(no subject)

When I was about eleven, I went to San Francisco with kcobweb's family. We stayed with friends of theirs, I think, and one night we all went to a moderately fancy restaurant.

I've said before that my mother was a very good plain cook. She made things like baked chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, but she made them well enough that, in later years, I didn't understand why it was a cliche for baked chicken to be dry and for gravy to be lumpy. Everything she made was good, but none of it ever touched, on the plate. As a picky eater, I found that this diet of plain, separated foods worked quite well for me.

So in this fancy restaurant, at age eleven, I announced that I was going to get the chicken. It came with a lemon sauce. Any sauce was suspicious to me, so I said that I wanted to have the sauce on the side. And one of kcobweb's family's friends said to me, "When the chef planned that meal, he had the sauce in mind. You should really have it the way he intended it to taste."

It was the first suggestion I ever had that there might be more to food than pleasurable sustenance - my first contact with the idea that there might be something intentional about food. I ordered my meal the way the chef intended, and liked it, and a week or so later I went home to my mother's non-touching meals. But, obviously, I have remembered that exchange. I wonder if it germinated slowly in my mind until I went away to college five years later, and began to develop my first foodie tendencies.

Where are the distant roots of your present self?