Why write about people or place or love? About dreams, fear, pain? How can thoughts, words about food be separated from any of these? Or from life itself? As old as the written word are passages about food, about the rituals of cooking and feeding and nourishing ourselves. More a universal even than words about sex, blood, horror, power and success, words about food are our common currency: how food looks and tastes and feels, its perfumes and colors and textures, how it comforts, cures, inspires.
If you want to know a people, know them at table. Know how they eat. I can't recall who said that but, by now, I know it's so. Proust's epiphanic little tea-wet cake; the dense black bread and just-dug onions, the stone jugs of sour kvas of Tolstoy's kulaks; Khayyam's bread and wine; Hemingway's release from a long hungry day as he sits tucked behind a table at Lipp in front of a distingué of icyAlsatian beer, a plate of hot boiled potatoes and almost enough bread to skate through the pools of fine olive oil which dressed them; the peach pie and the jar of thick yellow cream MFK Fisher shared with her father by a rushing California stream; my own moonlit supper taken with an ancient called Antonia as we sat upon the soft sienna-colored earth of a Tuscan garden between rows of staked tomatoes, plucking the still sun-warmed things from the vine, biting into them out of hand, neverminding the juices on our chins, our bosoms, tearing at the crust of a good loaf and wetting each mouthful of it with long pulls from a flask of good peppery red. And then there's that old tale about loaves and fishes.
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club