Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [82]
We were spending the month in a large farmhouse near Lectoure and were invited to several of the dinners through friends. At one for forty people on a hot summer night, the host was raising his glass and proposing, in the famously robust, life-loving fashion of the region, that after the meal everyone adjourn to the drawing room for a singing contest. Suddenly, at another table, a man shrieked and leapt to his feet, and moments later, a woman did the same. It took a few minutes to realize that, eighteen feet up on the molding, wasps were being overcome by the rising heat of the many candles and were dropping like shot to the tables, stinging wherever they landed.
The singing competition was postponed, but Armagnac was passed around again as an antidote and consolation.
CHINESE CUISINE
It is difficult to speak of a Chinese cuisine, since the country is so vast that it includes significantly different styles. They are:
• Northern, or Beijing: garlic and sesame, little rice
• Central and Western, or Szechuan: sweet-sour and spicy or hot
• Southeastern, or Shanghai: soy sauce
• Southern, or Cantonese: seafood, black bean, and garlic
The essence of Chinese cooking is the art of mixing, both ingredients and basic flavors, of which there are five: sweet, bitter, salt, sour, and hot. Sweet and sour, for example, make an interesting mix, while sour and salt tend to negate each other.
A meal has two main elements, the “necessary,” or fan, and the “pleasure-giving,” or ts’ai. Rice or other grains are fan. Meat, fish, and vegetable dishes are ts’ai.
Customarily, the bowl of rice is refilled at the end of the meal but is left untouched to indicate that hunger has disappeared.
Men traditionally sit on one side of the table and women on the other, which turns out to be not a bad arrangement, at least for talking.
DONALD SULTAN DINNER
The dining room in Donald Sultan’s small country house is longer than it is wide, with a worn floor painted in a brilliant black-and-white diamond design. It adjoins a square, far-from-modern kitchen. A painter, one imagines, possesses a sense of style. Maybe not Francis Bacon or Jackson Pollock, but definitely Donald Sultan, who has, among other things, designed the decor for a hotel named for him in Budapest and who is a remarkably good cook. He gave an impromptu dinner one August night that involved, however, not more than ten minutes of cooking.
With drinks there were two cheeses. One, he seemed to remember, was yak cheese, though this seemed unlikely, and the other a Fribourg. There was also a hard Italian salami on a board with a sharp knife and crackers. The dining table was covered with a beautiful cloth, and plates and silverware had been set out. There were many candles, including some in wall sconces.
On a large platter were sliced red and green tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and basil, and on another, quartered store-roasted capons. First, however, came soft-boiled eggs, decapitated in their shells, with a dollop of caviar on top. A bit later, a plate of steaming corn-on-the-cob was brought in.
There were five of us. After the egg, one ate as one pleased. As always, there was good wine, and for dessert, thin handmade cookies from the best local source.
Pleasurable in every way—the food, intimacy, ease, and presentation. The reaction was predictable: we ought to do this ourselves.
CORN
“People have tried and they have tried,” Garrison Keillor wrote, “but sex is not better than sweet corn.”
Sweet country corn, freshly