What is it about dining experiences that that makes them memorable ? Makes them glitter like pearls..
Perhaps it's the combination of the elemental with art. I mean.. you're feeding.. how more elemental can it get.. yet at the same time there's the art that attacks your senses and reaffirms your superiority vs the cows you are eating. It's not a coincidence that, in one of my favourite Catherine stories, she relates how, during her stint in Aix en Provence as an impoverished exchange student she was reduced to eating bread and water for a sustained period.. and suddenly out of the blue, a friend cooks her a luscious dinner. She started crying.. !
Beira, Portuguese East Africa.. Circa 1959
My mother, her 26 boxes and the 12 yr-old me, are awaiting to rendezvous with the ship to take us back to the motherland. My father has already fled the scene, under somewhat ambiguous circumstances, and is waiting for us in Athens. Hey, even my 12-yr old brain, that held nothing but Beano comics and "Secret Seven" Enid Blyton tales, could tell that something was fishy. Later on I theorized it must have been some kind of bankruptcy, take-the-money-and-run before-the-creditors-notice scheme. These days, using my own experiences as a guide, I realize it was most probably some detail (like forgetting to file tax returns ? ) that, unchecked, blossomed into a disaster..
The friends with which we're staying take us out to a beach canteen somewhere on the Indian ocean which specializes in.. prawns. Not what you usually associate with the word.. these were huge, size-of-your-hand squirming fat alien prawns, just plucked from the ocean, done on the grill.
But there is a snag.. they're done with piri-piri, the african pepper sauce of sudden death .. enough piri-piri to fuel hell for a month.. ! So once again my 12-yr old brain comes to the realization that there is no free lunch and decisions had to be taken. Like a biblical dilemma.. either you sacrifice your first-born or you don't love God.. just phrased differently. To enter taste-paradise you had to burn your tongue and everything around it. Whichever way I looked there was no way out..to taste the delicious flesh of the dead crustaceans one had to burn baby burn.. !I considered my options
carefully for about half a second and.. chose to burn.
The result was an unimaginable cannibalistic orgy of pain, eating and ecstasy that had the adults around the table sitting in puzzled silence. Here was a 12-yr old, obviously suffering, and yet inexplicably coming back to the platter for more punishment. Like a gastronomic Raging Bull soaking up the punches but groggily coming back for more.. I won't even mention the burning intestinal problems later..
To this day I am convinced that there must have been something in the prawns that induced a temporary addiction. No matter how many you had, you wanted more. No matter how it felt to have liquid streams of molten metal on your inflamed mouth you just
had to have more..
Prawns rarely have much to teach humanity, yet I think it was at precisely that moment that the seeds of the philosophy that would so faithfully guide me in my latter life were sown.. "Play now, Pay later" !
Athens, Greece around 1970-71
Giorgos Romanos the famous singer and stud, friend of Papeas, protege of Hadzidakis, took us to a newly opened resto somewhere behind the old Olympic Stadium. Beautiful spring night, sitting outside, about 6-7 of us, Aleka too, in some square within the hustle and the bustle, but not overwhelmingly so.. I ordered randomly since the names of the dishes were new and outside the standard greek vocabulary. I liked the name of the dish.. Piccata.. it sounded like a piquant sonata.
When it came I gasped.. for it was exactly what every cell my body was craving and would have ordered if they could speak and could agree. A round plush filet-mignon done in Mavrodafne wine covered in peas and carrots with a sauce made in paradise. The suddenness of a non-greek taste was like wearing pink at a funeral. I remember it so explicitly..
London, UK 1976.
Aleka comes to pick me up from the LSE and with some of my couple-colleagues we decide to go eat out. The perfect number for dining, between six and eight.. and somebody suggests a pizzeria somewhere close by. It's a gorgeous old dairy place redone with white ceramic tiles and that glazed look everywhere.
I get a Veneziana with.. tuna ! They all pooh-pooh my choice..( damn peasants.. what can you expect ) ..but I'm stunned at the tastes that are entering my mouth.. it's like Vivaldi himself is orchestrating all this.. the violin is the tuna, the basso continuo is the cheese and the sauce is owned by the violas.
Ah.. but the cherry on the top is still to come. While we're enthusiastically feeding and debating the ousting of Norodom Sihanook from the govt of Kampuchea, the doors burst open and an entire string quartet, complete with cello and viola, enter and start playing.. Vivaldi. Now not only the palate and the eyes are satisfied, but the ears too. What a cosmic conspiracy..!
I remember distinctly the silent giving of grace and thank you to whomever orchestrated this sudden symphony of well-being.. the beaming faces across the table.. the beauty of quattro Stagioni.. the delicate voices of the capers in my pizza as they sculpted the tuna into a baroque masterpiece.
We seldom realize it at the time, but these moments of peace and friendship, calm and abundance are what we're all striving for.. and all the Mathematics and Computer Science, and Physics and knowledge and Philosophy, work and Economics are just the meagre servants..
