Food

Forgive an old man for reminiscing. As a child, there were lots of swell discoveries like devil's food (soft toffee foam covered in dark chocolate) and honest milk shakes (ice cream, whole milk, and real whipped cream), but five items from my childhood stand out so clearly that I can still taste them. Gone now and impossible to recreate. There was a Luxemburger bakery that made a unique cheesecake, tan on top, a light airy cake with raisins. Another baker had hot crisp jelly filled donuts at 4 a.m. that no longer exist anywhere on the planet. Each day Smith Bros. brought in a catch of lake perch that were fileted, breaded, and deep fried. My uncle took me to a butcher's walk-in cold room, fresh raw ground beef on saltines. As a Boy Scout, the climax of a troop meeting was bursting hot juicy sausages and fresh kaiser buns.

The Dutch know cheese better than anyone else. Miniature Gouda (HOW-da) and Edam (AE-daam) are rubbery, inferior exports. Dutchmen eat "young" cheese that's soft, smooth, and sweet, and "old" cheese, a sharp, mouth watering slab in a sliced brodje, chewy round rolls that are baked daily in the millions. Dutch ham is marvelous. I had numerous gastronomic adventures in Holland, broiled garlic escargot, clear bright boujelais nouveau, "frit saus" on french fries, and an astounding Trappist Triple that had to be poured carefully because there was thick silt at the bottom of an ancient dusty unlabeled bottle. Breakfast in Holland is a joy, especially an Uitsmieter (literally: "thrown out the window") two sunnyside eggs with hot ham and cheese on two slices of fresh bread, a hard working farmer's midmorning meal.

Some discoveries were weird, like the chicken and rice casserole prepared by my Javanese housekeeper. It had two chicken claws sticking up in the middle of it. She also used a pail to splash water all over my big tile bathroom. She didn't know what toilet paper was, or why it might be desirable to avoid soaking it with cold water. I'm trying to remember a meal that I enjoyed anywhere in Indonesia. The beer was okay, a robust Dutch lager license. Australia did not have drinkable beer, and Aussies do ghastly things to sandwiches. However, there was a French baker in Subiaco with nice baguettes and gingerbread men. I paid $35 a pound for imported Costa Rican whole bean coffee at a Greek specialty shop in Northbridge.

Oh, jeez, England. No matter how much I spent at their finest restaurants, I never enjoyed a meal there, and if you want to torture someone, make them eat breakfast at a seaside hotel. For truly excellent food everywhere, even at a train station, go to Brussels.

It was a shock coming back to America. Giant portions, enough for two people on every plate. Saltgrass in Houston was okay. That's about all that anyone can say about U.S. dining, except little out-of-the-way French provincal cafes in Forestville and Wynnewood. I liked cooking at home better than eating out in America, but it was always a challenge to find a decent fish or fresh meat. I made up for it by drinking Dewars, the only label I liked, never cared for pricey single malts or Irish whiskey. In Scotland, I sipped Bell's straight up and my favorite dinner was deep fried cod and chips wrapped in slick brown paper.

I think there should be a law against anything liquid or solid in Germany. Their pancakes are stupid, wines and spirits are intolerably sweet, and I've had better pretzels in Philly. Unless you've had a cheesesteak on Sansom St., you don't know what a cheesesteak is, and mussels in South Philadelphia come with bulletholes in the booth and Sinatra on the jukebox.

Did I mention giant prawns in Singapore?

One last anecdote of the weird. There was a corner shop in Copenhagen that had ice cream novelties in a freezer, an afterschool treat for my eight-year-old daughter. She picked what looked exactly like a thick disc of ice cream covered in dark chocolate on a popsickle stick. She took one bite and spat it out. It wasn't chocolate. It was black licorice. Those zany Danes! -- excellent neighborhood bakeries, a million bicycles that have their own traffic lanes and stop lights, big train stations, big empty trains, and a bureaucracy that makes molasses slow DMV people look like superhuman wizards. To throw away a dinky bag of trash, I had to use a key and stuff it through a locked porthole the size of a coffee can lid in a block wall garbage annex. There were six portholes that emptied into little bins, most of them jammed full. You had to get lucky after unlocking four or five portholes to find one with space for another bag.

Made perfect sense in Surakarta to have a rebar rack on a pole, to keep rats from chewing up a big thick 30-gal plastic bag of kitchen waste, papaya rinds, cigarette butts, fish guts, chicken carcasses, etc. One day during a downpour, a little brown guy on a bicycle stopped, emptied the trash on my lawn, poked holes for his head and arms, and rode away with a raincoat.

In the middle of the night, I woke in terror. A voice shouted "EE-e-e-e!" outside my window. A friend explained that it was the baker, inviting me to buy fresh roti (bread) at 3 a.m. The neighborhood night watchman came an hour later and banged on my gate with a club, to let me know he was on duty and all was well.

Less sane than Surakarta, a Fox radio bulletin just now: Atlantic City casinos are allowed to reopen. No food, no drinks, no smoking. Why the hell go there?!

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