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Oct. 13th, 2005 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaWhen I was about eleven, I went to San Francisco with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 ofkcobweb'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?
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?
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Date: 2005-10-14 02:23 am (UTC)When I was in third grade, I had strep throat, a whole lot. And after I'd started feeling better, but wasn't quite better enough to go back to school, my mother taught me to bake chocolate chip cookies. That experience sparked both an interest in cooking, and an interest in research...later that school year, in order to complete the ten research reports my teacher required, with my mother's help, I researched the history of the chocolate chip cookie, baked seven different varieties, based on recipes I found in different cookbooks, and then fed them to my classmates, and surveyed them to find out which ones they liked best.
I still love baking today. Especially cookies.