Most memorable meals, take three: giving thanks

“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”

—M. F. K. Fisher

The day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all still riding that tryptophan high, seems like an appropriate time to resume our occasional series of posts on our most memorable meals.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, in part because it’s all about the eating with none of the anxiety that gift-giving can inspire. And I love all that traditional Thanksgiving food: the turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, biscuits, pumpkin pie....

This year, however, Heather announced that we would be forgoing the traditional turkey in favor of one of Madroño’s many wild hogs roasted in a pit—though after that announcement occasioned howls of outrage from daughter Lizzie, Heather crumbled and bought a turkey after all, just for the sake of peace in the family.

Whatever. Thanksgiving is at least as much about the side dishes (dressing, potatoes, biscuits, vegetables) and desserts (pies—oh, my Lord, the pies!) as it is about the turkey. Rest assured that no one in our house went hungry yesterday—that’s an artist’s rendering of us in the picture above, by the way—though I confess that I’m glad to have the turkey, to indulge my annual quest for the Platonic ideal of the turkey sandwich. (We did bury half a pig in coals on Thanksgiving afternoon, however, and dug it up at 10 o’clock last night; looks like we’ll be snacking on turkey and pig sandwiches for a while.)

Even more than it is about the food, though (and you’ll just have to trust me on this), Thanksgiving is actually about the fellowship. It seems to be the one major national holiday when there’s no anxiety about gift-giving, piety, or political correctness to distract or annoy us. We come together around the table with family and friends, and sometimes even with strangers, and we share food and drink and maybe a little football talk, and then we stagger off to the floor or sofa or even bed to lie down and groan for a while, and then we get up and try to sneak back in for maybe just one more little piece of pie.... Okay, okay, maybe it really is all about the food.

But on Thanksgiving that food takes on a deeper symbolic value than it does for most of the rest of the year; on Thanksgiving that quotation above from Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is truer than ever. On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year, when the exigencies of jobs, schoolwork, the finals of Dancing with the Stars, and other responsibilities make the preparation and consumption of food little more than an afterthought. (TV Dinners, anyone?)

Indeed, the thoughtful and conscious preparation and consumption of food was one of the prime inspirations for what we hope to accomplish at Madroño Ranch: gathering bright, creative people together around the table for nourishment both physical and intellectual. You could almost say that we hope to make every meal at Madroño a sort of Thanksgiving dinner, except that some of us would quickly weigh 300 pounds.

But you’re wondering when I’m finally going to get to that memorable meal, aren’t you? Okay, here it comes. It was a Thanksgiving during college. As I wrote in a previous post, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but went to college in western Massachusetts. In those days, largely for financial reasons, I made the long flight to and from home only for Christmas break (which usually meant spending endless hours in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as winter snows played havoc with flight schedules) and summer vacation.

One of my college classmates was a “townie”; his family lived and worked on a farm several miles from campus, and he invited several of us who weren’t going home for the holiday to Thanksgiving dinner with them.

Honestly, after thirty-two years, I don’t actually remember what we ate that night. It was sturdy, simple farmhouse fare, and I’m pretty sure it included all the usual suspects: turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, and probably yams, and peas with pearl onions, and no doubt there was pie—pumpkin and perhaps several others—for dessert. I don’t even remember how many of us gathered around that well-laden farmhouse table; I think there must have been about a dozen, what with the family and us temporary orphans.

But I do remember the feeling of being thought of, and taken care of. The warmth of knowing that, while I might be thousands of miles from home, I was still welcome at someone’s table. Every Thanksgiving dinner, when people gather with loved ones, or with strangers, to enjoy the abundance of nature transmogrified by the loving care of heat and spice and assembly, is a homecoming in miniature. At that farmhouse in Williamstown I was, if only temporarily, a part of a family again.

I hope I had the good grace to send a thank-you note to my friend’s mother, but I was a callow and self-centered college student, and I suspect I didn’t. This belated acknowledgment hardly makes up for my youthful lack of manners, but Mrs. Burdick, if you’re out there, I want you to know that your generosity made an indelible impression on me, even if I didn’t properly acknowledge it at the time. I will never be able to give thanks enough for that wonderful meal, or for your kindness in inviting us to share it.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (again!)
Martin: Marissa Guggiana, Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers

Most memorable meals, take two: a lobster tale

We’re in England and off the grid this week, but we have spared no expense in securing the services of a guest blogger, the lovely and talented Elizabeth Kohout. In this post, the second in what we hope will be an occasional series, Elizabeth relates the chilling tale of her first confrontation with one of New England’s most emblematic (and frightening) foods.

I’ve liked crustaceans (with one notable exception, which I’ll get to later) my entire life.

This initially manifested itself as a deep affection for Sebastian, the crab from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, possibly because my father does an excellent imitation of him and possibly because he stars in one of the greatest animated sequences of all time. Then, somewhere around third grade, I became the proud owner of a hermit crab, Scout, who liked to clamp herself to my t-shirt while I did homework. This ownership was joyful but brief, as Scout met an ultimately tragic end when a certain mother (who shall remain unnamed) failed to regulate a certain sister (ditto), who thought it would be a great idea to release Scout underneath the stove. We found her shell and her poor, desiccated body (Scout’s, that is, not my sister’s) beneath the stove four or five years later when we moved out of that house.

At this juncture, I began to shift my attention from caring for crustaceans to eating them, a pursuit I have found to be infinitely more rewarding. Our neighbors had an annual mudbug party, in which the entire neighborhood descended on their house to talk, drink coke or beer (depending on one's age), shriek and chase each other around with the live crawfish (not necessarily depending on one's age), supervise the boiling of said crawfish, and eat a possibly unhealthy amount of boiled crawfish. (We also spent a lot of time shooing their enormous dogs away from the food.) Beyond mudbugs, I developed a deep and abiding affection for shrimp (especially from this place), crab cakes, and squid (SQUID!), which I realize is not a crustacean but still falls under the seafood umbrella so I’m including it anyway.

Lobster, however, is a different story. I have a very fraught relationship with lobster. It began when I was quite young and pitched a fit in the grocery store because I wanted to visit the “yobsiss” and my mother wouldn’t comply because she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Several years of speech therapy later, I was able to say the word “lobster” like a normal person, but no longer had any particular interest in talking about them. Aside from appreciating the lobster cooking scene in Annie Hall, I think it’s safe to say I didn’t really think about lobsters for most of my adolescence. I certainly didn’t encounter many in land-locked Austin, Texas.

But then I went to a fancy liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where, every fall, the dining halls outdo themselves and cook up a really lovely and highly anticipated meal, the Harvest Dinner. We spoiled-rotten students got to dine on seasonal roasted vegetables, local greens, pumpkin and apple pies, and other edible autumnal delights. Oh, and lobster. That’s right, lobster. My freshman year, I queued up with my friends and picked up a ticket to get my lobster. We all went through the buffet line, marveling at the bounty laid out before us; I turned my ticket in to pick up my lobster and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head when one of the dining hall ladies plunked a giant red beast down on my plate. I lugged my laden tray to the table my friends had staked out, and as I sat down I realized that none of them had picked up a lobster. I had absolutely no idea how to eat the strange animal sitting in front of me and was embarrassed to ask, so I decided to play it cool and slowly ate all the food piled around it. Then I got freaked out by its unwavering, empty gaze and put a spinach leaf over its head when I thought no one was looking:

It turns out my friend Lilly was, in fact, not only looking at me but also armed with a camera phone. She burst into hysterical laughter, which then spread around the table, and captured the moment for posterity (see above). Once everyone had stopped laughing with (at?) me, the conversation drifted into lobster-related eating adventures. I tried to look like I, too, had spent my summers in Maine or other parts of the country where eating scary-looking armored animals is totally normal. Finally my friend Noah realized I was way out of my element and patiently coached me through dismantling and devouring the creature. My memory about this part of the meal is mercifully vague: I know that I squirted Noah and at least one other person in the face with lobster juice and that no one told me I was supposed to get melted butter, so once I finally got to the lobster meat, it tasted like mild, meaty salt water—not bad, but not amazing either. I wondered what all the fuss was about.

After dinner, we walked back across campus to our dorm. At some point, I paused for a moment. The sky was velvety and spangled with stars; the air was fresh and cold, and I thought there would probably be frost on the ground when I went to my English class the next morning. Anticipating the crunch of frozen grass underfoot reminded me again of the puzzling meal I’d just eaten. I thought about how odd New England is, how strangers don’t smile if they catch each other’s eye, how trees light up the hillsides with leafy flames, how even the mildest salsa causes people to whimper and fan their mouths, but they think nothing of boiling alive and then eating what essentially amounts to a living dinosaur for dinner. Then I ran to catch up with my friends.

—Elizabeth

What we’re reading
Heather: Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (again)
Martin: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Most memorable meals, take one: fire in the hole!

The other night, inspired by a typically wonderful dinner at Texas French Bread, my Best Gal and I got to talking about our favorite meals ever, and what made them so. Eventually, we decided that it might be interesting to write about some of our most memorable meals. Since it happened to be my turn to grind out our weekly post, I got to go first, but we hope to turn this into an occasional series. Stay tuned!

For the purposes of our discussion, I arbitrarily ruled out meals that Heather, an amazing cook in her own right, had made at home, which knocked out a bunch of contenders: her pork posole, her made-from-scratch pizza baked in the wood-burning oven in the backyard, her weapons-grade ratatouille, her charcoal-grilled bison-lamb burgers with all the fixin’s, and so on.

With those delectable meals off the table, so to speak, my thoughts turned immediately to the tagine we enjoyed on the pillow-strewn rooftop of an inn in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, and the tortelli at that trattoria (I can’t even remember its name) we blundered into by pure chance near the Duomo di San Martino in Lucca. Less exotically, I remembered wonderful meals at Higgins, in downtown Portland, Oregon; at Delfina and Swan Oyster Depot, in San Francisco; and at Savoy, in New York’s Soho.

Closer to home, I fondly recalled the burgers and Shypoke Eggs (actually a form of trompe l’oeil nachos) at the late lamented Little Hipp’s in San Antonio. And then there was that “Whole Hog” dinner prepared by Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due last year: seven incredibly delicious courses, each featuring some form of pork—even dessert, which was beignets fried in pork lard. (Oops! Please excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard.)

Somewhat disconcertingly for a couple of self-styled foodies, though, we found that we could rarely remember the dishes that made up these meals in much detail. Rather, what we tended to recall was the setting, and the company, and other such trivia. Not that the food wasn’t important, of course; but we concluded that it takes more than merely wonderful food to make a truly memorable meal. When it all comes together, there is something magical about the combination of the flavor and texture and smell of the food, and the comfort of the setting in which it is served, and true ease and delight in the presence of one’s companions (and what a wonderfully evocative word companion is, deriving from the Latin “with bread”—literally, one with whom you would break bread).

Or, alternately, a truly memorable meal might just involve intense pain and suffering, like the one I’m about to describe. Almost thirty years ago, during the summer after we graduated from college, we set off on a 4,500-mile road trip from Massachusetts to San Francisco and then back to San Antonio—all in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel hatchback, nicknamed Pollo for reasons now lost in the mists of time.

It was an eventful journey—in New Orleans someone busted in one of Pollo’s windows and made off with everything we owned, including the all-important cooler full of cold beverages, and in San Francisco each of my parents had an, um, entertaining reaction to my newly pierced ear—but in some ways the high point occurred as we were making our way back to Texas in July.

We’d been following Interstate 40 eastward, but we had an early edition of Jane and Michael Stern’s book Roadfood in which we read about this Mexican joint in the dusty little town of Socorro, New Mexico, and even though Socorro was some seventy-five miles out of our way we decided (ah, youth!) that it would be worth the detour.

We reached Socorro at the height of the scorching mid-afternoon heat and found the restaurant, next to the railroad tracks and surrounded by chickens, without too much trouble. It was almost completely deserted, in that dead time between the lunch and dinner crowds, and as we walked to our table we caught a brief glimpse of an enormous black cast-iron stove in the kitchen, surrounded by a swarm of diminutive elderly women in black.

Heather ordered… I don’t know; enchiladas or something. I ordered the tamales with salsa verde, I can’t remember why; perhaps the book recommended them? We sipped our iced tea while the women in the kitchen got busy; when the food arrived, it looked and smelled fabulous. We both dug in enthusiastically, and almost immediately I realized I was in waaaaay over my head.

The tamales were wonderful, but that verde sauce... oh, my God. It’s still probably the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten. My body’s alarm bells started clanging, the warning lights began flashing; my forehead, and then my scalp and neck and upper body, started pouring sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.

Soon my T-shirt was soaked; still the heat kept building. I drained several glasses of iced tea, to little effect. I noticed that all the women who worked in the kitchen had come out to watch me; they stood in the doorway, pointing and giggling, like a gaggle of highly amused crows.

Somehow I made it all the way through the tamales, then, trying to marshal my last shreds of dignity, stood up, marched out to the car, and changed my sopping wet T-shirt. Did the women applaud when I returned? I can’t remember, though they certainly should have. I’ve had many fiery meals since then, but none could compare to that one. Fortunately, my youthful constitution absorbed the dreadful punishment with no long-term ill effects, and we went on our way to Texas.

Yeah, that was a memorable meal, all right. Won’t you tell us about some of yours?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Martin: Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America