Culinary Delights

Dian Parker’s essays and short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines, and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. She also writes essays about color for various art publications. Parker lives in the hills of Vermont. www.dianparker.com

Coming upon descriptions of meals in my reading has an uncanny way of enticing me to create the same menu for myself. I relish the simplicity of Michelangelo’s daily repast of bread, fennel soup, one herring, and a glass of wine. Giacometti’s ritual lunch, always at the same Paris café, was two hard-boiled eggs, two slices of cold ham with a piece of bread, two glasses of Beaujolais, and two large cups of coffee. I fantasize about these meals as having magical powers to lift me out of the ordinary into genius. If I consumed them every day, would I become a great artist, too?

Food is as basic as breathing; our fuel to keep the body moving and creating. To simplify life down to the barest needs, you could live on bread and water for six months. Unfortunately, after two months you will probably have scurvy from a lack of basic vitamins. After six months, you will suffer from permanent organ damage and then death. In the desert, without water, you would last three days maximum. If you are carrying one gallon of water, you will survive for four days. Double that to two gallons and you would have a good ten days to live, and then again, death.

In my kitchen, Tuscan soup is mellowing in the slow cooker as I write, making every hour more difficult to focus. The smell reminds me of my Italian neighbor who has recently moved away. For ten years she cooked us huge Italian meals at least twice a week. The fare was decidedly peasant food; heavy meats, pasta, baked squash and potatoes, plenty of red wine. We’d sit around the table having seconds, my husband thirds, telling stories and laughing until her husband, said, “It’s time to repair to the living room.” We all needed the big chairs to give room for all that food to settle.

I keep notes in my journal of tempting referrals to food in literature. Murakami’s proverbial spaghetti in his novels; Patti Smith’s black coffee and black bread, with a saucer of olive oil, in cafes around the world, in her memoirs; lunch in Japan with Edmund De Waal’s uncle in The Hare with Amber Eyes: “An omelette and salad, toasted bread from one of the excellent French bakeries in the department stores in the Ginza. A glass of cold white wine, Sancerre or Pouilly Fumé. A peach. Some cheese and then very good coffee. Black coffee.” How could you not want such a meal after reading that?

Or how about Proust’s Tante Léonie’s anticipation of her favorite menu every day? “…the same omelette, the same fried potatoes and the same peach compote caused her to conjure up pleasures to come, hours beforehand.” What attracts me in these literary menus is the repetition of the meals. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get tired of shopping and cooking, so why does The New York Times Food section list different dinner recipes every single day? Proust himself, after waking up in the late morning, only had one or two croissants and a cup of coffee. I’d have that too if my secretary went to the bakery every day for fresh pastries ‒ if I had a secretary and a French bakery nearby.

I’ve been practicing daily (like an athlete!) intermittent fasting, which means sixteen hours each day of no food, only water, black coffee or tea. This regime is supposed to allow the tricylcerides in your body to use up stored fats and sugars, giving you more energy and longevity. I’m not sure I have any more energy than before I started and it’s been over a year. I think the biggest factor for longevity is eating like a peasant, but then you’ve got to work like a peasant – eight hours a day scything your wheat fields. If you worked that hard then you can feast like Jean Giono’s peasants in Joy of Man’s Desiring. Dense loaves of fresh baked bread, black wine, mountain herbs and fat stuffed in the hare’s black flesh. “The roasts were heavy and juicy, and at the first stab of the knife they broke open. The gravy was bronze with golden reflections, and each time it was stirred with the spoon, the lardings or green sediment of the stuffing or bits of still pink young bacon would come to the surface… The air was scented with narcissus.”

As I have a big yard, I thought for my sixtieth birthday I’d host a Provençal feast outdoors on long tables. I invited thirty people. As entertainment, my niece dressed up like a Parisian chanteuse. She and I agreed beforehand that we would only speak French when she came to the party, arriving late over the grassy field in front of our house. By that time, we would all have had our fair share of French wine, though no stuffed hare, and I laced the orange cake dessert with fresh lavender.

While the gathering was singing me Happy Birthday, my niece came over the hill wearing a white tulle dress, carrying an autoharp, her hair in pigtails. I greeted her in French and she sat on the grass at my feet and sang petite French songs, looking up at me with her large doe eyes. I wept ‒ wine, women, and song. Afterwards, I created a booth where people came and went, and I told them all their fortune, pretending I knew the future.

Food brings people together. Wine allows you to make things up as you go. As Proust wrote: “There is, following an ample meal, a sort of pause in time, a gentle slackening of thought and energy, when to sit doing nothing gives us a sense of life’s richness.” This is the way I’d like to feel all the time, even before dinner.