“A little hot for you?” Fletch asks.
“Yeah, but it’s more of a back-of-the-mouth burn, not so bad.”
I try hard not to inhale my “wings,” choosing to delight in all the flavor nuances. The colonel may use eleven herbs and spices, but this dish has, like, a million. I take meager sips of the Brut paired with it, anxious to draw out the pleasure of this experience as long as possible.
“Hey, did you taste the dot of sauce yet? It’s . . .” Fletch pauses to find an appropriately epicurean term.
“I haven’t.” In one fell swoop, I spear a bit of capon, sop up the sauce, and pop it in my mouth. I wait to feel the buzz coming from perfectly cooked capon mixed with a delicately balanced sauce, but all I feel is . . . warmth. Or, rather, heat.
Hot heat.
Fire heat.
Burning, burning, BURNING heat.
“. . . kind of spicy,” he concludes as tears begin to pour out of my eyes. I’m trying desperately not to make a scene, but I’m sputtering and choking. I grab my water to attempt to quench the feeling that I just French-kissed the devil.
I cough and wheeze and try to furtively wipe my tongue with a napkin, but that just seems to make THE HOT angrier. “There’s a bit of an after-burn, too,” he helpfully adds. I slam the rest of my water, my champagne, his water, his champagne, which I practically have to wrestle out of his hand, and I only find relief once I place his melting grapefruit-juice cube in my mouth.
I’m quickly distracted from my seared mouth when I see what the table to my left is being served. They’re getting mini-cupcakes baked with duck fat and filled with fois gras!204 The woman next to us groans as she bites into the cake, but no one pays attention. Everyone in here has cried out in joy and pleasure at least once over the course of their meal.
While I covet cupcakes, our fifth course arrives, and it appears to be a . . . a half-smoked cigar served in a dirty metal ashtray. Actually, it’s a Cuban sandwich shaped like a cigar, and the ash is really just a bunch of mashed seeds, but it’s almost too realistic. They’ve even created a cigar label out of some edible paper.
“I can’t eat this,” I say.
“I’m not sure I can, either,” Fletch agrees.
My stomach begins to roil. “A dirty cigar-filled ashtray is exactly what I picture when I feel sick and want to make myself barf.”
Fletch pokes at the pile of ash. “That’s got to be the magic of this place. It fools your senses. Your eyes and your mouth transmit entirely different images, and your brain gets mixed signals.”
“This whole meal has been some Alice in Wonderland ‘eat me’ kind of shit,” I note. “And it’s like there’s a party in my mouth, and I want to send out a Twitter message inviting everyone to join me.”
“That’s quite the astute observation. Perhaps Saveur magazine will commission you to write down your thoughts for their next issue?”
“Okay then, how about this? Tonight this restaurant has taken something I’ve done every day of my life and turned it completely on its ear. They’ve redefined the whole concept of food for me.”
Grudgingly he admits, “That’s not bad.”
I continue. “It just occurred to me that there are no paintings or posters or anything on the walls because this meal IS the art. And now I am going to eat some damn art.” I lift my cigar, dip it in the ash, and take a big, confident bite.
And maybe I had my eyes closed, but it still totally counts.
To: fletch_at_ work
From: jen_at_home
Subject: my mother is a fish
I wrote that I enjoyed As I Lay Dying on my Facebook wall today and every girl I know who went to Ole Miss posted to say that the whole town of Oxford, Mississippi hated Faulkner. They said he was really just an angry old drunk.
But, seriously? He won the Nobel Prize for Literature! If that doesn’t excuse you from having a few snorts before chasing lippy college students off your lawn, why even be an author?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Real World: Middle Age
“N OOOOO!”
I’m sitting at my computer, Googling the name on the slip of paper in front of me. I glance at the screen and back down at the paper and bury my face in my hands. This can’t be. This simply can’t be.
With a trembling hand, I dial Fletch’s office. He’s been much better about picking up the phone since I stopped calling him to discuss what happened on my TiVo cache of Big Brother.
“Hello?”
“Bad news!” I gasp.
Fletch is instantly concerned. “Is Maisy okay?”
“What? Oh, yeah, she’s fine. She’s on her bed and Chuck Norris keeps ambushing her and batting at her tail.”
“Did the Thundercats break another vase?”
I grit my teeth. “We have no more vases to break.” The upside of saving three feral kittens is the satisfaction of knowing they’re going to have a happy and safe life. The downside of saving three feral kittens is suddenly your house is filled with THREE FERAL KITTENS.
“Then what’s going on?”
“You know how for Authors Night we had to select an authors’ dinner? And I picked the one with the general because I thought it would be at Rudy Giuliani’s house? Well, we got the dinner all right.”
Fletch is excited because he really wants to meet the general and talk all about the kind of boring Army stuff that makes my eyes glaze. “Great!”
“Not great. Not great at all. I just got the host’s name and address, and I did a little Google-stalking. Okay, not only are we NOT going to be at a lovely dinner party filled with like-minded conservatives—we’re going straight into the belly of the beast.”
I can hear him exhale. “Now you’re starting to confuse me. Does this have anything to do with Big Brother?”
“No! The house where this thing’s being held? Okay, not only is the host buddies with George Soros but her foundation helps fund Media Matters for the Left and her son works for the Obama administration! This is an unmitigated disaster.”
“How so?”
“How so? HOW SO? I am going to crash and fucking burn the second anyone brings up politics. I won’t be able to keep my enormous mouth shut! I’m going to end up getting kicked out!”
Fletch is the voice of reason. “Isn’t the whole point of your project to push yourself to grow? Doesn’t it stand to reason that figuring out how to behave at this party will be much more of an accomplishment than if you sat around with a bunch of Republicans?”
I can’t argue with his logic, and yet . . . maybe I don’t want to grow quite this much.
“What are you getting?” I ask.
Stacey scans the menu before replying, “Probably the wiener schnitzel.”
I snigger. “Because it’s fun to say ‘wiener’?”
“No, I’m not twelve. I’ve had it before and I know I like it.”
“By the way, speaking of being twelve? Fletch and I were at our knife-skills class205 last week, and the instructor was talking about all these different types and brands of knives. The one that made us both giggle first was the boner by Friedr Dick. And then later, the instructor showed us this Japanese model of knife sharpener and said the only downside was you couldn’t use it on German knives because the blade’s not as thin. And then—then! She demonstrates and says, ‘See? You can’t put your ten-inch Dick in here because it’s too thick and it’ll get stuck.’ Fletch and I laughed so hard, we had to put our heads down on the table.”
“Did everyone else laugh?”
“No one. They all just chopped their onions and looked uncomfortable, which pretty much puts the nail in my theory that class follows culture.” Not quite cause for Shame Rattle, but close.
Stacey and I are having dinner at a German place. I decided to add this cuisine to my Eat the World curriculum even though I’ve technically had German cuisine before, having spent a few days in Germany when I was in high school. However, my memories are fuzzy at best.206 I recall writing my name in mus
tard on my plate at some restaurant on the Autobahn although I can’t tell you what I actually ate.207 And when we were in Bavaria, my friends and I stopped into some chalet-looking place when we had a free afternoon. We couldn’t read the menu, so we just pointed to the item that sounded most like soup. Whatever we got was fine, but it wasn’t memorable.208
Since this restaurant is right next to where we’re going later, giving German food another whirl made sense. The outside is adorably authentic-looking and I’ve wondered what the inside was like when I’ve walked by. Fletch is always saying we should stop in for some big sausages, which always makes me giggle since I apparently turn into Michael Scott whenever anyone says anything even resembling a vaguely double entendre. As part of my cultural Jenaissance, I’m working to change this, but it’s so hard.209
Anyway, on the street, it’s 2009, yet the second we actually enter the restaurant, it’s 1976. I’m not sure why it feels so dated in here, but it might have something to do with the Fifth Dimension playing “Up, Up, and Away in My Beautiful Balloon” on the hi-fi. Or maybe it’s all the faux-wood paneling, or the heavy carpeting and low acoustical tiled ceiling, or maybe it’s just the weird built-in “architectural” arches that we all loved so much back during the Bicentennial.
Each table is surrounded by the chairs my Girl Scout buddy Donna had in her breakfast nook, and the restaurant’s lit with the exact same caned, tulip-shaped hanging lamps I had in my fourth-grade bedroom. Frankly, I’m surprised there are German beer signs on the walls and not Jimmy Carter campaign posters. Feels like a key party could break out in here any minute. We spent a solid five minutes gawping and looking for Jack Tripper before we even picked up our menus.
“What should I get?” I ask Stacey.
“You can go one of two ways with German cuisine. You can take the sausage route. . . .”
I shouldn’t have to tell you what this statement’s effect is on me.
Stacey ignores the interruption and continues. “Or you could go the braised-meat route.” She pauses and raises an eyebrow, waiting to see if I can find an entendre. I can’t, so she goes on. “If you want braised, probably the most traditional item here is the sauerbraten, which is their version of pot roast.”
My stomach inadvertently heaves and I tell her, “Oh, I am not eating that. That I’ve had before. My dad is cuckoo for German food, and once for his birthday, he asked my mom to make him a sauerbraten. She cooked that damn thing for a week and our whole house stank of feet. I kept calling it sour-rotten. Even our dog was repulsed. She hid upstairs for three days. And then when my mom finally served it, the meat was awful and there were gingersnaps in the gravy!”
“To be fair, the recipe calls for gingersnaps. They go in the sauce.”
“Are the cookies whole but soggy from meat juice?”
“No. They’re ground up.”
“Exactly.” And then we both quietly shudder.
Stacey returns to her menu and her smile becomes a wry twist. “Perhaps you’d like a traditional German appetizer? Why don’t you try this or this?” She points to the part of the menu that lists jalapeño poppers and buffalo wings.
“Laugh all you want, but as I kid I’d have killed for ‘traditional German’ poppers or wings, no matter how spicy, if it meant I didn’t have to eat vinegar-cookie stew.”
We decide to forgo appetizers because of the time constraint of hitting our friend’s book signing in an hour. And something tells me we’d have struggled deciding between the herring in cream choice, the sausage salad suggestion, and the headcheese platter.
I order an iced tea because I’m driving, which is a shame because now that I’ve taken some wine courses, I actually understand why German wines like Riesling appeal to me so much. I like the floral notes and how sometimes the wine smells of green apples and fresh melons. I dig the mouth feel of a medium-bodied wine, and I appreciate that although it can taste sweet, the finish is crisp.
I decide on the rindsroulade, which is a strip of marinated sirloin wrapped around bacon and onions and served with a side of spaetzle, a homemade German noodle. Stacey, of course, gets the wiener schnitzel, an innocuous breaded meat cutlet.
Our dinners are served and there’s nothing green anywhere near our plates. Or red or yellow or orange, for that matter. Stacey’s dinner consists of a big beige patty with a scoop of something less beige, and mine entails a giant brown lump and some soft noodles, all swimming in a deep pool of gravy. If you eat with your eyes first, this is in no way appetizing. Suddenly I wish we hadn’t refused our waitress’s offer of more bread.
I take a bite of the spaetzle, which has the flavor and consistency of noodles in canned chicken soup. I slice a bit of my meat roll and taste it. I have a few more bites and proclaim, “You could serve this to people who’ve had stomach surgery. The rindsroulade could replace the rice in the BRAT diet.”
“It’s that bland?”
“Yeah. I mean, not bad, per se, if you’re looking for comfort food. And I could see eating this and then having the energy to chop down the whole Black Forest. But it’s superplain. And heavy. This? This is the polar opposite of Chinese food. You know, you have some and an hour later you’re hungry? You eat this, and two or three days later, you’re hungry again.” I slice into the middle of my meat, splitting it up so I can take half home to Fletch. It’s not that I’m such a doting wife. I’m just hoping a couple of bites will scratch any itch he had to come here for big sausages. As I cut, I hit something rubbery. “Wait, what is that?” There’s a foreign object lodged in the middle of my meat roll.
“A pickle, I think.”
“Okay, now I’m grossed out. I like a nice, cold dill slice served with a sandwich or piled on a burger, but a big, hot pickle210 baked inside my meat? That’s messed up.”
Neither of our dinners hold our attention long, so we finish more quickly than we anticipated and we have time for dessert. Stacey gets more iced tea, and I order German chocolate cake.
Whatever the rest of the meal lacked is made up for by this dessert. The slice is multilayered and piled high with buttery, chocolate-y, nutty frosting, full of freshly shaved coconut. The cake itself is dense and dark and moist. I can’t believe this came from the same kitchen as my entrée.
I make Stacey take a bite before I inhale the whole thing. She retrieves a fork and takes a small taste. “That is good. But you know what I don’t get? If German chocolate cake comes from Germany, what’s up with the coconut? Since when does coconut have anything to do with Germany? You see any coconut trees near the Berlin Wall? No. It’s weird.”
“That is pretty random,” I agree. “Do you see that in a lot of German restaurants, I wonder?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t ever go for German.”
“Oh, really? I guess I thought you did. I mean, you knew about this place and wiener schnitzel and all and maybe you grew up coming here.”
Stacey gives me an odd look and slowly replies, “Um, Jen? We Jews tend not to congregate in places filled with Germans. Particularly places filled with Germans AND big ovens.”
“Oh?” I think for a moment. “Oh, I get it.” I mentally scroll through my Rolodex of other cuisines I need to try. “Then how do your people feel about Lebanon?”
Stacey cocks her head even farther to the left and narrows her eyes. “Does the word ‘diaspora’ mean anything to you?”
“Do you avoid their restaurants, too?”
She laughs. “Actually, no, Lebanese food is delectable! Wanna do lunch at Semiramas next week?”
“That depends. Has their dining room been updated since the Betamax was invented?”
“It has.”
“Do they use any spices other than salt?”
“They do.”
“Will their meat dishes make me titter like a twelve-year-old?”
“Depends. Do you find sheep funny?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Then they’ve got ’em.”
I don’t even hesitate
to answer. “Consider it a date.”
“Dance! You dance! Dance, girl!”
In the darkened theater, I reach for Joanna’s wrist and squeeze it. She pokes me in the side in return while a ballet dancer grand jetés across the stage.
“Dance! Uh-huh! Dancin’! You’re dancin’! Woo!”
Joanna and I are attending a fund-raising dance performance, and we’re seated not only in the nosebleed section, but also apparently right next to a woman who has so much joy in her heart for dance that she can’t help but let it out in quick Tourette’s-like bursts. On my neighbor’s last “Woo!” she shakes her head so enthusiastically that she pelts me in the face with a couple of her hip-length dreadlocks. Fortunately, it’s not one of the beaded strands.
However, I’m fairly mellow about the whole thing, as Joanna and I had dinner at a Russian place beforehand, where we discovered the joy of flavored flights of vodka.
Traffic was obscene getting downtown, so I was almost half an hour late to meet her. While Fletch did his best to weave in and out of lanes to get me there quicker, Joanna sent me updates on her iPhone, telling me there’s a damn good reason that Russia never became a superpower in regard to wine. “Imagine cherry cough syrup,” she wrote, “only thicker.” Given that description, how would we then not opt for vodka?
Some details of our dinner escape me211 but I remember being first served a sampler platter heaped with colorful scoops of salads made of simple ingredients, like carrots and beets and mushrooms. This was followed later by another platter filled with hearty fare, such as stuffed cabbage and meatballs and Stroganoff. Our entrées were much heavier than German food, but also much more flavorful.
By the time we finished, we’d eaten ourselves sober again and were so stuffed that we could barely walk the few blocks to the theater. Okay, no offense, Russia, but if this is how you fueled up prior to battle, no wonder you couldn’t beat Afghanistan.