A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [19]
‘That was later. That was the last year we were here. When we were kids, it was fun, wasn’t it?’
‘I guess so. I don’t know. I’m still pissed about those shorts. Those berets. Jesus! What a thing to do to a kid.’
Chris started to look worried. ‘Calm down. It’s over. No more shorts. Put it behind you. Let it go.’
‘If you see a phone booth, let me know. I’m thinking about calling Mom. I got a few scores to settle. Those shorts . . . And maybe I should settle the Pucci incident while I’m at it. Did Pucci really have to be put down? I have my suspicions, let me tell you! And what kind of a name is that for a puppy? Puccini? There should be a law against pet names that cute . . . And no Cocoa Puffs! Remember that? All my friends were eatin’ Cocoa Puffs, Trix, all the Lucky Charms they wanted! What did I get? “Too sweet. Bad for your teeth.” ’
His big brother appearing to be on the verge of some sort of psychotic break, Chris did his best to pull me out from under whatever dark cloud was gathering. ‘Relax! You need a drink or something? Jesus, Tony. You can have all the Lucky Charms you want now! I saw a supermarché in Arcachon. We can go buy a box right now.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said, jolted back into the present. ‘I don’t know. I think I miss Dad.’
‘Me too,’ said Chris.
We set off for the dune of Pyla, Europe’s largest sand dune, a favorite outing long ago. Where once my brother and I scampered up its steep face on young legs, we now slogged, wheezing in boots in the loose sand, pausing every few yards to catch our breath in the wind and cold. Pyla is a gargantuan pile of sand, skyscraper high and miles long, rising over the Bay of Biscay on one side and spilling slowly into pine forest on the other. There used to be blockhouses, pillboxes, and gun emplacements on top, but when we finally reached the summit, they appeared to have long ago been buried in the sand. We stood there, Chris and I, with a thin spindrift of sand hissing along the dune’s surface, grit catching in our teeth, looking out at the gray-blue water, the seemingly endless pines and scrub, yearning for . . . something.
Our father had come here as a child, too. Back in the hotel, my brother had shown me an old hand-tinted stereoscopic slide my uncle must have taken back in the thirties. In it, young Pierre Bourdain, age eight or nine, skin browned by sun, stands triumphantly at the dune top, no doubt anticipating the best part of a child’s day trip to Pyla: the run down the dune face, leaping faster and faster, momentum and gravity pulling his legs out from under him, until he would topple over onto his face, to finish the trip in a whirl of sand, rolling dizzily, ecstatically to the bottom. His worried parents would have been waiting for him at the bottom – as ours were years ago – ready to treat him to a gaufre at the stand a few yards away. That’s how I imagined it anyway.
‘C’mon, Chris,’ I said, running straight at the precipice. ‘Race you to the bottom.’ Doing the best I could to imagine myself ten years old, I hurled myself into space, dropped, then ran as hard as I could, finally falling and rolling, Chris right behind me.
There was no waffle stand at the bottom. No gaufres. Two confused-looking backpackers in comfortable Scandinavian hiking boots watched bemused as two overaged American knuckleheads rolled to a stop near their feet. The souvenir stands were closed. Not a Pschitt, an Orangina, a Bananya, or a citron pressé to be had. Cold silence but for a few rustling pines.
What is an oyster if not the perfect food? It requires no preparation or cooking. Cooking would be an affront. It provides its own sauce. It’s a living thing until seconds before disappearing down your throat, so you know – or should know – that it’s fresh. It appears on your plate as God created it: raw, unadorned. A squeeze of lemon, or maybe a little mignonette