The meals I will never eat
There are more things to eat in this world than I will ever have the opportunity to taste. Somewhere, someone is preparing a dish I've never heard of, using ingredients I've never encountered and following a recipe passed down through generations I will never meet. There are meals being served in homes, tucked into street corners, sold in markets and celebrated at tables across the world that I will never sit at. And that's before considering all the things I haven't even discovered yet. I find this thought both delightful and equally devastating. For someone who considers eating one of life's great pleasures, the arithmetic is rather unfair.
And oh, the yearning. For the smells that rise from a stove or emerge from an oven. For the ingredients, familiar or otherwise, and the curious chemistry that happens when they come together. How one thing transforms another, how a little heat, time, and the right combination can produce something entirely unexpected. It's like magic.
Some of the meals I yearn for are inevitably tied to childhood memories. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that loves to cook and, just as importantly, knows how to eat. And goodness, do they like to teach us how to do both!
My mother's bacalao, for instance. I can still smell it. Of the three family recipes I've wanted to get from her, this is the one I cannot seem to replicate. It's not just the saltiness of the fish but the umami beneath it all, that elusive depth of flavor I can still summon in my memory but cannot quite reproduce in my kitchen. I have tried. There is something about it that remains hers, and hers alone.
Then there was a childhood dish from my sister's house, which we simply called spinach crepe. It was comforting, creamy, rich, and warm, and I remember eating it alongside roasted meat. I've since tried to recreate it, but it is never quite the same. It was something like cannelloni, with spinach wrapped inside and covered in a velvety cream sauce. There may even have been a hint of cinnamon, if my memory serves me right. I can almost taste it as I write this, which makes my inability to reproduce it all the more frustrating.
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There was also a sandwich shop in midtown Manhattan called Blimpie. It was a little like Subway, except greasier and considerably more comforting. I remember ordering a cheeseburger-like sub that was absolutely packed, with vinegar and oil generously drizzled over everything. It was glorious. I don't think they make that particular sandwich anymore, although I know they've kept their turkey sub, which was another favorite. Unless I make another trip to the United States, I don't see myself having either anytime soon.
While we're in Manhattan, I must also mention the cheeseburgers and mozzarella sticks from Jackson Hole. Those, along with the ubiquitous New York pizza that cost a dollar back in the day, played a considerable part in my tweens. Some meals are tied so firmly to a place and a time that even finding the restaurant again might not bring them back. I suspect the food would taste different now, if only because I am no longer the person who first ate it.
But not all the meals I long for have ever existed, at least not outside someone's imagination. There are dishes I would love to try, knowing full well that however many imitation recipes I find online, they will never quite be the real thing.
Take the birthday feast in Bilbo Baggins's hobbit hole. The descriptions of all that food, the simple abundance of it, the eating and drinking and general merriment have always sounded wonderful to me. Even the thought of Elevenses is enough to send me looking up recipes. There is something particularly appealing about a table laden with food that is meant to be enjoyed slowly, with no particular urgency to get anywhere afterward. A definite no to the lembas bread, though. I feel I've tried something like that before, and it was not a pleasant experience.
One bite can bring back a kitchen, a childhood, a city, a person, or a version of ourselves we haven’t thought about in years. And sometimes, what we miss is not entirely the food. It is everything that came with it.
Then there is a chicken my brother once prepared when we were camping. We wrapped the whole thing up, put it into a hole in the ground, and left it to cook for a good three hours. To this day, it remains the best chicken I have ever eaten. I don't remember the recipe, and neither does he, despite my asking. I have tried to recreate it repeatedly, both in a hole in the ground and out of one. Nothing has come close. I may never know exactly what went into that chicken, what combination of ingredients, heat, smoke, and circumstance made it so extraordinary. It is a particularly annoying kind of culinary mystery when the person responsible for the original masterpiece cannot even remember how he made it.
There is a special memory attached to each of these dishes. Perhaps that is why they remain so vivid. Taste and smell have a remarkable way of taking us back, sometimes more convincingly than photographs or stories. One bite can bring back a kitchen, a childhood, a city, a person, or a version of ourselves we haven't thought about in years. And sometimes, what we miss is not entirely the food. It is everything that came with it.
I suppose the sensible thing is to enjoy the meal in front of me. To order something unfamiliar when I can, to ask what something is called and to accept an invitation to a table I've never sat at before. There will always be another cuisine, another recipe, another little restaurant somewhere serving something extraordinary. I will never get around to all of it. None of us will.
But perhaps that is what makes the experience of eating so wonderful: knowing that the world is still full of flavors waiting to surprise us, even if we only get to sample a fraction of them. There is, after all, always another meal. Just not enough meals in a lifetime.
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