A Few Words About Food

Food is never far from our minds. We have been on the road for six weeks and there are too many flavors to sample. But we are also removed from of our decades old routines of cooking and exercise and composting and self provisioning. So it has been a bit of a challenge to strike a proper balance of what, where, when and how much to eat. It has also required more than a modicum of self restraint to not ditch the clothes we brought for European styles with larger waist lines. At least not yet.

For the first two weeks in France we existed primarily on bread and cheese. It is hard to top that magical moment when you are handed a baguette right out of the oven in its paper sheath, its warmth and aroma lingering for half an hour, all for less than a dollar. Combined with some ripe Camembert or firmer Comte and a glass or two of vin rouge and you have the national recipe for health, or at least the French paradox.Thankfully we also enjoyed some amazing home cooked meals in Katrine’s Paris flat and on the patio by lamplight in Le Cannet with Marianne and in Jean Francois’ and Carole’s Bearniese beautiful country home in Sauvterre and chef Alain’s kitchen just above the beach in Biarritz.

Yet by and large, our initial experiences with French restaurants were nothing to crow about. Dishes were often overly saucy, fish cooked nearly raw unless otherwise requested. And how on earth, since the French introduced lettuces to the world, was it so difficult to find an exceptional salad at a restaurant? We even found that it is indeed possible to be served inedible food in the motherland of modern cuisine.

In direct contrast, the French produce markets rival their museums for breathtaking visual display and content and sheer entertainment value. Every town has one and the markets in the cities are extraordinary culinary and cultural events. We’ve been traveling with a picnic kit and as the trip wore on, our eating habits evolved organically, combining leftovers from lunch or dinner with what we’d gleaned in the markets and boulangeries and local shops. There are always cheeses and some fruit and vegetables or tapenade and a bottle of wine that we haven’t finished. A simple taste of duck confit or a few shrimps stashed in foil complete the next day’s picnic.

One meal out per day, even sharing most dishes, can provide plenty of food for two people, especially with a well maintained picnic basket. In Amboise we read that Leonardo Da Vinci’s prescription for a long life was to “eat only when you are hungry.” Jefferson was said to always leave the dinner table hungry, perhaps requiring a bit more discipline. Was it the French who said “eat to live, don’t live to eat”? My family’s business had silk screened this on a wooden plaque shaped like a pig that hung in our kitchen when I was growing up. We had a cutting board with “there is no sauce in all the world like hunger” attributed to Cervantes. But I also vividly remember a friend once telling me, “I’m just a fat slob. I eat whatever I want and I hate the fucking gym.”

My older brother Dave commented upon his return from a Peace Corps stint in Zaire that culture shock is nearly one hundred percent digestive. Truer words may have never been spoken.

One night, visiting friends in Toulouse, we arrived in the rain as darkness fell on a Saturday night. They had been shucking for what must have been an hour and we soon sat down at a table with platters of four kinds of oysters and sourdough bread and a heaping bowl of prawns sautéed in their shells with garlic and oil and lemon. The organic Languedoc wines flowed and we noted the differences between oyster varieties, following a custom we had learned in southern Chile: oyster with mignonette, a sip of wine, taste of bread with salted butter, repeat. In true French fashion, our hosts followed with salad and then a cheese course and we were treated to a tete du moine, which literally means “head of the monk.” This cylindrical wheel of cheese was served on a special wooden block with a steel rod through its center that allowed a blade to rotate on top, curling off beautiful florets of cheese in perfect bites, firm and creamy and sour and distinctly addictive somewhat similar to a true provolone. We have yet to buy a cheese curler or a tete du moine but we may have to one day to delight our guests.

Somewhere along the way, we discovered a salad dressing recipe which was actually closer to finding a new religion. Coming from people who eat salad at least twice a day and produce most of the ingredients at home, including the olive oil, this is saying a lot. The secret was using white wine vinegar in the vinaigrette and as we travelled through Spain and Portugal it kept popping up. These dressings transformed even the plainest iceberg lettuce and industrial tomatoes into something heavenly, even when drenched. Overdressing is often considered a sin where we come from, which gets me back to the religious element. At one restaurant the owners proudly told us that they made their own vinegar in-house with leftover white wines. Aggressively shaken and emulsified with olive oil and salt they created a dressing that you dipped your bread into long after the salad was gone and then your finger when there was no more bread.

A store owner in Porto directed us to the Matosinhos district of the city, which is a fishing village by the beach to the north with many restaurants that open onto a cobbled lane closed to cars. By this time we were eating just one meal out per day and that was most often lunch. The restaurants all had grills out on the streets with mesquite fires smoking and fresh seafood covered with rock salt and just a tiny bit of oil. It was a treat just strolling and observing the grills with squid and giant prawns and large sardines by the dozen and all sizes and varieties of whole fish and giant filets crackling and sizzling and peppers roasting in the coals. One restaurant had a tool like a branding iron they kept in the coals to caramelize the sugar they heaped by the palmful on their pots of creme brulée. We shared a whole turbot and salad and vegetables and a bottle of white albariño and then trekked back to Porto, nearly seven miles along the public walkway that traversed the beach and the Atlantic ocean with surf schools and parks and sculptures and restaurants and students promenading and the old men playing cards and barbecuing and drinking wine in the late autumn sunshine.

The restaurant of my dreams, which I will never open, will have checkered table cloths (red and white or blue and white, they just must be checkered). And it will be small enough so that everyone has a view of the kitchen or drink prepping stations, as watching food workers performing their arts is, to my mind, almost as satisfying as eating a great meal. Maybe it will be named Fibonacci, a word and concept that I love because it describes all the principles that would shape the food sourcing and preparation and restaurant operations, accounting for all terrestrial and celestial and other cosmic cycles and ensuring that any leftovers would be optimized and accounted for with little to no waste. Of course the name Fibonacci has most probably long since been taken which is another reason why this restaurant will never open.

As we head toward Pamplona, Hemingway is not farm from my mind. After a little research I found that “a moveable feast” was a reference to a saying for “a holy day for which the day was not fixed.” Camus wrote in The Stranger that “Masson remarked that we’d had a very early lunch, but really lunch was a moveable feast, one had it when one felt like it.”

We are blessed. Exploring without obligation, one meal blending subtlety into the next, trying to make the most without overdoing, the best always shared with others or outside in some unexpected stop along the way with the rocks and the sun and just what we are carrying and wanting for nothing more, wandering amidst the wonder.