FOOD CONJURING
By Linh Dinh
In China, they bury eggs for a thousand years so that their offspring can enjoy them later. In India, holy men dine on the cremated remains of angels. In America, buffaloes have wings and the cowboys gnaw on them between chaws of tobacco. They also snack on oysters that tumble down the Rocky Mountains.
I have a friend who lives on the twelfth floor of a filthy high-rise. The elevator has been broken for years and so, several times a day, she has to trudge up and down a dank, dark stairway reeking of human spillage. Her tiny apartment, though, is monastery clean. Its walls are lined with shelves of cookbooks in several languages.
Much of this woman’s ridiculously small salary, from working in a shoe factory, is spent on these books. She loves to brood over the fantastic dishes described in them. Their ingredients are often so exotic, so bizarre sounding, she can only imagine what the words are referring to, what they must taste like. (These cookbooks are so cheap they have no photographs or illustrations.) What is basil exactly? Or parsley? Pone? Pimento? Cumin?
Each word offers a different taste. Some have volume but no density. Some emit crude, rustic sensations. The most intriguing leave paradoxical, even tragic, consequences on the tongue.
By calling an old dish a new name, my friend believes (or allows herself to believe), you’re already changing its taste. One does not eat bread but baguettes. One does not eat instant noodles but pasta. A beautiful girl with a hideous name becomes a hideous girl. An ugly girl with a pretty name becomes a pretty girl in print and in memory.
One can also enhance a dreary dish by conjuring up an exotic one. Each night, as she is slurping her usual dinner, Ramen Pride, you will find her hunched over the recipe for stracci integrali, Umbrian buckwheat noodles smothered in truffle oil and chicken livers. Or Odessa stew, tender beef cubes simmered in a dark sauce sweetened with prune skins. Or pollo en mole, a Mexican dish of boneless chicken in a broth of chocolate, raisins, almonds, and nutmeg.
“Do you know cheese has been around for 5,000 years?” she asked me once, her eyes sparkling, “and I have yet to try even one variety! Their very names excite me: gorgonzola, Bel Paese, gjetost, raclette, sap sago. If you say sap sago over and over, sap sago! sap sago! sap sago! you have already tasted sap sago, whatever that is. A foreign word, like a foreign dish, resists the tongue at first, but you must learn how to swallow it anyway. To acquire someone else’s taste is a moral act. A bigot loves his mom’s cooking and nothing else. Do you know a wheel of parmigiano weighs as much as a man, and must be cut by a saw?”
When talking, my friend has a habit of suddenly lunging forward, like a thoroughbred exploding from the gate. It is as if she wanted to leap out of her clothes. Her arms are also swimming constantly to keep her body from drowning. I told her I have only experienced one kind of cheese, Laughing Cow, and cannot imagine any other. One kind of cheese is enough for me, I thought.
My friend shot me a brief, snorting laugh. She then declared that the variety of food available in the world is the clearest proof that a person’s range of experiences is indeed infinite, and that there’s always room for change. A strange dish will transform a person. If Uncle Ho had tried guacamole, for example, he wouldn’t have turned out the way he did. Only a sick man pretends he has never eaten peaches.
“Sexual promiscuity will dull the senses,” she continued, her eyes enlarged and darkened, “but the reverse is true of one’s appetite for food!”
“But you’re not eating new foods!” I shouted, “only reading about them!”
“So be it! Cookbooks are my travelogues. They point to a truly vast universe, unlike pornography, which rehashes the same-old-same-old from three or four angles. That’s why each day I must swim in these verbal stews. I’m sick of all the old words. A foreign word hints at, makes us conjecture, new adventures!”
To illustrate her point, she brought her sweating face closer to mine and scatted: “Pomodorifarcitimugginiarrosto!”
I very much wanted to interject that the reality behind a strange word is often just ordinary, or even less than ordinary, but I did not dare to contradict her.
There are times I suspect my friend would never actually try an exotic food. She’s infatuated with words, not with matter. Words are all she’ll ever eat. She’s like a lifelong virgin who’ll spend each night thinking about what other people are doing, the close-ups, the different combinations, whereas the rest of us, who fuck all the time, never think about sex anymore. She is sadder than the prisoners who regale each other with drawn-out descriptions of meals from their distant past. At least they have eaten something. My friend wants to renew her interest indefinitely by keeping the actual experience at bay.
“What’s more,” she continued, “when you sample a new dish you are cannibalizing an entire culture. When I suck in a single strand of spaghetti I’m swallowing forty generations of Italians.”
My friend’s last thought conjured up several suggestive sentences in my head. I stared at her thin, open lips. I’ve often wondered.
“Do you know what olives are?” she asked.
“You must think I’m a complete idiot,” I chuckled. “Everyone knows the story of Noah’s ark. There was a pigeon on it that ate olives.”
“Exactly! But have you ever seen an actual olive?”
“No! But neither have you!”
“The big difference between us,” she declared, “is that I care about olives although I have never seen them. It’s important to me that there are olive trees shading distant countries, and that somewhere, someone is eating olives.”
To her mind, cookbooks are superior to any other kind of literature. “You will learn more about the English,” she announced, “by pondering the recipe for grilled kippers than by reading all the plays of Shakespeare.”
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