The Man has just given me a piece of advice that I feel worthy of sharing.

“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.

❧

For breakfast, he makes us boiled eggs; and gives me the egg cup while he utilizes a half-empty Ox cube box, which I find simultaneously chivalrous and ingenious of him. Then he watches while I struggle through the egg (I haven’t had a boiled egg in years, I tell him, truthfully and a bit defensively), giving me the occasional and helpful pointer, until I cry out:

“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.

❧

We went out into the garden on Sunday. I mean to say, we went into the garden properly on Sunday. Not as we do generally, with winter gloom all seeped into our pores, and a fog hovering on the horizon: rushing, in the last moments of daylight, to pour compost into the bin, to watch the finish of a brilliant sunset, to catch one more breath of fresh cold outside air before we retire inside, where it is warm, full of snuggles and food with the heater going and a glass of red wine in hand.

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.

❧

We have food phobias.

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.

❧

At a wine tasting last night (held upstairs at the Corner Club, formerly QI) I discovered that, in fact, I have a curious way of tasting wine indeed, as it actually very often doesn’t involve taste at all, in its conventional sense. Instead, I have a tendency to experience the wine. As a pathetically undereducated and only very informal fan of wine, I certainly enjoy identifying the curious tastes in a glass (a cursory glance through the notes I made last night reveal that I found one to be faintly meaty, another nutty, another simply “sharp”) but what I notice more fiercely is what the drink actually feels like (how it rolls over my tongue, the way it leaves the roof of my mouth), and in fact most of the notes I did make have more to do with tactile impressions than flavors.

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.

❧