Food V

            Another life-changing food experience was our first trip to Spain in 1983. I started keeping a journal during this trip.  Katharine and I took a swing north from Madrid through Leon, Cantabria and the Rioja and then back to Madrid.  Later we were joined by three close friends for a drive down through La Mancha to Jaen and then on to Córdoba, Seville, Granada and the Mediterranean coast.  My journal records sightseeing, but it mostly talks about what we ate.  And the meals were worth recording.  It was my first exposure to many foods: my first baby eels, eaten as a first course for lunch in the basement comedor of the Alfonso XIII Hotel in Seville (eels Bilbao, with garlic and a trace of peppers), my first suckling pig, at Botín in Madrid, a restaurant famous for the dish.  At El Caballo Rojo in Córdoba I had my first taste of the meaty vegetable from the thistle plant, cardos, or cardoons in English.  Cardos are the bottoms of the European wild thistle, Cynara cardunculus, like a miniature artichoke heart, sweet and tender, served in this case in a cream sauce flavored with jamón serrano.  “Cardoons with ham’s cream” was the quaint translation on the menu for the English-only speaker.  Cardoons sounds distinctly Scotch, and I suppose Scotland is known for its thistles, but the cultivated cardunculus is a southern European phenomenon.  Other foods that I had disdained before, I found prepared in magical ways on this trip.  The homely eggplant in the hands of a cook in Almagro became a savory appetizer; elsewhere, prepared with ham or with cheese it had inspired the sixteenth-century poet Baltasar del Alcázar to sing its praises.  Spinach, never a favorite of mine, was transformed by sautéing with a little olive oil and pine nuts into a delicious side dish. In a marisquería in Madrid’s tapas zone around the Plaza Victoria my friend David Earnest introduced me to percebes, goose barnacles, steamed and requiring a fair amount of unwrapping of tough hide to get to the tender meat, juicy, salty, and with the slightest hint of iodine. The many novel tastes overwhelmed the other novelties of this trip.

Food IV

            While I was in Europe my parents moved to California. My first artichoke I ate in Huntington Beach, where my parents’ apartment was in a complex across the street from artichoke fields, less than three miles from the beach itself.  Here, too, I had my first taste of Sand Dabs, that delicate Pacific flat fish, usually no more than six inches long, with buttery flesh.  I’ve never seen them in a restaurant away from the California coast. The frog’s legs I ate at Le Petit Moulin in Santa Monica one Christmas vacation I would never have ordered; they were a surprise on the prix fixe dinner: tiny little joints in what must have been a classic poulette sauce of white wine and mushroom stock.

            My next big food revelation came when I married and my wife Katharine and I moved to New Orleans in 1970. I know that my first encounter with whole Blue Crabs was in our first days there, at the lakeshore restaurant called Fitzgerald’s—gone even before we left the city in 1976.  Katharine waited patiently, having already finished her own dinner, while I worked slowly and awkwardly through a dozen of them.  Later I learned faster techniques from the locals.

            Our first batch of whole boiled crayfish came at the French Quarter apartment of Bill McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy’s brother, who taught with us at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, later renamed the University of New Orleans.  Pounds of heaped, steaming crayfish at the center of a newspaper-covered table, with bowls of red beans and rice on the side, and a technique considerably simpler than that for Blue Crabs: pull off the head and suck its juices; put a thumb on each side of the projecting tail shell from the bottom and push with the fingers, cracking the tail open.  Learning the speedy separation of a crayfish tail from its shell gives almost as much pleasure as eating the little morsels.

Where did I have my first oyster?  I can’t recall, but when Katharine and I moved to New Orleans in 1970 I had already developed a taste for them, and sometimes made a lunch of a couple of dozen with saltines and a Jax beer—made down on Decatur Street until the brewery was closed in our third year in town.             I often went on oyster hops, eating two or three dozen at several places such as the Acme, Felix’s across the street, and the Desire Oyster Bar on Bourbon.  As I have said, one can make a meal of two dozen oysters, eight or ten soda crackers, and a couple of beers that will now have to be Dixie, since the Jax brewery is closed.  I have eaten eight or nine dozen without feeling I had overdone it.