Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [21]
FOOD AND MEMORY
The classic case of memory evoked by food, of course, is Proust’s—the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea vividly recalling his childhood. But the one we like best is of an English friend whose pantry holds hundreds of jars of jam and marmalade.
She grew up eating the homemade variety. As an adult she turned to the Tiptree brand, which has the ingredients, texture, and taste of homemade. After moving to the United States, she was able to find it here and always had a number of flavors at hand. Soon after their meeting, the man who was to become her husband scolded her for the wastefulness of having several jars open at once. She rather crossly let him know that her habits regarding jam were not his concern. And as for the few jars she had in reserve, being properly sealed, they could keep for years.
He never mentioned it again, though in the 1970s, while they were traveling in England, he suggested they stop at the Tiptree factory in Essex, northeast of London. There, in a room that looked more like a huge kitchen than a factory, women chatted as they chopped fresh fruit, and an eighty-year-old man with a lifetime of experience tasted each batch of the double-cooked, extra special tawny orange marmalade they were making that day.
A decade later, her husband, in his early sixties, was dying of heart disease. One afternoon, a Tiptree van pulled up in front of their house, and the driver unloaded six hundred jars of her favorites—raspberry, apricot, and, of course, tawny orange. It was a farewell gift to her from her husband who, after he was gone, wanted her to remember him every morning at breakfast.
BREAKFAST
My wife and I tried two or three times in the last forty years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
Our first breakfast together was huevos rancheros in Santa Fe. Later, there were romantic breakfasts in Paris hotel rooms—croissants, bread, and unsalted butter delivered on a tray with heavy silverware and a separate pitcher of warm milk for the tea and coffee. When shared breakfasts became more frequent, we often had tea, toast, oranges, and chocolate. There was a time when we included halva. We had a phase of soft-boiled eggs and another of Irish oatmeal that took half-an-hour to cook. Not long ago, we rose at 5 a.m. and staggered onto the lawn to see a spectacular meteor shower. An hour later, we sat down to some scrambled eggs and went back to bed.
It can be practical, as with the now popular power breakfast before the regular workday begins. It can be pleasantly solitary and was the only meal at which Emily Post said it was permissible to read a newspaper or book (television at that time wasn’t a consideration). Whatever its form, medical experts agree that breakfast is essential for kick-starting the metabolism after its overnight slowdown. For physical energy, mental alertness, and even weight loss, breakfast continues to be the most important meal of the day.
AGED BEEF
Like wine, beef improves with age, though the time needed is measured in days instead of years. Meat gains tenderness for about ten days after slaughter, and the flavor increases for up to three weeks, all the result of natural processes. Most beef sold in grocery stores has been aged for five to seven days, generally long enough to have most of the benefits. Good restaurants may use beef that is twenty-one days old and pass the extra aging costs on to the customer.
There are two methods for aging. In “dry” aging, the meat hangs in a humid room of circulating air cooled to 34‑36 degrees F. The “bag” method, used now by about ninety percent of wholesalers, involves vacuum packing and refrigerating the beef. It is preferred because the meat shrinks less and is less likely to pick up odors or flavors from its surroundings.
ROSSINI
“To eat, to love, to sing, to digest: in truth, these are the four acts in this opera buffa that we call life and which vanishes like the bubbles in