in the hall of mirrors

Babette

I have been reading Isak Dinesen's stories for two or three days, marveling as always at how beautifully they are written, at how rich they are – like everyone I wish there were more of course, but they probably wouldn't be so layered and subtle if she had written them much faster.

This afternoon I left the house to do one of the periodic presentations by HIV patients to medical students; afterwards I convinced Bob to walk with me to the nearby market, which has wonderful Asian fruit and vegetables, many of which I don't even know how to cook. I bought four of a strange green fruit, like apples, that soften to a rich white flesh – I can't remember the Indian name – they're in a bowl in the kitchen; I'd forgotten how rich, strong and complex their smell is, sweet and tart in a strange way.

Late tonight, the last story I read before bed was the famous, and very beautiful, 'Babette's Feast', about the worldly and the sacred, and the beauty of art, and of food... so it is appropriate that, across the darkened apartment, from the kitchen through the middle room and hallway, past the windows open to the spring night air, the perfume of the fruit comes to me while I'm lying in bed....

Therapeutic

One way to get past sullen dullness is to do things, to make things, to have something to take care of.

Two window boxes with herbs: parseley, sage, rosemary and thyme – and basil, as it happens; some new plants, plus the three rather tired ones I'd had in the windowsill all winter, all of which desperately wanted larger growing spaces (and now they have them). All very simple – something I'm sure either of my sisters, especially the elder who does landscaping, could have done in ten minutes without thinking – for me a bit more complicated and fussy, but ultimately successful. Slightly annoying to lose a few inches of sunlight in the room – up here you need all you can get – but I like the boxes anyway.

And the plants are finally perking up a bit... yes, the tops of lots of them are chopped (I used a bunch of basil and rosemary on the chicken last night). But the basil already looks happier than it has in months – its roots have clearly noticed all of the compost and plant food and water and, above all, room to grow, in just one day.

Hmm: symbolic, that. I guess I should go out for a walk, yes?...

Duisburg III: Breakfast

Wow. German breakfast…

‘Full English breakfast’ is something I seldom have at home, as it is a rather elaborate restaurant ritual; and besides, although I enjoy it while I’m eating, all those fried meats tend to return and get re-tasted all day.

Modern German breakfast – I don’t know how long this has existed in this form, but it was very familiar to me in Kiel, Darmstadt, Berlin, and in various trips to Switzerland, Hamburg, usw. – is several pieces of really good, warm, bread and rolls, with sliced cheese and meats, butter, and various pastes, and jams and such. Along with, as in this case, a soft-boiled egg, yogurt with nuts in it, very strong tea, orange juice; plus half a tomato (as the vegetable course). The student version, which I remember from my months of sleeping in the Darmstadt university student dorm with Herbert – the gentle, charming Herbert, who liked California police uniforms, and is now a Heilpraktiker in Berlin – has only the primary elements of this breakfast – bread, cheese, pastes, in bottles and on boards scattered across the table.

I know that the sliced cold cuts and little pastes in plastic containers must be the modern devolution of something that probably looked quite different a few decades ago, but I love it this way – the wide and bizarre selection (you can have anything at all on your bread, from Nutella to liver pâté), the richness of each… and, best of all of course, that really good bread. I’m not much for French bread; and I know that English and American bread are pallid imitations of what they so badly recall. But German bread, now that’s real bread…

And I eat it all. Even the tomato.

Being-in-the-world

Still been a bit groggy, and dismayed by the grogginess (though grateful for that extra hour today). Finally forced myself out of the house in midafternoon; walked through the neighborhood, among people doing the things people do (students in couples shopping, a guy with a big smile riding a bike, various children). Mild envy of their involvement in their own lives....

and so did some grocery shopping: not mostly necessities (my pantry's full of those) but luxuries and exotica, having been driven in that direction by reading one of my favorite food blogs. I fell for:

chocolate with nutmeg
soba noodles
smoked peppered mackerel
smoked salmon

(yeah, yeah, but I bought the cheapest one, and hey we're near Scotland so it's sort of local – and therefore really kind of a sensible purchase, yeah okay get off my back)

oat biscuits
Polish rye bread

(there's a massive influx of Polish food in the corner shop, responding to the new Polish immigrants in the neighborhood – although it does recall my year in Berlin, the Polish versions of Mitteleuropäischer foodstuffs are frankly mostly rather boring; and the labels are entirely in Polish, so there's not much that I'm willing to gamble on)

chocolate breakfast cereal
ghee
Greek meatballs, and Greek-style fava beans
Thai curry vegetables
fudge brownie mix (uh, is there a hidden agenda here?)
chorizo

(finally gambling on this once more – although all the chorizo I've bought here has been unappetizingly fatty, this is a new brand, so what the heck)

and
some sort of Chinese fruit

(that I don't recognize, and have no idea what they're going to taste like – hopefully not like lychees, rambutan, or guava, all of which I can't stand – actually they look like they might be custard apples, which are pretty wonderful in the split second between when they're ripe and when they fall apart).

(By the shade of Sei Shonagon, what a list.)

Then afternoon tea (that's the only thing you can really call it) at the café around the corner; meat and potato pie – sort of the prepackaged version of an English Sunday roast, which I rarely have but which was very welcome today. And reading Barthes' Empire of Signs – certainly one of the most self-indulgent things he ever wrote, and one of the most pleasurable to read; a strange and poetic look at the signs of Japan. When the charming (and good-looking) South Asian guy at the corner shop asked what the book was about, I said, well, it was by someone who loved aesthetic and symbolic things – and where would he have more fun, where would he feel as though he were in a more wonderful playground, than Japan?

The pleasure of being out in the world... when I came home, the apartment's air seemed close and without oxygen – that's what happens in winter, I suppose. I opened all the windows....

South

Tonight's pasta: conichiglie, with chopped-up anchovies melted in olive oil, and roasted tomatoes, and capers, and a can of tuna (that was possibly overkill) and lots of black pepper. It's got a bit of a kick – hmm, no lack of anchovy flavor....

I would love to live in Italy, or Spain, or Greece. A shame it's so implausible – they would either have to start hiring foreign academics (don't hold your breath) or I'd have to be rich enough to buy a house there, and live there (perhaps I should start answering those spam e-mails telling me I've won the lottery). But the pleasures of the people, the food, the weather – the sheer pleasure of pleasure, the joy of living in a culture where pleasure has a respected place.

If I lived in Barcelona, for instance, after this rich pasta I could have some of that chocolate liqueur....

Luxuries

A bit sleepy/groggy tonight, don't know why. Too much sugar, perhaps?...

Brought back from Spain: turrón, several kinds – egg yolk and sugar, which I love (and which I was told doesn't last, so I bought only one); almond paste and crushed almonds; and chocolate with almonds. Didn't bother with the wafer and egg whites one – had just hacked my way through a whole one that I'd bought in Rome, which was a bit like chewing through stone....

Roasted almonds, roasted hazelnuts (they're better than the ones they sell here). Dried fruit – sounds boring, I know, but these were some French dried fruits that were in the grocery in Sitges that were sort of half-dried and had a very different consistency to the ones I'm used to; the strawberries and apples were especially good (my guests the other night went right through a bowl of them). Buying figs here, at the corner store, reminded me of the much more amazing figs we took off the trees in Crete – G– and K– had become adept at this, watching for certain trees by the side of the road, planning when the green would turn purple. And the herbs there, and the mastikha....

I keep making things a bit more interesting in the kitchen – pesto in the hummus, a cayenne-lemon mixture on the salmon, pistachios in the saffron rice – feta marinated with olives and garlic... That's actually one of the advantages of visiting Mediterranean countries: one relearns that food is supposed to be good, rich and strong-flavored all the time.

One thing I had to leave behind, because it seemed impossible to take liquids through British airports after the Heathrow scare: the chocolate liqueur – not merely chocolate-flavored spirits, but more like pouring chocolate. And they were selling a white chocolate and a vanilla liqueur that were similarly made – ah well, next year....

As I've said, my increased fascination with strong flavors and related luxuries (bath oils, incense) may be associated with living in a northern country (and of course it's turning into autumn). Or a replacement for a sex life (Freud) or distraction from the relative boredom of living alone in a small city... of course, this jars slightly with the Marxist tone of my department: but then I've always been the self-indulgent bourgeois here.

And perhaps I'm just too sleepy to make sense tonight....

Out to lunch (Sitges V)

Today Susan and I went in to Barcelona on the train, to wander around and indulge ourselves. I wanted to do something unusual for lunch – in Sitges we have been a bit too conservative, too pedestrian, landing repeatedly at a popular Argentine steak house (pleasant but a tiny bit boring). So we were thinking in terms of El Bulli, the famous Costa Dorada restaurant that has ‘deconstructive’ cooking – not because there was any intention or even any faint chance of getting there, but because the demented chef who created it has followers and imitators in Barcelona. So we ended up at the Santa Maria... only a mild version of deconstructive cuisine, with a lot of what would really be called fusion; but the idea was there, and it was an amazing meal.

We had the ‘taster’ lunch... odd variations of ikuru-sushi, tuna empanadas, sardines with curried mayonnaise; then a cube of tuna; and, most intensely, a chunk of duck’s liver, fried – amazing and appalling at the same time; my body reacted to it like a strong shot of tequila, the kind where your eyes tear up and you leap for the lime. Then figs sliced on bread, covered with melted cheese. This was followed by three desserts – a small cup of cantaloupe, mango, and something I couldn’t identify, covered with a layer of pudding; a dollop of a tiramisu-like cream, like a ‘conceptual’ tiramisu; and finally a cluster of cornflakes on white chocolate and a rather fierce dark-chocolate truffle, in case you weren’t completely wrecked by this point.

Amazing... intense, but amazing. How to have fun with food (without, of course, throwing any of it)....

•••

Later that same day, I had dinner (as though I needed it by then). This was, however, the opposite kind of decadence: rather than elaborate avant-garde fragments, we ate the heartiest and most overwhelming of traditional food – two Catalan dishes, a calamari fried in tons of garlic, followed by fideuá with seafood. Perhaps my digestion will never forgive me, but: what a day for a gourmand....

•••

And the next day, lunch at almost the same level of density – but this time, after the avant-garde and the traditional, the sophisticated. A quasi-French, quasi-Catalan restaurant of great hauteur – the starter was an intense conglomeration of mushrooms, some of which had been shaved paper thin; the main course was rare ostrich and pears with chocolate sauce (and when did your mom last make that at home?). I ended by choosing a plate of cheeses, each of which was seriously intimidating (the kinds of cheeses that have more personality than most people) – the truth is, they were too much for me, and I felt a bit as though the menu itself had pointed out what a provincial, suburban colonial I really am.

Okay: it’s time for me to pull back. Three intense meals in a row: enough to make anyone a bit dizzy. Tonight, for dinner, I am allowed one fig... and water.