Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [62]
When fully ripe, all melons fall away from the stem or can be removed with the slightest pressure. Nevertheless, some are cut or pulled away prematurely, and although they may become softer and juicier, they will not ripen further. To find a ripe cantaloupe—American cantaloupes are actually muskmelons—check for deep ridges on the surface, for the sweet smell of melon, and for a fruit with a slight softening at the stem end. For the best flavor, they should be cool but not chilled.
CHOPSTICKS
Chopsticks were invented in China over four thousand years ago, probably evolving from twigs used to spear food from a cooking pot. Knives took over this function in the West, but Confucius, who considered knives instruments of aggression, encouraged the use of chopsticks as part of his teaching of nonviolence. The name in Chinese is kuai zi, which means “quick little fellows.” “Chop” came from the pidgin English for kuai.
Chopsticks spread throughout the Orient, those belonging to the rich made of gold, silver, ivory, or jade. Most, however, were—and are—made of bamboo, which was plentiful and cheap, with no taste or smell that could affect the food. The Japanese made them from a variety of woods and lacquered them for durability. It was not until the late 19th century that the disposable bamboo variety became popular.
Traditionally, Chinese and Japanese chopsticks differ in length and shape. The Chinese are ten inches long, square, and blunt at the tip, while the Japanese are rounded, come to a point, and are a couple of inches shorter. They are efficient enough to pick up a single grain of rice, but the accepted way to eat rice is to use the chopsticks almost like a scoop, moving the grains from a small bowl held close to the mouth.
Chopstick etiquette says you should not gesture with them as you talk, nor should you use them to pass food. And you’re inviting misfortune if you drop them or place them crossed on your plate, unless you do it in a restaurant to show the waiter you’re finished and ready for the check.
M. F. K. FISHER
On this day in 1908, Mary Frances Kennedy was born in Albion, Michigan. As M. F. K. Fisher, a name more masculine than feminine—Fisher was the name of her first husband—she was to become the foremost American writer on gastronomy, author of more than twenty books and onetime columnist on the subject for The New Yorker. The purity and toughness of her prose made her greatly admired, and her extolling of life as it should be lived, as well as her demonstration of it, distinguished her from others.
Her father was editor and part-owner of a newspaper in Whittier, California, and by the age of fifteen or sixteen, M. F. K. was a part-time journalist. She learned to write by more or less breathing it in. As a newlywed in 1929, she made the first of many trips to France, and as she later wrote: “It was there, I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be.”
She married three times, two of them ending in fond divorce and the fated middle one, the most passionate of them, with the suicide of her husband, who was weary and ill. The Gastronomical Me, a memoir and probably the finest of her books, describes part of this and stands with the work of A. J. Liebling and Ernest Hemingway about some of the same places and times. She once said that she always had to write toward someone she loved, to make it seem real, and that someone turns out to be the reader, with whom she is oddly intimate.
About eating her first