Mangoes on Wednesday

Sometimes in life you need a little gift. Here are some simple instructions to practice the pleasure principle on the cheap.

Go to the produce department at your grocery store and find the sliced mangoes. You could buy a fresh mango, but that wouldn’t be a gift for yourself. That would be work. Buy the sliced mangoes in the plastic container instead and promise to recycle the plastic if you need that peace of mind.

When you get home, put the container somewhere in the bottom of the refrigerator. It is a law of nature that the mango spears in that container are nowhere near ready to eat. They are still basically white, sour, and tough. Walk away and do something else. You have plenty to do. Forget about it.

In the meantime, perhaps the week ahead will kick you in the face. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

Notice the mangoes late on Wednesday night. Maybe you will be rooting around the refrigerator looking for the last Inca Kola, or maybe you are thinking about the leftovers from Monday’s dinner down there somewhere. Whatever the reason, look in the back. When you see the little plastic boat full of beautiful little golden yellow spears, now perfectly ripened, you may curse with delight. That is up to you.

Resist the urge to crack open the container and scoop the contents into your greedy maw two or three spears at a time right there at the refrigerator. This would be good, sure, but a measure of patience now will pay off later.

Take the container over to the counter and open it carefully. Search your spice rack for the Chili Powder and liberally dust the top layer of mangoes with the rich, ochre-red seasoning. I learned this trick from a woman selling mangoes on the street outside of the New York Public Library. She was shouting, “Mango, Mango, Mango, Mango,” a simple but effective incantation, and I was drawn like an insect to the porch lamp on a summer night. When I handed over four sweaty dollar bills, she produced a Zip-Loc bag full of the precious golden slices—which is the closest thing to a drug deal I have been involved in for many years—and asked, “you want chili?” You want chili.  

Now you are ready. Grab a fork and recline like Nero on the couch in the living room while you eat every single chili-seasoned mango spear in the box. This is a gift.

1,000 Foods: Afternoon Tea

I am eating and writing my way through Mimi Sheraton’s 1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die. This is the first entry on my blog documenting the odyssey, but there will be many more — judiciously spaced, of course, because at the end of the book I may be karmically obligated to drop dead. In today’s entry—the very first item in Sheraton’s first chapter on British and Irish food—I tackle that most stereotypical of British meals, “afternoon tea.”

Tea is symbolic. Where I grew up, it was served cold, so sweet it would numb your teeth. It seemed to say something essential about who we were. In the kinds of restaurants we visited, places named “Famous Amos” or “Country Kitchen” or “Tad’s,” two things were always true. First, the place would be rollicking on payday Fridays. You might mistake the dining room for a Christian Science reading room on Tuesday nights, but on Friday you’d better show up early and bring your outside voices. Second, sweet tea was the drink by default.

Sweet tea was a ritual. You’d sit down at a wooden picnic table, and a woman—always, always a woman—would emerge from the kitchen or meander over from another table to take your drink order. Each person in turn would say “sweet tea for me,” or “same here,” and moments later she would return carrying three or four enormous red plastic cups. Ice cubes would clack against the sweating plastic sides, further watering down the light brown brown substance in the cup, flavored more by sugar than tea leaves, and we loved it. We’d drink it like water, even those aunts and cousins with more sophisticated palates who took it with lemon, and it was an experience.

Tea at home was a different ritual. Everyone had an opinion about how it was best made. Mom brewed a fastidious pitcher, closely following the instructions on the side of the big generic box labeled, simply, “Tea Bags.” A consummate woman of the nineteen-eighties, she left the pitcher in the refrigerator unsweetened and kept a ceramic tray full of Sweet n’ Low packets on the counter. Dad’s tea was more anarchic. Dad would throw twenty or thirty tea bags in a pot of boiling water on the stove, turn off the heat, and let the roiling cauldron steep to a rich, tannic brown as the water cooled. Then he would transfer the mixture to a pitcher with about a cup of granulated sugar and toss it in the refrigerator tuned, always, to the lowest temperature setting. Thrilling to drink, a glass of dad’s tea would leave leave you thoroughly satisfied but somehow thirstier than you were when you started.

When I was a teenager, my relationship with tea changed along with my idea of who I might become. Beguiled by the tea section at the end of the coffee aisle, rapidly growing by the late nineteen-nineties to include such exotic offerings as chamomile and “Green Tea” (written in faux Chinese letters, dark green on a pale green field), I found myself experimenting with the kettle, adding honey instead of sugar. A friend taught me to add milk to my black tea, in the English style. We sent off for the Stash Tea catalog on the internet and when it arrived our little group of friends passed it around like a porno magazine, circling sampler collections of Oolong and Chai in Algebra II or daydreaming about fields of verbena and lavender in Language Arts. Something about Stash Tea felt emancipatory, like we were turning our backs on the sweet tea at Famous Amos or Tad’s and all it represented.

Iced tea and teenage rebellion are not what Mimi Sheraton had in mind when she included afternoon tea in 1,000 Foods. “One of life’s pleasantest indulgences,” Sheraton writes, “is afternoon tea, preferably in London, although as this cosseting meal regains popularity, it can be enjoyed in upscale hotels and romantic tearooms around the world.” Neither upscale hotel nor romantic tearoom, alas, the Famous Amos restaurant and the language arts classroom at Westside High School were nonetheless joined with these illustrious locations through the ritual symbolism of tea.

I did not know the “cosseting meal” of afternoon tea as Sheraton describes it until I was in my thirties, on my first trip to New York City. Emerging on a blustery October morning from the steaming train station onto a cold wind tunnel street in the Village, we stuffed our hands in the pockets of our lightweight southern jackets and started walking, thrilled by the simultaneous familiarity and difference that characterizes the city for outsiders. We wandered through Washington Square Park, laughing to recall all the film scenes we had watched unfold in this spot or another; I whistled and took pictures of the Blue Note; we felt real cool on Bleecker Street; and then we made our way slowly up the concrete spine of Manhattan. We stumbled upon the Flatiron Building quite by accident, holding our own camera over the heads of tourists snapping pictures of the iconic triangle for Instagram. We wandered through Times Square and walked gapemouthed through the tangle of commerce and bodies north of there until my wife pointed at a place down the street and said, “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

That was the first time I had ever heard of the Russian Tea Room.

We entered the Russian Tea Room around 3:30 in the afternoon. The shadows were already beginning to lengthen outside. Compared to the wind blowing relentlessly cold outside, the warmth in the tearoom was palpably luxurious. A waiter dressed in a rich, double-breasted jacket pulled a semicircular table away from an upholstered couch on the finely trimmed forest green wall. We took our seats and bleared around the room, a dimly lit jewel box of green and red, paintings and chandeliers. At the table across from ours, a group of young women arrayed in crinoline Victorian finery and fascinators took their tea, stopping every so often to pose for group photographs or focus their attention on one of the group’s members while she delivered a brief monologue. Unprepared by my Famous Amos background in the deep South to interpret this place and its social meanings, I gazed on the room as one peering through the looking glass.

Soon, thankfully, a waiter emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and a pot of tea to ease the burden of interpretation. “It begins with delectable crustless sandwiches trimmed into rounds or finger shapes,” Sheraton writes of afternoon tea in 1,000 Foods. At the Russian Team Room, these sandwiches were delicate but transcendently flavorful triangles of chicken and shrimp salad, smoked salmon, artichokes and red pepper, turkey, bleu cheese. “These dainty sandwiches are mere preludes to currant-studded scones and crumpets,” Sheraton continues, “and pound cakes such as the caraway seed classic, topped with clotted cream and fruit jams and marmalades.” I cannot explain it better.

The tea, a samovar of simple but effective Darjeeling black, tied the meal together. It connected us across time and space with the afternoon tea rituals of the imperial nineteenth century, the evening traditions of the ruling class in the capital city of the American Century, and the humble tea fields in south Asia where the leaves were harvested. It also recalled the tea rituals of my own youth. It was mysterious and worldly like the Stash Teas in our high school catalog, simple and unapologetic like the sweet tea on the table at Famous Amos. Tea is ritual.

McDonald’s: Communion

A large Diet Coke and a medium fry.

It is the second day of January and I am on the 5th day of a “vegan cleanse.” I’m not quite sure of what I am cleansing myself. I agreed to the cleanse because it felt, somehow, like cleansing myself of the worst parts of American capitalism. Those parts that reduce thinking creatures to so many dollars realized per dollar spent, no matter the cost in misery, in health, or whatever other problems we imagine we could escape if we just had enough money. Enough money to be somewhere else when the knocker and the butcher come for us, too.

I said yes to the cleanse, but here I am: in the drive-thru line on a rain-soaked Saturday afternoon, waiting impatiently for the line to move up so I can find something, anything, without animals or their “products” in it to go with my drink. I still think like an omnivore, so I consider for a moment picking up a sundae as a surprise for my wife at home. It takes me a beat too long to realize why that is a bad idea, why it might be a different sort of surprise than what I had in mind. It’s got to be fries, I learn. That’s all there is.

There is something vaguely shameful about McDonald’s. Even if you don’t mind the cruel calculus of fast food, if you love the idea of an international supply chain delivering dripping death from the killing floor to the PlayPlace in a neighborhood near you, you’re still likely to feel a little shame waiting in the line at McDonald’s. You’d rather be somewhere else. You probably wouldn’t want a friend driving by to see you there. Perhaps our willingness to wallow in this shame, time and again, for food that nobody seems to actually like, is evidence that we’re all in an abusive relationship with the golden arches—but that is a thought to unravel some other day. Right now my order is up at the window.

I take a sip and pull around the building. My dog pokes her little shaggy gray head into the space between the driver and passenger seats, her eyes boring a hole in the bag of fries in the passenger seat. For her this is what it’s all about, really: food, always. I share a fry with her and think, in that warm glow of peace and well-being unique to salty, fried foods, that it’s much the same for us. Down there at the bottom of everything it’s always about food. Our lust for travel, our finest memories and innermost desires: food. Everything else, from sex to symphony orchestras, is a distant runner-up.

It is in this salty afterglow that I reflect, too, on the good radiating from this building. The teenagers working their first jobs behind the counter. The managers—if they’re good ones—imparting a new category of knowledge to their young charges. The meals on the table, directly and indirectly, for which this place is responsible. I think about the homeless men and women inside, safe from the rain and cold in one of the few places that won’t turn them out. I think about my father-in-law, for whom McDonald’s is somehow a wonderful meal, and the complicated generational differences underlining my inability to understand his opinions about this and everything.I think about my mother, who passed a tiny portion of the damage our culture has done to women down to me in the form of a deep and abiding taste for Diet Coke.

This place smooths, in a small way, the jarring gaps of age, of race, of gender and wealth and sensibility and morality that divides us all. Maybe that good flowing out of the front door offsets some of the bad flowing in through the back. I take a sip. I pass a fry to my dog. She takes it, ever so gently, from my hand and retires to the back seat. She’ll be back for more before I can finish my own. I eat another fry, savoring the salt, the hint of oil, and think, soon the rain will stop. Out in some featureless place, where I don’t think it ever rains, McDonald’s will continue turning cows into dollars. Tomorrow my cleanse will continue. But today we have shared some fries, we two, and that is all we really need.

Food and Place: Lucilla and The Grey

The difference between good food and great food has a lot to do with its relationship with place

Tonight we ate at Lucilla here in Tallahassee, and it was really good. I had the vegetable pot pie–a flavorful concoction of corn, squash, asparagus, tomatoes, field peas, shiitake, and scallions in a roasted shallot tomato velouté ,suspended between a couple pieces of flaky pie crust and served alongside a decent-enough salad of mixed greens with cucumbers and radishes drizzled with a vinaigrette. It was all really well done–for real, you should eat there if you’re in Tallahassee–but I don’t know that I’ll remember anything about the meal beyond its quality a few weeks from now. I think this is because we remember stories and, unfortunately, the menu at Lucilla doesn’t have a story to tell. 

While it’s clear that the menu is mostly “Southern,” it’s a little bit all over the place. You can get “Snapper St. Charles” or Blistered Shishito Peppers, if you’d like; or perhaps you’d prefer to choose between Pasta Bolognese or Shrimp & Grits. Each of these would be undoubtedly delicious, but the menu doesn’t have a story to tell about the people who made it or the things that inspire them. Contrast this with The Grey in Savannah, Georgia. On Chef’s Table, Executive Chef Mashama Bailey recounts how she originally developed a really eclectic menu. After she was encouraged to focus the menu by mentor Anne Willan, she chose to focus on place. This is a big part of what makes the restaurant so successful. It’s not a Savannah institution, like Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room, but it might as well be; because everything about it, from the location and decor to the menu and attitude, is so richly evocative of the city that it seems almost impossible to skip the restaurant when you visit. 

Telling a story about place the way that The Grey does elevates the occasion from a merely sensuous thrill to an aesthetic experience. This, I think, is what we remember most about restaurants. It’s what drives Vice to make a film about Pok Pok in Portland. It’s why the Travel Channel is mostly food shows. It’s also what keeps us going back to some really mediocre places, like Olive Garden or Outback Steakhouse. 

So here’s maybe a lesson for budding restaurateurs: evoke an interesting place well, and you’ll be successful. Add wonderful food to the mix? You’ll be legendary.

Seriously, though: go eat at Lucilla! You won’t be disappointed. 

Lemon Cake in the Dark

Decided to try my hand at both baking and food photography tonight.

The electricity went out at my house just as this cake was coming out of the oven. I melted the butter in the warm oven while zesting and juicing a lemon before mixing the whole thing with an unholy amount of powdered sugar by cell phone flashlight. The power came back in time to decorate, garnish, and take the photos.

It tastes as delicious as it appears.