"food memory" news and stories

My friend Cindy is one of those great cooks, who is able to eat something in a restaurant and then figure out how to recreate it at home in such a way that it is always better and more perfect than the restaurant could have imagined. A couple of years ago, she invited me over to dinner and made up a batch of fish tacos, inspired by ones she had eaten at El Vez, a local high-end Mexican restaurant. We sat in her overgrown backyard, assembling taco after delicious taco from the platters of fish, toppings and sauce that she had constructed. We ate far past the point of satiation, as it just tasted so good.

Well, that's what the image you see above makes me think of, that night, sitting in a backyard, enjoying some perfect food and a good friend. The dish and pic is by Average Betty and there's not only a blog post with recipe, there's also a video that goes along with it (have you watched Average Betty before? She's fun).

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Yesterday, in my post about the Walnut Sauce recipe from 1978, I briefly mentioned one of the best meals I ever had. A few of you were tantalized by that hint and asked to hear the full story. Well, ask and ye shall receive.

My great-aunt Flora loved good food. In her prime, she was a psychiatrist and traveled to Paris at least once a year to shop for very expensive clothes and eat delicious things. In her retirement, she made a point of taking herself out to a very nice lunch several times a week. The summer when I was 12 years old, my mom and I were in Philadelphia visiting my grandmother and Flora invited us all to go out to lunch with her. She took us to a French restaurant called Michel's that doesn't exist anymore. I've lived in Philadelphia for the past six years now, and it was gone long before I got here.

I ordered one of the lunch specials, which was a plate of penne pasta in a creamy, beef-infused sauce. It was unlike anything I had ever tasted before. The pasta was perfectly cooked, so it still had a bite, and the ribs on each of the noodles helped carry the sauce to my mouth. The taste sang with notes of mushroom, cream, sage and beef. It was neither too rich, too salty or too beefy, instead just totally right. I can still remember the quiet that fell over me as I ate, slipping two noodles at a time onto the tines of my fork, trying not to eat too fast in order to lengthen the experience. It was the first time in my life that I understood the power that really wonderful food has to captivate.

Okay folks, now it's your turn. Tell us about your best meal!

Late last week, the Washington Post's Kim O'Donnel wrote a post on her blog, A Mighty Appetite, about the food that makes you cry. The food that evokes memory in a way that is bittersweet or layered and complex. She recounts a friend's tale of his mother's post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches and her own experience teaching a young friend to cook Joe's Special (the recipe is at the end of the post) while in Zambia.

For me, the foods that make me cry are linked to simple joyful times. During the years when I was in college, I always went home to live with my parents for the summers. On weekend mornings, my dad would often cook breakfast for us, concocting vast egg scrambles bursting with spinach, zucchini, tomatoes and basil from his garden. Having breakfast made for me always made me feel so cared for, a true sign of love through food.

What are the foods that make you cry? (Tears of joy and sadness are both welcome).

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I was sitting at my computer yesterday afternoon, mindlessly reading blogs and looking for a little writing inspiration when I picked up a plum that I had gotten from the kitchen just a little while earlier and bit into it. The taste of that particular plum (its brethren are pictured above) transported me back 20+ years and several thousand miles, into the back yard of the house in which my family lived during our Los Angeles years. That house had several plum trees, a really large one in the back and a couple of smaller ones along the side of the house, on the strip of ground that separated our space from the neighbor's.

As a young kid I got a profound sense of pleasure whenever I got the opportunity to pick my own food. It satisfied my longing to be like Laura Ingalls Wilder. My mom often made jam with the plums from those trees, although in those days it was always a little too saucy as she couldn't bring herself to add the sugar required to make it jell. Still, it was always delicious, especially because it came from our yard.

I do love it when a bite of some seemingly ordinary foodstuff gives me the opportunity to travel through time and space. Are there any foods that are similarly evocative for you?

Photo by Marisa McClellan