Memory Lane
Age 4: Bliss. Mac’n’cheese on a rainy day at my best friend’s house.
Someone asked me if I’d always “been into” food. I thought, “Not really…” and began reviewing my youthful ambitions: Ballerina. Disney Imagineer. Christian martyr.
Being a cook never crossed my mind. But then I went back and did some digging. If I had a bare wall and was allowed to decorate it only with the crispest snapshots of long-ago occurrences, food would be main point of focus. Some highlights in my food timeline:
Age 2: Buying powdered doughnuts at the drive-through convenience store in Miami.
Age 3: Sitting in the yard with my cousins, wearing a ratty t-shirt reserved for the stains from impossibly juicy mangos. Instead of mud pies, my grandmother and I made mud tamales.
Age 4: Tea time with my mother at 3:00pm, prompt: white toast with butter and guava jelly as the sun set in a blaze of orange. Tea time in Buenos Aires: white sliced bread, butter spread evenly to crust-less edges, cut into quarters.
Age 5: Realizing that not everyone had enough to eat. The supermarket in Granada was mostly dusty shelves. Encountering rice pilaf as an individual course in Mexico—and hating it.
Age 6: Experiencing fancy food: Guanábana bombe for a fancy dinner party, courtesy of my grandmother. Profiteroles bathed in warm chocolate sauce at a white tablecloth restaurant in Mexico City. Getting sick after eating marzipan grapes at a First Communion party. Discovering consommé.
Age 7: Eating birthday cake with Jell-o. Apparently a common occurrence at Mexican birthday parties. Feeling grown-up because I loved pistachio ice cream.
Age 8: Eating my first TV dinner—I just had to try that cherry cobbler.
Age 9: Reading the Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie series, mesmerized by the descriptions of food preparations. The Hobbit falls into this category as well.
Age 15: Reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s article about Roman pizza bianca, then devouring a 12-inch rectangle of said item at the forno in Campo dei Fiori. It was better than I’d dared to imagine.
Age 16: Discovering Roman peaches. I can still smell them.
Age 28: I don’t think I’d ever really enjoyed lobster until I had it cooked in briny ocean water in Cape Cod.
When I eat or cook it’s hard to stay in the present and not travel back in time. The smell, the taste, the touch—déjà vu and comfort.
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Tags: Mac n Cheese
March 30th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
I love this piece. <3
March 31st, 2010 at 1:27 pm
My little Mrs has a love affair with food that could possibly be matched only by my own:
Age 1: Sugar. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Age 5: Turron de Chocolate (Nicaragua chocolate icebox cake) and Tres Leches. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Age 8: Sir Pizza on Key Biscayne. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Age 19: Vigoron (naturally fried pork rinds with yucca and cabbage slaw) in Nicaragua. i’ve been hooked ever since.
Age 29: Peter Luger’s steak. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Age 33: Momofuku (most everything on the menu). Leave it to David Chang to come up with cereal flavored soft serve ice cream like Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Here’s to waiting for that next culinary milestone. Cheers!
April 1st, 2010 at 1:32 am
la vaquita! we used to buy those same doughnuts along with chocolate/vanilla/strawberry ice cream. i loved those stops.
sir pizza on key biscayne is the best pizza…not even the new sir pizza in coral gables is the same.
i’m going to go find something to eat now…
April 2nd, 2010 at 11:53 am
¡Sí! La vaquita. ¡Me encantaba pasar por allí!
April 6th, 2010 at 9:41 am
You forgot that at age 7 or eight you had a muenster cheese sandwich every single day for lunch.
April 6th, 2010 at 4:29 pm
True! And 20 years later, I go on week-long grilled cheese sandwich binges. Sometimes I have them for breakfast!