Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [88]
DATES
Dates—sweet and with color like amber—most probably originated in the Middle East, where Iraq has been the largest producer and exporter.
In Arabic, the date palm is called nakhla, “the tree of life.” Muhammad instructed his followers to cherish it, and dates are still traditionally the first food eaten at the end of each day of Ramadan. The fruit itself is so nutritious that even today, desert nomads can exist for a long time on only dates and milk from their goats.
Over millennia, date palms have provided not only fruit, but also stalks for rope and roofing, leaves for baskets, and juice for the distilled alcoholic drink called arak. The trees have been around since before recorded history and appear in the earliest Egyptian carvings. Dates are also perhaps the oldest intentionally cultivated crop. The palms are either female or male, the first needing pollination by the second in order to bear fruit. Insects won’t do the job—they’re not attracted to the flowers of the tree. The wind can do it in a haphazard sort of way, but far more effective is deliberately bringing the pollen of the male blossom to that of the female. One male tree can provide enough pollen for fifty or more females.
The trees are mature at about thirty years, and once fertilized, are prolific, with a single female tree usually producing more than one hundred pounds of dates a year for decades. Those usually found in the supermarket are the “soft” variety, with “semi-dry” and “hard” dates being less popular. Sweet, almost sticky in consistency, and relatively high in calories, they’re eaten fresh or dried or used in baking, and provide fiber and iron.
In the ancient world, the best dates were said to come from Jericho, which still produces them due to ideal conditions, since date palms, according to Waverly Root, like to have “their heads in the sun and their feet in the water”—which is to say, a desert oasis. During the ripening period from April to September, even dew will spoil the crop.
MENUS
The job of a restaurant menu is to list what’s available and its price, and it usually reflects a collaboration between chef and owner. The owner wants it to represent the personality of the place, and the chef wants the freedom to develop his own interests and style. The latter often shows up in the form of specials that are announced by the waiter, a list that sometimes seems longer than the menu itself.
The earliest menus were used only by cooks and staff, and were posted in the kitchen as a reminder of the dishes to be served and in what order. The first offered to diners were many pages long and listed the dozen or so dishes that were actually available, along with the hundred the chef might make if he happened to have the ingredients and the inclination.
It used to be in the United States that you had to go into a restaurant to have a look at the menu, but more are now posting them in the window, as in Europe. In Japan, this often takes the form of a display of realistic plastic replicas of dishes, and if your Japanese is weak, the waiter will step outside with you, so you can point to your choice.
SEEDLESS
“Seedless,” in the citrus trade, doesn’t mean there are no seeds, but that there are five seeds or fewer per lemon, orange, or grapefruit.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat …. I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.
—SAMUEL JOHNSON
A man who possessed neither wealth nor power but for whom an age is named, Samuel Johnson was born this day in Lichfield, England, in 1709. His greatness lay in his powerful intellect, his wit, and his influential essays, biography, and criticism. And he wrote, almost single-handedly, the first Dictionary of the English Language.
His biographer, James Boswell, said of Johnson, “I never knew any man who relished good eating more than he did. When at table he