Opinion Mix it up

Enid Blyton’s,”The Faraway Tree”,reminds me of my granny’s sweet and sour mango pickle,eaten straight from bottle kept out in the summer sun. “Nancy Drew” is reminiscent of the Snickers bar and a bite of Bounty (the coconut centre bar),then of course there were many more books,most of John Updike’s “Rabbit Omnibus” did taste of tuna sandwiches packed for college lunch,and Truman Capote oh..divine..only good desserts were eaten in his company. Eating and reading,and that is how i remember quite a few good quotes,story-lines all mashed up with memory of a good meal. I was often asked,”Is the food so bad you want to distract yourself with a book?” “No! In fact it is so nice I want to remember it along with this nice story”  For some strange reason that explanation did not cut it. Ah well,I also remember some rum sipped reading Henry Miller,then of course there were many books read in the mellow high of a full bodied red. So mixing up two good pleasures,does that seem too much?

If childhood does have the musty smell of old books or a sniff of an old perfume bottle can take you back to your mom’s dressing table,then yes,food does that too,it can remind you of certain books. We do tuck into many a meal in front of the TV,but I don’t have any shows that I remember with food,maybe only Giant Robot or Fraggle Rock watched with a mug of Bournvita,yes only those TV shows were really worth attaching a taste to. TV today is nice but not thrilling. Not enough for slow savouring,only a book fits in there.Like in “Babette’s Feast” by Isak Dinesen where “a Caille en sarcophage avec sauce perigourdine (quail in puff pastry shell with foie gras and truffle sauce),salad made with Belgian endive and walnuts in a vinaigrette,  Blini demidoff au caviar (buckwheat cakes with caviar and sour cream) and a dessert of  “Savarin au Rhum avec des Figues et Fruit Glacée” (rum sponge cake with figs and glacéed fruits)” is served up. Or try “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” the book by Fannie Flagg,where “You can get eggs,grits,biscuits,bacon,sausage,ham and red-eye gravy,and coffee… For lunch and supper you can have: fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish; chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables,biscuits or cornbread,and your drink….the vegetables are: creamed corn; fried green,  tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans. And pie for dessert.”

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And if you still dont feel like munching on something while reading these,test yourself,fittingly in time for Christmas. An excerpt from Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” “We eat our supper (cold biscuits,bacon,blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron,ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple,rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh,so much flour,butter,so many eggs,spices,flavorings: why,we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home….” “The black stove,stoked with coal and firewood,glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl,spoons spin round in bowls of buttter and sugar,vanilla sweetens the air,ginger spices it; melting,nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen,suffuse the house,drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thiry-one cakes,dampened with whiskey,bask on window sills and shelves.” Bite that.