joyce, jet-setting, and cooking in the cruz

The first two lines of the Bloom section in Ulysses may well be the best two lines about food ever written:

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

Joyce is right to build Bloom by his (unique) appetites: what and how we eat reveal something essential about who we are. I mistrust people who have indifferent relationships to food, to whom flavors and textures and even dining experiences blend together in a vague beige expanse of memory.

I remember meals in intricate detail. There was the plate of potato gnocchi, plump morsels of rich softness yielding gently to the teeth, that I shared with my sister and her boyfriend in Santa Cruz. Its velvety dark mushroom sauce tasted of the earth, returning the potato to its origins while elevating it to something sublime. That evening, my sister ordered a flight of wine for the fun of it, and asked the waitress not to bring the food too quickly. I realized she had become an astute diner, one who pays attention to her tastes and eats with exuberance (or perhaps she always has been and I only just became conscious of it. This latter is almost certainly the case). We began with a green salad, ordered by la soeur, that was just what a salad should be: a small plate of perfect baby butter lettuce tossed with parsley, marjoram, dill, and chervil. The leaves of lettuce rose in stacked curls of green, coated with just enough, but not too much, clean, sharply vinegared dressing. We ate that alongside tiny, jewel-toned beets infused with orange, and slices of bread in a fruity and richly scented olive oil. Next came a cool salad of lentils topped with warm barbecued octopus, the dark (sea)horse of the menu. Curled blackly
atop its bed of lentils, it seemed intimidating until the first tentative bite. Then the sweet, smoky char of the squid blended with the gentle, quiet flavor of the lentils. I'd like to say we fought over the last bite, but I'm pretty sure I hoarded all for myself.

The true star of the meal, though, was the gnocchi; the memory of that taste brings the others with it in true Proustian fashion. It also recalls my whole week in Santa Cruz, wandering the stalls of the farmer's market as I filled bags with peppery arugula, trim little Japanese cucumbers, and nutty sunflower sprouts. I would make a salad for dinner that night to balance a menu my sister and I had devised. Impressing me yet again with the specificity of her tastes, she wanted to make a tapas-style meal with several small dishes and lots of intense flavors. We had already made an Ancho chile jam for a southwest spin on bruschetta: it lulled you first with notes of sweetness, then as you swallowed walloped you with heat. The dried chiles gave it a deep brown-red color and a taste that I can only describe as old, like the smell of a warm dry cellar in Mexico. We would spread the jam on toasts, then top them with a fine salsa of avocado, fresh corn, and lime. There would be other dishes as well: Thai pork balls wrapped in lettuce with mint and cool rice noodles, sizzling shrimp with homemade aioli, eggplant bruschetta with mellow roasted garlic, homemade (and lethally strong, as it turned out) mojitos. The salad, simple and slightly austere, would offer a cool respite.

At the heart of these memories of food and flavors is my sister. She is the force around which my thoughts turn, my relationship with her the pulse that brought life to these meals. We worked together in the kitchen, moving easily despite the small space, transforming raw ingredients, fusing them together into a meal. I talked about the unique alchemy of cooking, how it seems both mysterious and magical to cart shopping bags into the kitchen and emerge with a delicious meal. She laughed at me and said she could tell I was in school. And certainly it is a luxury to think about food like this, to elevate the simple act of nourishment beyond biological necessity, to call it art.

So I continued chopping eggplant, mincing garlic, squeezing juice from yellow lemon halves, sautéing shallots. My sister, alchemist, coaxed oil into egg yolks, whipping the two together into satiny peaks of mayonnaise. Dinner was coming along fine.