The Vinyl Café Notebooks

by Stuart McLean

  23 January 2004

  WATERMELON

  The Elizabethans, I have read, used to believe in something they called a “world order.” This was a formal and strict hierarchy of the world’s beings and things, a hierarchy that “began with the angels and ended with the ants,” everything carefully sorted from the top to bottom. Elizabethans, who didn’t have Paris Hilton to preoccupy them, spent a lot of time arguing about the sorting, trying to arrive at a consensus of where every little and large thing fit, which might seem like a trivial pursuit to you but was important business to an Elizabethan, given the fact that they believed if anything ever moved out of its order—say, for instance, a peasant was to become a king—then the world would tumble into chaos.

  In these democratic days we live in, the order of things has become more fluid. Relativism is the password of the era, and the idea there might be a world order we could all agree on has long faded to black. Or, more to the point, from the public to the private. Because, like it or not, we are all at heart Elizabethans. We go to the polling booth when we are called to, but deep in our souls we all carry around our private sense of where things fit in the world. But I would put forward that one of the true delights of life is those moments when your sense of order and where things fit is turned upside down. Which is why, of course, we all want to bet on the underdog or can’t help watching when some holier-than-thou preacher is hoisted on his own petard.

  A few weeks ago, as you have probably guessed by now, my sense of order was sent for a loop. I am still reeling. It came, as bad news so often does, or used to anyway, with the morning mail. An item in a magazine I subscribe to, a magazine whose job it is to keep me on the cutting edge of things. And in this issue, on the cutting edge of things nutritional.

  The article was simple enough. The editors had developed a scale on which to rank and sort, according to their nutritional value, all the fruits of the world. Something any God-fearing Elizabethan would be happy to read about.

  They used six variables, including the amount of vitamin C, fibre, potassium, folacin and those pesky little carotenoids. I settled down to study the results, and I’ll admit it, I settled down a little smugly, thinking to myself, I know the answer to this. The blueberry, I thought, is the most nutritious fruit in the world.

  Not even close. Blueberry ranked number 23 on the list, with a total score of 59, well behind all the gold-medal fruits like the mango, which got a score of 97, or the grapefruit, which came in at 110, or the cantaloupe at 204. Impressive, yes, but in a whole different universe than the winner, which scored 424 on the scale—who guessed guava?

  Guava is not an answer that would ever have occurred to me. I haven’t, to my knowledge, ever eaten a guava. Nor have I examined one with curiosity in the produce section of my local grocer. I haven’t eaten, haven’t touched, haven’t even seen a guava. To be honest, I wouldn’t know a guava if it fell from a tree and hit me on the head, or rolled out from under a bush, or tumbled from a vine, or whatever guavas do.

  But it didn’t totally surprise me, it didn’t shock me that something as strange, and rare, and exotic as a guava was the silver bullet of health; what knocked me for a loop was the fruit that came in second.

  The fruit that edged out the grapefruit, and papaya, and the kiwi, and the cantaloupe, and the blackberry, and what am I saying? It didn’t edge them out. It demolished them. The blackberry, for instance, which I had been thinking was a virtual antioxidant nuclear bomb, only scored 124 points on this scale. The fruit that came second place had 311 points. That’s more than double. And the fruit that came in second place was the watermelon.

  Don’t get me wrong.

  I love watermelon. But I have always felt it was no more than coloured sugar water. Nature’s Kool-Aid, as it were. And now I read that two cups of watermelon have the same amount of fibre as two slices of pineapple. If you would have asked me a week ago, I would have told you the only way to get fibre from a watermelon would be to eat the rind. (Pineapple, by the way, received 47 nutritional points.) But watermelon’s real boasting rights are its high levels of lycopene—a proven cancer-fighting agent.

  There were other shockers on the list. The papaya outstripped the orange. Persimmons trumped bananas, and most shockingly, the apple, the apple of fame and folklore, came in a dismal 33rd in the rankings, after rhubarb, for heaven’s sake.

  And this was when my view of the world began to totter, and I began to wonder if maybe my entire food choice system was misguided. If I could be so wrong about watermelon, what other nutritional crimes was I committing out of ignorance?

  Maybe I should be eating more doughnuts. Maybe two cups of coffee a day is not enough. Maybe I should have started smoking at fourteen like all my friends said.

  All I can say with certainty is that it’s pretty clear I haven’t been eating enough watermelon—which is understandable.

  It isn’t the most convenient of fruits. You can’t throw a slab of watermelon in your backpack in case you get hungry on your way to work. And it is a fridge hog. Even a modest watermelon will fill an entire fruit drawer, and not leave room for, well, even a guava. You pretty much have to own a car to transport a sizable watermelon home from the grocery store. You are not likely to pick one up on a whim when you are out for an evening stroll. Buying a watermelon, unlike, say, buying a nectarine (39 points), is a commitment.

  And it isn’t exactly versatile. You will not, in the depths of winter when fresh watermelons are scarce, find cans of watermelon chunks with the other canned fruits. There is no such thing as fresh frozen watermelon, or jars of watermelon sauce, homemade or otherwise. And I can’t imagine the wretchedness of attempting to make, or eat, a watermelon pie. Furthermore, if there is such a thing as fresh squeezed, un-reconstituted watermelon juice, I have yet to hear of it.

  At www.watermelon.org you can find the National Watermelon Promotion Board and download an impressive list of watermelon recipes if you feel so inclined—like grilled watermelon cheddar burgers or watermelon stir-fry with chicken and capers.

  Misguided, I would say.

  I would like to put forward that the watermelon’s drawbacks are its strengths. They aren’t shoved into every muffin or cake like the ubiquitous raisin. They are somewhat of a rarity. A transient portent of good things to come. A sign of summer. When huge cardboard boxes filled to the brim with the enormous, unlikely fruit show up in the grocery store, they signal the beginning of hot, lazy days. Like summer, melons are fleeting. Those boxes won’t be there for long.

  You have about two months to indulge in as much lycopene as you want. What are you waiting for?

  As the famed tenor Enrico Caruso once said, “Watermelon. It’s a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face.”

  12 June 2005

  ODE TO THE POTATO

  My ode to the potato,

  that humble little tuber,

  which looks like a hippopotamus

  or something rather ruder

  if you leave it in a bag, that is,

  instead of in the pot,

  and it goes all soft and wrinkly

  and smells like stuff

  I’d rather not talk about

  while standing on this stage,

  for the purpose of my little ode

  is really to engage

  your imagination,

  and your taste buds,

  I’m not here to nag.

  I have come to praise potatoes

  I’m not here to make you gag.

  You can mash them, bash them, put them in a pot.

  You can freeze them, or fry them,

  you can eat them cold or hot.

  They’re not mentioned in the bible.

  Yes, that makes some folks wary.

  And they are high in glyco-alkaloids

  and that can make them scary,

  causing headaches, cramps, comas

  and in rare cases death.

  But there’s something else they cause,

>   I should mention in this breath:

  sheer delight

  if you slice them long and thin

  and fry them up in oil.

  Oh, let the sin begin.

  I am talking of the French fry,

  sprinkled liberally with salt.

  I would die for French fries.

  Is there anyone who’d not?

  The humble pomme de terre,

  the apple of my eye,

  drenched in dill and butter,

  or a sour creamy sigh.

  A generous bowl of gnocchi,

  a steaming bowl of soup,

  a loaf of bread,

  potato head,

  a most congenial root.

  I knew a woman once who grew one in the shape of a duck. She was living with a certain man, who planted her potatoes for her that spring. But she had a new man living with her in the fall when it was time to dig her potatoes. As she watched him, through the kitchen window, working the garden, the clothes snapping on her clothesline in the wind, she thought to herself, Love can come and go but a potato ... is forever. Oh yes, they endure. Endure indeed they do.

  On the plates of kings,

  the potato sings

  a creamy song of cheese,

  a saucy song of succulence,

  a crispy tune of cheer

  of butter lakes,

  potato cakes,

  pepper grinders,

  parsley flakes.

  Or in a pot,

  a peasant stew,

  a fire of flickering meals,

  the darkening night,

  potato blight,

  an Irish sigh,

  a teary eye.

  One potato, two potato, three potato, four.

  Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.

  And out you must go as fast as your flipper

  flapper floppers can carry you.

  potato feast,

  potato famine,

  boiled alone,

  scalloped with salmon,

  my bud,

  my spud,

  my sweet potato pie,

  my Yukon gold,

  I’m growing old,

  stay with me till I die

  7 September 2008

  THE BAY LEAF

  I have harboured doubts about bay leaves for years. Whenever I have come across one (and I have pulled my fair share of bay leaves out of soups and stews), I have rolled my eyes, either literally or figuratively, privately or publicly, depending on the company, because, well, between you and me, I have never seen the point.

  More to the point, the bay leaf is the only spice that has ever humiliated me. Surely I can’t be the only one who has, on more than one occasion in my case, removed a piece of bay leaf from my mouth and signalled my wait staff, my plate pushed discreetly forward, my head dropped, as I stare at this thing I have worked out of my mouth. Then, as politely as I can manage given the circumstances, allowed that I wouldn’t be finishing my soup or stew or whatever it was, having found this bit of whatever in it. I have handed the wet leaf over in my supercilious way, calculating all the while in my cold little heart the free meal I have undoubtedly scored, only to be told that that little bit of whatever wasn’t whatever at all.

  Maybe I am the only one who has done this?

  But surely it is reasonable to harbour doubts, grave doubts, about a spice that can reasonably be confused with any number of things? Some of them plastic. A bay leaf doesn’t seem to undergo any physical transformation even after bubbling in a pot of beef stew for literally hours—your beef is as tender as beef tends to get, and your bay leaf is still hard and plasticy enough for me to ... to, well, you know what I did.

  It has long been my contention that the bay leaf hangs around the spice rack like a dim relative. The plumber’s helper. The photographer’s assistant. The vice-president of spices. The guy who doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all but is on the payroll just in case. The placebo of the spice rack.

  It has been my belief that a pot of stew without that bay leaf would taste no different, not at all, not one whiff, than the pot with it. Or for that matter, a pot full of them. Go ahead. Double up whatever the recipe calls for and tell me you can tell the difference.

  Try that with garlic. (Garlic, which, incidentally, was worshipped by the Egyptians. And, I would put forward, with good reason.)

  Or try that with cloves. Wars were fought over cloves. Cloves have played a pivotal part in world history.

  Tradition tells us that thyme was in the straw bed of the Christ.

  The only thing I know about bay leaves is that if you keep them in a dark place, they last for years, maybe even lifetimes, with no evidence of change.

  Have you ever tried a bay leaf?

  I did this week.

  I had nothing better to do, and before I knew it, I was standing in front of my spice rack, like a photographer’s assistant, and something came over me ... guilt? Who knows.

  Anyway, I popped one in my mouth, and I can report that slipping a bay leaf into your mouth and letting it marinate there, between your teeth and cheek, for, say, a half an hour, like I did the other afternoon, is not unlike walking on a piney mountaintop with the Aegean Sea stretched below you. At least I think it was the Aegean. It was an azure blue, that’s for sure, and it smelled like pine, although there was also a distant scent of mint on the wind.

  Bay leaves are, it turns out, flavourful in their dry Mediterranean way, and if you give them little nips with your teeth every so often, they release bursts of sappy flavour, not as strong as pine sap, more a memory of sap, with a tingling pineyness and hints of menthol. My leaf put me into a sort of Mediterranean ennui.

  Before long, I was thinking how W.O. Mitchell was known for his snuff, and Mordecai Richler for those nasty little cigars, and wondering if maybe I should be known for something too. And why not for chewing bay leaves?

  I could get a little silver box from Birks or, better, from the Bay, to carry my bay leaves around. A writer needs something like that to make him stick in the public’s mind. And I’m not that big on snuff and cigars.

  Perhaps a bay leaf isn’t like the vice-president in charge of nothing in particular but is, instead, that fellow in the office with the indeterminate title, who despite being overlooked by just about everyone is really the person who gets everything done, who makes everyone else look good.

  The Delphi oracle, I just read on the web, used to sniff the smoke of burning bay leaves to promote her visionary trances. There is a lot to read about the bay leaf if you do a little poking around. It turns out the bay leaf grows on the bay tree. And the bay tree is also known as the laurel tree, and the Greeks used to give laurel garlands to athletes at the Olympics. There is much, it turns out, to recommend bay. A baccalaureate means laurel of berries, and we have poet laureates, and well, bay leaves are my new thing.

  I feel like I owe someone an apology.

  18 May 2008

  CHERRY SEASON 2006

  The all-too-short 2006 cherry season has come and is almost gone where I live.

  These days, when you can get a box of strawberries in the dead of winter, cherries may be the last of the seasonal fruit. They come, around here anyway, during the first few weeks in July.

  And when they come, you know you have to move fast because by the time August arrives, cherries will be long gone. And you can mark me down in favour of that, in case you were wondering.

  Not the going. But the coming and the going. I like to measure the passing of the years with things like that: the return of the warblers, the departure of the geese and, yes, our annual visit to the pick-your-own cherry orchard.

  Cherries may be the most convivial of the summer fruits, the only fruit served communally. Strawberries require individual bowls. Put a single bowl of cherries on a table and one thing is for sure: people are going to hang around.

  And what could be better than hanging around a bowl of cherries with your friends on a summer afternoon? Except ma
ybe cherry-picking.

  A cherry orchard may be the perfect place to while away some of the summer—like all orchards, it’s blessed with the grace of shade; but unlike any other orchard I can think of, a grove of cherry trees has perfected the rhythm of summer. Which is to say that time in a cherry orchard moves languidly. You can pick more apples than you know what to do with in about five minutes. But a bucket of cherries can take hours, and that is about all the work that should be required of anyone on a sunny Sunday in July.

  What could be better than to be sent out to the orchard and told not to come back until your bucket is full, and it is just you and that flock of starlings who are honing in on you like guided missiles, immune, apparently, to the banging of the propane bird clapper? The birds and the berries and the whir of the cicada and, of course, the red stain on your lips and fingers.

  23 July2006

  BOOK BUYING

  I moved, lock, stock and barrel, a year ago; over a year ago, come to think of it, and I still haven’t unpacked the ten cartons of books that are in the basement. I haven’t a hope of unpacking them until autumn at the earliest, and, let’s be honest, that’s not going to happen. I did go through the boxes at Christmas and pulled out the books I wanted to read first, and I have the ones that don’t fit on the bookshelves stacked neatly, more or less, in piles in my bedroom and in the den, and there is a pile in the living room and one in the kitchen (but they are smaller piles), plus the ten boxes in the basement. They were heavy to carry down there. So, I’ve made myself a resolution, a firm and binding resolution that I’m not going to buy another book, not one, until I have read all the ones I have in the piles and gone through the ones in the basement.