Season to taste

My grandfather appears to me in ice cream sundaes. Growing up, I occasionally accompanied him while he ran errands. As a reward for patience and staid hands among drawers of gleaming nuts and bolts at the local hardware store, he would take me to the nearby Friendly’s. I can’t remember if he got anything – if I had to guess, it involved peanut butter (Reese’s Pieces, or “Ree-sees Pee-sees”) – but for me, it was the same every time: Monster Mash. Mint-chip ice cream, dyed a lurid green, and hairy with whipped cream. Its maraschino cherry nose went first, then its peanut butter cup ears. And when he didn’t have anything to do or buy, I’d still get ice cream – a bland New England company’s Neapolitan or chocolate chip, it too under whipped cream and always, always, rainbow sprinkles. The final course for me, my cousins, and brothers. We sat cross-legged on a waxed picnic sheet in the living room, and were served with coffee mugs and thin silver spoons.

There are some foods and meals I’ll never forget: those sundaes, the deep bowl of mussels and salty tomato-garlic broth for my first dinner in Ireland, the eggy yellow cake with chocolate frosting and dense crumb I ask for every birthday. I navigate my surroundings using scent and taste, readily allowing food to sustain my identity, to feed my memory. (Seriously, ask any English professor of mine in the last four semesters.) So, as you may guess, I hungrily (har-har) anticipated the next memoir on my list, The Gastronomical Me by M. F. K. Fisher. The cherished American food writer, and good friend of Julia Child tells of her life in early childhood through her mid-thirties, when she settled in Europe during both World Wars. I gravitated towards this book for our like-minded gluttony. Fisher and I learn through our senses and unabashedly participate in food rituals, honoring ourselves and others. We remember using sound and sight, yes, but also scent and taste.

Food serves a frame for Fisher’s travels. It orients her to unrecognizable places, especially those devastated by war. It gives her a language with which to communicate. (We all have to eat.) My initial excitement – how lovely to find someone who thinks as you do! – soon subsided, and I found myself bored. One consommé was the “best” she’d ever tasted… like the “best” consommé three pages before and another fifteen pages after. Perhaps my punctiliousness is showing, but this superlative frustrated me. If you can’t choose, if you’re going to waver, then don’t. This book, this translation of the world, is grounded in sensory descriptions. I expected its pages to be filled with an almost synesthetic quality, or at least a stimulus for the senses. Instead, the descriptions were lists in paragraph form: Here, let me tell you what I ate today, yet again. The memorable flavors blended together. I can’t remember even the vile ones.

Fisher is also tired of restaurants and entertaining and propriety and being exoticized. (Mdme. Fisher, you are American?! I will bring you our richest pâté from the goose that was fed nothing but buttered bread since its first squawk! Please, Mdme., it is free of charge for the beautiful American Mdme! said every waiter in the book.) Themes of hunger and love, emotional starvation and satiation are consequentially watered down. (Don’t get me wrong, this book is worth reading. Fisher just tends to hide a bit.) Throughout this “project,” I’ve come to expect a turn in personal writing, some kind of complication or development of thought – a revelation. But like plane food, the words were flat and the tone sluggish.

But I reread the above paragraph and wonder, Am I right to suggest such edits? If you follow this blog, recall the logic (?) of my last post. Fisher could’ve experienced the best in one specific moment in the present. Time passes. She finds another best, the best for that particular time. These evaluations contest others made before and after. While these superlative adjectives may obscure the need for finality and creativity, I can’t criticize Fisher too harshly. Isolating each meal as its own essay, she chooses to fragment her narrative into individual bites. Perhaps the third consommé was the perfect complement to Fisher’s “sea change,” while the second was ideal for Fisher’s first authentic Burgundian meal. Let me redact my earlier protestation: Why must a memoir be entirely logical, or, more simply, why must we choose? We’re not required to be steadfast in our frivolous opinions. (Other concerns like morals, political views, and our conceptions of justice and equality, in my opinion, develop our character more significantly than our favorite pizza toppings.) As a whole, Fisher’s narrative is filled with fallacies. When taken apart, the taste of each is full and distinct. (With this in mind, I’m tempted to return to the dissatisfying structure of Naked by Sedaris. Am I stumped by essay collections, or can Sedaris not execute a satisfying narrative? As explained in an earlier post, I believe the latter, but I would enjoy an argument for the former.)

I’m a bit too old for my grandfather’s special treatment now, although he’d make me a sundae if I asked. I know because a few months ago, he nearly did. During a visit, I reminisced to my grandparents, assuring them that my memories of them were fond ones. How delicate the white porcelain mug was, its thin blue rim still intact after years. How greasy and tacky the feeling of crushed sprinkles in your molars. Opening his eyes a bit wider, he found a way to revive the past by offering to make me one. I protested. I wasn’t trying to coerce him and I wasn’t hungry, but I think I turned down his offer mostly because it wouldn’t taste the same, not as delicious or enchanting as when I was seven or eight. I feel similarly averse at the prospect of going down the street from campus to Friendly’s. The mint chip monster would be terrifying, cloyingly sweet. My tastebuds have been burned with time. Why reevaluate and mock the tastes of my childhood with the understanding I’ve gained in the past decade? Let me keep the pleasure of those memories intact. 

Maybe food is too personal a topic for me, and for Fisher. We want to let those flavors linger. Complex, flat, acrid, nauseating, or rich – let them be. Maybe we know that our palates misled us. (I, for one, used to love not Fluffernutter (Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter), but Fluffer-jelly sandwiches. Pasteurized egg whites and flavored sugar, mmm?) The first sip of stout, the first gamey taste of venison. Or the final loaf of bread your grandmother ever made, the taste of water after hours of yard work. How do these moments taste, how do they feel? Stir and season to taste: what do you want in that moment? Then localize your hunger.

What do I mean? Fisher puts it best (yes, the best) in the introduction to the book:

Like most other humans, I am hungry … it seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it.

For reference:

The famous Monster Mash. Less green than I remember.