Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [113]
WISHBONE
Wishbone lore goes back 2,500 years to Etruscan times, when certain hens were thought to have powers for predicting the future. A circle was drawn on the ground and divided into twenty-four sections, one for each letter of the Etruscan alphabet. The hen was then asked a question, placed in the middle of the circle, and like a feathered Ouija, ate the kernels in an order that signified the answer, such as the name of a husband-to-be or the outcome of a dispute. The hen was then killed and its breastbone dried and used as a lucky talisman.
When the Romans later adapted the custom, two people tugged on the dried bone, each making a wish, the winner being the one who got the longer part of the bone that included the head, hence the term “lucky break.”
CANDY
Candy came from the Arabic word qand, which means “sugar”—always its main ingredient. Originally a combination of fruit or nuts with honey, candy came to be made with sugar from cane, imported first from India over five thousand years ago. It has always been val ued for the pleasure of its sweetness—in French, the word bonbon means “good good.”
Like many luxuries, candy belonged exclusively to the wealthy through the Middle Ages, but by the 15th century, the cost of sugar was less exorbitant, and candy became available to almost everyone. One of the most popular forms was marzipan, a paste of sugar, nuts, and egg whites formed into fanciful shapes and still made today. Sugarplums, small balls of candy mentioned in The Night Before Christmas, written by Clement Clarke Moore in 1822, have been eaten since Shakespeare’s time.
The most popular candy worldwide is chocolate. The non-chocolate variety is divided into “hard” and “soft,” depending on when crystallization of the sugar is stopped. “Soft” includes gum-drops, caramels, cotton candy, taffy, and jelly beans, whose centers probably originated in the chewy sweet called Turkish Delight in the Middle East, eaten since Biblical times. Jelly beans established themselves in the United States when they were advertised as something special to send to Union soldiers during the Civil War.
When Mary Poppins said, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” perhaps she was aware that until about 1300, candy was sold almost exclusively by doctors to cover the taste of vile medicines.
GROS PLANT
There’s a wine called Gros Plant—Big Plant—named after the vine itself and grown south of Nantes in the Loire Valley, making it a relative of Muscadet. The wine authority Robert Parker says it is so “green”—so acidic—that it takes a masochist to drink it. Others are more forgiving, describing it as an uncomplicated dry white that goes well with seafood. That’s how we first met it, in France in the autumn of 1976.
In late November of that year, we were speeding along the highway toward Cherbourg and passage on the last Atlantic crossing of the season on the Queen Elizabeth II. Suddenly we caught a glimpse of a large hand-lettered sign: “Gros Plant.” An arrow pointed down a dirt road. We turned around and followed the road to a farmhouse with chickens wandering through the yard. In a shed, a man and his ten-year-old son were pasting labels on their wine bottles, the boy applying the glue to the paper, the father positioning it on the glass. We bought a case.
On the dock at Cherbourg, as we waited for the ship, there was a huge stack of wooden cases like ours, except for the words stenciled on the sides: “Blanc de Blancs Taittinger,” “Champagne,” and the owner’s name, “Rockefeller.” We felt a limited kinship. At the time, the duty charged on a bottle of wine was ten cents, and there was virtually no limit on the amount of hold baggage.