Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [73]
Julia Child added the useful advice to oversalt slightly as salt loses its strength in a cold dish. The soup should be moderately thick.
Serve chilled with fresh minced chives sprinkled on top. Serves five or six.
OUZO, RAKI, ARAK
Ouzo, the traditional liquor of Greece, is clear in color, flavored with anise, and often diluted with water, which turns it a cloudy white and somewhat lessens its considerable wallop. The equivalent in Turkey is raki, and in Indonesia arak, both distilled liquors made from fermented fruit, with or without the addition of anise. Both raki and arak are fiery and rather harsh and come from the Arabic word meaning “sweat,” which may refer to its effects, depending on the quantity.
But it is not just about the alcohol. It’s about a way of life, a state of mind. To sit in a taverna at the end of the day, perhaps in the old Plaka neighborhood in Athens at the foot of the Acropolis without the summer crowds, sipping ouzo, this is pleasure. At hand are the traditional hors d’oeuvres called meze and usually included in the price of the drink. They might be a small plate of meatballs, fried fish, a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers, or cheese, especially feta.
If you are sitting alone, it tends to be a contented solitude. Wafting over you is conversation from other tables. Passersby drift past through the narrow street. Life seems coherent and to be proceeding at the right pace for a change. Or with friends, an evening of the kind in Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek or Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, when talk is animated and passionate, touching on all matters, into the night.
COLUMBUS
Eighty-eight men under Christopher Columbus set sail this day in 1492 from Spain aboard the Niña, the Pinta, and the flagship Santa Maria on a voyage intended to prove a radical notion, that the earth is round. They sailed with enough food on board to last for a year. The wooden casks that held it, however, expanded and contracted in the sea air, allowing the brine that preserved the meats to leak out and dampness to invade and mold the dry supplies, including rice, beans, flour, and hard biscuits. The spoiling meat and any fish that were caught were cooked on deck over a fire built on a bed of sand, then served in a communal bowl. There was also salt cod, anchovies, almonds, raisins, molasses, honey, olives, and olive oil on board, along with strong red wine.
It had been thirty-four days since they had stopped at the Canary Islands for fresh water, and the men were close to mutiny, fearing their captain was mistaken—that the world was, indeed, flat and that they were nearing the edge. Columbus persuaded them to persevere for three more days, and on the very next, October 11, they spotted land.
WATERMELON
The best watermelon ever was on the island of Naxos in the Aegean, when, after hiking for hours, we collapsed into café chairs under the trees to cool off on an intensely hot August day. We were served large chunks of exceptionally juicy fruit, and you could understand why in ancient times watermelons were carried as a source of liquid when water was scarce or undrinkable.
Originating in Africa and well-known in ancient Egypt, watermelons came to America with the slave trade. It wasn’t long ago that they weighed twenty pounds or more, enough to serve everyone at a large picnic. Today with smaller families and less patience with the seeds, the most popular varieties are closer to ten pounds and can fit into a refrigerator without cutting. They’re also seedless, based on research with sterile hybrids done half a century ago by a Japanese scientist.
The rind is actually more fragile than it seems, and watermelons are picked by hand in the fields and passed hand to hand to the truck. It is a myth that you can judge a good one by thumping it. Instead, look for a dull, rather than shiny, rind and a yellow underside where it rested on the ground. If the underside is white or pale green, it was picked before it was ready, after which it will ripen no further.
SOYER
Alexis Benoît