We took our friend Elizabeth (visiting from New York) down to Miami last Saturday and before dinner she noted that I was a finicky eater. I took exception to the charge.
Considering how food now dominates the world of travel, it was worse than being accused of having no sense of direction. Thanks to TV, travel writers can now mouth platitudes (they’re almost encouraged to do so) as long as they’re enthusiastically downing some hideous foodstuff that may or may not be indicative of what the local population eats.
Anyway, in my defense, I explained to Elizabeth that I am simply not a big meat eater. I left out – assuming it was understood – that I can’t stand organs or offal.
Later it occurred to me that if I just gave up meat, nobody would think of me as a finicky eater. They would just say, respectfully, that I was a vegetarian.
Reading this weekend about the Federal Writers' Project - I'm speaking on the subject this Wednesday at the main library - I came across a familiar name: Jerre Mangione, the man who served as national coordinating editor.
I got to know Jerre in the 80s in Philadelphia. Searching my bookshelves I came across his book, The Dream and the Deal, and, opening it up to the title page I read the inscription he had written to me and Hania. It was dated "Labor Day, 1987."
The inscription reminded me of a meal we had shared, at a cafeteria in Center City. We both took spaghetti, but only I took bread with it, which I thought was necessary for sopping up the sauce. I asked Jerre why he had refrained.
"Italians never eat bread with pasta," he said. "It's redundant."
I have not eaten bread with pasta since.
Christmas Eve an Alsatian feast at our French neighbors - goose and sausage with sauerkraut - and Christmas Day Polish borscht with mushroom dumplings followed by pierogis. The foods of two lands that have kept their identities - and in one case independence - despite being squeezed between two behemoths.
"People know about Chilean wine," chef Matias Palomo told me. "But we want to show them that there's a lot more: dried fruits, olive oil, mushrooms, fish."
We were sitting at Haven, on Lincoln Road (the non-pedestrian part), and I had cut into Palomo's preparations for the evening's dinner, which he was making along with Haven chef Todd Erickson. Palomo wore, villainishly, an all-black chef's outfit, his hair pulled back in a mini samurai bun, though he was soft-spoken, thoughtful and friendly.
He said the evening's meal would use traditional Chilean products in non-traditional ways, like empanadas with mussels and merquen-cured Chilean trout with quinoa, mixed berries and avocado. Merquen, he explained, are smoked chile peppers. Chiles from Chile.
He talked about the variety of foods found in the longest country in the world. "We have 800 different types of potatoes," he said. "Two hundred and fifty kinds of fish. And we eat," he said dispiritedly, "eight." He sounded like a man on a mission to open the eyes not just of the world, but of fellow Chileans, to the country's cornucopia. And I began to wonder if the next favored food, after Peruvian, will be Chilean.
The dinner was delicious.
Yesterday morning during my creative writing class we got talking about oysters. Susanna, who is 100, said that years ago she went out with some friends and they all ordered oysters, except for her; she ordered a martini. She didn't know how anyone could eat those things, but she watched as her friends ate them with great enjoyment. She ordered another martini and then, finally, joined the feast. "That's how I ate my first oyster," she said.
The other day my friend Susan dropped off some mangoes from the two trees in her yard, and I was reminded of how, up north in the summer, people would give you their surplus zucchinis. 'Foist off on you' might be a better way to put it. One slow news week Russell Baker wrote a hilarious column for the New York Times about how every summer he'd get bombarded by friends bearing zucchinis, a vegetable that he - and quite a few other people apparently - didn't have much use for. You had an image of people receiving zucchinis and then passing them on like fruitcakes.
In South Florida friends give us mangoes, and nobody writes humorous columns about it. We accept them gratefully and eat them sloppily, drippingly, happily.