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by C. Jeanette Tyson
I don’t know, chocolate never really did much for me.
Unless you count that summer with the Eurail pass.
A Rembrandt is a Rembrandt, but a strapping blond ex-pat -- Canada?
Australia? Jersey? -- with a crisp baguette, soft cheese, oversized chocolate bar and
racing hormones are a sight to behold.
Imagine the cultural exchange. There you are,
young, out of your home, out of your skin. Every moment is ripe with
possibility, not at all cheapened by the fact that you drink so much wine
you can’t remember your own name, even if you did know how to say it in
German. Or Swiss. Or whatever they speak wherever you are. Your fingertips
could be on fire and you would wait until he had finished hiking the north
face of the Eiger so he could douse the flames with the snow in his mouth.
This is how your life will be from now on.
Afterwards you write long, impassioned letters,
splurge on international calls. Then when you move in with your graduate
school boyfriend you somehow forget to pass along your new address, though
you still harbor a fondness for trains. And European chocolate.
Still, how, among all foods, among all the mystery,
texture, unambiguousness of anything else we could put on our plates, did
chocolate become the symbol for sweet romance?
"I like cheese,"
says a woman friend. "I love the smell of cheese, the creamy, oozy
texture of cheese. The rich, pungent taste of cheese. It's alluring and
sexy..."
Another friend goes for Italian. "It's where
you go within that first 2-week period of lust and obsession and it satiates
you in a way that you're hoping the upcoming sex will. Being a good southern
girl I always waited that long to put out."
That reminds me of someone I’ll call Pasta A,
after his sexy alternative to take-out when coming home to nothing in the
fridge. Onions, garlic, olive oil: that was the whole recipe. But the way it
melted in your mouth, oh my. Or maybe it was the way he tossed his tie on
the counter and rolled up the sleeves on his perfectly tailored shirt and
put on the music while he was cooking. When a guy’s this good in the
kitchen, you’re fairly sure it’s going to extend to the rest of the
house. A nice thought, anyway.
Another friend gets squirmy at the mention of raw
fish. " I do think of my old boyfriend when I eat sushi and drink lots
of sake. We would get very touchy at the sushi bar and end up in front of
the fireplace, under a blanket, making out for hours. Plus he'd turn on
those seat warmers on the way to his place and set the tone, so to
speak."
Someone else mentions the back-to-Eden qualities of
figs and dates; another champagne, movie theaters and a gorilla suit.
Others have developed rituals of comparing, say,
calamari, in restaurants. It becomes a kind of lovers’ shorthand: sharing
food, sharing judgments, sharing beds??
I don’t assume everyone’s cleaning out the
fridge 9 ½ Weeks-style, but I also don’t believe all those women clogging
the grocery store aisles are always comparing prices.
Maybe they’re allowing themselves thirty seconds
to think about Doritos.
A long time ago, when we were feeling the pressure
and weight of our future lives, but didn’t know much about what those
would actually be, I went with a man. We weren’t so much into food but we
were into running. We put the miles in, he said later. I’ll say. Anyway,
after seven or eight miles in the grueling heat, we’d flop down on the
brick steps at his front door. There was no pretense, we looked like hell
and smelled worse. There wasn’t enough energy for tension or confrontation
or even expectations. He liked to eat Doritos after one of these runs. (I
know, I know, but we were young, it hardly mattered.) So we shared a bag of
chips in the fading light and talked and laughed and I would lean against
his knee and whether it was endorphins or cheesy salt or love, it was,
apparently, 2 sweet 2B 4gotten.
__________
C. Jeanette Tyson is AustinMama's beloved foodie-in-the-field, a
freelance writer and mother of three-year-old Maddy and Jackson, the twin
pieces of her own heart, of whom she thinks with great love every time she
digs Cheerios out of the sofa. Her favorite little chalky heart is the one
that says "Chances are." Got a tip, suggestion, idea or feedback for A Little More on Your Plate?
Send it to Jeanette at: foodie@austinmama.com
