Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [126]
The point of eating one course at a time, rather than mixing them all on a single loaded plate, seems to be the opportunity to concentrate one’s attention on each flavor, each perfect ingredient, one uncluttered recipe at a time. A consumer trained to such mindful ingestion would not darken the door of a sports bar serving deep-fried indigestibles. And consumption controls the market, or so the economists tell us. That’s why it’s hard to find a bad meal in Italy. When McDonald’s opened in Rome, chefs and consumers together staged a gastronomic protest on the Spanish Steps that led to the founding of Slow Food International.
We did have some close gastronomic shaves in our travels, or so we thought anyway, until the meal came. Early in the trip when we were still jet-lagged and forgetting to eat at proper mealtimes, we found ourselves one afternoon on a remote rural road, suddenly ravenous. Somehow we’d missed breakfast and then lunchtime, by a wide margin. The map showed no towns within an hour’s reach. As my blood sugar dipped past grouchy into the zone of stupefaction, Steven made the promise we have all, at some point, made and regretted: he’d stop the car at the very next place that looked open.
We rejoiced when a hotel-restaurant materialized at a motorway crossroads, but to be honest, we were also a little disappointed. How quickly the saved can get picky! It looked generic: a budget chain hotel of the type that would, in the United States, serve steam-table food from SYSCO. We resigned ourselves to a ho-hum lunch.
In the parking lot, every member of a rambunctious bridal party was busy taking snapshots of all the others with raised champagne glasses. We tiptoed past them, to be met at the restaurant entrance by a worried-looking hostess. “Mi dispiace!” she cried, truly distressed. The whole dining room was booked all afternoon for a late wedding luncheon. While trying not to sink to my knees, I tried to convey our desperation. The words affamatto and affogato blurred in my mind. (One means “hungry” and the other is, I think, a poached egg.) The hostess let us in, determined in her soul to find a spot for these weary pilgrims from Esperanto. She seated us near the kitchen, literally behind a potted palm. It was perfect. From this secret vantage point we could be wedding crashers, spies, even poached eggs if that was our personal preference, and we could eat lunch.
The hostess scurried to bring us antipasto, then some of the best pasta I’ve ever tasted. We didn’t poach on the wedding banquet, just the three ordinary courses they’d whipped up to feed the staff. While we ate and recovered our senses we watched the banquet pass by, one ornate entry after another. Forget all previous remarks about simplicity being the soul of Italian cuisine, this was an edible Rose Bowl parade. The climax was the Coronated Swordfish: an entire sea creature, at least four feet long from snout to tail, stuffed and baked and presented in a semi-lounging “S” shape on its own rolling cart. It seemed to be smiling as it reclined in languid, fishy glory on a bed of colorful autumn vegetables, all cupped delicately in a nest of cabbage leaves. Upon its head, set at a rakish angle, the fish wore a crown carved from a huge red bell pepper. Its sharp nose poked out over the edge of the cart, just at eye level to all the bambini running around, so in the interest of public safety the tip of His Majesty’s sword was discreetly capped with a lemon cut into the shape of a tulip.
I imagined the kitchen employees who carved this pepper crown and lemon tulip, arranging this fish on his throne. No hash slingers here, but food poets, even in an ordinary budget roadside hotel. We’d come in expecting steam-table food, and instead we found cabbages and kings.
The roads of Abruzzi, Umbria, and Tuscany led us through one spectacular