Decet: Gustatory Musings
written by: Louis Gallo
I.
Stuffed Artichokes
Naturally, there will be food. I call my mother long distance, and after the ‘Happy Easter,’ she will tell me what she’s fixed for the family down there. The usual turkey and oyster dressing, a spinach and chickpea casserole, French green beans, and, ah, stuffed artichokes. I crave it all; it’s been so long. My mother cooks by instinct, by religion, but I coax the recipe out of her anyway, knowing that I will have to decipher into more precise terms, those of an auditor or accountant, more directive, less magic. Well, she laughs, it’s easy, and repeats the old story:
A secret recipe handed down from some great-grandmother who sold ravioli in the streets of Genoa. First, she says, chop up a bulb of garlic and a pile of flat-leaf parsley. … A whole bulb? That’s a lot of garlic
… And add about half a container of grated Romano and parmesan, oh, and the same amount of breadcrumbs, the Italian kind from Progresso. Put them in a pan with about an inch of water and douse the tops with olive oil–don’t forget to cut off the stems and points at the top. Spread the leaves with your fingers and stuff them in. That’s it… let them steam.
How long? I ask.
Until you can pick the leaves off tenderly. Do it on a low to medium flame. Tenderly.
That’s a lot of garlic, I finally sigh. She laughs, it’s for eight people, what you thought it was just one artichoke? I’ll have to try it, I tell her, certain now I will never try, that at some point I will burn the leaves, add too many breadcrumbs, go slightly higher on one cheese or the other, use the wrong olive oil. Tenderly. I cannot hope to watch the leaves detach themselves and rise from the pot like angels. My faith is neither enviable nor extravagant.
I hope you do, she says, pleased, mother-happy, but remember, she says, the recipe is a secret. Don’t tell anybody.
II.
Italian
Grandma arranged four chipped, glazed bowls on the surface of her porcelain kitchen table, one pooled with olive oil, another piled with screaming red pimentos, in the third, a mound of shriveled capers, in the fourth, potent anchovies unrolled and spread flat like veneer.
Grandpa cut a toasted slice of bread, dipped one side of each half in the oil until saturated, added two anchovies apiece with a sprinkling of capers and pimento. He pressed together the half sandwich and passed it to me or Ruthie or our parents or whoever begged the most.
He made one after another until everyone had enough, the flock fed. When it was his turn, he took his time. That bread floated in the oil almost, but not quite, for good.
Then the capers and pimento burst out of his mouth as he bit into the coppery bodies of fish. We watched his face proclaim the right taste, the joy, and graceful ease of a minor perfection unglued from time. Only later would we know exactly how good those sandwiches tasted, when we tried but failed to recreate them ourselves. We surmised a missing ingredient, some essence of our grandfather, corporealized, passed through his fingers into the concoctions. Some aura or soul spice. He was a sly one, all right.
III.
Bean Soup
I first discovered it decades ago in the streets of Manhattan when a girl named Hope led me by the fingertips to a Jewish deli which she described as well-nigh sacred. I took one sip from a soup spoon and …ahh!
I’ve supped it hundreds, maybe thousands of times since, but nothing comes close—it had an obscure ingredient, some herb or spice not encountered again—maybe hope.
And that spicy black bean soup in Charleston, where Cat and I visited when we first learned she was pregnant with our first daughter. Melted cheese layered onto the surface—if only I could remember what kind of cheese … because I do adore black beans. We had just visited a nineteenth-century graveyard and spotted the tomb of John C. Calhoun. I never did pay the parking ticket that slipped under the windshield wipers of our van.
And my grandmother’s navy bean soup! Holy Infant Jesus of Prague! The taste lingers on the tongue of my mind and will so linger until I have no mind—or tongue. Another lost recipe, another lost beloved, another secret ingredient no one bothered to recall. Because no one then believed that time would expunge the delectations of the past.
IV.
Emy’s Patio-Bourbon Street
for Vera
When the rat dropped from the banana tree onto our table, we laughed and ordered more martinis.
Which is the fiercer omen? That, or the molten stare of the macaw unruffled in its golden cage by river breezes curling through clacking tubes of bamboo that rise like stirring rods into the black soup of sky?
It’s hot here. And wet. I drink and seldom care about bills, cancer, and dirty air. I peer into your sultry Aztec eyes with tedious longing. A blond Aztec?
Why was that rat perched in our tree? Why do we eat green pepper stuffed with peacock meat, Oysters Margot, and trout meuniere? Will the world spin from our feet or slink away in rodent fear because we oblige old appetites?
You have spilled Tabasco on your blouse. We laugh … as reality lolls like a herd of cows.
We dance when we can, recite poems, and honk like quaint accordions.
I’ll return alone some other night to toast a ghostly summer moon. And crush the rat.
V.
Easter Sunday
We gather at the wooden table, spread with Belgian hand-stitched lace, a lead crystal bowl full of wet grapes at the center, and we wait, we wait for grandmother to return from the kitchen, a crypt of rosemary, sweet basil, and garlic. The screen door keeps out the butterflies but not the pungent wafts of confederate jasmine, which nudge us like soft fists. Kisses.
We wait for grandmother and her salver of lost bread, the small green pitcher of La Cuite, the powdered sugar, and slivers of iced strawberries. As we have always gathered on this holy day. For grandmother.
And as we wait, we watch each other slowly, gently disappear into milky gauze, then mist, then light, we turn into light. We are the light, the life, the resurrection, the body, the edible flesh of our grandmother, who smiles, hobbles into the room with, surprise!, a platter of fried plantains, our favorite.
She is time, she is creation. We tear into the fruit with our teeth, tiny tombstones embedded in our gums. Our Father, you have misled us. We visit her grave. We have never visited her grave.
For she is levity, a butterfly, the soul, breath of the ages, pneuma, the egg.
Shafts of sunlight break through the tall French shutters as we feast, bleaching us invisible. Our grandmother arrives with a bowl of glazed caramel flan.
“Wait ’til you taste it!” she gushes.
We dig in, stuff ourselves and pray, fade again into light, the luminous cream flooding this eternal moment when we laugh and gossip and talk small above the clanks of pots and pans in the kitchen.
VI.
Banquets
Long ago, six friends and I dined at Galatoire’s on Bourbon with its fine linen tablecloths, and napkins monogrammed with a cursive letter “G,” and on its silverware, the engraved “G.”
That meal cost us over $800, which was expensive in those days (shudder to think what it would cost now).
Ah, I had an initial vodka martini, then shrimp remoulade, then pompano amandine, and for dessert, this caramel (don’t say karmel, I hate that) mocha extravaganza, oh so delicious, so dear, it broke us all for the next three months.
So one night, hungry and poor, I found Manuel’s hot tamale stand on the corner of the Chef and Elysian Fields. I sat on the curb and devoured ten tamales straight and washed them down with the Dixie I’d brought along. I engraved the letter “G” in some street shells with the toe of my shoe.
Oh man, the best tamales in town or anywhere else I’ve been, so delicious and so cheap, no linen, no silverware …
I used my fingers and spent five bucks.
VII.
Dream Recipe
Here’s a recipe I dreamed the other night, which may say more about the quality of my dreams than the dish itself –
Slice the top cap off a green pepper, gut it, line the insides with baby Swiss cheese, fill the hollow with hummus (the kind with artichoke and spinach bits), Progresso breadcrumbs, diced tomato according to taste, a sprinkling of capers, a teaspoon of minced roasted garlic, garnish the top with sprigs of Italian parsley and celery seed and herbs of choice …
Now, would you eat this? Sounds rather appetizing. So, I will, someday, when I find time to gather and mix up the concoction. But it’s the dream that haunts me. What has the unconscious come to: piddling recipes one might find in Good Housekeeping? Don’t think I’ll call or e-mail Daniel for an interpretation. Or Freud, who would no doubt declare the hollow a womb, and the stuffing …
Daniel’s dream of four malign beasts rising out of the sea, especially the ten-horned monster, now we’re talking, Daniel out-Nebuchadnezzar Nebuchadnezzar! MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN …
Such scribbling on the wall.
But who needs another apocalypse? Think I’ll stick with the recipe; think I may just have every ingredient stored in the cupboards and refrigerator, all save the pepper, the vessel.
VIII.
The Best Po-Boy
Once, not in Aleppo, not Byzantium, not stony Prague, but Bogalusa, Louisiana, I found a corner dive, the kind decorated with gaudy metal Coca-Cola signs and hand-written specials on blackboard slate, that served the best shrimp po-boys ever concocted, hell, maybe it wasn’t Bogalusa but Domilici’s on Annunciation Street. Those who indulge know that every po-boy is different, every chef fiddles with the ingredients and degree of ketchup, horseradish, Tabasco …
The white sauces don’t cut it at all. So when you come across the Platonic sine qua non, you slip into a gustatory sublime and spread the gospel. It’s religious, of course.
And does this not apply to just about any summum bonum? The purpose of metaphor. I alone am come to tell ye! No finer woman than what’s her name down in Bogalusa way back. Best Dodge Dart I’ve ever driven! But as to what’s her name, here’s the glitch: nothing else that comes along will do. It’s what’s her name or nothing because we stick with what we crave and give up craving anything else. Whereas, we all know, a finer sedan, a finer woman, a finer po-boy may lie inches away around the corner.
But we won’t even sniff, taste, or sample. We’re buried in the tomb of nonpareil. We know our Plato. The heavenly fix before Heaven. I knew the man—no democrat, let me tell you. Gave him a bite of my po-boy, let him fondle my what’s her name for a moment for the sake of comparative ecstasy. And it’s absolute ever since, absolute misery over what we’ve lost and what we refuse to find anew. And this we call judgment.
IX.
Verbena Bakery
When we were just about old enough to drive, we’d make a run to the Verbena Bakery every night. Verbena Street. No commercial district this–just an old New Orleans duplex (we call them shotguns), one half converted for business. Regular houses on all sides. The place was dim, smoky, and sweltering inside–and you’d look in vain for any official licenses.
In the middle of the room stood the biggest table I’ve ever seen, coated with flour, dough, bowls of butter and lard, vats of jelly, cutting tools–once I even saw a cat licking itself in the middle of it all. The baker was this lanky old man who never said a word. He did everything, from sliding the raw dough on platters into a long wall oven, then pulling them out when time. He set the platters on the table and went at them with his tools, and, before you could blink, out popped wet, glazed, chocolate, jelly, cream, and powdered donuts.
The two helpers, a one-armed galoot, blue with smudged tattoos, and a tiny old lady with leaking bandages wrapped around her wrists, took orders, dumped the donuts into white bags, and worked the register. Best damned donuts in the world, we thought–so hot they steamed, so greasy they moaned, so undercooked it was like eating paste. We bought them by the bagful and drove out to the lakefront, where we parked and feasted. Once, Jimmy ate two dozen jellies at one sitting. He started to puke later, but at fifteen, puking is no big deal. At the same time, I turned a little green.
This went on, and on until one night we made the usual trek only to find the place boarded up. A sign from the Board of Health dangled from a single nail. We didn’t bother to read it. We understood. Nothing so good can last for long. The roaches didn’t bother us, or the cat hair that occasionally wound up in my mouth … Even Miss Penny’s gauze (though dad told us it was probably diabetes). Something was happening to the world–it had become cleaner, healthier, more official. Older. Who could have guessed that decades later we’d realize those donuts were the most lousy food a quarter could buy. But that’s not the way we choose to remember them. Best damned donuts in the world. I’d stake my life on that.
X.
El Ranchito
I have a new girlfriend, and of course, we’re mad about each other, so mad we snub everybody and miss appointments and skip classes and forget our jobs, and you know how it goes.
I don’t know anything about Mexican food because I come from a large Italian family and no other cuisine is tolerated, but Rosa loves this little Mexican place, El Ranchito, on Elysian Fields, a dump really, somebody’s house refashioned into restaurant, and in those days you don’t find Mexican just anywhere, not like now where on every second corner one shoots up overnight, El Puerto, Cinco de Mayo, Casa this, Casa that …
There are only three or four in the entire city and Rosa really digs El Ranchito with its five or six tables draped in red-and-white checkered oil cloth, its sole proprietor, a stout, short but jovial woman who serves as hostess, waitress, cook and whatever, and I can’t remember her name but she smiles all the time and can’t speak English too well, so I wind up saying things like por favor and gracias and what little Spanish I know, agua fria maybe, frio? Cuánto dinero? Since no prices grace the menu.
Rosa tells me I have to try this thing called empanada, a fried pie stuffed with shredded meat or chicken and lettuce, sour cream and grated cheese and guacamole with I think parmesan sprinkled on the outside and let me tell you it is sublime, greasy as hell and a cholesterol nightmare though I don’t know about cholesterol yet, and it has some other secret flavor, something lemony but not lemon, what?, I don’t know, but it’s burrowed into my brain, and I’ve spent much time exploring herbs and spices trying to find it, and sometimes I think I come close but never quite get there, and I’d give a lot of dinero to anyone who can identify that mystery. Dill comes to mind. I want to taste it again, so much so that sometimes I peruse Mexican cookbooks hoping I’ll come across some rare entity that just might be the thing. You don’t find empanadas on the menus of many of the newer restaurants …it’s all tacos and burritos and refried beans now, and I don’t know why there are no empanadas, or maybe they have different names now.
Rosa and I spend many a night gorging at El Ranchito, but one day the place abruptly closes …
A hand-written sheet of paper Scotch-taped to the door, that’s all, gone for good, and not long after, Rosa and I break up, less abruptly, and all that’s left of the era is a beautiful taste in my mind and this fierce hunger for more future and more past. Except that Rosa’s back a few months later, and we get married across the river by a justice of the peace.
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