A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature)

by Lonely Planet

  Even though I was the one who knew at least a little high school French and Stephan knew none at all, we agreed that he should continue the search alone while I waited with the bags.

  I sank down onto one of the suitcases, feeling woefully conspicuous and worried that I might start sniffling. The past few weeks had had their share of trying moments. To begin with, hypersensitive to jet lag, I had not had a good night’s sleep since leaving New York. Also, this happened to be a period when members of my family rarely saw eye to eye—or reason to be quiet about it—and every little disagreement had managed to blaze into a quarrel. And then, like most inexperienced tourists, we’d exhausted ourselves trying to do too much in the short time we had.

  Yet even my misery couldn’t blind me to the enchantments surrounding me. There is what filmmakers call the magic hour, and then there’s the magic hour in Paris. And here came a quaint sight: a street sweeper, not a machine but a man using a handmade broom. As he passed he acknowledged me with a throaty ‘mademoiselle’ and touched his cap smartly.

  ‘I may have found something,’ Stephan said carefully. ‘I’m not sure what you’ll think, but just to prepare you, it’s kind of a hole.’

  A narrow old house in the Rue Jacob, dank and dark within. A strong odor of ammonia mixed with whatever the ammonia was meant to, but couldn’t quite, get rid of. The room, up several flights of curving stairs (there was no elevator), was dingy and cramped and sinister looking. Had there been a rug, I would have looked for bloodstains on it. The iron bed was coated with rust, and the mattress was so curiously lumpy it might have been stuffed with dead cats. There was the smell of dead something, in any case. The only other furniture was a battered armoire (there was no closet) and a badly tattered armchair.

  When we’d pictured ourselves going to bed in Paris, it was always somewhere modest, of course, but nevertheless, inevitably (it was Paris, after all) charmant. If the place had been merely austere, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But this was seedy. I forbear to describe the state of the toilet. At least it was on the same floor; the shower, on the other hand (and there was only one), was way downstairs at the back of the ground floor. A crude structure with barely enough room to turn around, it was, as I recall, not entirely protected from the elements. Although, thank God, there was hot water, I couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like to shower in winter. A gap in one wall looked out on the backyard, turf to a couple of free-range (not that the term was in use back then) chickens.

  We’d planned on having dinner in a restaurant that first night, but we were no longer up for it. We’d noticed several wonderful-looking food shops nearby, and we thought we’d buy a simple meal of bread and cheese to eat in our hotel room.

  But this, too, turned out to be an ordeal, my bad French bewildering (but not amusing) shop servers and holding up other customers (it was the hour when these shops were at their busiest), whose intolerance I know I wasn’t just imagining. I thought of the obnoxious sibyl on the train …

  Back in the hotel, the only place to spread our supper was on the bed. We’d talked about going out after we finished eating, to a café, or at least for a walk, but instead we huddled in that glum little room, feeling fragile and incompetent and defeated.

  An exquisite buttery croissant, a steaming bowl of café au lait—who doesn’t know what’s for breakfast in Paris, gourmet capital of the world?

  We’d been told when we checked in that our tray would be waiting for us downstairs.

  The dishes were cheap soft plastic, the coffee tasted insipid and was only lukewarm. No croissants, but four slices of inedibly stale American-style toast, a better use for which, as Stephan would later suggest to the front desk, might be shingling the roof.

  We didn’t know whether the grouchy old couple running the place were the proprietors or just caretakers. (I like to think that they not only owned the building but that they lived long enough to make a killing when properties in that quarter became among the costliest in the city.) It was he who prepared the breakfast trays and made the beds. More to our amusement than to our indignation, we noted that he was also hitting the Scotch bottle my brother-in-law had bought us in the Army PX and which we’d brought with us from Frankfurt. He spoke English quite well. He was not hostile like his wife, but he was not friendly either. With the black beret he wore even indoors, perched at an angle on his bristly white hair, and the frequency with which he expressed the Gallic shrug, he was the ‘Frenchy’ of old black-and-white Hollywood movies.

  She spoke no English but managed perfectly to communicate the deep displeasure we gave her. It was she who was usually behind the front desk, and she scowled every time we passed as if she thought hotel guests were just about the worst idea anyone ever had.

  The day before we left (our next stop was Amsterdam), we walked into an elegant confiserie, where I bought a bag of licorice drops. I’m a great lover of licorice—authentic, pungent licorice of the kind that’s always been hard to find in the States. In Germany I’d discovered some excellent varieties, but this French licorice tasted evil to me. Stephan wanted none of it, either. But rather than throw the bag away, I thought of offering it to Madame when we checked out.

  I was afraid she’d respond with her usual rancor. Instead she snatched the bag from my hand, crushed it to her chest, and thanked me with wide-eyed joy, like a child who hasn’t seen candy in ages. It was good to have this for our last impression of her.

  But wait. Here we are already leaving Paris and I haven’t said anything about the coconut. Nor have I said that, despite the rocky start, we ended up having a fabulous time. Though lack of French continued to cause trouble—resulting, for example, in my once getting pâté when I thought I’d ordered soup and another time getting pasta when I thought I’d ordered pâté—clearly the woman on the train had been full of merde. (I’ve since met a couple who told of being outraged when the cashier in a Paris supermarché refused to ring up the tin of pâté they’d set on the counter with a baguette and some cheese and wine; only when he pointed at the tin and said meow did they understand.)

  Now I can’t say whether it was the Boulevard Saint-Germain or the Boulevard Saint-Michel where the street vendor had his stand, but it was a spot that we passed often during our ten days in Paris. The raw pieces, which cost a franc (twenty-five cents) apiece, were kept submerged in bowls of water. It did not occur to me then how unsanitary this was. But if you want to enjoy street food, you can’t be too concerned about hygiene. Better to think what Orhan Pamuk writes (quoting a friend of his Istanbul childhood), that it’s the dirt that gives it its flavor.

  The vendor looked about my age, and though shabbily dressed had golden hair and noble features: both prince and pauper. I thought he might be one of the many students who filled that quarter. If so, he never went to class. All day and well into the night he was there with his bowls of coconut, and the same late October air that kept the pieces nicely chilled made him turn up his collar and bunch his hands inside his frayed pockets.

  I had never eaten fresh coconut before and I found it delicious: just the right degree of sweetness and just the right coolness and size for a refreshing light snack. Whether hungry or not, I had to have a piece any time we happened to be near his stand. Though perhaps it was really him I craved. He had a sweet smile, his teeth as white as the coconut meat.

  That’s all. A small thing. A minor episode of my Parisian adventure. But such is memory that, ever after, it would not be the roasted squab (even better than the pigeon I knew from the Chinese restaurants where my father worked as a waiter); it would not be the snails, or the tournedos and mushroom sauce; it would not be the pommes frites, or the salade niçoise, or the lemon soufflé that lived on as the taste of Paris for me, but the un-French coconut.

  And now another gastronomic moment comes back—it, too, a memory of street food.

  Walking along the Seine one day, I had one of those bolts of homesickness that can strike even in the midst of the most exciting a
nd enjoyable travels. And suddenly, more than anything in the world, I wanted a hot dog. Luckily we weren’t far from the Eiffel Tower, where hot-dog carts abounded. When I proposed to Stephan that we head there at once, he stopped and stared at me. Back home in New York, I never ate hot dogs. In fact, as he reminded me, I had always expressed particular distaste, not to say disgust, for the idea of eating any hot dog that came from a street cart. Which was true. Still, I insisted. After all, we weren’t back home, were we. And once I had the thing in my hand I could not have been happier. Indeed, that Paris hot dog survives as one of the most powerful food memories of my life. I managed to eat most of it before I started to cry.

  There would be other trips to Paris (though never again with Stephan: we broke up the following year). There would be marvelous croissants for breakfast. Unforgettable meals at places like L’Ami Louis and Jacques Cagna and Le Grand Véfour. Nice hotels. Reservations. Paris for grownups, in other words. Wonderful, wonderful, but there was a cost. The cost was youth.

  LOUISA ERMELINO is the reviews director of Publishers Weekly magazine and the author of three novels: Joey Dee Gets Wise, The Black Madonna, and The Sisters Mallone.

  FISH HEADS

  Louisa Ermelino

  The hostel was dreary. Jakarta felt polluted, crowded and dirty after the island paradise of Bali, where we had rented a room in a family compound and discovered fruits worthy of fairy tales: mangos, mangosteens, jackfruit, papaya, and pale yellow pineapples cut into wedges. An enterprising young woman named Jenik had gotten herself a blender and access to electricity and, at a stand on the dirt road to Kuta Beach in 1968, the smoothie came to town. Jenik also figured out pancakes and French toast and would make omelettes with dirty blue-gray mushrooms …her eggs, your mushrooms … magic! But for how long can you watch the sunset and dance with the Barong? We had left home for adventure, to tip over the edge of comfort and familiarity, and Bali was only the first stop. We didn’t have much of a plan, but we knew we were moving west, with India in our mind’s eye, but far into the future. We had all the time in the world.

  In Sydney we’d bought a series of tickets that would take us through Java and Sumatra to Singapore. We had bus tickets, ferry tickets, and chits that would get us lifts on trucks in Sumatra. We had small bags and bellies full of nasi goreng and chicken satay. We’d had a Christmas feast at a Chinese restaurant in Denpasar with turtle soup and a collection of lacquered birds that, if they had still had their feathers, would have done a taxidermy shop proud. We’d roasted goats on spits over wood fires on the beach and piglets in pits of charcoal. We were loving Indonesia. The dreary hostel and grimy city would be left behind as soon as we’d washed our clothes and changed some money.

  The night before we were to leave Jakarta, a man came to the hostel dormitory. I don’t remember if we thought it was odd that he was there, or how the conversation started, but he made us an offer that we thought we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, refuse. He convinced us that the overland trek to Singapore was a terrible undertaking. Unreliable transport, he said. Impenetrable jungle. Mosquitoes. Nowhere even remotely decent to eat or sleep. And it would take weeks. And it was the rainy season. What were we thinking? There were six of us. We looked at each other. What were we thinking? Of course, our new friend had the solution. A ship to Singapore. Ocean breezes, deck chairs, all meals included for the seven-day journey. I personally loved ships, loved being at sea, had sweet memories of crossing the Atlantic on the Italian line, coming to Australia on a freighter. Someone poked me. What would it cost? Important point. It sounded like a big-ticket item. We were backpackers, remember? someone said. Our new friend said not to worry. He would make it happen for us. He’d take our existing tickets plus a few extra rupiah. A bargain, he said.

  We parted with our tickets and rupiah and the next morning we were at the dock, along with, it seemed, a thousand others—despite the appearance that the ship had no accommodations for passengers. It was outfitted for cargo, clearly. Pandemonium reigned. We made a quick decision to follow the crowd. We were the only foreigners but we were used to that, so we climbed the gangplank and got on board. Families were claiming spots, laying down mats. Space was tight because of the cargo, which appeared to be garbage, piled up high in the bow. There was also no way we were changing our minds and getting back off. The crowd was moving only one way. We spread out our sleeping bags and sat down on the deck. I had a flashback to summers in Coney Island, with beach blankets laid end to end held down by shoes and radios. The ship pulled out. Our fellow passengers started getting sick almost immediately. I closed my eyes and leaned against my backpack. Believe it or not, I was hungry.

  I took good food for granted. I grew up a first generation Italian-American. We weren’t big on ambiance (I don’t think I saw a milk pitcher until I was of legal age) but we knew about food. Lamb at Easter, the rib chops as tiny as a baby’s fist, the lamb’s head, capozelle, split and roasted with parsley, garlic and parmigiano; minestrone soup with five kinds of fresh beans and gobs of pesto stirred in; veal shoulder stuffed with egg and bread and oregano. When I started traveling, I didn’t know much about the world or what there was to see, but I was open to what there was to eat. Camembert in France, ham sandwiches with butter (butter? Hmmm), pork-liver pâté. In Italy, puntarella and buffalo mozzarella, sautéed rabbit, fresh figs. Yogurt and honey in Greece and feta with tomatoes and cucumbers; profiteroles, zaatar bread, King of Persia pistachios, roasted corn, duck eggs swallowed raw in a tea glass on the road overland to India.

  A gong sounded. People started to stir, then slowly, stampede. A line formed that snaked the length of the ship. I didn’t see any food. I didn’t smell any food, but a gong and what could pass for a queue facing in one direction was enough for me. I imagined rice and vegetables with a fried egg on top, soup with scallions and cabbage and pillows of tofu, maybe a shred of pork or chicken. I hadn’t eaten since early morning. The line moved but I was too far away to see anything. I smiled at the babies; I pushed with the best of them. I was very hungry and nearing my turn.

  And soon, there in front of me were the servers, ladling food onto tin plates from two huge oil drums. I was pushed from behind, handed a tin plate, and pushed again.

  I looked down. A ball of rice and two silvery fish heads. Maybe there were three. Fish heads? I liked the look of a whole fish on a plate as well as anyone: braised with ginger, or roasted with fennel. I even liked the way a whole fish looked after it was eaten. A charming head and tail and a beautiful skeleton of bones.

  The rice was gummy, the fish heads were small, stuck in the rice, eyes staring. I didn’t know what to do with them except look for a cat. My companions, English and Australian, gave back their plates and left the line empty-handed. They hadn’t liked the Christmas turtle soup or the lacquered goose poised in flight. They pooled their money with a plan to bribe the crew. I decided not to give up. I was very hungry. I took my tin plate and went back to my place on the deck. I formed some rice into a ball with my fingers and shoveled it into my mouth with my thumb. The fish heads looked at me. I picked one up and studied it. I poked at it with my fingers and found a small round of sweet white flesh at the cheek. And more to eat in the furrow at the top of the head, and above the eyes, at the forehead (if fish have a forehead). I broke it apart and sucked the bones. I ignored the eyes and the gelatinous bits (personal … aspic gives me shivers) and I started on the second head. I finished the rice. I rinsed my fingers and my plate. My travel friends, meanwhile, had managed to score a pineapple and a bag of mandarins for a small fortune. They set about rationing like shipwrecked sailors. I accepted a mandarin section. I have always liked fruit after a meal. I unzipped my sleeping bag and lay down on the deck. I dreamt of fish heads.

  The next day lunch was fish heads and rice and dinner was fish heads and rice. Twice a day, every day, for seven days, I ate fish heads. I found more tasty bits. I found the joy in fish heads. I smiled at the babies. I breathed in the sea air.

  T
he ship ultimately left us, not in Singapore, but on a tiny island off Malaysia that had never seen a tourist, where the police were kind enough to put us up in a jail cell for the night, and for another small fortune, we hired a boat to take us to Singapore. We went straight to Maxwell Road to eat amazing dishes at the open-air market: Hokkein mee (fried prawn noodles); Hainanese chicken rice; chili crab. I didn’t miss the fish heads. But I’ve never forgotten them.

  There was an old Italian man in my neighborhood who had served time in Alcatraz. In ‘the hole’, he said, they fed him bread and water. ‘I’d put the bread aside,’ he told me, ‘and after two days it tasted like cake …’ In Indonesia, I learned what he meant.

  NEIL PERRY (AM) is one of Australia’s leading and most influential chefs. He manages seven award-winning restaurants in Australia—Rockpool, Rockpool Bar & Grill Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Spice Temple Sydney and Melbourne, and Rosetta Ristorante—and develops quarterly menus for Qantas’ International First and Business Class travellers. He is also author of seven highly successful cookbooks and has a weekly food column in Fairfax’s Good Weekend as well as a monthly column in Qantas: The Australian Way.

  CITY OF WONDER

  Neil Perry

  I remember it like it was yesterday, driving into Paris from the airport. It was a beautiful May morning in 1984. This wasn’t my first trip overseas. I had been to Athens seven years before, I just think it was the overwhelming beauty of everything I saw out the cab window and the fact that now, as a professional cook, I felt I was returning to where it all started; at that time, France was the undisputed king of gastronomy.