April 25, 2003
Chinese Food Truck
My love affair with Chinese food started in Tallinn. I remember very little about that meal - as is common in Estonia, it was cold, windy, and wet; there were a lot of us (three small families' worth); and our lovely hostess and her husband took us to her favourite Chinese joint, a fairly large restaurant with upscale pretensions. I have no idea what I had, but it was good. A long time passed before my next Chinese meal - for some reason, this cuisine made its inroads to Tallinn long before it reached Riga.
The next encounter took place in London Chinatown, shortly before my high school graduation. Four of us wondered cluelessly until hunger made us dive into the first open door and order randomly from the menu. The place was small, packed, noisy, and overpriced. My companions complained about all of these and more. I had fish, and it was great, but when I ventured to express my enthusiasm my mother snapped at me to stop rubbing it in. I think I was the only person who enjoyed that meal.
I don't remember when or where I fist had Chinese in the States - although my delightful companion probably played a part. But gradually, almost impreceptbly, it has become comfort food, welcome and acceptable in most shapes and forms, from intricately prepared duck, to a greasy scallion pancake from the Kong, to a dollop of tofu and vegetables dumped over steamed rice and into a styrofoam container from a Chinese food truck.
The food truck, of course, is in a category of its own. It's an experience inseparable from plastic forks, blustery Boston afternoons, wooden benches hugging the edges of parking lots. Food in this context becomes a pretext, and is almost irrelevant in itself. It has to be hot, cheap, and plentiful, and it doesn't have to be anything else. It's food without pretense that, perhaps, brings us back to the time when we didn't really care, managing to silence our picky, health-conscious, image-conscious selves by satisfying some minimum requirements and carefully flirting with others.
And it's a long way from that Tallinn joint.
April 11, 2003
Plums
Buying fruit nowadays is a depressing business. Supermarket shelves are packed with beautiful produce, but "beautiful" is as far as it goes. On closer inspection, one quickly discovers that the fruit has absolutely no smell - it might as well be made of plastic - and the taste is not much better. Part of the reason apples are so popular may be that they are so forgiving to modern farming methods: tough and sturdy, they can be allowed to ripen and still withstand being transported thousand of miles. We still know what apples taste like, but, with rare exceptions, we no longer taste peaches, plums, or apricots - they have become concepts; we eat them in effigy, sinking our teeth into essentially tasteless flesh and imagining what the real thing would feel like on our palate.
Cook books - especially books like Alice Waters's Chez Panisse series, Moosewood, and other proponents of organic, environmentally-conscious, food-in-season diets - are to a Star Market shopper what pornography is to most of us. They are even more inadequate as a substitute for food than pornography is as a substitute for sex, and, like porn, descriptions they provide are vague, idealized, sharply and obviously unreal. But they set one's mind wandering on the right track, drive imagination into filling in details of the cold, sweet shock of fruit juice bursting into one's mouth and dripping from the chin, of smooth, delicate flesh constrasting pleasantly with the tart skin, of running one's tongue over the last precious scraps of flesh on the rough stone... These wistful images flood one's mind, making one try again and again the pitiful effigies of fruit in supermarket isles.
But sometimes an aroma of Bartlett pears wifts through the aisle, and soft, curvy sides of big purple plums catch one's eye, and one forgets about caution, and silences one's skepticism. And sometimes - unexpectedly - one gets the real thing.
March 20, 2003
Condensed Milk
Today H., one of the Russian staff members in the Center, walked into the kitchen as I was spooning condensed milk into my mug of coffee. She spotted my yellow can of Eagle Brand, her face lit up, and she exclaimed "THAT's who drinks coffee with condensed milk! I KNEW it was one of "our people!"" She went on to recount some of her favourite condensed milk memories, and while I am amused that I was identified as a Russian on the basis of a habit I picked up from Toscanini's, condensed milk did play a much more important role in the Soviet Union than in the United States. So here is a condensed milk retrospective.
~~~
My mother and I were at a summer resort - a lovely camping ground in a pine forest by the river, occupied mostly by happy families with young kids. I was five or six, and spent most of my time playing with kids more than twice my age, exploring the local children's library, picking mushrooms in the pine forest, and trying - fruitlessly - to learn to swim. One day I came back to our room and was introduced to my mom's new friend, Slava (short of Vyacheslav) - my stepfather-to-be, although none of us knew it at the time. He offered me an open can of condensed milk and a spoon and I wasn't sure what to do. In the end, I refused politely. I really wanted that condensed milk, but an entire can of it was intimidating, almost too good to be true, and I was self-conscious of a very real possibility of dripping the stuff all over myself. Mom giggled nervously and said: "She's like a faithful puppy - won't take food from a stranger." It took me a while to forgive her, and I refused condensed milk on principle for days to come.
~~~
Condensed milk sandwiches were an important part of my childhood. The concept sounds kind of gross - and, in all fairness, it probably is - but I was really fond of these sandwiches. Preparing one was a ritual. First, a white brick-shaped loaf of bread was sliced into quarter-inch-thick slices. The can of condensed milk was taken out of the pantry and carefully pierced on top - one large hole, to pour the stuff, and a smaller one on the diameter to let in air. The milk was then poured - in a criss-cross pattern, if one wanted to be boring, or in elaborate line drawings. The resulting sandwich was usually consumed with a large mug of hot black unsweetened tea.
~~~
Boiled condensed milk. That's all I'll say. It tastes a
bit like caramel =) (and if you want to try it for some reason, don't
forget to pierce the top of the can, otherwise the whole thing will explode
and make a mess of your ceiling, at best).
March 10, 2003
Royal Danish biscuits
Growing up in the good old USSR I never liked biscuits or cookies. The Soviet version of this delectable treat was singularly uninspiring: they were square things, twenty of them wrapped in unattractive brick-shaped packages , with names like "Red October." One would need to perform chemical analysis on them to determine if butter was used - no one's taste buds could be sensitive enough to detect it. They were dry, but not crumbly (a culinary achievement in itself), and tasted of cardboard more than anything else. It is thus not surprising that I didn't care for them (but it is surprising that many other people failed to understand why that was the case).
Then came the late 1980s, and food from abroad slowly began to trickle into Soviet kitchens. The first samples were brought in by people who were fortunate enough to travel abroad; gradually, brightly colored packages made their way onto the shelves of grocery stores. Royal Danish biscuits were one of the first treats to seep through the Iron Curtain. The packaging probably played an important role - they came in round tins, brightly colored and sturdy, which made wonderful gifts long after their contents were gone. My mother still owns two such tins: a standard blue one, with a drawing of the Danish royal palace on the lid, and a festive red one, with a fat and cheery St. Nicholas. She keeps buttons in them.
The tins, of course, were beautiful, but so were the biscuits themselves. Crumbly, rich, and buttery, cloyingly sweet, and with a hint of vanilla. They came in five shapes - four of them tasted exactly the same (many a taste experiment was conducted to determine this!), the fifth had tiny chocolate chips. Strangely, the chocolate chip ones were never eaten first - this fate befell tiny twists, sprinkled with sugar. They were by far the prettiest, and by far the furthest removed from a regular, square Soviet biscuit. Chocolate chips went next. The last to remain were rectangular biscuits.
One can still find the Royal Danish tins in supermarkets, although now they compete with many a brand - German, Scandinavian, British. Local producers have also caught on, and rectangular bricks were replaced by more attractive packages, and more palatable biscuits. One can still find the square ones (although they now taste much better) - they sell fairly well, because of their low prices, and, perhaps, some nostalgic value.
Oh, yes, in case you're wondering, sombody left a tin of Royal Danish
in the office kitchen this morning. I still love them =)