospect, I am very grateful for that touch), put them in a pot with cut-up bananas, covered everything several cups of ketuchup, and let the whole mess simmer for, jeez, quite a while. Yet another bonanza for Three Aces Pizza We Deliver Till Two.

I agree. I love food: I love cooking it, I love eating it, I love shopping for it, I love reading recipes. But I'm also interested in food from a ...I guess an analytical, or sociological perspective. I'm interested in food in itself, and also in how it relates to other stuff. And I don't think that one approach is somehow more or less legitimate than another.

One of my favorite kids' books -- now, sadly OOP, I'm betting -- is called "The Search for Delicious," in which the king has sent all his knights and ministers far and wide in a quest for the most delicious thing in the entire world. They bring back all kinds exotica, but when drought strikes the kingdom, a Wise Old Woman points out that, in fact, "delicious is water."

I wonder if people's private appetites tend generally to be down-market. The Colwin example I quoted certainly is; you just know that the grape jelly getting dolloped over the fried spaghetti is Smucker's or the supermarket house brand -- nobody is using imported Swiss jam for this kind of thing. And a few months ago, when I surveyed some colleagues on their guilty pleasures -- the stuff they secretly craved but generally avoided eating -- the No. 1 response was Kraft Mac 'n Cheese. Original recipe, please. Mine was Captain Crunch, and my wildly status-concious, rigidly vegetarian boss confessed to a secret longing for Spam. The 20-year-old kid in the art department -- the one with the metabolism of a hummingbird -- didn't understand the question, so we all banded together and shot him.

Laurie Colwin wrote a wonderful essay about private appetites. She said that when you ask people what they eat when they're alone, they always say "Oh, just a salad," but then you find out that they secretly eat stuff like fried spaghetti with hot sauce and grape jelly or sliced white bread dipped in mayo and pudding mix. (Ok, I made the second one up, but the recipe Colwin included was a spectacularly repulsive-sounding mix of eggplant with soy sauce and yogurt.) I think one of the differences between the stuff Colwin was writing about and the midnight snacks you write about so beautifully is that her "secret appetites" seem mostly to be gratified by whatever can be dug out of the back of the fridge; I don't think anyone goes out and shops for the jelly and the hot sauce in anticipation of dinner. Your private meals, by contrast, seem to be very deliberate. What a pleasure it is to see you here. I was given a copy of the original edition of "Simple Cooking" about.....gee, 15 years ago? I took it with me on a project that turned out to be a misery and a half, and the only thing that kept me sane was curling up in my horrid hotel-room chair in the evening and reading your essays.

Actually, my former fiance, who's something of a maven on the subject of Native American tribes, tells me that "buffalo you can eat with a spoon" was regarded as an enormous delicacy by at least one of the plains tribes. Members of the tribe would kill a buffalo and leave the body on a frozen river. Over the next few months, the tribe would move downstream, and the spring thaw would eventually liberate the (now thoroughly rotted) buffalo from the ice, and carry it down to the tribe's dinner plates. I probably have quite a lot of these details wrong, but I am sure of the apparent allure of the rotten buffalo. And isn't pheasant traditionally considered unfit to eat until it has been so thoroughly "hung" (read: rotted) that its tailfeathers fall off? On the disgusting/delicious point -- which I think is a really good one -- I think Calvin Trillin and either John Thorne or M.F.K. Fisher have written about the heady, intoxicating appeal of straddling that line.

And, for the love of gawd, don't slice habaneros, then go to the bathroom! Just one word: Tampon. I sat in a dishpan full of yogurt for an hour. And I apologize for what is clearly Too Much Info.

One thing that occurs to me is that some disgust-reactions are rooted in class: designating entire categories of food as "disgusting" and therefore inedible is a way of reaffirming the fact that one has the luxury of choice. Interestingly, I think this equation has been turned on its head over the past 30 years or so -- at least in this country -- such that it has become a mark of status to accept a broad array of foods as edible. The middle class congratulates itself on chowing down on sushi and chilies and stir-fried sea slugs as a way of differentiating itself from the Big Mac-gobbling folks lower down on the scale. I also think it's interesting that one of the things the middle class (again, I'm talking U.S. only) has embraced is the whole panoply of what used to be regarded as "poverty foods" -- everything from whole-meal bread to oxtail stew, all the stuff that our ancestors worked so hard to avoid having to feed their families. And I wonder how this appropriation of poverty food ties in to the discussion -- elsewhere on these boards -- about the "decadence" of the $50 hamburger at db moderne. It seems to me that Bouloud's appropriation of poverty food, and the designation of entire categories of stuff as fit only for the poor, and therefore inedible....are two sides of the same coin.

Do they have to be mutually exclusive? I own a bookstore, and a huge percentage of our sales are "hand sells," meaning books the customers buy on our recommendation. As an owner, I always want to boost sales. But at the same time, I got into the book business because I love turning people on to books I think they'll like. I only recommend books that I genuinely believe will appeal to my customers' tastes, but this is far from pure altruism on my part; our customers come back precisely because we make good recommendations. So in the long run, I'm motivated by both money and the desire to improve my customers' experience. I don't know that it's any different in restaurants.

I think it's an issue of symbolic weight. The concept of "burger" carries a lot of it in this country. A "burger" is kind of the epitome of Honest Grub; an icon of working-class integrity. Larding it with frou-frou stuff like truffles and foie gras -- those instant icons of upper-class excess -- is sort of like Marie Anoinette playing peasant or Marla Trump swanning around in $600 custom-ripped jeans. It's a case of the frivolous upper class appropriating a symbol of the working-class Average Joe. And many thanks to you and Steve for helping me navigate the system