The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [149]
I ate scrumptious Willapa Bay oysters poached in whiskey and served with Columbia River sturgeon caviar in a beurre blanc; an Italian vegetable-lentil soup (Washington lentils, of course); sturgeon baked with a creamy sauce of sake and wild mushrooms; and a deeply flavored pear sorbet made with a Washington Riesling. The next morning, the owners of the Shelburne Inn, Laurie Anderson and David Campiche (who has lived here all his life), fixed one of their famous breakfasts: David’s handmade caviar, smoked salmon, and potato-clam cakes; Laurie’s pastries and sourdough rolls—the starter may be a hundred years old—and gallons of hot coffee from Seattle’s Torrefazione.
Then we walked to the lighthouse at the mouth of the Columbia River. The storm had lifted for the first time in a week, and the morning sun on the Pacific was dazzling. But there was a culinary tragedy in the making.
The salmon fishing season on the Columbia had opened at midnight, fully ten hours earlier. As salmon do not feed as they swim upstream to their spawning grounds, they are at their fattest and most luscious at the mouth of the river, just as they begin to run. This is the only perfect place to catch them and the only perfect time to eat them. Grown men swoon as they describe the taste of spring-run Chinook. And I had come here, at no small risk to my safety and that of my rent-a-car, to taste of this perfection.
But there was not a boat in sight. Either fearful that the storm would resume or wary of the crosscurrents it had left behind, every fisherman for a hundred miles around had simply decided to stay at home. A day later I would leave the Pacific Northwest without even a bite of fresh salmon. If the Columbia River were in New York City, I thought bitterly as I boarded the plane for home, it would have been choked with boats by 12:01 a.m., all vying with each other to catch the first and fattest salmon of the season and rush it to my table. Pacific fishermen are fair-weather sailors, I decided. It is no accident that Captain Ahab set sail from Nantucket, not Santa Barbara, in his quest for Moby-Dick.
June 1990
Out of North Africa
Malsouka, masfouf, makfoul. Malsouka, masfouf, makfoul.
Malsouka is a thin leaf of pastry. Masfouf is fine-grained couscous. Makfoul is the bottom of a couscous steamer. I can’t imagine why people say that Arabic is impossible to learn. Zgougou is a kind of pine nut. Zgougou is my favorite word so far.
But sometimes I think that if I had learned the Arabic words for “Where on earth is my tour bus?” I would have been far better off. I was in the medina, the old walled town, of Sousse, Tunisia’s third-largest city. In the heart of the medina are the souks, the medieval maze of market stalls and shops. And I had gotten lost in the souks of Sousse. I was innocently in search of a certain type of flat bread—thin, round, unleavened, stretchy, dense, wheaty, tender, and dotted with dark bumps and blisters from contact with the hot earthenware griddle on which it is baked. I wandered the souks in vain, encountering only a poor version of French bread and airy, biscuitlike flat breads.
And then I came upon the real thing. Unfortunately, someone was already eating it, sitting in front of his hardware stall. I inquired in French; most Tunisians are at least bilingual. He swallowed, gestured up the narrow, crooked street, and told me to walk fifty meters and then turn right. My head down, I paced off fifty meters and turned right, nearly slamming into a huge, furry cow’s head that hung before a butcher’s stall, an advertisement for the freshness of the meat on offer. After refusing to sell me his gigantic triangular cleaver—I have never seen one like it—the butcher also directed me