He Feasts!

Dear Reader,

2011-02-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

"Later, Alastair would think of it as a religious experience, that is to say one that confirmed in a single moment, both delicate and rich, the yet unproven certainties of the world and of life. He sat, as men have sat for centuries, caught up in the spell of a woman who was able to prepare fish well; beguiled as surely as Merlin, where minutes swept by like summer thunder. It was a thing which confirmed his humanity, emphasized it, announced him as a being wholly separate from the creature world that had given up this delicate and flaking morsel between his lips. There was something ageless and pure about consuming a fish, more profound than eating a mammal. Fish seemed to him to be nothing more than mobile food, coursing their eager, thoughtless way through the oceans on a quest to either eat or be eaten. Even his moment of rapture encouraged this flight of fancy, that fish were ancient, static and unevolved, changeless in the primordial seas, that his distant ancestors had sat as he sat now, with a fillet of Turbot before them, flaking and browned along the smooth shoreline of its edges. It had been pan fried, in butter, rolled first in olive oil and a light dusting of searing flour, salt and pepper and it lay atop a meek and surrendering bed of leeks and the the robust landsman of a roasted potato alongside like a harbor. Across from him, Daphne smiled expectantly, uncertain of her victory, and in the moment he knew he loved her, felt the certain certainty of the thing. It was linked somehow to this flaking fish, to the innate knowledge that he was an elevated being, that they both were, that they were not part nature in quite the same way as this delicately prepared fish. He leaned forward and kissed her wolfishly."

Excerpted from Harbour Days: A Romance of the Cape, by Lionell Templeton

Dear Reader,

2011-02-20T14:04:00.000-08:00

"In part, civilization means the confidence of never being more than a half an hour away from home made scones."

Dear Reader,

2011-02-17T09:22:00.000-08:00

John Fowles doesn't exactly say, but I think we can safely assume that the French Woman's Lieutenant enjoyed - at one time or another - chicken thighs in a white wine sauce, and green beans sauteed in black pepper and balsamic vinegar.

Anyway, I did. Thank you, R.

Dear Reader

2011-01-31T17:12:00.000-08:00

What, I ask you, is there to say about noodles? What can on even add to this perfect, ancient solution to the more ancient question, "what is another way to get my carbohydrates besides bread?"? Alright, hold on, you say, what did the ancients know about carbohydrates or metabolism? Well, funny you should ask because apparently someone has been neglecting their Tacitus. He mentions them somewhere between documenting Roman daliances and describing the delectable liver of a gorged Ortolan.

Well. It will be a cold day in Erebus before I crunch through the hollow bones of a hot buttered Ortolan, but I do love noodles. So, thankfully does R. She is skeptical of pasta, and feeds it to me selectively, and only whole wheat. I dream of the beef capped mountains of my youth, days of cross country and being a hopeless bachelor with basically a three meal week (spaghetti, burritos and sort of a chicken curry thing, in case you wondered.)

Well, imagine my rapture at noodles. I love them. They are dear old friends to my mouth. R made them, wonderful Asian noodles. Because she is a perfectionist, and has done more magical things with them in the past, she expressed distaste at these ones, which were, apparently, too gluelike or soft or sticky or something. There is no purposes to this post (apart from the sudden desire to revive this much neglected blog) other than to tell her, and i know she'll read it, that I love noodles, and tonight was, even for a man well schooled in the heights of what can be done with them...yes...even less successful noodles are amazing and bring me totally disproportionate joy.

So don't badmouth your noodles. It distracts me from my rapture.

Dear Reader,

2010-03-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

It may surprise you to know that I have accumulated, over the course of a strange and wonderful life that has led me across states, countries and continents, some unusual skills. Among these are the ability to pick locks and a facility with many different forms of cutlery.

It's the second I'm going to write a little bit about today. One thing my mother was always keen on stressing to me was the general principle that when cutting vegetables, meat, or really anything for a cooked dish, the governing idea is not that one size is better than another, but that all things should be cut roughly to the same size. As a result of this early training I possess a not inconsiderable ability to rapidly dice, chop, slice or sever any variety of ingredients into pieces so orderly and even as to look almost uncanny.

I've bragged enough, but I'll leave you to trust that I'm also telling the truth.

So I was proud to play sou chef to my wife the other night, when she took a stab at ratatouille. The recipe we followed came from the frankly awesome, if neurotically down to earth Jamie Oliver. It Involved aubergines, zucchini, red peppers, onions, garlic....and fish.

I'm happy to say it was one of many meals my wife makes that I end up taking as lunch the next day, and then lingering in the lunch room so that one of my unsuspecting coworkers will happen upon me, see and smell it, and then mention blithely, innocently, how great it looks.

And usually, that's an excellent segue to talking about how evenly sliced the vegetables are. "You'd think it took a machine to do that, huh..well..."

Dear Reader,

2010-02-09T13:46:00.000-08:00

My father, while wargaming with the 3rd Ranger battalion one dark night, crouched several feet away from an "Enemy" Combatant, and was motionless. In the darkness, the other man peered at my father's camouflaged form, bedecked as it was with native foliage to break up his silhouette. Staring back from a face covered in the claylike, black face camo, my father did not move. The man looked at him, then walked away, checking over his shoulder once or twice, but writing off that odd lump in the darkness as a stone, or a bush, but not a man.

The lesson I take here, Dear Reader, is one well known to the hunter slowly stalking a deer through the frozen forest, the Vintner laying down bottles to posterity and even the young romantic, patiently pursuing his enigmatic lady across worlds and time with a consuming purpose. The lesson, Dear Reader, is one of patience.

Too often dismissed as a trait reptilian in its origins, an antagonistic discipline to the virtue of hot blooded impulse. Shakespeare, as we all recall from our formal schooling, idolizes impulsivity. Not without his patient characters, the Bard loves, however, to hold up his Hotspur and his Fortinbras as little known, but ideal characters. They favor quick action, they are men of consuming certainty. While Shakespeare doesn't seem overly interested in exploring this trait, as he abandons it to his minor characters in favor of his Hamlets and Hal's , I understand him to idolize this trait as something ethereal, unreachable, indiscernible, but utterly desirable. One might assume that Shakespeare prefers a Falstaff, but don't think one can find that in all honesty. Shakespeare assumes we all ought to be the quick acting Hotspur, but fall short in the form of Hal. Shakespeare is also a bit of a raunchy fellow, and I don't think Hotspur or Fortinbras seem like much fun to him.

That is all to say that patience where food is concerned, is a trait carefully examined, human, and virtuous. It also tastes uncommonly good if applied correctly.

Few victuals set off the lesson of patience better than the the pork shoulder. I count it a considerable curiosity that the pork shoulder appears to have been created for the sole purpose of slow cooking. A piece of meat with less fat might make a fine steak, and might cook quickly and beautifully to pink perfection in a frying pan, but that same piece of lean perfection will go to tough nothing in a slow cooker. Not the pork shoulder. This unlikely piece of meat is riddled with marbled fat and striated muscle, a tough intractable piece of meat. Built around the sculptural abstraction of the shoulder blade, this muscle is a varied landscape of firm, impenetrable flesh, stubborn and forbidding.

Enter the slow cooker. I recently purchased this slow cooker for my wife R-. We haven't the need for a cooker with a timer, and it was high time we got away from the ceramic crock pot of my childhood. The best part of our new contraption is being able to take it from cook top to slow cooker. Brown this, then stew the fight out of it.

It is, I should say just once more, a fortunate thing to be wedded to a cook. Consider this, Dear Reader: Louis L'amour once wrote a short story in the Bowdrie series which includes gift buying advice for a young man. "Buy her a pocket knife," exclaims one outlaw, explaining "she'll get bored with it, leave it around, and then you've got a pocket knife." There's some similar self service at work in the culinary wife. And today, I sort of got my pocket knife.

R- threw this rough and tumble hunk of meat into our new slow cooker with onions and a mysterious red rub which I will confess I didn't pay any attention to. I detected the smell of chiles and other rich odours, but that is all. Some manner of liquid went in too, but again, no recipes from me, Dear Reader. This shoulder sat bubbling in our slow cooker for a day and a half, and today, as a proud owner of a Y chromosome, it fell to me to remove it and pull the pork apart.

Considering the mean spirited muscle that proudly sank into the crock pot the day before, I hardly recognized the tame and thoughtful piece that came out. The meat literally fell to pieces, docile, redolent, and beautiful variegated shades of red and brown. There was very little pulling to be done. I've never seen anything so utterly transformed. We will eat this rich and smoky concoction tonight.

But, to patience again. The slow cooker is a many splendored thing. Slow cooking oats (1 cup steel cut oats, 1 cup chopped figs, one cup dried cranberries, 4 cups half and half, low, overnight...like no oatmeal you've ever tasted...and there's your recipe) transforms them from the glue like breakfast fare we grew up with into something of unexplored grandeur. The journey of patience is one I look forward to, a discipline worth the journey.

One cannot deny the stark beauty of the Japanese aesthetic, but the silence of Zen is like the vacuum of space. It is not the cultivated patience of the slow cooker and I take no great joy in it.

As a final thought, Dear Reader, someone very close to me is getting married. He is a patient sort of man, and he's finally got his woman. I know men who confuse and cannot quite sort the difference between indecision and consideration. Likewise I know men who cannot discern impulse from certainty. There are times that call for quick action, times that require patience. And I think, Dear Reader, that the Slow Cooker is worth a moment of reflection for someone stuck in this situation. We see the purpose and the product all in one piece. Patience, after all, is virtuous, and not at all the same thing as simply waiting.

Dear Reader,

2010-01-22T07:00:00.001-08:00

This Christmas, I was visited by two spirits. Not spectral, of course, but libatory. While I'm confident that I am not the first person to explore that pun, I want to take a moment to say that it doesn't decrease my satisfaction in having done so. Spirit...spirit...moving on.

My wife had the good foresight to purchase two fantastic bottles for me that I think it makes good and decent sense to point them out.

Bottle 1 - WHISKER'S BLAKE, CLASSIC TAWNY

An exalted Port with a humble price tag. This Australian, hailing from the Maclaren Vale of South Eastern Australasia, is a truly fantastic ambassador for Port wines. I'll hasten to add that the grizzled countenance that graces the bottle does wonders for the visual enjoyment of pouring a glass as well. For some reason, there was a time when it was easy for me to take the dark cherry and deep, smoldering undertones port as...forgive me modern world...effeminite. I'm long since surpassed this infirmity in understanding, and I'm happy to say that the shotgun toting visage of Whiskers on this bottle is a wonderful aid for anyone else so afflicted.

Buy this bottle. The nose is full of chocolate and coffee, and the palate is long and elegant, finishing with proper dryness. Explore the smokey walnut depth of it's exposition and the dark luxuriant carmel spice of it's finish. I challenge you, dear reader, to conceive of a better evening with a better bottle.

Bottle 2 - WILD TURKEY, AMERICAN HONEY

Bourbon Whiskey is serious stuff. If you're not quite in the mood, or somewhat too delicate to enjoy the scouring flames of strong alcohol, or if the evening is lookin a little calmer and smoother than a violent a vivifying drink, this is the stuff. A delightfully smooth and sweet liquor that takes all the robust power of Bourbon Whiskey and plays it out into a sweet nectar, this honeyed drink is surprinsigly solid and thoughtful on the tongue. I was concerned that this would descend into a kind of alchoholic candy in the mouth, but the flavors retain their richness and balance against one another well. A splendid sweet thing to sip on after a large dinner.

Dear Reader,

2010-01-18T18:59:00.000-08:00

I have been, since October, a hot house flower. Between November and December, attentive men like myself may reasonably expect to enjoy the the best eating of their year. In fairness, even the inattentive eating dullard is in the same position. these are the cold winter months when snow drifts block doorways and mankind hunkers down within the warmth of his walls with nothing but company and culture to sustain him, and no distractions of sunshine, or the lazy summer explorations of field and stream. This is the time of Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas feasts. There are mornings over hot tea and leftover pie, and a general embarrassment of culinary riches. In these months, migratory food lovers return like salmon, upstream to the suburban homes where their hard working parents feed them the meals they were weaned on.

And yet, since October, I've maintained a curious radio silence concerning my enjoyment of food. Considering the accumulation of food and tales of food between Thanksgiving and the midnight feast of New Year's, this is indeed a shame. These stories will drift out soon enough, and in some sort of context, but for the moment, I will endeavor to explain the silence they currently belong to.

The clinical observation of the sociologist has it that most children are conceived in the winter, for obvious, snowbound reasons. Where there are books, and meals and lovers and coffee, the diligent and observant man inevitably becomes fatter, smarter, and does his bit to pass on that knowledge, fatness and in my case, deep love of food., to a new generation.

Knowing this, you may take with some surprise, Dear Reader, that I have shirked this typicality, and instead my wife R- and I welcomed the birth of twins into the winter world.

Here in the early months of a young new year, there is no food I care to write about more than the astounding and generous gifts of food we've received since the twins arrive.

To give myself a small measure of credit where it is due, I have been, since perhaps November, doing a good deal of the cooking in our home, since R- was quite otherwise occupied and not too keen on standing on a tile floor for long periods of time. I will not describe this period beyond the acknowledgement that we all survived it. As I've said elsewhere, I am capable enough in the kitchen, but it is a grim kind of subsistence living when I cook, not without flavor, but without magic.

Since the birth of our twins (which I hasten to add were born considerately on 12/30/2009, and just in time to find their place on my form 1040 this year) our friends have provided meals for us for the last several weeks.

I've said elsewhere that there are few meals to compare to one made for you. It's important though to distinguish the particular, melting gratitude of a meal made for you because of a particular circumstance. The get well meal, the celebratory dinner, and these weeks of meals in recognition of two new family members all carry with them a wonderful brand of culinary intimacy. We are known by the cooks.

That, Dear Reader, is all I have to say on the subject for now.

Dear Reader,

2009-10-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

Patrick O'Connell once told me (along with about 100 other people watching a demonstration he gave a few years back...but I think you'll agree it sounds more impressive the way I wrote it) that all French chefs, when they die, will be passed through a fine mesh strainer.

When I started this little note some weeks back, the idea was for it to be about texture. Food texture. We respond to food with, I think, all of our five senses, and they all work in concert. So, I was thinking about texture because R- made me a sausage and red lentil soup puree. Now, before I was married you would never have caught me dead with a pureed soup. that's because for whatever reason, I came of age with the notion that real manly soups have large manly chunks of large manly ingredients. In short, there was something more satisfactory to the male psyche in a stew than in a proper soup. A puree seemed dainty, and my approach to food has never been, and still is not, dainty. So, the pureed soup, when I first encountered it shortly after tying the knot represented a struggle.

The battle is an age old one. The raging fever dream of the primordial hunter, filled with the inexplicable desire for chunks of venison roasted over an open flame. The desire to kill and prepare one's own game is, I think, a universal vestige, and it exists in at times discomfiting conflict with an affection for air conditioning, carpet and yes...pureed soup. I can say this now, on the far side of my suspicion of smooth soups because I recognize that texture is not a simple matter. It is a question of appropriate texture for appropriate taste. It is a question of refinement, culture and civilization itself.

This revelation came to me unexpectedly, because this bowl of warm red lentil and sausage soup, served with a rough crust of sourdough bread, was the last civilized meal I ate for almost three weeks. I vanished into the culinary void of business travel.

Normally, traveling for work is an opportunity to explore local cuisine, to find a special restaurant and further my gastronomical exploits, plying the trade of a gourmand out in the world. This was not to be the case. I travelled to backwaters, arrived after anything useful was closed, was isolated in business meetings, cajoled into working dinners at mediocre establishments.

This weekend for instance, I ordered chinese food from three separate restaurants in one evening, throwing the first two orders of food away. They were utterly inedible. The third was only passable, and I ate it at 11:30 at night. I wandered into an all night diner, hoping to be pleasantly drawn back to the marvelous Greek diners I remember from my time in Ph- (another tale for another time, dear Reader). Again, this was not to be so, and overcooked eggs with undercooked bacon ruined an evening and the morning to follow it.

So I have seen the dark side, dear reader. I have travelled in the wasteland and returned a changed man. I have lain awake nights dreaming of sausage and lentil soup, pureed. When I was a child, dear Reader, I thought like a child. Now I'm proud to say that when you see roughness done badly, you can fully appreciate the power of delicacy, and you can hunger, with a ravenous abandon, for refinement.

Dear Reader,

2009-10-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Mr. I-, a dapper and very serious scotsman with meticulously grayed hair, told me to take something into account the next time I went through a buffet. I should state at the outset that Mr. I- was one of the most interesting companions I have ever shared a meal with. It's an interesting fact that what you're eating and who you're eating it with can utterly change the experience of that meal. The meal, in this instance, was an all one can eat breakfast buffet served on the floor of an "edutainment" ride at Disney's Epcot center.

All you can eat buffets, Mr. I- informed me, are laid out with economics in mind. Salads and starches lead the first half of of the line, and only in the second half are the more expensive foods introduced. The proteins etc. "People will fill plates wi' salad an' bread, then be too embarrassed to pile their plates up when they get to the end," he said.

Now I'll believe almost anything told to me in a Scottish accent, but Mr. I- made his fortune in the cruise ship industry and clearly knew what he was talking about. His explanation of food service strategy came as we were enjoying this really superb breakfast behind the scenes at Disney World last week. Disney is an odd place for this kind of conversation, and an even odder place for serious business meetings. And yet, there we were, shaking hands with Imagineers, and getting real work done, surrounded by the cartoon facades of Disney. But behind the scenes, behind the well ordered storefronts of Epcot, Disney enterprises are a fantastic swirl of organized motion. Delivery trucks, and an unending influx of "cast members" (Disney does not have "employees" only "cast members.")

Breakfast, then, is like anything else at Disney. All the meals they fed us were excellent. Smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, coffee cake, lots of fresh fruit. We sat, with around seventy other folks and enjoyed these things, while Mr. I-, with casual Scottishness, took the magic out of it.

"We could feed," he said with his somewhat Americanized, just-south-of-Glasgow brogue, "each guest on the ship for about 17 dollars a day. We fed the crew members for about 2 dollars a day each. They ate mostly ox tails and rice, and weren't interested in lobster tails or leftovers from the buffet."

Mr. I- was full of frugal Scotch wisdom like this, and his whole demeanor got me thinking about open extravaganzas of food, like buffets.

So, when I returned to the temperate climes of Autumnal V-, and left the seasonless tropical sandbar of Florida behind me, I came home to our little town's Fall festival. In the town of F-, where I live, the Fall festival is an all day, close down the streets celebration. Potters, booksellers and artists line the streets, and everywhere the celebration of plenty is the order of the day. This year, it was pouring rain all morning, but this didn't seem to slow down anyone's enthusiasm. A local 80's cover band (The Legwarmers) took their place on the main stage, surrounded by the really important feature of the festival. The food vendors.

Kettle corn, crab cakes, barbecue, burgers, fries, it's all here. A local man makes his own astounding chorizo along with chicken empanadas. Several Thai restaurants have done their best to get into the swing of things, some with greater success than others. Right next to the funnel cakes and crab cakes stand, a vendor (new this year) was selling "chicken piece on a stick." While descriptive, this didn't strike me as terribly great advertising, but it all smelled good enough anyway.

I bought a steaming bowl of pineapple fried rice and red curry for $5, and it all turned out to be fantastic. We sat, listening to the Legwarmers in the steady pour of rain and I was glad of the unabashed qualities of the scene.

Naked Autumn, abrupt and chilly, came in with the discomfort of rain, and gusts of wind, just like it should. It's hard to imagine living in Florida, where the fluctuation is merely from tropical to semi-tropical, interrupted periodically by violent hurricanes. This breeds, I have seen in my time spent in Florida, an attitude that almost anything can be put off till next year.

With this in mind, it was a funny thing to come from Mr. I- and his cool Scottish Presbyterian musings about the science of economical food arrangement, back to the haphazard islands of feasting that clustered together all over our little Fall festival.

For the lover of food, bent on dictating his culinary conquests, these two different experiences of all one can eat meals presented a conundrum. Buffets are often ridiculed as symbols of gluttony and excess. And yet, according to Mr. I-. cost-control on these expansive meals relies on human conscience and guilt. Likewise, someone who could find a cause to rebuke one for gluttony at a Fall festival is really no fun, and probably won't get invited to said festival. So I think there's some moral there, something we can latch onto and say proudly that love, or appreciation, or coming together to eat trumps and conquers silly moralistic notions about what to eat and where. I suspect there is a moral, but I was too busy enjoying myself to really get at it.

Dear Reader,

2009-10-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

Listen, because here's the weird thing about poets. April, according to T.S Eliot, is the cruellest month. William Cullen Bryant can't help himself either in Thanatopsis (yes Latin scholars..."a meditation on death"). Poets hate springtime. Or at any rate, springtime, with its profusion of color, flowers and bounding young rabbits, reminds them, naturally, of death, and how nothing ever lasts. That's because poets, in their petulant and lovely way hate fun and love being different. Spring is also a little bit obvious about its symbolism. What, are they expected to write about how everything leaping up in the blooming glory of exuberant new life...reminds them of the exuberant blooming glory of life? That's a little ostentatious of nature. Far be it for the poet.

Now Autumn...Autumn stirs poets the opposite way. And that shouldn't surprise us much either, for the same reason. While everything is falling heavily from the trees, and turning to musky fecundity in the cooling earth, while the leaves are flaming out in one last glorious gasp of lost Summer grandeur, poets are reminded of fertility and life. Except for Robert Frost, but he's pretty much devoted to meloncholy and decay in every season, glorious man that he is.

So you might think poets would be handy fellow to have around when things get ugly, and less fun on the weekends. You're probably right.

But here we are, wrapped in the steady slowing down of Autumn. In V-, where I make my home, we take our Autumns seriously, and this week found ourselves out among the orchards picking apples, back rolling pie crusts on our marble counters, and heaving pregnant squashes into our larder. The leaves change slowly here, and they do it with a deliberate flaming passion. The mornings are crisp and dim, and cold fogs roll in off the hills. And what's more, it's a long Autumn. I used to live way up north in the town of D-, and on August 27th, every year, the temperature would drop to -20 degrees and everything would die over night, coated in a fine dusting of ice. Then it was brown until the snows came in September. So I have a deep abiding affection for the temperate forests and long harvests of V- and the east coast.

Last night, we closed our grilling season in grand fashion. With steak. It's hard to describe the perfect steak in terms that don't sound barbaric. Don't let your vegan friends drive any ten penny nails of guilt into you over that, because as much as it is barbaric, it's equally sublime. So we enjoyed a steak with a really solid Greg Norman red wine, courtesy of J- and our Thursday dinners. There's not much to add by way of tribute to this perfect, medium rare steak, tender, blackened, and yet as yielding and juicy to its core that it reminded one of a savory kind of fruit. Such was the mixture of color and texture and flavor. There, that's about as unbarbaric a thought as I can muster before moving back to the point here, about apples, and squash and the damp earth and the gathering Autumn.

Autumn is the purest drama of nature, barring certain animal activities. It is all fruition, and quite a different sensation than the relief and awakening of Spring. It is the fruit of labor. It is the smell of earth, and the comfort of home fires, ovens and the bounty of harvest. So I don't blame the poets a bit. Not really. And in not blaming them, I was driven to write this:

Not a sonnet about Autumn

How do we know that fallen apples smell
Equally of sweetness and of death?
Is walking through an orchard's heavy breath
The only way that one of us can tell?
Above, the canopy is caught in flame,
This quiet conflagration we all know,
Burns down its spent brown leaves to black below,
The strange damp ash october comes to claim.
Leaving yielding fruit flesh to neglect,
We bring our bags of brassy apples home,
Where apple pie half-eaten in a dome,
Is tended by warm lovers we expect
Will talk all night and take their coffee black

J-

Dear Reader,

2009-09-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

Over a hissing pile of pert, bluff and arrogant kale, I felt a sudden and unpredictable urge to say something fatherly and wise. Kale is a broad and wrinkly green leafy item, which contains a goodly amount of phytonutrtients, vitamin C, calcium, folates and, as I understand it, in sufficient amounts allows you to see in the dark, leap over fences and regrow severed limbs. It's also dynamic in the pan, and needs the taming force of heat to be at its best, going from rough and tousle headed to civilized and shiny with a little olive oil and coaxing with a spoon. So, I took a stab at something methuselahic while this little drama played out and two cubic feet of kale shrank into the culinary equivalent of a dress shirt and tie on its way to church.

"Food," I explained to G- as she prodded the cocksure and unyielding pot of crunchy young kale, "tastes better when you have a hand in making it."

G- is three now, and has been standing on her yellow stool adding seasonings, stirring, and exclaiming "it smells 'alicious" for almost as long as she's been around. She nodded and "mmm'd" appropriately at her thoughtful and experienced father and the kale sizzled and shrank in beautifully upon chopped bits of garlic and proved me right. Sort of.

Almost as soon as I said it, I could think of a dozen exceptions to my new rule about knowing where your food comes from and how it was made. Isn't this the war drum of the Alice Waters crowd? Go out there and slaughter your own oxen!

Well, I can easily recall food prepared for me without my foreknowledge or examination, crafted with love or the genteel professionalism of restaurants that far out class anything I've ever thrown together. Now i'm not dismissing the virtues of whole food slow food stuff, and watching G- devour HER kale with a primal enthusaism I figured there must be at least a kernel of truth in my brash and plucky assertion.

Anyway, the incident bounced around unresolved through my gastronomical adventures this week.

...four years earlier...

On my honeymoon I bought a bottle of wine that seemed to awaken some kind of carnal longing in the man peddling it. He became by turns a little flushed, sweaty and insecure while describing its many virtues. We drank this fantastic wine, and all I remember about its name was the unlikely graven image of a rhinoceros from the label. "Rhino wine". Barbera. Barbarrosa. Barbarino. Something like that. It has faded into the hazy past of the first month of marriage. I now simply think of it as the former lover of the Italian wine merchant who visited us for a night, and then vanished in the morning without so much as a note.

But here's the thing: Wine itself is a mysterious and divine ichor, the product of soil science, plant husbandry, love and magic. I know how it's made, sure, but I don't make it and I promise you that does not affect my enjoyment or gratitude in the slightest. So I worked at a kind of gratitude that I'd forgotten the name of this wine, and was pretty successful. Which proves me wrong, sort of.

...forgive the violation of Aristotelian rules for drama, and allow me to fast forward again...

Last night, we resumed our weekly meal with my in-laws, and thanks to the kitchen labors of J- (and nothing from my end) supped on a pork tenderloin stuffed with prosciutto and spices and wrapped in a flaking puff pastry. This was paired with purple cabbage cooked as far as my tongue would tell me in sugar and red wine vinegar. There also lovely green beans and salubrious baked potatoes...but these sides merely served to frame the tenderloin, which was a monument to the preparation of meat.

This tenderloin, alternately yielding, dissolving and resisting with delicate juicy pugnacity was I think the greatest Thursday dinner of my life. Thursday is an odd day, and serves usually as a grim reminder you have one more day of work left this week. It's an inconvenient day, and were my math better I'd consider working to have it abolished. But that's another matter, I'm getting to the wine.

The wine, which trailed and curled around the symphonic movements of the pork like a rogue wandering oboe solo (...this metaphor is starting to do the same) was astounding. It was a full bodied Burgundy, all nose, with a short intensely dry presentation followed by a deep well of cherry something or other afterwards. For some reason it made me think of the words "overture" and "horsemanship"...though if memory serves neither is an official wine essence.

Anyway, this was a wine to remember. Doomed to repeat a history I failed to recall, I entirely forgot to read the label.

So today, wracked by considerations about what I told G- on Wednesday, the memory of the forgotten rhino wine, I tried once again to decide that the unknown is marvelous, and haunting, and let's face it the unexpected gift, the undeserved and unlabored for meal often tastes better. At the risk of making an endless invocation of this point, here's yet another example of the real timeless truth of the situation. It's what I should have put together to tell G-.

It's vital to appreciate the labor that goes into food. It helps you appreciate it. When you feed yourself you take pride in it. When you're fed you know just what to be grateful for. It changes your appreciation for skill, and makes certain that no finely crafted pork tenderloins simply float by without acknowledgement.

(Addendum - Here also I should toast to the stooped and desperate figure I must have cut contradicting my enthusiasm for mystery and culinary gifts and digging through my in laws recycling to find the name of the Burgundy and scribble it down with hypocritical glee.)

J-

The Argument: He Feasts

2009-09-17T18:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader:

Give a man a fish, so the saying goes, and you’ve fed him for a day. Wrap that same fish in parchment paper, bundled up with yellow squash and thyme, a drizzle of white wine and olive oil with a touch of soy sauce and black pepper and then bake it, and that same man might propose marriage.

Anyway, a man who enters into matrimony without a thought to what he’ll be eating for the rest of his life is a fool indeed and deserves what he gets. I, on the other hand, have had the good fortune in my life to be surrounded by and brought up among people who love food, and are eager to prepare it, explore its possibilities and most importantly feed it to me. Moreover I had the good sense to marry into splendid cooking.

Now I’m capable enough in the kitchen, a knack I owe to a long line of culinary instructors, and I make no discriminatory bones about whether men or women should be the ones cooking. My mother was a superlative baker, and our kitchen was like an apothecary shop with weights, measures, white flour, spices and the attending tools of the trade, ranging from simple biscuit cutters to much more menacing and motorized implements. I learned something about baking, the delicate chemistry of it and all that. What I learned which is maybe more important is that I haven’t got bakers hands. My hands get too hot by far to avoid melting butter or providing too much encouragement to glutens. I can make a fine biscuit, but I have to do it with a fork. Helping out with the baking always meant a metal bowl of ice water for my flaming fingers. Oh, I learned well enough how to bake, but my instruction was much more about appreciation. Unlike stage magic, knowing how a thing is done well can make eating it all the more pleasant (illusions are not notoriously palatable).

Proper enjoyment of food, along with clothing, playing cards and pugilism, is one of those things which separate us from the animals. It is a noble endeavor, and ranks proudly alongside the strange hunger which first drove man to look to the moon and dream.

But consider this: I've a dozen friends with a dozen blogs between them, all about the various wonders of food: The horrors of fast food, the virtues of slow food, the necessity of whole food and the lugubrious pertinacity of processed victuals. For these women (and they are largely women) let me say that I am extremely grateful. They are the laborers who turn the meanest root vegetable into a splendid table, and tirelessly devise new and more fetching means of doing so.

The stern fact is, the world is gloriously overburdened with inspiring theories about the creation of food, detailed methods for it, recipes, and the creative siren songs of explosive chefs and cooks the planet over. There’s an absolute worldwide love affair going on with culinary athleticism, and a frank sad vacuum of appreciation for it.

Well, here I am. This little page will remain devoted to praising the cooks in my life and their wine and company. Most especially these tales of enjoyment and adventure will focus on the wondrous and capable R-, my lovely wife, and the superhuman talent she possesses for making food and society fit for kings. A true meal, as you shall see, can make the meanest company magnificent, and is only made better with good company.

Not enough by half is said by those who actually get to eat the clever dinners and the wholesome feasts, reaping the benefits of food theory and capable kitchen craft that elevates earthly ingredients to please the eye, mouth and soul. Where the author strays into grandiosity do your best to recall that when fed like royalty a man feels like royalty. He feasts.

J-