Eating - Jason Epstein [56]
PURÉED PARSNIPS
I served it with three pounds of parsnips, which I cut in chunks and boiled till tender, then puréed in a food processor with a cup of half and half and a touch of powdered ginger.
My friend and neighbor Sheila Lukens contributed two bottles of a fine Mt. Eden Syrah, and so ten of us celebrated the annual rebirth of the land in Omani style, more or less.
ELEVEN
WHY WE EAT
Strip away the trimmings and you will find that all living things, from dainty amoeba to lumbering elephant, from wiry Barack Obama to leafy maple, share a common structure: an alimentary system supporting a reproductive apparatus. Why this of all possible arrangements should be our fate is anybody’s guess. But it is plain that in the great game of survival every living thing requires nourishment in order to replicate itself and defend the tenuous grip of its species on its place in nature. Because survival demands excess, fussy feeders and reluctant breeders vanish from the gene pool, leaving stronger appetites in charge: witness the maple feasting on sunlight, then showering its multitudinous seed on the ground, or the voracious trout and its redundant spawn, or the human obsession with these twin excesses, haunting our dreams, stories, art, and music.
All other living things rely on instinct or design to govern their hunger and lust, for unregulated desire means conflict, corruption of the habitat, and eventual extinction. The isolated forest regulates itself. The lion takes a zebra from its herd, shares it with its pride, then sleeps like its pussycat cousin sated on Purina as the herd moves on, food for another day. But when human beings encounter a pretty face or fowl, external constraints are needed. Hence our collective submission, older than recorded time, to priests, magistrates, and sacred texts to curb desire: a survival strategy embedded in ritual, law, and conscience called civilization. This uniquely human condition is foreshadowed in the expulsion of our ancestral parents from their garden of primal instinct and thrust into lives of self-denial—of either/or—a burden and an opportunity devolved upon their progeny to the present day.
In my own case, some years ago I put myself in the hands of a physician famous for curing addictions. His technique, with the help of a hypnotic drug and a rumored cattle prod, was to associate the unwanted appetite with unpleasantness, and so for several years thereafter I dined parsimoniously until the treatment failed, for eating is not an addiction, like drugs or tobacco, that can be squelched outright. Later I turned to the late Dr. Atkins and lost twenty pounds in two months of carbohydrate starvation—only to gain ten back a month later and the rest a bit more eventually.
From my Atkins adventure I contracted a few lasting aversions: pretzels, which I never liked anyway, and bagels, with their forty grams of densely packed carbohydrates. But I see no reason to eschew the wild Baltic salmon from Russ & Daughters or Lombardi’s pizza or Di Palo’s incomparable gorgonzola dolce on a Tuscan cracker. Perhaps my New York neighborhood with its multitudinous temptations is at fault. But I chose to live here. There is no escaping one’s self.
TARTE TATIN
I began this book in the blueberry season when I violated my vow to forgo another pie and ready myself for a year of abstinence. Now it is apple time and my resolve has again failed. I have baked a tarte tatin and will not pretend to bake no more. Tarte tatin can also be made with pears (comice are best, just as they begin to ripen). For the traditional tarte tatin, however, you must use apples, preferably Golden Delicious, which are not good eaten raw but hold their shape nicely in a tart. The tarte tatin is baked upside down, with the apples under the