A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Read online

  A

  FORK

  IN THE

  ROAD

  TALES OF FOOD, PLEASURE & DISCOVERY ON THE ROAD

  EDITED BY

  JAMES OSELAND

  LONELY PLANET PUBLICATIONS

  Melbourne • Oakland • London

  A FORK IN THE ROAD

  Tales of Food, Pleasure & Discovery on the Road

  Published by

  Lonely Planet Publications

  HEAD OFFICE

  90 Maribyrnong Street, Footscray, Victoria, 3011, Australia

  BRANCHES

  150 Linden Street, Oakland CA 94607, USA

  201 Wood Ln, London, W12 7TQ, United Kingdom

  PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2013

  Edited by James Oseland

  Cover design by Roberto Devicq

  Design and layout by Leon Mackie

  1st Editon

  eISBN is 9781743601105

  © Lonely Planet and contributors 2013

  LONELY PLANET and the Lonely Planet logo are trademarks of Lonely Planet Publications Pty. Ltd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher.

  JAMES OSELAND

  James is the editor-in-chief of Saveur, America’s most critically acclaimed food magazine. Under his editorship, the magazine has won more than 40 awards, including numerous James Beard journalism awards, and three from the American Society of Magazine Editors. His 2006 book, Cradle of Flavor, a memoir with recipes about his time living in Southeast Asia, was named one of the best books of that year by Time Asia, The New York Times, and Good Morning America and won awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. He is also the editor of Saveur’s cookbooks, including Saveur: The New Comfort Food and Saveur: The Way We Cook. James is a judge on the cooking competition program Top Chef Masters, and appears as a guest on other international television shows. He is writing Jimmy Neurosis, a memoir of his punk rock youth in the 1970s, for Ecco Press, a HarperCollins imprint. James has lived in India and Indonesia and now resides in New York City with his husband, Daniel.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  James Oseland

  CONSIDER THE TWINKIE

  Giles Coren

  WE’LL HAVE THE CASSOULET

  Francine Prose

  THE GOOD WITCH

  Sandi Tan

  THE OYSTER MEN

  Jay Rayner

  SOUTHERN EXPOSURE

  Jane and Michael Stern

  HOW TO EAT FOR FREE IN HELSINKI

  M.J. Hyland

  AN ITALIAN EDUCATION

  Curtis Stone

  AFLOAT ON THE AMAZON

  Gael Greene

  WHAT BECOMES A LADY

  Rita Mae Brown

  ENCHANTED ISLE

  Monique Truong

  THEY EAT MAGGOTS, DON’T THEY?

  Joe Dunthorne

  LAST SUPPER IN TUSCANY

  André Aciman

  CHASING THE TAIL OF CHIUCHOW

  Fuchsia Dunlop

  FACE TO FACE WITH FUGU

  Marcus Samuelsson

  HIGH ON THE HOG IN GEORGIA

  Daniel Vaughn

  STOLEN APPLES, YANKEE POT ROAST AND A CABIN BY THE LAKE

  David Kamp

  THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE FALL LINE

  Annabel Langbein

  OMAR SHARIF SLEPT HERE

  Alan Richman

  A MELANCHOLIC’S GUIDE TO EATING IN PARIS

  Josh Ozersky

  THE IMPORTANCE OF CHICKEN LIVERS

  Beth Kracklauer

  CUISINE BY DESIGN

  Madhur Jaffrey

  A WEDDING FEAST

  Tom Carson

  LEEK OF FAITH

  Carla Hall

  GUNS AND GLUTTONY ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

  Ma Thanegi

  A TASTE OF COCONUT

  Sigrid Nunez

  FISH HEADS

  Louisa Ermelino

  CITY OF WONDER

  Neil Perry

  DEVIL IN A BLUE APRON

  Frances Mayes

  THE BOYS OF SUMMER

  David Mas Masumoto

  A COFFEE CEREMONY

  Kaui Hart Hemmings

  MEAT ON THE HOOF

  Naomi Duguid

  THE CATCH

  Tamasin Day-Lewis

  IN MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN

  Martin Yan

  MADE BY HAND

  Michael Pollan

  INTRODUCTION

  James Oseland

  Every traveler has two or three or even a hundred of them: moments on a journey when you taste something and you’re forever changed. It might be a fancy or dazzling dish served by a tuxedoed waiter, or it might simply be an unexpected flavor or unfamiliar ingredient, offered by strangers and encountered by happenstance. At their most intense, these tastes of the new reveal something elemental about the place you’re in, and about yourself. These are the kinds of experiences I asked the writers in this book to capture in their stories.

  One of my earliest such epiphanies happened when I was twelve. My father took me to a restaurant in Chicago called Jacques, one of the great American temples of French cuisine in the postwar era, a kind of place that doesn’t exist much anymore. Though we were only an hour from our suburban home, this elegant redoubt in Chicago’s downtown Loop felt like another planet. Dad told me that Jacques was one of the best restaurants in the country. I don’t know if that was true, but the duck à l’orange I had there certainly transformed me. The limpid and tangy sauce, the rich and fatty meat, the mingling of sweet and savory flavors—it was too magnificent for words. My enjoyment of the dish, which I’d ordered at Dad’s suggestion, seemed to draw me closer to this taciturn man who’d always been a mystery to me. More than that, it made me feel, for the first time, like an adult. Or at least it gave me a taste of what being grown up might feel like.

  Another moment of transformation through food happened seven years later, on my first solo trip abroad, to Southeast Asia. One stormy night, on a visit to Penang, Malaysia, I stumbled upon a night market in the middle of a field on the edge of town. While wandering through the warren of food stalls, in the center of which a Chinese opera troupe was performing, I met an old man who spoke a little English. He took me around to all the vendors, pointing out the foods each of them was selling. I sampled nearly everything, but what I remember more vividly than almost any dish I’ve eaten since is the char kuey teow, a Malaysian street-food staple of stir-fried rice noodles. I was blown away by the new flavors: the briny taste of fresh-caught cockles, the bite of Chinese spring onions, the hot, spiky funk of chile sambal, and the deep savor that I later learned can only come from ingredients that have been stir-fried in pork fat over extreme heat. The food was literally life-changing. I felt I suddenly understood this place, and I realized with equal suddenness that I wasn’t necessarily the person I thought I was up until that moment. I’d discovered another part of me. The depth and brightness of the flavors told of a world that was utterly different from what I’d known, and they told me I had a place in it.

  Now I seek out that feeling of discovery wherever I happen to be eating. Even the lunch-hour meals I dash out for from my office in Manhattan can transport me, and put me in touch with something fa
scinating. A sortie to my favorite South Indian vegetarian place on Lexington Avenue or to my favorite Korean lunch counter on 32nd Street loosens the grip of the workday and lets me experience the world again in a purely sensory way. These humble meals tell me that there is always another epiphany around the corner. They remind me of the great, exciting promise of life.

  There really is something fabulous and even miraculous about the act of eating. Savoring food is the one thing we do every day that is direct and unmediated. Taste does not lie. It’s pure. The impressions it leaves are sharp, invigorating, and emotional. And those impressions can last a lifetime.

  That’s what I find so beautiful about the essays in this book. Each of them says something ineffable about how we process and remember tastes and sensations, and about how they alter our view of the world. The stories encompass a vast mosaic of experience, from bitter to sweet to everything in between, and an equally vast range of voices. Some are rough, some are intensely refined. But they all have one thing in common: they chronicle food and eating in a deeply personal way.

  Each story will take you on a journey, whether it’s restaurant critic Gael Greene supping on star fruit in the Peruvian jungle, novelist Francine Prose coaxing a cassoulet from the kitchen of two bickering restaurateurs in rural France, or chef Martin Yan watching his mother at the stove when he was a child in Guangzhou (a wholly transporting experience that didn’t involve leaving home). But the essays in this book offer more than armchair travel. They will arouse your appetite for life-changing moments of your own. They will prompt you to seek your own fork in the road.

  GILES COREN is the award-winning restaurant critic of The Times of London, to which he also contributes a weekly opinion column. He is editor-at-large of Esquire’s U.K. edition, is the author of the nonfiction books How to Eat Out, Anger Management for Beginners, and a novel, Winkler, and has presented numerous television series for the BBC.

  CONSIDER THE TWINKIE

  Giles Coren

  In the late 1970s, when great cairns of bin bags piled high on every London street corner, when the kitchen lights flickered and died each dinnertime (at first excitingly, then increasingly less so), when the grownups wore brown and smelled of Rothmans and Maxwell House, and I wore little grey flannel shorts and a pink school cap, my waking and my night-time dreams were of escape. And like so many of the miserable and dispossessed before me, the badly treated and the badly fed, the bored, the lonely and the small, the place to which I dreamed of escaping was America.

  And also like so many other would-be emigrants from dark and dismal lands, I focused much of my longing upon food. Just as the Israelites followed Moses to Canaan largely for the jumbo portions of keenly priced milk and honey he promised were on offer there, so I longed for the brightly coloured and endlessly thrilling mouthfuls that were eaten on American TV shows and in the American books and comics that I devoured nightly, after a supper of thin, brown fish fingers, all grey in the middle, with brown tinned peas, followed by a tooth-aching brick of Wall’s non-dairy ice cream, tasting of frozen margarine and Hermesetas.

  In America, they had Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, Lucky Charms, Cheerios and Big Macs from McDonald’s. In Callaghan and Healey’s Britain, we had Panda cola, Vimto, Tizer, Shredded Wheat, Puffa Puffa Rice, Birds Eye frozen beef burgers (oh, that sad, grey, ashen taste of bovine mortuary slab) and Wimpy bars.

  Sure, some of the American versions just about existed here by the time I was ten years old, but they were not ubiquitous, and as far as the grownups were concerned, who grew up with rationing, made dinnertime more of a moral than a nutritional exercise (‘Elbows off the table; don’t talk with your mouth full; no getting down without permission …’), and gave us to believe that we were lucky to be eating at all, there was no question of travelling the extra miles across town, or spending the extra pence, that might occasionally have scored us the bona fide twentieth-century American originals we craved.

  And some products you could not get here at all: applejacks, Hershey bars, Oreo biscuits, but most of all Hostess Twinkies.

  Ah, Hostess Twinkies. The tastiest thing I never ate. These I knew about from comics, specifically the American DC comics I bought secondhand for 6p a throw because that four pence off the new price could be spent on 1p cola chews, with their slow-dissolving chemical tang of the New World, to be chewed while I read about Superman and Batman, Flash, Green Lantern … in adventures which stopped every three or five pages for adverts featuring full-page mini-adventures in which those very superheroes battled crime with the help of Hostess Twinkies, Hostess Cup Cakes or Hostess Fruit Pies (available in apple, cherry or blueberry flavour).

  These confections seemed to me every bit as mythical as the magical flying foreigners who touted them, and indeed the very land from which they came. To say nothing of all the non-comestible pleasures my comics advertised, such as BB guns, X-ray specs (for looking at naked ladies THROUGH their clothes!), and colonies of real living sea creatures who would arrive by post, come alive in a tank of water and obey your every command.

  All these items could be yours, the adverts promised, for a few cents and the provision of a zip code.

  ‘Daaaaaaaad, what’s a zip code?’

  ‘It’s like a postcode, but in America.’

  ‘So what’s our zip code?’

  ‘We don’t have a zip code. We only have a postcode.’

  ‘Well, then how am I going to get a gun, some X-ray specs and a colony of mermaid slave girls?’

  So my father explained to me about advertising. And when he had finished, I had only one question: ‘When can we go to America?’

  ‘One day?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you’re older.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘When.’

  ‘Unless you shut up, never.’

  ‘But Daaaaaad, you went to America.’

  ‘Yes, son, I did. But not until I was twenty-three and …’

  Then his eyes glazed over, and he was back in 1961, at the University of Minnesota, eating steaks the size of baseball mitts and three cheeseburgers at a time, queuing up over and over again at the college canteen, where they laid on this food mostly for the football players—a bounty that was unimaginable to a boy from Southgate, North London, who had grown up under wartime and postwar rationing, with hardly any meat or chocolate or eggs, living on soups made from the ninth boiling of a stoat. He talked about the food of his American sojourn endlessly. Later, when I wanted to ask about sex and drugs and rock and roll on American campuses in the 1960s (he also went to Yale and Berkeley), all he could talk about was the food.

  And it was he who got me into cowboys, with their endless bacon and beans, eaten on laps off metal plates round a campfire, with a cup of coffee whose grounds they flung into the flames before rolling over and going to sleep. Such loucheness, such a casual approach to food … in my house no food was ever consumed anywhere but at the kitchen or dining-room tables, and nothing was ever, ever thrown anywhere. God, how I wanted to go to America.

  Then one Christmas, 1980 I think it was, because John Lennon had just been shot dead in New York, making me, for some reason, want to go to America even more, there was a card in my stocking from Santa Claus that read: ‘Voucher: Valid for one trip to Disneyworld, leaving January 4th, also valid for parents and sister.’

  Disneyworld. In Florida. In America.

  And so, twenty-five years before I boarded planes to eat at El Bulli, the French Laundry, Chez Panisse, Noma and Arzak, I flew to America to eat EVERYTHING.

  On the final page of The Great Gatsby (my father’s favourite book, and thus mine, and no small factor in my lifelong yearning for America), Nick Carraway wanders down to the beach and looks across at the American mainland from Long Island:

  And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green
breast of the new world … for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

  And I knew just how those sailors felt as I pressed my ten-year-old face up hard against the cold plastic of the cabin window after eight or nine sleepless hours, and spied, looming up out of the wet gloaming as we descended into Miami airport, suspended high above a huge parking lot … the golden arches of McDonald’s.

  ‘Dad, can we go to McDonald’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, Daaaaaaad! You promised … wait, did you say “Yes”?’

  Oh frabjous day. Oh brave New World that has the power to make my father say yes to McDonald’s. He never said yes to it at Shepherd’s Bush Roundabout ahead of a two-hour drive to the New Forest, because of the smell it would make in the car. Or to the one in Golders Green, because there were no tables there, and he didn’t like to eat while standing. Or to the one on Finchley Road because … I forget why not. But in America, clearly, everything was possible. Just like everyone had always said.

  Maybe it was because in America, to eat in McDonald’s is not a dim, cheap, dirty alternative to the authentic food of the host land. There, McDonald’s is authentic. It is native. It is natural. It is real. And anyway, nobody in America has any table manners, so who cares if the kids eat with their hands and drink fizzy pop through a straw?