Ten years ago I visited Britain for the first time.  My parents and I toured the country for two weeks in a blue Ford Focus; I sat in the backseat listening to a Cranberries CD over and over again and writing stories in a green spiral-bound notebook.  We came from California, where friends brought us eggs freshly laid from their free-range chickens, or lettuce from their organic vegetable farm; I picked my own oranges and watched my grandparents crack macadamia nuts with a machine in the garage.  And we’d heard jokes, every one of them, the gist of which was: Haha!  The English can’t cook!

But the funny thing was, there we were, and we weren’t having a hard time finding a good meal anywhere.  We ate the best Indian cuisine we’d ever tasted; we had Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese.  And pasties!  Cornish pasties!  After a long hike along the coast a pastry full of hot meat and creamy potatoes is exactly what you want, especially when it’s just started to rain with such force that the parking lot has flooded and turned the stairwells into waterfalls.  We had bread and cheese, glorious cheese; and ate more chocolate, I don’t know why, than seemed humanly possible.

Ten years later, and here I am again in England, living here.  The English are no longer the focus of quite so many food-based jokes; we’ve learned better, it seems.  But what I like best, and what’s most interesting, I suppose, is the European approach to eating.  Here’s what I mean: you can stretch a meal out.  And there’s no better day to do this than on Sunday.  The Sunday Roast is the classic way of doing this, and it doesn’t get more English than this: a hunk of meat (beef, pork, chicken, or lamb), potatoes roast in goose fat (or butter), vegetables (maybe some cabbage, carrots, parsnips, leeks), all slathered in gravy.

The thing that’s nice is not so much the hearty sustenance (though I’ve no objection to it!), but that it’s more of an event than a meal.  A Sunday lunch (or dinner) is a social engagement of a very special nature; casual, gentle, slow-paced.

How to Have a Successful Sunday Lunch

1. Plan ahead; but not too far ahead.  Mention to your friends on Friday or Saturday that you’re thinking of doing lunch, and would they like to come?  But don’t buy any of the ingredients until Sunday morning.  Planning is over-rated, but also, you’ll get fresher stuff.  Go to the butcher, not the supermarket, if you can.
2. Don’t start cooking until your friends start to arrive; that would be silly (remember: planning is over-rated).  They’ll be late anyway, which means you have the morning free to do with it what you will.
3. By this time, everyone will be starving.  Serve some crisps and a few drinks.  Commence the cooking!
4. Forget a crucial ingredient; take a stroll to the corner shop and hope they’ve got what you need.
5. Several hours later, the food will be ready, and boy will you be ready for it.  But to wash down all that meat and grease, wine!  Lots of wine!
6. Remember halfway through the meal about pudding.  Something quick–a fresh fruit crumble is always nice–that you can involve your guests with.  Have them get their hands dirty making the crumble while you nip to the shop to get cream.
7. Continue with the wine-drinking.  For maximum effect, do not do anything even remotely productive for the rest of the day.
8. (Tailor these instructions to suit your needs.)

And now, without further ado, I send you off to your next food-based destination: Nurinkhairi.  Happy surfing!

1) First, let’s discuss men who wear sweatbands (I mean the ones that go round your wrists, not the ones round your head, though that would be weird on a whole different level) whilst doing something ordinary and untaxing–say, walking down the street eating a pack of crisps.  Wearing a perfectly respectable shirt and jeans.  And flip flops.  Not trainers, but flip flops.  (Did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops and look anything but silly?  Come to think of it, did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops period?) Because I just don’t understand this one.  Maybe in the 1980s this was cool (it made you look preppy, sporty, ready-f0r-anything?), but in 2009, it just makes it look like you’re either a) suffering from worryingly overactive sweat glands, in which case why is that crisp Jack Wills polo so miraculously dry? or b) strangely concerned with dripping sweat into your crisps or indeed, c) both.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is, boys, get a grip: either on a tennis racket, in which case, please feel free to wear wristbands to your hearts’ content, because Roger Federer does, and it seems to work for him; or on reality.  You look silly.

2) Shops.  Let’s talk about shops for a moment.  I don’t mean the high-street, high-fashion variety, or the second-hand charity kind, or anything in-between.  I mean, I sometimes don’t know where to go when I need to get something very basic, like, say, Vogue (just this once, don’t ask the inevitable “need?” question–remember, I’m ill).  Not either of the two corner shops within a stone’s throw of our house, certainly–though I can go to either if I need the basic ingredients for a meal, and one or the other if I’m short on newspapers or booze.  Not the Co-Op down the road, either, apparently (I stuck my head far into the magazine rack to check, but all they had was Cosmopolitan and about a billion tabloids, so I bought the Cosmo and spent a furious half hour on the couch wondering how the editors get away with it all and, if they really know all the secrets to success, happiness, self-confidence and a sizzling sex-life, why anyone bothers to buy the magazine anymore–shouldn’t we all be out fucking and shopping?).  I struck gold at the newsagent across the street from the Co-Op, unsurprisingly, but here’s the thing that gets me: the newstand seems to carry just as much food, and as many household odds-and-ends, as the Co-Op.

I always thought that newsagents, like newsstands, were temples to the printed page, where glossy magazines and dozens of newspapers in dozens of different languages stood proudly on display, while cigarettes and the occasional bit or bob hid behind the counter, but this is obviously and vastly untrue.  There’s even one on the Cowley Road with a post office and, allegedly, a dry-cleaning service.  I’m just not sure that in the US, there’s a comparable complexity of shops.  Sometimes I want to pop into Boots, which I’ve had a hard time learning is not, despite appearances, synonymous with CVS, to buy something I think I should be able to get there–a magazine, a house-cleaning product, laundry detergent–only to be whisked by the crowds past baby clothes, expensive perfumes, women standing idly at designer perfume counters, seven aisles that encourage you to shampoo-condition-colour-moisturize-stylize your hair, and a thousand other things I didn’t know I could use to improve my appearance.

3) On a similar note…when I’m sick, there are two things that I crave invariably: lots of love and attention, and an infusion of brand-name artifical American goop.  The former has been bestowed well and kindly upon me by the Man, who has been nothing short of angelic these last few days; but the later has proven far trickier to get hold of.  Specifically, I want Gatorade, I want PowerBars, and I want saltine crackers.  The first and the last I can more or less find replacements for, but there is not, I don’t think, in all of England, a single PowerBar.  Ordinarily, fake food shot up with vitamins, made chewy and artifically flavourful, wrapped up in shiny plastic, would not particularly appeal to me, and I certainly wouldn’t mourn its absence in a country which has given me so many other good unwholesome foodstuffs, like Jaffa Cakes and Curly Wurlys (they do know how to name things here).  But PowerBars are like comfort food for times of physical woe, and when I’m sick I get particularly irrational about this.  Obviously.

Past a nursing home. Everything looked suburban. Not expensive but empty, tired, devoid of spirit. Around a corner, a sudden pub. We ate round a long table. Potted shrimp, scotch eggs, salmon, terrine, soft bread. Mashed potatoes, curly kale, slabs of bleeding beef. The Man looked especially happy. “Are you happy?” I said, looking over the top of my red wine glass. “Meat,” he grinned, reminding me of my dad’s 50th birthday (picture: a barbecue pit by the beach, some friends, and nothing to eat but pounds and pounds of tri-tip, which my mother had bought thinking it was the manly food to get). I even got past my fear of meat that hasn’t been cooked so well it looks black and enjoyed the tenderness (a little).

We sat on couches after. Shared an espresso, the Man and I, with a sugar cube. Back on the tube. We all shared no-hot-food-on-the-bus-back-to-Oxford horror stories (there are many). We were on the bus back before midnight. All so civilized. At St. Clements we alighted. As always I felt cold. I had to pee. I’d fallen asleep on the coach and my neck felt bent the wrong way. At home, relief, the sighs after a long night, but also a bewildered and delighted sense that neither of us had once considered screaming in frustration, this time.

“You’re not eating the nob of your sausage?” he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
“No,” I say. “I got bored with it.”
He picks it up, eats it. I’m chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
“You’re going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage,” he says. I swallow.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

(Maybe not so adult.)

This is after my very first English Christmas. We went to church in the morning, which is not something I regularly (or, frankly, ever) do (the Man opted to stay at home and help cook the Christmas lunch). The church was a beautiful English village church, wood-beams, stone walls, but inside, it had been carpeted, which made it feel too soft and comfortable; too much like the modern establishments of my own youth.

A pair of boys handed us a bright leaflet with carols to sing. Scattered amongst the traditional songs were photographs of smiling children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Middle East. The children were all called things Mohammad or Mehmet or Moshe and in spite of having families from Islamic or Jewish backgrounds every single one was holding a cross, or decorating a Christmas tree, or pointing at a picture-book bible.

The other leaflet, a green folded paper, let us know when we were meant to say things like, “Glory be to God,” and, “Jesus is the truth, allelulia!” Midway through the service a woman stood up to distribute gifts to a few children in the audience, each time asking the child, “and what have you done for me today?” and each time receiving the rueful mumbled response: “Nothing.”

And she would say back, “Nothing, exactly. You’ve done nothing for me, but I’m giving you this gift anyway. So this is a token of my love.” Like most good religious messages, it turned out to be a metaphor: God loves us, the woman was saying, even though we’ve done nothing to deserve it.

“Oh yeah,” said the Man when I returned home, feeling I’d been suitably guilted for the day. “That’s standard C of E. That’s not really considered religious.”
“Have we really done nothing to deserve God’s love?” I said, forgetting, in my religiously-coloured guilt, that I’m not even sure what I believe about God. “And how on earth is that not religious?”

As it turns out the English have just as curious a relationship with religion as the Americans. As far as I can tell, the Church of England is not so much a Church-with-a-capital-c as an establishment with some tenuous and primarily historical links to some tenuous and primarily historical religious beliefs. But it’s pervasive. If you go to a church wedding in England every single member of the audience will know not only the words to all the hymns but, more impressively, will know when to stretch certain words that don’t look like they should be stretched, or when to take a very long pause that isn’t written into the music, or when to forgo breath because everything needs to be squeezed into one beat. They all know this because regardless of whether their education was public or private, they grew up singing these songs in school.

You couldn’t, on the other hand, logically sing a song with the words,

Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray

in any American public school and not risk an uprising of mothers quoting the constitution. We have that famous so-called separation between church and state, you see; but actually, the English are the ones with the real separation. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (or any other carol) isn’t seen, as the Man so aptly pointed out, as religious–just as traditional. If half the audience on Christmas morning had stood up and pronounced themselves Jews, or Athiests, I don’t think anyone would have blinked–or thought it odd that they were sitting in on a Christian ceremony.

Our relationship with religion in the states, however, is just as bizarre. We claim to have severed the tie between religion and governance, but elect our leaders based on their religious ideals and affiliations (any political pundit will tell you that if you want to be president, you need to seem to have a good Christian family, regardless of how religious you are). We inspire an actual fear in our children that saying the words “Christ our saviour” means that we believe in something that might be objectionable to someone else, but one of our nation’s most impressive artistic legacies, gospel singing, is a form of worship. What we forget, I suppose, is that we founded our country based on having the freedom to worship any way we wish, not on creating a secular society.

***

But regardless of the religiosity, or secularism, of English society, this was Christmas as I have never seen it before. For the first time ever, I set out snacks for Santa before going to bed (a glass of port, a glass of milk, two mince pies, two carrots–”why the milk?” I wanted to know; “in case Santa wants a choice,” the Man informed me). The next day at breakfast we opened our stockings; after church we spent hours (no, I am not exaggerating) opening gifts, adhering to strict rituals of present-distribution. We commented on missing the Queen’s speech. We took a very lenghty nap after a very heavy lunch. We played cards and sipped gin and tonics. We ate crackers and fruit and cheese for supper. We went for a starlit walk, our noses numb from cold.

Today I sit on the sofa in the lounge, South Pacific on the TV in the background. I hear a woman singing: “And they say I’m naive to believe anything from a person in pants…”

And because we are adults, but still not very adult, the Man and I giggle.

So yes, I missed my family this Christmas, and even the incongruous California warmth (when I was a child it angered me that Christmas came every year so hot and sunny); but here we are, and we’re very, very happy, and we’re together, which, as I told the Man when he suggested that Christmas was ruined because he had a cold (only a man would say that) is the most important thing of all.

“Here,” the Man has just said to me. “Taste the beer-and-cheese sauce I’ve just made,” and waved a spoon at me. I think it’s time for me to rejoin the circus.

“Don’t try to scratch your nose with a cupcake,” he’s advised me. “I just got cake in my nostrils.”

I’m going to join my cake-snorting love in the lounge, and resist the urge to scratch body-parts with baked-goods. I suggest you do similar.

“You can’t assume that I know everything about eggs!”

(And then add, in a very small voice: “and just because I don’t doesn’t make me any less of a person.”)

Things are fine until we start on the toast:

“This is good marmalade!” he says.
“Mmm. Good, proper, marmalade-y marmalade,” I agree. Then I add, because I somehow think this is relevant to the discussion: “It’s just from the shop around the corner. We bought it in October.”
“I know,” he says. “We keep forgetting to use it because it’s been in the fridge.”
“You have to refrigerate it!” I say. This is an argument of ours; well, I say argument. It’s more like a mild but irrevocable cultural rift.
“No, you don’t.”
“Oh I know,” I concede, as if he’s somehow dragged it out of me after hours of hard debate, “But it’s better if you do.”
“It’s got preservatives. It’ll keep for months out,” he tells me, for the thousandth time in our relationship. Then he adds thoughtfully, “hmm, lucky we did put it in the fridge, really, given that we got it in October.”
“Hah!” I say, and we reach a quiet sandstill, punctuated by chewing and swallowing and a sort of haughtiness that neither of us quite deserves. I finish my toast. I say:
“Anyway, I like jams better when they’ve been refrigerated.”
“You do?”
“I like the cool taste of refrigerated jam contrasted with the hot crunchy feeling of buttered toast,” I tell him; and I mean it, I think.
“Um,” he says.
“Well, it’s true.”
“All I’m saying is that it isn’t necessary.” He checks the jar of marmalade. “See? It doesn’t say ‘refrigerate after opening’”
“It’s British. Of course it doesn’t; nothing ever does.” I can’t tell if I sound righteous or jealous; briefly, I picture a world in which my kitchen actions are not dictated by the words printed on cans and jars–free, free! Oh, you lucky Brits.
“That’s not true.”
“Well, apart from milk.”
“And hummus!” he says.
“Oh! You’re right. And hummus.”

And where can we go from here? We crawl into the lounge and watch the day, which hasn’t yet decided if it wants to be cloudy-miserable or only partially so. We have been recovering from illness all week, and are giddy with it. Wellness is in reach, but we haven’t yet reached it. We listen to Radio 4 and put aside our culinary differences for a bit. There’s a special on street food; in South Korea, we learn, street vendors have composed a song to promote their craft, as they fear their kind are endangered by a government that sees a vendor-free country. “We’re human too,” is one of the lines; the music sounds like a boisterous, march-like carousel tune.

The sun continues to play games with the window; it’s shining through now, now it’s not, now it is. It’s a kind of seasonal hide-and-seek: here’s spring, in all its hot glory; now where’s it gone?

Last night we heard fireworks going off; they sounded so close, so random, that they could have been gunshots, or thunder, so we opened our window and peered out; across the street we could see green bursts reflected in a dark window.

Cloudy again. The marmalade is still out on the table.

No—we actually went out into the garden for the sake of going out into the garden on Sunday.

There is a large part of both of us, I think, which wants desperately to be proficient in the wordless, yet timeless, language of gardening. Each of us would like to be able to coax things into being with nothing but soil and water and will; for there is a way, I suppose, in which gardening satisfies the ego, is a bit like playing God, whereby you can create, where once was merely dirt and emptiness, something that lives, and breathes; something which can get sick, can die, can reproduce, can flourish, and yet which can also satisfy basic human needs: the need for beauty, the need for sustenance. In this way we are merely arrogant in our desire to garden.

Also we are conscious of something: some pleasure felt when we know that the herbs we’ve used to spice our meal came not from some anonymous field thousands of miles and infinite worlds away, but from outside our very own back door, from a terrain we know (know well) and love. The only energy required to obtain these herbs, we can say, was the energy to take a few wavering steps into darkness with an electric torch, to bend and pluck from the earth itself a leaf; to straighten up, return inside, crush into food that sizzles with pleasure upon being seasoned.

When food loses its anonymity, it becomes something more than “food” in its most modern sense. MacDonald’s is food; Kentucky Fried Chicken is food. But what history have you with a Bic Mac? I know the world is a very large place; but there is a part of me which wants to say that we may not necessarily have the right to consume without contributing; at least, we certainly do not have the right to consume without understanding. There is a process to food: it is not born the way it is served.

So we went out into the garden. Neither of us properly knows what to do with a garden but we each know that we want to make one which will bear us vegetables, which will suck up time on the weekends and drink water when it rains and which will make our fingernails black with dirt and our knees sore from kneeling. And we figured we could start with the most basic sorts of things; it is only early February, after all, and we live in a northern climate, a cold place, a wet place, where winter means something beyond temperature and daylight hours.

So he plucked the weeds from the vegetable patch while I raked the leaves that had caked themselves onto the path. I swept along the sides of the wall and tidied the area that had been used until now as a catch-all: outside, but still part of the house, it had accrued all kinds of detritus–half of an old welcome mat, most of which had rotted away; banana peels and old sagging flowers, all dried out; old clothespins which had fallen from the line in summer, when all it took to dry the laundry was a bit of sun and a warm breeze. When he had wrestled all of the weeds from the patch, we switched jobs, and I raked over the mud searching for rogue roots while he darted from one corner of the garden to the other, mending things, moving things, bending close to things and examining them.

It reminded me of something we’d done in California close to Christmas, when my parents had wanted us to help them ready their own small vegetable patch for regrowth later in the year. So we spent a sunny afternoon removing dead tomato plants which had tied themselves to each other; plucking out old carrots which had become withered and shrunken in their abandonment; raking over the soil, smoothing it, soothing it, readying it for more, more, more growth. At the end of the day we wiped sweaty brows and went back up the house for a beer and some warm soup.

There is a curious kind of satisfaction in doing something like that: destruction for reconstruction’s sake, you could almost say. On Sunday we left the garden looking more barren than it has for months; yet infinitely more hopeful than it has since I can ever remember. Is that not utterly strange? We cleared things away; we put a human stamp on something that had begun to decay, to dishevel, to become a messy knot of inattention. The only sign, at the end of the day, of our interference, was that things looked even less likely to grow there: for what, you find yourself thinking, wants to grow where there are no sweaty piles of leaves on the path, no weeds sprouting, no clothespins lying like a broken promise of warmer weather?

And yet from the tidiness we created, we hope (we know)–green things will happen, in time, with care.

I used to make fun of him for his: conference pears. I only had to speak the words; and as soon as they escaped my lips they seemed to go straight to his head. He would shudder in the same way he does when I put on an English accent and say “water” (the only word I can say truly convincingly, at the moment) and goosebumps would rise on the back of his neck.
“They’re only pears,” I would say, “I’ve seen you eat pears.”
“Not conference pears,” he would say back, cringing.

It had to do with their skin, he confessed one night: their horrible scaly pearskin, slightly fuzzy like a peach, rough and wrong. Like when you see something that’s completely disproportionate, and it makes something in your head go berserk, go all dizzy because things aren’t as they should be. Like the window display I once saw in Boston, with huge denim jackets sized for Sasquatch next to mini jeans clearly meant to fit Malibu Barbie.
“I’ll be your conference-pear handler,” I promised.
“Thank you,” he breathed, relieved, I think.

But the other day, I was pondering the poetry of compost: the way teabags and old brown lettuce leaves arrange themselves in the bowl, nestled amongst green carrot-tops and strips of red and yellow peppers and old potatoes, when it occurred to me that I have my own food phobia, akin to his conference-pear-horror.

Sprouting potatoes. The ones that have been sitting on the counter for too long, a few weeks maybe, the ones that things have started to grow out of. I get the same kind of vertigo looking at sprouting potatoes that I did looking at the denim window display. The worst is when they’ve got little flowerbuds, usually dark purple, at the end of the green sprouts. I’m actually shuddering just thinking about it.

To even the score, I told him about my dread of sprouty potatoes, and he promised not to ever make me deal with them if he could help it. This is how I know we are good for each other (or one way I know): we take care of each other’s food phobias.

And each other’s food loves. We say things like, “it’s ok, we’ve got hummus” without a trace of irony. It really is ok, though not just because we have hummus but also because of all the other things that are hidden in the folds of being able to say “we’ve got hummus”. This weekend we made our own hummus: a smattering of spices and pepper, some garlic, lemon juice, chickpeas in their own water, all blended together with a delightfully phallic aluminum blending stick. Then we sat in the lounge eating our hummus and drinking cider and reflecting on the richness of this kind of evening.

We made winter vegetable soup, too. This was about a week ago. We had a preponderance of root vegetables. No, preponderance doesn’t even begin to cover it. We had an invasion of root vegetables. Carrots and potatoes and swedes and Jerusalem artichokes pouring out of boxes and bowls, practically spilling from the kitchen. George the poet came by once and assured us we’d never go hungry like this, but then some of the potatoes started to sprout and I panicked and we decided we should do something about the whole situation, so one evening, a really cold one, when all you want is soup and to be inside, we cooked them up and put them in a wonderful stew. Neither of us was quite sure what to do with the Jerusalem artichokes–which do not look like artichokes, which do not come from Jerusalem–so I looked them up. “Cook them like you would potatoes,” said one website, “but beware that they have a tendency to produce very potent gas.”

We had fresh tomato-infused bread from Maison Blanc and lots of butter and listened to Radio 4. Sometimes I think we are very old people in very young people’s bodies, and I love it.

Are Scotch Eggs the ultimate hangover cure? We wondered this once. Because they are such perfect little balls of everything you crave when your head won’t stop pounding: they’re warm, breaded, meaty, eggy, and, best of all, you can dip them in hummus. (“It’s ok; we’ve got hummus.”)

Last night we went over to an impromptu dinner with some friends. “We have lots of chips,” they said. “And steak. And pink bubbly.” We stopped by the Co-Op on our way, so that we’d have something to bring them, but the only meat they had was lamb, so we brought lamb chops and red wine and the rest of our homemade hummus. Then we ate steak and lamb and bacon and chips and hummus and champagne and red wine and whiskey with ginger wine and talked, more or less, about the first lines of books. That is what food does to us.

And I was happy, because the night before, I said, all I’d been craving was a big chunk of meat. There is no way to say that, if you’re wondering, without making it sound like a thinly guised euphemism–nor is there any way to express the relief of finally getting said meat (“oh, you finally got some, did you?”), but it doesn’t matter. The other day when they didn’t have any condoms in the shop, he brought me home The Observer‘s Book of Food–a Saturday special–instead, to tide us over until we could get to a real store.

I found myself turning to the boy (beside me in a suit, looking almost unfairly dapper), who is of course infinitely more knowledgeable than myself in matters of both viticulture and culinary adventures (I had to ask him what was on my plate at dinner later), and telling him all about what my mouth was experiencing. Trust a girl to always want to talk about her feelings, even when it’s taste on the table, right?

Finally I said: “Actually, most of the time I’m so distracted by what I feel that I don’t even notice most of the flavors,” to which he very kindly replied (I’m including this only because it may add a tiny bit to my credibility here): “That may be, but you do notice flavors I would never be able to point out, and after I’ve seen you write them down that I find myself agreeing completely.”

Sweet indeed; and to be fair to myself, I’m unlikely to enjoy a wine whose flavors I inherently object to. But the discussion came to its zenith after the Syrah was poured; I took a sip, wrinkled my nose and twisted my lips as if I’d just tasted something foul, and was in the process of noting on my paper that I most definitely did not like this one when I discovered that the taste in my mouth was suddenly quite pleasing, and the actual feeling even more so: a kind of warmth spreading through my belly, settling on my tongue and in my head. The aftertaste was soft and buttery and I felt like I might be glowing. I immediately went back for a second (and rather large) sip; and was again confronted with revulsion. “Ugh,” I said out loud, and then felt all warm and fuzzy again, and smacked my lips happily against the creamy taste.

“This one’s like a fickle lover,” I said at first.
The pinstripe suit beside me lowered his glass in surprise. “I’m sorry?” he said.
“Well, that’s not the best description. But my first reaction was that I absolutely hated it. And about two seconds later I loved it. It’s got such a nice feeling—all sort of—warm and glowy—and—” I paused, wondering if what I was about to say was even allowed to be uttered out loud, or if someone would come escort me away from the very civilized table for being too crude—“it’s sort of like the feeling of being on the cusp of an orgasm? Only obviously not so intense.”

To the silence beside me I begged, “do you know what I mean?” and got at last a, “yes, I do, actually,” and a thoughtful sipping.

“But it’s amazing how extreme the two reactions are,” I went on, “and how quickly I switch from the first to the second. It’s almost like…umm…ok, these are probably not official wine-tasting terms, but it’s like someone who you think is a real bastard at first, only he turns out to be absolutely sweet in the end.”
He actually agreed (was it all the sipping?) and then “surely,” he said, “surely we know someone like that?”

(Which is how the Syrah, which they sell, rather wonderfully, by the glass at The Corner Club/QI, came to be called, between the two of us, after a friend of ours.)

Then Mike, the man who had brought all the wine, started speaking about terroir, which he translated roughly as “taste of the place”—an elusive term used, I gathered, to describe the way the components of place (soil, sun, wind, rock: whatever it is that makes one grapegrowing site utterly unlike another) are imparted into the taste of the resulting wine. Apparently new world wines (Australia, Chile, California, for example) have a tendency to lack true terroir, where it is far more apparent in old world wines.

My understanding of the term may be rudimentary at best, but it is interesting to think that there is a word for being able to taste the origins of a wine. Then I started wondering if perhaps the new world wines lack this because the new world itself (being new only in a euro-centric cultural sense, of course) lacks the same sense of roots and identity as the old?

I can say this because I am myself a product of the new world (in other words: I may still offend but you cannot call me crass or unfeeling; I have greatest respect for my roots and my homeland) and the one commonality of my new world, at least, is a sense of confused heritage. I’ve lived somewhere that was settled by the Chumash, taken over by the Spanish and owned by Mexico before it was appropriated again by a young country whose ideological values tended to align more with Western Europe than anywhere else; somewhere that has subsequently been settled by scores of people from all over the planet. You see an old building and it is maybe a hundred years old; what is that compared to the ruins of Stonehenge, the medieval cathedrals of Western Europe, the villages that have existed since written records began? The place itself is old (the soil, the bedrock, the mountains and oceans) but the people who were there first are there no longer, not in any great number—replaced by inhabitants whose roots stretch all the way around the globe, invisible golden strings that run lines back and forth, up and down the earth.

In such places, grapegrowing is a new endeavor (I remember the fields of the Santa Ynez Valley before they were turned into a thousand vineyards, and I am young indeed). No wonder then that you can’t taste the place as well; for the place is still developing itself. Earlier we had sat upstairs with a local restaurant owner talking about California cuisine, which is so wonderfully a product of cultural hybridity, of combination and amalgamation: where else do you get a food culture where fresh is paramount (and, thanks to climate, eminently possible) but where dishes themselves are things which have been influenced by Mexico and South America, the Far East, Europe, and classic American ideals of cuisine? If terroir is about tasting the environment in which a given varietal has been grown, then it would be impossible to taste in new world wines, wouldn’t it, where the environment is as mutable as the sky?

for posterity’s sake, I should really add that none of the photographs in th
is post were taken at the event described.