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Photo: My Christmas present
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, mon petit chou had been asking lots of questions about breakfast foods: which were my favorites, did I prefer pancakes to waffles, if I could have anything for breakfast, what would it be? I have no idea how I answered him because it could be corned beef hash and two eggs over easy one day and a stack of pancakes the next.
In Japan, I craved the elaborate and savory breakfasts of grilled mackerel, grated daikon, tofu, rice, and pickles. In Naples, I had a cappuccino and a cornetto (croissant) or a graffa (sugar doughnut) at the bakery around the corner from our apartment. Once I learned the baking schedule I would arrive just as the graffe were hot and ready. I would greet the baker, the only Neapolitan I ever met who was shy and taciturn. After two years of nearly complete silence while I drank my coffee and ate my pastry, one day I informed him that we were leaving Italy. Then he talked to me for an hour, wondering at so much he hadn’t had the nerve to ask me before.
Lately, I’ve been eating a yogurt made by Pequea Valley Farm in Pennsylvania which is sold at the Del Ray Farmers’ Market. The yogurt is made from milk from grass-fed Jersey cows and is, therefore, a rich yellow color in late summer/early autumn. Lately it has become a little more white. Delicious.
Anyway, I love breakfast and don’t understand skipping this most satisfying meal.
Photo: Oh deep waffle pockets.
Waffles! Waffles are inexplicably happy. I have no Proustian revelation when I eat them, just a general sense of contentment. But I’ve never owned a waffle iron. Now I do.
Photo: Cod with chips at Eamonn’s in Old Town Alexandria.
Oh chippers, with your golden crispy white flaky steamy fishy treasures. What mixed feelings I have about fish and chips…
Golden Hind: We lived in Marylebone during our two-year overseas tour in London. Carlos would walk to work straight down Baker Street to Portman Square. I took a train from Paddington Station to my office near Oxford. We drank at our local, ate at our favorite Lebanese place on Edgware Road, and shopped at our local butcher and at the Marylebone Farmers’ Market. When we wanted fish and chips, or when we were reenacting Ye Olde English tour for our houseguests, we’d walk down to Marylebone Lane, a narrow one-way, curving street that had once been a cart track beside a small stream. At the hanging sign with Drake’s ship, we’d enter the small chipper, point out the (decoration-only) antique fryer, sit in the “atmospheric” dining room, and order mushy peas and plates of haddock.
Photo: Tool kit.
Fryer’s Delight: Hell, every newspaper, every magazine, every Web site in Britain and Ireland does a periodic Best Chipper List. The reviews of Fryer’s Delight—written in breathless prose, which, in a time of no-fat eating, dared you to enter Sodom and Gomorrah—noted that they fried in beef tallow. So of course I headed east from Marylebone to Holborn to sit with the off-duty cabbies in a cloud of cigarette and grease fire smoke. The fish was oily and filling; it tasted of Geroge Orwell and D.H. Lawrence. I was sated but I never went back.
Photo: Eamonn’s
Eamonn’s, what’s all this Nostalgia? The place carries an aroma of fried food and homesickness for another country and another city culture. It pines for another time when the cod was cheap and plentiful. The chandeliers and wood paneling, the display of Cadbury’s chocolates, the chalkboard menu are trying to hit Joycean notes in an American town founded by Scots. You know this stage setting very well; it’s in every city around the world where there’s an Irish pub. Despite the Pogues playing on the sound system, we’re in America: the ketchup proves it.
By the way, grouper doesn’t work for fish and chips. The taste was fine, but the texture too Sponge Bob Square Pants. Haddock was, and still is, the best replacement for cod in these dark days. Some argue, and I’d agree, haddock tastes better anyway.
Photo: Grouper with chips.
Fish and chips is a strange delicacy. Two hundred years ago one could walk across the Atlantic on a bridge of cod. Today the Atlantic species are dying of overfishing and of global warming. Cod remains strangely resistant to human efforts to manage the fisheries. Even as haddock has slightly recovered, cod remains desperately threatened. I asked Eamonn’s for the source of their cod. I received a very friendly e-mail telling me it was sourced from Boston, caught by “day boats and shipped daily” to Alexandria. The foodie press, of course, rarely mentions the issue of the cod fisheries. Their silence is the silence I imposed on myself as I ate my meal looking at the front door with the motto: “Thanks be to Cod.” Thank you Cod, fare thee well.
Fish and chips shops must sell nostalgia because what was once the cheapest fish, the fish that fed so much of the Western world, is now expensive and scarce. We can continue to eat fish and chips using the less threatened fish, but a chipper is anachronism, a reminder of common meals for common people. In Old Town’s touristy and upscale streets, we drank expensive Guinness and ate our expensive and rare piece of dayboat cod. Even though the night we went the cod was excellent (the fries were just ok), I don’t know if I’ll be back.
Photo: Entryway of Boai-so, a soba and tempura restaurant in the Arashiyama neighborhood of Kyoto.
It has been a lovely morning despite the guilt I feel not doing much productive work in the new house while my husband is in an office doing that Navy stuff he does. I checked out Daily Kos, watched Prop 8–the Musical. A comment on that thread directed me to Neil Patrick Harris in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Then I remembered and read some more Dispatches from Roy Kesey, An American Guy Married to a Peruvian Diplomat Living in China on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. All the videos and readings were delightful. I drank Coca-Cola (the hard-core stuff) that we bought because we were having a big family party and some people would be driving. Otherwise we wouldn’t have it in the house because I tend to drink it. All.
Last night the new stainless steel vent hood for the stove arrived in an overly large FedEx truck. The truck was at least 50 feet long and it made all the 1939 brick bungalow houses on our street look tiny. It was huge, not one of those boxy FedEx trucks that look friendly and efficient and from which the guy in shorts jumps out and hands you a thin white package. This was a trailer truck; it was moving-your-household-goods-from-Japan big. The delivery man, whom we were inclined to like already because he had called ahead to tell us there was traffic and that he’d be late, swung open the back doors and disappeared into a long, shockingly empty, very unlit trailer. While he was banging around in the dark, rolling a hand cart, unfastening things, the guys across the street walked out of their house. We had been informed by other neighbors that these guys “do the big Christmas lights every year.” I was eager to meet them because they have lived in the neighborhood for more than 10 years and because the yard contractor who trimmed our bushes and cut down a dead tree after we moved in told me that the inside of the guys’ house looks “exactly like Key West.”
Carlos introduces me. They tell us about the previous owners of the house: conservative, Southern, not entirely happy living in Northern Virginia, she a “natural gardener.” I tell them I like plants you can eat. They speak of dead heading the perennials and I feel panic rise. I was thinking a few basil plants would do. We agree to show them ours if they show us theirs. They laugh and say they can see well into our house anyway. I have to remember to draw our newly hung curtains at night. The delivery man emerges from the dark, rolls our vent hood into the house, and drives off in that rattling, empty truck. The guys head off to buy a Christmas tree; we walk to the butcher to buy the duck and pork belly Carlos ordered to make cassoulet this weekend. Good first meeting.
At family gatherings I am asked, “You miss Japan, huh?” I do. Now I love that we’re ordering meat from the butcher and talking neighborhood history and picking out paint colors and having a vent hood put in, but it’s difficult to express the loss I feel having returned from five years in London and Yokosuka. Roy Kesey’s dispatches from China reminded me of that feeling of adventure and strangeness that becomes addictive. I crave the everyday newness of a foreign country. I miss speaking Japanese. At this point in the conversation someone will suggest I find a language group to practice Japanese and I say, yes, of course. But it’s the otherness, the dream state of living in a foreign country—you are yourself and yet you are someone else—that I miss. There I was Studying Japanese or Tasting Sake or Soaking in an Onsen. Even in English-speaking London, we were Having a Pint at Our Local or Taking the Train to Scotland. Here, in Virginia, I am definitely the regular me, with all my regular characteristics: unevenly ambitious, Coke-swilling, indulgent me. And if I cannot conjure a Rilkean poetry out of our new household adventure, I will have failed myself. I dread the guilt and the failure.
How to invest the arrival of the vent hood with the same frisson as an entry into an unknown soba restaurant in Kyoto? After all, observing the mechanics of the process by which the contractor will hang the machine and construct a soffit (a new vocabulary word! I’m learning a new language!), the satisfaction of having a good vent hood under which I shall fry and sear, these are solid experiences, are they not? I shall persevere through this banal nostalgia for the exoticism of the East and embrace the Christmas lights, the raking, the dead heading, and the vent hood. Onward!
Dear Friends in Russia:
Thanks for your repeated attempts over the past few weeks to comment on my post: Ichi no Tori (yakitori bar). I’m glad that you find that one and only post so very compelling. Perhaps it’s something about grilled meat and sake that piques your interest. Sadly, I have never learned the Cyrillic alphabet and so cannot approve what are, I’m sure, lovely compliments on my writing and photography. I thank you for your supposed kindness. Perhaps I might feel more comfortable approving your comments if the URLs you provided ever linked to a legitimate Web site. I’d hate to suspect you of being spammers.
Again, many thanks for your interest and commitment, but I simply cannot approve your comments.
Best of luck in your Internet endeavors.
Yours sincerely,
Madam
