Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [52]
It happens that the defining seasoning in Vietnamese cooking, nuoc mam, is also a fish sauce and is to the Vietnamese what salt is to Westerners and soy sauce is to the Chinese. It is made in almost exactly the way that the ancients made garum. Small, silvery anchovies are layered, salted, and fermented for months in wooden barrels. The first liquid is drawn off after three months and poured back. After another six months the extraction, more or less like the first pressing of olive oil, yields the finest sauce. There are further pressings of lesser quality.
Nuoc mam mixed with lime juice, white rice vinegar, sugar, garlic, shallots, and fresh chilies is nuoc cham, the wonderful dipping sauce. Squid Brand Fish Sauce is the name of probably the best nuoc mam marketed widely and can be found in Asian food stores. It should read ca com, made only with anchovies.
EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON
It was after his success as a poet and playwright, using the pen name Owen Meredith, that Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, served Queen Victoria as viceroy of India and, later, ambassador in Paris. His father was Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who coined the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword” and wrote the novel Paul Clifford, famous only for its opening “It was a dark and stormy night …”
The son’s long verse-romance, Lucile, includes this tribute:
He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope,—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?
THE SIX SENSES
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
Brillat-Savarin recognized the five basic senses—taste, touch, hearing, sight, and smell—but he also believed there was a sixth: physical desire, a unique and distinctly French idea.
Everything subtle and ingenious about the first five senses, he wrote, was due to this sixth, “to the desire, the hope, the gratitude that spring from sexual union.”
PRETZEL
The pretzel is said to have been invented almost fourteen hundred years ago in a monastery in southern France where a monk frugally twisted leftover scraps of dough into a shape like that of arms folded in prayer, with the three openings representing the Trinity. They were called pretiola, meaning “little reward” in Latin, and were given to children who learned their prayers. The name evolved into brachiola, which means “little arms,” and then to bretzel or pretzel when they became popular in Germany and Austria.
Sold by street vendors as early as the 15th century pretzels were associated with good luck and even became part of wedding ceremonies, used in “tying the knot.” Pilgrims brought them to the New World and found the Indians eager customers, and a century later the Pennsylvania Dutch created the first commercial pretzel bakery in America.
From the beginning, pretzels were made, as the best still are today, of the simplest ingredients, the same as those for bread: wheat flour, water, yeast, and salt. At first they were baked like bread, too, to be soft. The story is that a baker fell asleep and overcooked a batch, resulting in the perfect, crisp, golden-colored pretzel. No sugar, no fat, and no cholesterol.
PEPYS’S DIARY
1669. Deteriorating eyesight forces Samuel Pepys, an official in the British admiralty, to make the last entry in the diary he has been keeping since New Year’s Day of 1660, encoded because of its candor. The diary, the greatest in the English language, was finally deciphered and published more than 150 years later. It was filled with gossip, description, confession, and many references to what was drunk, including Rhine, Canary, and English wine, as well as something quite new called champagne, introduced to London