Oh, the daze in which I queued through immigration, picked up luggage, waited for cabs to be hailed, climbed in, pointed when I saw it, and ran, ran, ran out into the rain …
‘Won’t it be closed?’ asked my mother. ‘It’s quarter past nine.’
‘Closed?’ I called back as I pushed open the door. ‘Nothing closes in America. Not even at midnight!’
God, I remember the big pink face of the girl who took my order—I even think I remember that she was called Dana—and her thick, syrupy accent, and her failure at first to understand mine. And I remember the warmth of the fresh new burger in the beige polystyrene box (I miss those boxes: like tea in bone china, a Big Mac is most advantageously served on polystyrene—these new papery ones just won’t do, they don’t insulate the food properly, they allow it to cool and they lend it a mulchy, cellulose taste that I find cloying) and I remember the heat and steam as I popped it open and the nutty whiff of sesame; the softness as my teeth sank in to the point where childish incisor cracked the toasted surface and sank through air and bleached flour and a little bit of gypsum; then shredded lettuce, diced onion, crinkle-sliced pickled cucumber with that tell-tale whiff of dill (even now, the merest suggestion of dill in, say, a sauce for gravlax, just screams ‘Big Mac!’ at me); then ‘special sauce’, sweet, tangy, ever-so-slightly petrolly; then cheese, sort of, tacky if properly melted, no dairy flavours at all, but a pervasive umami that binds all the elements together; then meat, grey-black, sweaty … and there, as ever, the sadness began to set in.
After the first sugar rush, the descent. The post–Big Mac tristesse which becomes almost a wave of grief as you chew the last cold mouthful and toss the empty, ridiculously light box into the flapping bin at the door, and experience once again that aftermath of the triumph of expectation over reality.
And then jetlag sleep for what felt like days.
After that, everything began to look up. To begin with, we had scored from McDonald’s (my baby sister and I) little plastic figurines of Ronald McDonald and a character called the Hamburglar and a purple thing called Grimace that were as yet unknown in Britain and would ensure copious kudos points back home. Not to mention the opportunity to report that Big Macs here tasted very slightly different. Only very slightly, but enough to be noticed by a ten-year-old’s hypersensitive virgin palate. And as Vincent Vega says, ‘It’s the little differences … I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it’s just … it’s just, there it’s a little different.’
For example, the Raisin Bran which room service sent up on our first morning in the Orlando motel where we were staying: my mum and dad in one room, my sister and me in the other, alone with a phone and our first ever American room service menu.
Back home, we had Sultana Bran. It was my favourite cereal, but it was not without its failings. For the flakes were much thicker and harder in Sultana Bran than they were in Bran Flakes, for no reason I could ever ascertain, less malty, less inclined to mulch nicely with the delicious cold, silver-top milk the Unigate man brought every morning in tall glass bottles. And sultanas were all very well, but they were not as sweet and rich and treacly as raisins. Why did nobody see this apart from me?
Except someone did. The whole of America did! Oh, what a cereal this was: genuine Bran Flakes with tarry black raisins, not overbaked multi-grain crossover flakes with shrivelled green grapes. No wonder Superman and Batman chose to live here and not in shitty old England.
And then after the cereal, waffles. And pancakes. Not lame-o flat floury pancakes like on Shrove Tuesday but thick fluffy pancakes, with maple syrup and crispy bacon. Here, bacon was not piggy and wet and bendy but properly crisped, to a point where it was commensurate with man’s capacity for wonder. And you were allowed syrup on it. Crispy bacon with maple syrup. Pudding at the same time as your main. Sweetness and savoury together. No waiting required. Where was the moral lesson in that?
Exactly. Nowhere. In America, you just ate whatever you wanted to, whenever you wanted to. And nobody had a word to say about it. So we ordered hamburgers to the room, with Coca-Cola, in the middle of the night. And chips. And ate them. And nothing bad happened to us. Once, we even asked for Vimto to see what the telephone guy would say. He said he would do his best to find something like it. Could we please describe it to him? But we couldn’t. Who could? All we could do was giggle.
And when we couldn’t wait for room service, we ran out into the corridor and bought food from the vending machine by the lifts. Food from a machine! The thing I remember best from there is Cheetos—slightly disappointing compared to a Wotsit, but exotic too, in their slight grittiness, toasty corn notes and bland, less insistent cheesiness.
And while we ate, we watched Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, and a giant talking moose called Bullwinkle. Not Andy bloody black-and-white rubbishy Pandy or some stupid mule, like back in England. And then we went down to the lobby and played ‘Asteroids’, pinging the crap out of polygonal aggressors from a little magically swivelling triangle and trying to remember to hit ‘hyperspace’ whenever things got too hot.
In the end, I hardly recall if we ever got to Disneyworld. I suppose we must have done. But I remember nothing of it at all. What stayed with me forever were the hamburgers and the Raisin Bran, the machine-vended midnight snacks and the pancakes, the bacon and the maple syrup and the …
… wait! Oh no. I forgot to eat a Hostess Twinkie. That was the whole point of going to America: to sample whatever the hell this ‘angel food cake’ was, that was so delicious a legion of costumed superheroes swore by it.
Gradually, as I grew older and left comics behind, I forgot about Hostess Twinkies. And then last year, at the age of forty-two, I found myself in Los Angeles, filming a TV pilot for BBC America and desperate for a smackerel of something round about teatime o’clock. So in a break to reset cameras, I ducked into a small general store and was walking down the line of snack options, mulling over the various horrible pies and hideous granola bars, when I came upon a packet of Hostess Twinkies.
I stopped dead and looked around me. Was I really here? Was I really, finally about to eat one of these things? I looked at the packet and saw no natural ingredients at all. Through the polythene, the two bright yellow food fingers squished under my finger and thumb and then regained their shape like bath sponges. They were not refrigerated because a Twinkie, famously, will last for a hundred years, because it contains no unstabilised dairy proteins.
‘You can’t eat Twinkies!’ yodelled a producer who had wandered in for cigarettes. ‘Those things are gross, nobody eats those.’
And I was about to put them back, when a wormhole opened in the space–time continuum, and the little fellow in his shorts and cap from 1978 was standing there, desperate to know what a Twinkie tasted like, before getting back to his dreams of BB guns and X-ray specs. So I bought the packet, took it out into the California sunshine, and opened it.
I smelled it. It smelled of nothing at all. I bit in and looked down at the remaining chunk in my hand, a spongy, cylindrical yellow-orange carapace around a column of slick, shiny, white cream.
I bit. The carapace yielded like rotten flesh and moved across my palate like old wet carpet, the filling began to coat my gums like some sort of dermatological ointment, there was a mild whine of sugar and a mutter of ‘cheese’ from far, far away. Saliva rushed to the front of my mouth, summoned by hysterical, traumatised tastebuds. My tongue caught in my throat. My uvula trembled. My stomach heaved …
This, without question—and bollocks to Batman—was the most disgusting thing I had ever, ever eaten. Ever. In all my born days.
Apart, perhaps, from a Birds Eye beef burger.
FRANCINE PROSE is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of a James Beard Award for an essay she contributed to Saveur magazine.
WE’LL HAVE THE CASSOULET
Francine Prose
; Everyone knows that the holidays can turn up the heat under simmering family tensions and cause them to boil over—sometimes with volcanic results. But for some reason I’d never expected to experience that sort of domestic eruption in a foreign country, involving someone else’s family, a mini-disaster that exploded beyond the domestic dinner table to consume a restaurant kitchen.
I’d gone with my husband, our two sons, and my mother to spend Christmas in the south of France. This was in the early 1990s; my sons were entering adolescence. We’d planned to take part in all the elegant (the multicourse Christmas Eve dinner with its traditional thirteen desserts) and the funky, folkloric: the midnight mass, complete with sheep, at the church in Les Baux-de-Provence. Customs with which the region celebrated the season.
French friends who summered in the area told us about a small town—the name escapes me now—not far from Les Baux. There was a Nativity pageant that local people and their kids put on, every Sunday afternoon in December, at the high school. Very simple, very touching, and for the moment undiscovered by the tourists and Parisians in mink coats who crowded the chapel for the midnight mass in Les Baux.
Better yet, there was a fabulous restaurant just across the street from the school, the kind of place that had already begun to disappear: small, family-run, unpretentious, not expensive, serving only a few marvelous, perfectly prepared dishes. In other words, the fantasy French small-town bistro. The kind of place where local families went after Sunday mass. We could go for lunch there before the Nativity play. No reservations needed. Who knew if they had a phone.
The restaurant was exactly where—and the way—our friends had described. When we got there, the owner and his wife were serving early lunch to a few multi-generational French families who did in fact look as if they’d come from mass.
A simple place, nothing fancy. But someone obviously cared about the details: the dishes, the cutlery, the linen. It smelled like garlic and olive oil. Delicious. We were overjoyed.
The drive there had taken longer than we’d thought, and we were all hungry. And when you travel with kids, even older kids, it’s hard to relax when they’re hungry. Everybody just be patient!
The middle-aged owner (moustache, plump, thinning hair, big smile) stepped straight out of a Marcel Pagnol film from the 1930s to greet us and showed us to a table. He apologized. He had things to do, and he disappeared into the kitchen.
A waitress (his wife, it seemed clear) brought us a basket of delicious bread and a dish of olives. She was blonde and looked like a Provençal country-western singer.
We studied the menu, which, as promised, was small and appealing, but large enough so that (this was my idea) we could all order different things and taste one another’s food. We would only be there once, so why not have the full experience?
My sons said, ‘Tripe? Disgusting.’ We could have whatever we wanted. They were having the steak frites.
Fine, I said. Whatever. No one had to eat tripe.
When the waitress returned to take her orders, she kept glancing back at the kitchen.
I’m not sure I would have been so attuned to the signs of kitchen meltdown if I hadn’t been around for a few in the past. Scenes were part of the drama at the cooking school near our house, where you could eat delicious French food and watch, behind a window, chefs reducing culinary students to tears.
The first wood-fired pizza place in our town in upstate New York was opened by two brothers, and the wife of one. On the first night they were in business, one brother hit the other over the head with a skillet and sent him to the emergency room.
After that it was just the one guy and his wife. They had a mural painted of themselves looking out on a Tuscan landscape. Until one night we went there and noticed that the husband had been painted out of the mural.
In any case, I felt something familiar in the air of the restaurant in Provence. A sort of sonic rumble. The calm before the you-know-what.
Maybe I was imagining it. I decided to think that I was.
We ordered soups and salads, then the veal stew, the roast duck, the goose. Two orders of steak frites. The waitress wrote down what we wanted, and, with a hasty glance at the kitchen, vanished through the swinging door.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty. The waitress brought more olives. So far, okay, it was fine. This was what you expected if you ate at places that hadn’t yet discovered what a microwave could do to food.
Another five minutes, maybe more. One by one, the French families left. Were they looking at us that way because they knew something we didn’t, or was it just that we were strangers and they were curious why we were there?
They all knew how long we’d been waiting. We asked, What’s going on? They shrugged and smiled. We were strangers. If they knew anything, they didn’t have to tell us.
The last French family had been gone for a few more minutes when we heard a man shouting, really loud, from the kitchen, phrases that were way beyond my college French. There was some thudding of things against walls, and breaking. Now the woman was yelling too. No one seemed to have been hurt.
We looked at each other. Now what?
The owner slammed through the doors so hard and fast he seemed to levitate slightly off the ground. He passed us without seeing us. He didn’t care how long we’d waited. We were not his problem. The front door banged shut behind him. Facing the window, I watched him get into his car and drive off.
Probably we should have left. I don’t know why we stayed. To see what would happen next, I guess. And also: we’d ordered lunch! I didn’t remember seeing any other places to eat nearby. It was Sunday afternoon, it was starting to snow. The Nativity play was supposed to start in just over an hour. We were hungry!
A nervous young man I hadn’t seen before opened the kitchen door and looked out. He saw us and seemed even more nervous than he’d been before. After a while the waitress reappeared. Her eye makeup was blurry, but otherwise she was okay. Obviously, she knew that we had heard and seen her husband leave. So it was an awkward moment.
She said she was sorry, they didn’t have anything we’d ordered. Not the duck, not the veal, not the steak frites. Rien du tout.
My mother said, ‘So okay, what do you have?’ It struck me as the kind of question that, under the circumstances, only a sweet little old lady could get away with asking.
The waitress looked startled.
‘Cassoulet,’ she said.
‘What’s cassoulet?’ asked our sons.
‘Franks and beans,’ we said. ‘You’ll like it.’ They asked how I knew they’d like it. I said I knew.
‘Fine,’ I told the waitress. ‘We’ll have the cassoulet.’
‘Ten minutes,’ she said.
‘We’ve got an hour until the play,’ I said.
‘Who cares about that?’ said my mother.
Was it really a great cassoulet? The greatest cassoulet ever? I remember that it was. I remember thinking that it made sense the dish she had on hand, and could give us, was one of those foods that got better, a day or a few days later.
Every bean was a masterpiece. The chunks of sausage were sublime. I’d thought I’d known something about duck confit, but until now I’d known nothing. I’d been a cassoulet virgin. Our dishes were topped with a breadcrumb crust that crumbled into the sauce from the beans.
Our sons ate it all. They loved it. My mother couldn’t finish hers, and divided what was left between her two growing grandsons.
We asked for our bill. How reasonable! We paid. We thanked the waitress a dozen times. My husband left a giant tip, though we knew that a lot of French people didn’t tip at all.
We got to the school auditorium in time to see the Nativity play, which was sweet and touching. But by then I’d been to years of school plays, and no matter how pretty the little French angels were, how tender the little boy shepherds, I couldn’t stay interested for all that long in someone else’s kid’s school play.
What we took away from the day was a re
newed and lifelong respect for cassoulet. The food of dependability. The food of better-the-next-day, of even better the day after that. The food of many flavors melding into one. The pops and bursts of each mouthful of beans, the fattiness of the sausage and duck, the salty, dark, crumbly crust. The food of warmth on a winter’s day. The food of Sunday afternoons. The food of: Your husband has just walked out the door, and there’s nothing else in the kitchen.
Let me be clear about one thing. I would rather have spared the wife the unpleasantness of what had just happened. I would have skipped our fabulous cassoulet if the Sunday afternoon hadn’t exploded. But we weren’t the cause of it, we were just the witnesses, and in a way, I guess, its beneficiaries. We ate what was in the kitchen, and paid our bill and left.
Did the couple reconcile? Did they split up forever? Did he drive away and never come back, or did this happen every Sunday? Which possibility would have been worse?
I have no explanation, or any way of knowing. All I have is a partial memory of the human drama of that afternoon alongside a much more pleasant and ever so slightly guilty memory of the food.
SANDI TAN was born in Singapore, educated in the United Kingdom and at Columbia University, and lives in Pasadena, California. A former journalist and filmmaker, her debut novel The Black Isle was published in 2012. To find out more visit sanditan.com.
THE GOOD WITCH
Sandi Tan
On the day I was born, my father gave me up to his mother. I state this not to elicit pity or envy, but only to establish how I was torn between two cultures from the very beginning: father and grandmother (three, if counting my mother, but she was kept out of the picture). Duality had always informed me and so, too, adaptability: I would be equally uncomfortable everywhere.
My grandmother’s house in leafy early-1980s Singapore was all custom Knoll replicas, deep-pile silk rugs, some books, servants. My father, in contrast, was an angry guy with a perm who drove his MG Roadster way too fast—no house, no books, no servants, and whenever he laughed it was most likely at his own fart jokes. His favorite word was ‘bugger’, used as a noun, never as a verb—that’s sick, man!
A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Page 2
