Nostalgic for lunch
Today the car is in the shop and I am not going home for lunch, a change in routine which I do not welcome. Each day I go home to find that Magda has prepared a delicious quick meal for me, and today there is none of that and this makes me cranky and somewhat nostalgic for lunch, the lunch I am not eating today and all the lunches I have enjoyed in the past, in this hemisphere and others. The salad days. Actually, the salads were particularly delicious. Maria would make them massive, apparently from ALL the vegetables in the kitchen in whatever combinations and proportions seemed to strike her that day — her daily chance to be creative. Beets, celery, diced onion, slices of cold potato, hard-boiled egg, grated carrot, and so on, all in a large steel mixing bowl and drizzled with a simple vinaigrette.
In San Jorge, Argentina the high point of my day was usually lunch. I would cycle slowly home in the midday heat. “Home” was the Hotel Jardín, where I lived for nearly a year in room #14. There were only 14 rooms. Mine was at the end of the upstairs hall on the left. Immediately next to my room was the door that opened onto the very large terrace, all white stucco with a thick, low parapet and no railing. I would often spend the long hours of siesta on this balcony, napping in the sun, occasionally immersing myself in the knee-deep pool of tepid water that was kept there for pretty much my exclusive use.
But before going up to the terrace, or to the dim small confines of my coolly shuttered hotel room, there was the languid ritual of lunch. It would begin when I entered the small dining room/bar on the ground floor. This room managed to be both cozy and bright, with big mullioned windows opening onto the Ford dealership across the street and a low ceiling that Maria and Silvia kept completely free of cobwebs. These two were full-time chambermaids and they pursued any trace of impurity with a relentlessness you don’t see in so many chambermaids anymore. They also shared the cooking duties in the small kitchen behind the bar, and the more serious scullery in an outbuilding across the back garden. I loved them like sisters and they treated me like a child, based no doubt upon my syntax.
The ritual began like this, day-in day-out, rain-or-shine, River-Plate-or-Boca-Juniors, in lazy Argentine Spanish:
Maria: Child, what are you going to eat?
Me: Oh, I do not know, Maria, what is there to eat?
Maria would then list the perhaps four things to choose from. These things varied almost not at all. Occasionally she would surprise me by telling me that her son had shot a hare just for me, but usually the list was woefully limited:
Bife de carne = grilled steak without embellishment
Bife de pollo = grilled chicken with lemon wedge
Pa’ta = pasta with an elided pre-consonantal /s/
Ñoquis = gnocchi with a post-alveolar sauce
These things, as noted above, did not vary. In addition to the fabled hare, which Maria would do fantastic things to, occasionally there would be home-made raviolis in place of the ñoquis, for example. All of the food was wholesome and delicious, particularly those salads, but a year is a long time with no variety. Nostalgia relies for its existence upon our ability to strip away the mediocre and disappointing and to focus only on the memorable and positive. Why it may require five years of hindsight to be able to consider our existence in such favorable yet sad light is a mystery. During my year in Argentina I often grew weary of the same food day after day, the lack or even distrust of seasoning. I grew manically frustrated by the small variety of food available in this small town marooned in the vast flat pampas. I missed many flavors, notably the hot, the tangy, the extreme spice. I longed for the scalp-tickling thrill of wasabi.
But none of that is important now, because I am feeling nostalgic for those lunches, and for the one I am not eating now. Forget that with every lunch we eat comes the chance to be nostalgic for something else.
a perfect example: i DO care what you had for lunch.
Comment by kilowatthour — Tuesday 21 November 06 @ 14.09 MST+2.00
Loudon Wainwright 3 wrote a rather sad a song about dining out alone. Lyrics here: http://tinyurl.com/2g37n
Comment by simon — Tuesday 21 November 06 @ 15.22 MST+2.00
Nostalgia relies for its existence upon our ability to strip away the mediocre and disappointing and to focus only on the memorable and positive.
Now, here is a well-said remark.
Comment by Loxias — Wednesday 22 November 06 @ 09.51 MST+2.00