A Celebration of Chefs and Others

I was sitting courtside as the Los Angeles Lakers hosted the Denver Nuggets for Game 2 of the First Round of the NBA playoffs.

Brian, the waiter, who always works that part of the arena, approached to take my order.

“Chicken tenders, two barbecue sauces, and a bottle of water?” he asked knowingly.

I nodded.

“Thanks, Brian.”

I’m going to have to start re-thinking my order. I’m in a floor seat, in the middle of the electric atmosphere of the post-season, a sellout crowd, media everywhere, and I felt like I just walked into an old movie and told the bartender, “I’ll have the usual.”

By the time the first quarter ended, Kobe Bryant already had twenty points, and I already had barbecue sauce on my shirt.

All in all, it was a good night – for the Lakers and for my dry cleaners.

Who knew from Mexico whilst being brought up in the Monopoly board burbs of Southern New England in the fifties?  It seemed a very distant land – exotic, fantastic – as foreign and far away as California.  The word Mexico called to mind jumping beans, dancing with sombreros,  "Z's" slashed midair,  Cisco and his humble sidekick Pancho galloping away, Pancho Gonzales slamming a tennis serve, Speedy Gonzalez slamming a cat — a lot of really speedy stuff.  It's no wonder I thought the Mexican peoples only ate fast food.

I was growing up in the miraculous new age of instant gratification grub.  Chinese food, pizza, take out burgers, and foods hunted and gathered from pouches and frozen boxes were America's new staples. New sorts of consumables were purchased by my parents weekly. I recall my first corn products off a cob – daffy yellow corn chips crunched hand over fist in front of the television console, lumped into a large category called  "snacks."  Anything one ate away from the dinner table and consumed mindlessly, endlessly, with no silverware, that soiled your fingers and "ruined your appetite" was a "snack."  So when I visited California in seventy-two and experienced Mexican food at a party for the first time,  corn chips dipped in a tasty chartreuse paste, it continued to seem "snack,"  and not to be taken seriously.

I had never heard of M.F.K. Fisher until I started working at One for the Table. She was/is apparently one of the most famous food writers of the last century. I rarely read about food, only branching out occasionally to pick up Gourmet, Food & Wine or Cooking Light depending on what recipe was featured on the cover. In recent months I discovered I was one of the only ones not familiar with her work, because her name kept popping up in various pieces on this site as one of THE people everyone consulted when it came to enjoying good food. Finally, intrigued by her reputation and tired of reading murder mysteries, I decided to see what all the fuss was about...and found a new friend.

There are times when I scrutinize my outfit before I leave the house, and find it absurdly, compulsively over-accessorized.  It’s then, as I grab my keys and prance out with red sneakers, mismatched bracelets, and a brooch shaped like a turnip, that I’ll find myself thinking of her.  Subtlety, in many things, is often advised; but I, heeding Anne of Green Gables, rarely listen.  If at a dinner party, after I’ve gone on and on to someone about a book they’ll probably never read, ignoring every attempt they make to escape me, she’ll just appear in my mind.  And often, when faced with a moral dilemma, like whether to leave the last bite of pie for the person I’m sharing it with, or to request that my upstairs neighbors stop rollerblading on the hardwood floor, I’ll ask myself:   

“What would Anne of Green Gables do?”