Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [94]
There are volunteer groups around the country who still go into fields to glean on behalf of the poor. In Maine recently, schoolchildren collected fifty tons of potatoes following the harvest. Eastern Long Island is potato country, too. Though some fields have fallen prey to developers, there are still many filled with the low, dark green, bushlike plants. In the fall, heaped trucks take curves a little too fast, causing potatoes to fall off and bounce to the side of the road. We sometimes stop the car, pick up the potatoes, and cook them that night, before the gashes and bruises make them inedible. It is not that, like Ruth, we can’t afford them. It’s just a way of allowing them to realize their true destiny.
BEET SOUP
Borscht—also known as borshch or bortsch or borsch—is the best-known Russian soup and, along with cabbage soup, the most popular. There are many recipes for borscht: Russian, Ukranian, and Polish, simple and elaborate. Borscht for the czar, as made by Carěme, had chicken, veal, duck, sausage, filet of beef, eggs, bacon, carrots, celery, horseradish, and other ingredients. Irma Rombauer’s version has only carrots, onions, cabbage, and beets, plus some seasoning.
“Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht,” the poet Yevtushenko said. “You can throw everything into it—beets, carrots, cabbage, onions …. What’s important is the result, the taste of the borscht.”
FIRSTS IN FRANCE
1976. First night together in France. We were in Beaune, the town that is the wine capital of Burgundy. The hotel restaurant had a well-deserved Michelin star. A star in this part of France is usually to be relied on. We had a very good meal; a fine, her first, in the bar; and in every way aware of our good fortune, went up to the comfort of our room.
In the morning, trucks were going by. We were hungry enough for breakfast, brought on a tray, and I read the Paris Trib in the bath.
The journey had begun.
J.S.
The ecrevisses I ordered, not knowing what they were, arrived looking like a kind of giant shrimp still in their shells. To dismantle them seemed impossible, so, fortified with the Beaune wine, I ate them heads and all. The waiters were inscrutable, the neighboring diners impressed. In the bar afterward, I held the kind of glass I’d seen only in the movies and sipped Cognac with soda, no more intoxicating than the entire night—hotel, man, France.
K.S.
TRUFFLES
The truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus that grows underground on the roots of trees, usually oaks. In the past and often still, it is considered an aphrodisiac. Some types are found in North America, North Africa, and Spain, but the black truffle found in France, and specifically in Perigord, along with the white truffle of Alba, in Italy, stand apart from all the others. When consumed fresh, they are a great delicacy, either enhancing other foods or by themselves. Truffled turkeys could, before the French Revolution, be found only on the tables of the highest nobility or the best-paid whores.
Truffles are, in a sense, accidental. Why and where they are formed is a mystery. The ancients believed that lightning was a necessary factor in their creation. As with other old notions, there may be an element of truth in this, as it has been observed that certain shocks to the soil in which truffles have previously formed seem to restore them—nearby road building or even the pounding of basketball played on that ground.
It is by their distinct, pungent aroma that truffles are detected underground by dogs or pigs. The latter come by this skill naturally but pose a problem in the