The Past Is Never Dead, But Maybe It Should Be

"The good old days are so alluring because we were not around, however much we wish we were."

                      —A.O. Scott

This coming weekend is homecoming at my alma mater, William & Mary. It is also my graduating class's 25th reunion. Ugh, nothing like a reminder that your "glory days" lie a quarter of a century in the past. But based on what I actually ate in college, it was far from glorious.

Let's start with the dining hall (or the Commons as it was called at W&M—how fitting). It was all-you-could-eat and the only thing it had going for it. Even with the hyper-metabolic rate of a nineteen-year old, I didn't need two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries, and a soft-serve ice cream cone for dessert. Maybe things have changed, but back then I'm pretty sure those burgers were manufactured in a factory in Ohio, flash-frozen, and then shipped in a refrigerated truck that drove off the line in the early Johnson administration. 

Now W&M did try to offer a dining option relatively more palatable than the frozen pizza and tater tots at the Commons. I think it was called the "Market Place," and it was closer to my dorm than the Commons, so I usually ended up there. The problem was that this was not an all-you-can-eat establishment. You had a certain monetary limit on your meal plan. For example, you may get $8.00 for dinner (1989; do the math; it's called inflation). But even back then, $8 didn't get you much, unless you could live off of a salad or a single slice of pizza. By the way, I've never met someone who ate only one slice of pizza. It's like going to a ball game and having one beer and one hot dog. What's the point?!

So what was left? Sadly, not much. I had a small microwave and a small refrigerator (covered in R.E.M. and U2 stickers). I also had some kind of electric tea kettle that boiled water, a very dangerous contraption. That was my kitchen.

My memory is hazy, but there were a lot ramen noodles and cans of tuna fish (mixed together). And hot pockets, which I've referenced in another blog post.  There was a lot of cereal. There were a lot of bologna sandwiches. That was it. If I had written a cookbook in 1990, it would have fit on the back of a postcard.

My last option was eating out. We didn't have a lot of options in Williamsburg, Virginia, back in the late 80s and early 90s. It was also expensive for a college student. If you had $20 to spend, you damn well made sure that most of that went toward buying a couple of pitchers of Miller Lite! Hey, beer has calories! 

But this coming weekend, we don't plan on having hot pockets and ramen noodles. We will have a real, grown-up cocktail party with good food and expensive hooch. We'll talk about the "glory days" and how much fun we had and the crazy stuff we did. But if someone who looks a lot of Michael J. Fox shows up with a crazy looking Delorean and offers to take us back to October 1991 or thereabouts, we will politely decline and return to our canapés and champagne. 

When a Man Is Small, He Eats Twinkies!

M.F.K. Fisher, in her essay, When a Man is Small, wrote “[w]hen a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity that soon dims.” Later she writes, “[S]ome foods are utterly delicious, and he thinks of them and tastes them with a sensuous passion which too often disappears completely with the years.”

This essay got me thinking about the foods I once loved but haven’t eaten in years and, quite frankly, would find revolting if forced to eat them now, even on a deserted island with Kira Knightly. These were foods that I once gobbled up with a mindless intensity, blissfully ignorant of their blandness, chemical notes, or over-processed and over-salted construction. But damn did I love them at the time! While I would like to say that the following chronological list reveals some kind of culinary growth, each one is as banal as the one before it. Here they are: Vienna Sausages, T.V. Dinners, Hostess fried fruit pies, and Hot Pockets (don’t judge!).

OK, let’s start with the Vienna Sausage. That round, little, pale “sausage,” tightly packaged seven to a can. (This was actually a trivia question during trivia night at a local bar recently!). True story:  when my twin boys were just starting out on solid foods we gave them cans of what appeared to be Vienna sausages, but which were actually called “meat sticks.” I’m not kidding! I guess this was a marketing improvement?!  Well, I had to try one and, “oh my God!” I bleated, “these taste like shit!” Neither I nor my boys have had “meat sticks” since!

Moving up the culinary hierarchy, my next stop is an icon of Mad Men America: the T.V. Dinner! I’m talking about that aluminum, four-sectioned,  school-lunch-tray variety of the late 60s and 70s. Damn, did I love T.V. dinners. (When my Mom pulled one from the grocery sack, I got more excited that a senior citizen yelling “bingo!” at Shady Pines nursing home!) My favorite variety was fried chicken, perhaps because I grew up in the South; though this probably irked my Mom—though she didn’t show it—because she made damn good fried chicken. Of course, there was always that mystery desert at 12 O’clock. It was either some kind of chocolate or cherry concoction.

Speaking of cherry concoction, the next item on my list is the Hostess fried fruit pie. I must have eaten one of these every day for lunch for six or seven years. They came in various fruit flavors: cherry, blueberry, apple, and peach. As if the caloric count was not high enough, they also came in cream flavors, such as lemon, chocolate, and vanilla. My favorites, however, were the fruit ones, especially blueberry. Recently, I was in a handy mart getting some water and Gatorade for one of my son’s soccer games, when I spied one of these puppies. Out of curiosity, I flipped it over to take a gander at the calorie count. (We didn’t have these in 1981, or if did, we ignored them!). Holy shit! It was something life 4,235 calories. That’s enough to feed an entire village in the developing world! Hell, that’s enough to feed half of Hollywood!

So, let’s move onto high school and college. Now we’ve come to the Hot Pocket. I have no idea who came up with this concept. And hopefully the person who did has been convicted as a war criminal at The Hague. For those of you who are not familiar with the “Hot Pocket” concept, it is a pastry (almost like an empanada) filled with cheese and some kind of “meat product”—not to be confused with the aforementioned “meat stick”. The Hot Pocket is placed in some kind of sleeve (at least it was) and put in the microwave for a couple of minutes. What comes out is benign looking, but filled with a molten core hotter than Three Mile Island. How I got through 11^th and 12^th grade and 4 years of college eating these things I do not know. But damn I loved them at the time.  The last time I ate one was June 22, 1993, and it made me deathly ill. I’ve not eaten one since. If I’m going to get sick on food now, it better be locally sourced foie gras or P.E.I. oysters.

What I knew now, I didn’t know then. And what I truly enjoyed then, I find vile now. Nonetheless, that doesn’t diminish the apparent joy such food gave me then. Everything is relative. Going back to Fisher’s essay I mentioned above, she wisely, and more eloquently than my oscitant ramblings, captured how our taste in food changes and how food changes us over time:

But we must grow old, and we must eat. It seems far from unreasonable, once these facts are accepted, for a man to set himself the pleasant task of educating his palate so that he can do the former not grudgingly and in spite of the latter, but easily and agreeably because of it.

So the next time you go to the grocery store and take your buggy down those aisles of highly processed exemplars of American industrial acumen, say to yourself: “Wow, I thought the frat parties were bad enough…. !”

When a Man is Small...

M.F.K. Fisher, in her essay, When a Man is Small, wrote that “[w]hen a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity that soon dims.” Later she writes, “[S]ome foods are utterly delicious, and he thinks of them and tastes them with a sensuous passion which too often disappears completely with the years.”

This essay got me thinking about the foods I once loved but haven’t eaten in years and, quite frankly, would find revolting if forced to eat them now, even on a deserted island with Kira Knightly. These were foods that I once gobbled up with a mindless intensity, blissfully ignorant of their blandness, chemical notes, or over-processed and over-salted construction. But damn did I love them at the time! While I would like to say that the following chronological list reveals some kind of culinary growth, each one is as banal as the one before it. Here they are: Vienna Sausages, T.V. Dinners, Hostess fried fruit pies, and Hot Pockets (don’t judge!).

OK, let’s start with the Vienna Sausage. That round, little, pale “sausage,” tightly packaged seven to a can. (This was actually a trivia question during trivia night at a local bar recently!). True story:  when my twin boys were just starting out on solid foods we gave them cans of what appeared to be Vienna sausages, but which were actually called “meat sticks.” I’m not kidding! I guess this was a marketing improvement?!  Well, I had to try one and, “oh my God!” I bleated, “these taste like shit!” Neither I nor my boys have had “meat sticks” since!

Moving up the culinary hierarchy, my next stop is an icon of Mad Men America: the T.V. Dinner! I’m talking about that aluminum, four-sectioned,  school-lunch-tray variety of the late 60s and 70s. Damn, did I love T.V. dinners. (When my Mom pulled one from the grocery sack, I got more excited that a senior citizen yelling “bingo!” at Shady Pines nursing home!) My favorite variety was fried chicken, perhaps because I grew up in the South; though this probably irked my Mom—though she didn’t show it—because she made damn good fried chicken. Of course, there was always that mystery desert at 12 O’clock. It was either some kind of chocolate or cherry concoction.

Speaking of cherry concoction, the next item on my list is the Hostess fried fruit pie. I must have eaten one of these every day for lunch for six or seven years. They came in various fruit flavors: cherry, blueberry, apple, and peach. As if the caloric count was not high enough, they also came in cream flavors, such as lemon, chocolate, and vanilla. My favorites, however, were the fruit ones, especially blueberry. Recently, I was in a handy mart getting some water and Gatorade for one of my son’s soccer games, when I spied one of these puppies. Out of curiosity, I flipped it over to take a gander at the calorie count. (We didn’t have these in 1981, or if did, we ignored them!). Holy shit! It was something life 4,235 calories. That’s enough to feed an entire village in the developing world! Hell, that’s enough to feed half of Hollywood!

So, let’s move onto high school and college. Now we’ve come to the Hot Pocket. I have no idea who came up with this concept. And hopefully the person who did has been convicted as a war criminal at The Hague. For those of you who are not familiar with the “Hot Pocket” concept, it is a pastry (almost like an empanada) filled with cheese and some kind of “meat product”—not to be confused with the aforementioned “meat stick”. The Hot Pocket is placed in some kind of sleeve (at least it was) and put in the microwave for a couple of minutes. What comes out is benign looking, but filled with a molten core hotter than Three Mile Island. How I got through 11th and 12th grade and 4 years of college eating these things I do not know. But damn I loved them at the time.  The last time I ate one was June 22, 1993, and it made me deathly ill. I’ve not eaten one since. If I’m going to get sick on food now, it better be locally sourced foie gras or P.E.I. oysters.

What I knew now, I didn’t know then. And what I truly enjoyed then, I find vile now. Nonetheless, that doesn’t diminish the apparent joy such food gave me then. Everything is relative. Going back to Fisher’s essay I mentioned above, she wisely, and more eloquently than my oscitant ramblings, captured how our taste in food changes and how food changes us over time:

But we must grow old, and we must eat. It seems far from unreasonable, once these facts are accepted, for a man to set himself the pleasant task of educating his palate so that he can do the former not grudgingly and in spite of the latter, but easily and agreeably because of it.

So the next time you go to the grocery store and take your buggy down those aisles of highly processed exemplars of American industrial acumen, say to yourself: “Wow, I thought the frat parties were bad enough…. !”

Something Worth Crying About

“An honest laborious Country-man, with good Bread, Salt and a little Parsley, will make a contented Meal with a roasted Onion.”

—John Evelyn (17th Century English diarist)

©2014 Chris Terrell

One of the best uses for onions:

French onion soup

I have a large basket in my kitchen where I keep produce and bread. This basket invariably contains one or two onions, a few garlic cloves or shallots, and perhaps occasionally some leeks. And while the fridge and panty may be a bit low on provisions, these few items are enough to make a contented meal indeed. 

Onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks are all part of the allium genus and have been on our plates and in our bowls for a long time. The onion originated in northern Asia and Palestine and has been cultivated for more than five thousand years.

Onions range in flavor from sweet to pungent, but in either form they enhance the flavor of almost any dish. The same is no less true about garlic. Without it, Italian and French food would not be the same. Shallots’ sweetness and subtle flavor gives food an onion flavor without the harshness of an onion. Thus, they can be served raw and diced in a mustard vinaigrette. But . . .  leeks? Where to begin! With their full and rich flavor, they stand on their own as a dish, such as the iconic French dish, poireaux vinaigrette (more on that below).

Unless you’ve been using your microwave to eat Hot Pockets your entire life and have never even owned another piece of kitchen equipment, then you have probably experienced burning tears when cutting an onion or even a shallot. What’s that all about? It’s basic chemistry. 

When you cut an onion, you break millions of tiny cells, which causes an enzyme to freely mix with sulfenic acids to produce some crazy thing called propanethiol S-oxide, a volatile sulfuric gas that wafts up into your eyes. (Yes, I know this sounds like some kind of 1950s horror movie!) The gas then reacts with the water in your tears and forms sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid burns, stimulating your eyes to release more tears to wash the irritant away. Thankfully, cooking onions inactivates the enzyme. Otherwise, we wouldn’t eat them! 

Unless you want to wear safety goggles, there’s not much you can do to prevent the tears. I have actually tried swimming googles but then couldn’t see what I was doing. I decided that I would gladly trade a few tears for a few stitches on my index finger! I’ve also read that running a fan or cutting the onions under running water works. Again, sharp knife, wet slippery onions—not a good plan. And here’s the strangest one of all: take a match, light it, then blow it out, and then hold said smoldering match between your teeth as you cut the onion. This one doesn’t  work either—I’ve tried it too!  But all those tears are worth the price—a culinary road to Canossa if you will—whose reward is the sweet smell of onions slowly caramelizing into a rich golden brown on the stove.

Here are two of my favorite recipes involving the genus allium, one from Julia Child and her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and one from David Lebovitz’s, My French Kitchen. Bon appetite and feel free to cry!

Julia Child’s Onion Soup

The onions for an onion soup need a long, slow cooking in butter and oil, then a long, slow simmering in stock for them to develop the deep, rich flavor which characterizes a perfect brew. You should therefore count on 2 1/2 hours at least from start to finish. Though the preliminary cooking in butter requires some watching, the actual simmering can proceed almost unattended.

For 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs. or about 5 cups of thinly sliced yellow onions

3 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon oil

A heavy-bottomed, 4 quart covered saucepan

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon sugar (helps the onions to brown)

2 quarts of boiling brown stock, canned beef bouillon, or 1 quart of boiling water and 1 quart of stock or bouillon

1/2 cup dry white wine or dry white vermouth

3 tablespoon cognac [In my opinion, optional]

Rounds of hard-toasted French bread [You can also use stale, day-old French bread]

1 to 2 cups grated Swiss or Parmesan cheese [I always use Gruyere!]

Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

Cook the onions slowly with the butter and oil in the covered saucepan for 15 mins.

Uncover, raise heat to moderate, and stir in the salt and sugar. Cook for 30 to 40 minutes stirring frequently, until the onions have turned an even, deep, golden brown.

Sprinkle in the flour and stir for 3 minutes.

Off heat, blend in the boiling liquid. Add the wine, and season to taste. Simmer partially covered for 30 to 40 minutes or more, skimming occasionally. Correct seasoning. Set aside uncovered until ready to serve. Then reheat to the simmer.

Just before serving, stir in the cognac. Pour into a soup tureen or soup cups over the rounds of and pass the cheese separately. [Now this is where I part ways with Ms. Child, I slice the Gruyere and heap it on top of the individual soup bowls and place under the broiler until melted and browned.]

David Lebovitz’s Poireaux Vinaigrette À La Moutarde et Aux Lardons

(Leeks with mustard-bacon vinaigrette)

Traditionally the leeks were cooked in a big pot of boiling water. However, it’s better to steam them, which prevents them from getting waterlogged. Smaller leeks, which appear in the springtime…are preferable for this dish because they’re quite tender, although larger leeks are just fine, too. Just make sure that you clean the leeks very well…, and cook them until they’re completely soft all the way through.

[According to Mr. Leibovitz, it is imperative that, if you are serving these to any Parisian friends you may have, the leeks be arranged tête a queue (head to tail).]

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

Bacon Vinaigrette 

2 cups (200g) thick-cut smoked bacon cut into lardons 

1 tablespoon sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar

1 tablspoon Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt

3 tablespoons neutral-tasting vegetable oil [I prefer Canola.]

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

5 large or 10 small leeks, well cleaned

2 hard-cooked eggs 

Preparation

To make the vinaigrette, cook the bacon over medium heat in a skillet until nearly crisp. Transfer the bacon to a paper towel to drain. When cool, chop the bacon into pieces about the size of tine peas.

Whisk together the vinegar, mustard, and salt. Whisk in the oils, 1 tablespoon at a time (the sauce may emulsify, which is fine), then stir in 1 tablespoon of the parsley and two-thirds of the bacon. Set aside.

To prepare the leeks, fill a large pot fitted with a steamer with a couple of inches of water. Bring it to a boil over high heat and add the leeks. Cook the leeks until tender; when you poke them with a sharp paring knife, it should meet no resistance at the root ends. (Smaller leeks willtake about 15 minutes, and larger ones will take about 30 minutes.)

Remove the leeks and let drain and cool on a plate lined with paper towels. Cut the leeks in half crosswise, and arrange on a serving platter, alternating them head to tail.

Peel and dice the hard-cooked eggs and scatter them over the leeks. Pour the vinaigrette over the leeks and toss them and the pieces of egg in the dressing so they’re thoroughly coated, then  scatter over the remaining bacon pieces and parsley.

Is It True You Can't Go Home Again?

You can't go back home...to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... .'

--Thomas Wolf

Last summer, when the fear and uncertainty of the Great Pandemic of 2020 was at its strongest and the turning tide was no where to be seen, my two sons decided to defer their freshman year of college to 2021 when life was presumed to return to normal. (As if life, or especially freshman year of college, has ever been "normal.") One son took a job in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, focused on his interest in history by helping a historical cemetery organize and archive a hundred year's worth of documents. My other son also took a job close to his heart—the great outdoors—by working as a lift operator ("liftie") in Breckinridge, Colorado. Hamp started in November and by February, I must sheepishly admit, I still had not visited him. 

My hard-working liftie.

But that changed when I booked a hotel room and a plane ticket and made my way to Breckinridge a few weeks ago. The plan was food (obviously), his birthday, and skiing. 

About the skiing....

The last time I skied was in 2001—almost twenty years to the date that I stepped off the plane in Denver. At the time, I was a pretty avid skier and not too bad at it, if I must say. So what happened? Kids. Career. Inertia. 

I grew up in the South. I didn't grow up in a skiing family. My interest in skiing, oddly, coincided with my nascent interest in James Bond movies. Skiing and Bond have gone hand in hand since the beginning. In the summer of 1981, when I was between fifth and sixth grade, I saw For Your Eyes Only, part of which takes place in the Italian Alps. It all seemed so elegant, with all the dining al Fresco (at least until Bond interrupted). That movie also had one of the best ski chase scenes of any Bond film. That fall, I discovered that I wasn't the only one enamored with the glamor of skiing. My friend Don and I dreamed of the day when we would go skiing with expensive clothes and glamorous girls in tow. We both had ski jackets that, because we lived in the South, were worn maybe two or three days a year. Before Don and I could take off on our grand ski tour, however, I moved away to the suburbs of Washington, DC.

Living "up North" was when I finally got the opportunity to ski on a regular basis. In high school, we would pile into our cars on cold, dark Saturday mornings and head up to the slopes in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Western Maryland. To save money, we packed our own gourmet lunches: Bologna sandwiches, Doritos, Oreos. And of course, there was always a bota bag or a flask for some liquid courage for the black diamonds. 

The skiing adventures continued into college, but the food choices, sadly, remained the same. One time, on the way back from Snowshoe in West Virginia, our pickup truck skidded on an icy road and hit a car in the oncoming lane. No one was seriously injured, but my friend Brian, who was driving, broke his wrist. We spent the night in a very small town called Franklin, where they had to open the clinic to treat Brian's arm. To this day, I recall a local asking me if I knew who the town was named for. Thinking this must be a trick question, I slowly answered, "Benjamin Franklin?"  He looked at me as if I had just won the Nobel prize. We spent the night at the local Holiday Inn. Dinner came from a diner next door. My dad once said that, when in doubt, order a ham sandwich because you can't screw it up. Well dad, I gotta call B.S. on that one. That diner in Franklin, WVa, in the winter of 1989 somehow figured out to royally screw up the simple, yet noble, ham sandwich. 

Other trips included Sunday River in Maine for Spring Break 1992--I know, wrong direction. I don't remember what we ate, but we did consume a lot of frozen mudslides. 

So....back to Breckinridge.

I arrived on a Friday evening, so it was too late to ski. I was also tired and not up to going out to dinner. The answer was easy: pizza. My son recommended Luigi's. He said it was very good, but out of his price range. Hampton learning the value of a dollar!? At this point, I couldn't deprive him because the only person who loves pizza more than I is Hamp. And it was worth the COVID-19 wait. The only way I could've gotten a more authentic NY-style pizza was by airplane. 

The next day, Saturday, was when the rubber hit the road; the big test; the moment of reckoning. This was either going to be like riding a bike or a riding in an ambulance. Thankfully, it was the former. I even looked pretty good, thanks to some slick ski clothes from some friends who live in Colorado. Don from sixth grade would have been impressed.

Dinner that night was at Empire Burger, a place where the burgers live up to the name. I mean, if you can't get good beef out West, then you are, quite frankly, incompetent. Hamp got the double cheeseburger because this place was a bit of stretch for his liftie income. I warned him; he paid the price. 

Sunday was Hamp's birthday. We had dinner reservations for 8:45, but after a full day of skiing, neither one of us wanted to wait that late. Instead, we headed to a Vietnamese restaurant, Peak of Asia, that Hamp recommended. He had heard it was good, but too rich for his wallet. (Notice a pattern here?) The pho was excellent, but the highlight was when a co-worker who worked there greeted Hamp and gave him a birthday present. The spring roll also had a lighted match in it. We all sang happy birthday. 

Lunch of Champions  

Monday, Hamp had to work. I was on my own. Maybe because I wasn't concerned about looking like a doofus in front of my 19-year old son, I really let it rip. I had my best day of the whole trip. I tore it up, hitting a breathtaking 26 MPH on a blue! I rewarded myself with a hot dog and a beer at 11,000 feet. At the end of the day, however, I was pooped. Eating out that night was a no-go—pizza again.  

Tuesday. My last night in Breck. For the previous four nights, I had been trying to get reservations at Mi Casa, the local Mexican restaurant that gets great reviews. It didn't happen.  We found the next best thing at Sancho Taco, a Mexican street taco restaurant with awesome Margaritas and authentic street tacos. I don't know about Mi Casa, but it would be hard to beat this place. Go with the fried chicken taco!

The next morning, Hamp had to head back to work, and I had to head back to Atlanta. As we said goodbye, I could tell that my son was not looking forward to Hot Pockets and microwaved hotdogs. And while he will roll his eyes at half the crap his old man says, he certainly appreciates the decent meals he gets. Yeah, this was probably the best eatin' I've had on a ski trip. Maybe one day, when Hamp's been off the slopes for many years, he can return the favor with his kids.

And yes, you can go home again if you know how to read a trail map.