Why Do We Eat?

What would you choose for your last meal?

This question is, in my opinion, a culinary Rorschach test of the most fiendish complexity. The answer reveals as much about a person's views on food as any I can think of (with the possible exception of 'White rice or brown?').

Pondering a response gets us thinking about what we value when we eat. Flavor? Technical skill on the part of the cook? Ambience? Company?

What responses do we expect in ourselves when we have a a good meal? A flood of emotion? The spark of memory? Do we want to be dazzled and impressed? Would we rather be comforted and coddled?

The question has been popping up a lot lately. First, there was the awesome Last Supper challenge on Top Chef last week. Then, there was a discussion in the New Yorker review of Modernist Cuisine, where John Lanchester wrote,

There is no taste inherently better than another ... tastes are not innate but learned and the acquisition of taste is a kind of dance between the person at the stove and the person at the table. The dance between the cook and the eater goes on longest at home, which is why we grow up loving a food from our first and most sustained encounter with it.

This view was echoed in a recent interview in which Grant Achatz (talking with Terry Gross) described how his signature dish of pheasant, shallots, cider and burning oak has been known to move customers to tears. Because it is mind-bendingly delicious? Because the artistry is so exquisite? No. It is because the aroma of wood-burning sometimes takes diners back to their childhoods, when they played in piles of crisp autumn leaves. To me, that's about as profound as food can be. I get it.

But I don't share it. I'm afraid none of this rhapsodic navel-gazing explains why I eat - or what I find worthy in food. Call me shallow if you like, but I do not eat to have a transcendent metaphysical experience. I eat because I'm hungry and because food tastes good. Sure, it can provide insight into an unfamiliar culture or another person's way of thinking. Yes, it can be eye-opening if the ingredients or techniques are unfamiliar. But ultimately for me it's about the functionality of food, all the way. Pillows full of cinnamon smoke? I understand the thinking, but I think I'd rather have a nourishing bowl of really good soup that tastes fantastic and fills me up, thank you.

I'm totally with Michelle Bernstein on this one. Nostalgic daydreams won't provide much comfort as I prepare for the hereafter, but let me relive my first exposure to revelatory restaurant dishes (and by that I do not necessarily mean expensive or elaborate) and I'll go quietly into the night.

After Bravo's Last Supper episode, Sir and I discussed at some length which meals we would choose to experience again. Astonishingly, it transpired that we agree on the time and place of our individual choice for The-Best-Meal-of-All-Time Blue Ribbon (although not the course; a mere detail in the grander scheme of things).

The time: July 1991. The place: Voros Kaviar (Red Caviar), a Russian bar on Ostrom Utka in Budapest. For the first time in our lives we ate borleves (a spiced wine soup); blinis with caviar and sour cream; fogash paprikash; and orange souffle with apricot sauce. 

The joint was on an unremarkable back street and hard to find; not elegant but not a dive, either. There weren't very many customers. I don't remember the decor, or the service, or the music playing in the background (although I know it was not gypsy violins, thankfully). Certainly none of the food prompted philosophical reveries or, indeed, striking emotions of any kind. But something about it was really, really good.  Up to that point in my life, that wine soup was the best thing I'd ever eaten; an epiphany about the possibility of flavor.

Would it taste as good again, if I had exactly the same soup in my own kitchen now? It's not an hypothetical question: the first thing I did the morning after my culinary awakening was drag Sir all over town so I could find a cookbook with the recipe in English. I was successful and have made wine soup many times since. It is always delicious. But is it the same? Not quite. It probably wouldn't be as good if I went back to Voros Kaviar and ordered the identical meal tomorrow. Food is never the same twice, no matter what Michelin-starred chefs claim. At any rate, a quick bit of online research has revealed that the bar no long exists as it once did: after the end of Communist rule it became Arany Kaviar (Gold Caviar) - and I can only imagine what it has become.

And that is why for my last meal I will need a time machine and a teleportation device. That will enable me to enjoy the shock of the new (as, ironically enough, it once was) all over again.

Fractured Amy's Last Meal

First course:

Borleves. Voros Kaviar, Budapest, Hung. (circa 1991).

Main course

Grilled loin of gemsbok. Arnold's restaurant, Cape Town, SA (present)

Sauteed spinach. Ristorante Tinelli, Edinburgh, UK (circa 1998)

Zafrani pulao kashmiri. Spice India, Allentown, PA (present)

Dessert

Pistachio macarons. Dalloyau, Paris (Bois de Boulogne) (circa 1988)

Can you believe it? Could it be true? Even though it would hardly matter at that stage in the proceedings, my entire meal would be unexpectedly, coincidentally, and gloriously gluten-free.

My conscience will be clear when I meet my maker.

Borleves (wine soup)
This recipe is word-for-word as it appears in Elek Magyar's classic text on Hungarian cooking, Az Inyesmester Szakacskonyve (The Gourmet's Cookbook), published in English by Corvina. The recipe appears on p. 61 between those for vajleves (butter soup) and zabpehelyleves (rolled oat soup). I guess leves means soup. The destructions don't specify red or white wine: at Voros Kaviar they made it with some sort of chardonnay-ish number and that is how I always do it.

• 1.5 pints good table wine (see above)
• 1 lemon
• 3 inches of cinnamon
• 2 cloves
• 8 egg yolks
• 8 tablespoons of sugar

Bring the wine to the boil, add the juice and chopped peel of the lemon and the spices. Beat the egg yolks and the sugar until fluffy, then strain the boiling soup onto them. Put back on the heat and beat with a whisk until thick. Strain and serve.

Top Chef All-Stars, Episode 15: The Last Hurrah

I love the 'Last Supper' challenge on Top Chef.

The conceit is a simple one: our brave cheftestants must each cook a judge's choice for his final blowout.

The last time they did this challenge a couple of seasons ago, several of the cheftestants, presented with simple favorites like roast chicken, shrimp scampi, and tomatoes Provencal, misunderstood the brief. When one is tasked with cooking an individual's last request, one should not 'dig deep', add one's 'own spin', or decide to 'improve' a dish that has stood the test of generations. The judges want what they want for their last meals, and the chef who improvises does so at his peril.

If Marcus Samuelsson tells you to cook him salmon, spinach and potatoes you ought to know it's because that's what he grew up with, what reminds him of home and maybe even makes him feel loved. You do not then proceed to gild the lily with spinach three different ways and cream with everything. That misses the point. You do not suddenly decide to re-invent Eggs Benedict (Wylie Dufresne's selection that time around) with challah bread and your own version of hollandaise (there's a reason it's a classic, after all). When Jacques Pepin says he wants his squab with peas, dammit, that's what you give him. Carla's risky but oh-so-canny offering -  an utterly plain dish of fresh, simple, buttery baby peas - caused, I fancy, her subject to wipe a tear of joy away.

But if it's not the dish you remember, despondency is bound to follow.

Bravo's producers must have realized their error, because last night they didn't allow such room for misunderstanding. Instead of being presented with the name of the judge's terminal dish and then told to go for it, our challengers were able to talk at length to their Chosen Ones and find out the reasons their dishes were so beloved or (in Blais' words) 'get a good read on their soul'.

Why did Wolfgang Puck want goulash, spaetzle, and apple strudel? Because that was his favorite dish from a humble childhood, the one the family ate on special occasions. When describing his memories of this meal, the Austrian artiste's nostalgia was palpable: I imagined this was his birthday treat.

Morimoto's choice of miso soup, rice, pickles and sashimi? It's what his mother used to have ready for him when he got home after baseball practice. Antonia was right when she said this humanized the Great Man in a way that nothing else could. Soup? Pickles? How unexpected - and yet, what else could it have been?

Michelle Bernstein and her fried chicken with dumplings? This one was particularly interesting, I thought. Not because this American standby was reminiscent of her Jewish-Latin upbringing: quite the opposite, in fact. The dish was the centerpiece of one of her earliest restaurant memories: a time her father took her out for something new and gave her a glimpse of a wider world.

Poor Antonia, tasked with Morimoto's boyhood favorite, didn't stand a chance. Would it have been possible, even for the best chef on the planet, to steam rice just like his mother did? Or duplicate her miso soup? What an unattainable goal! With such simple choices (and culturally unfamiliar ones, too) there was little room for error and no room to hide. Chef's disappointment in Antonia's offering was evidenced by his quivering lower lip and downcast eyes: the soup suffered from excessive salt and the delicate raw tuna was too heavily spiced. Even had these been perfection, she made a fatal error by - horrors! - seasoning the rice. I imagine the Iron Chef wanted an utterly plain bowl of superbly-cooked gohan (his mother used to pick over every grain, apparently) - and it's difficult to see how any of our competitors could have pulled it off.

Goulash? Fried chicken? Apple strudel?

Child's play compared to a perfect bowl of rice. Or a bowl of rice prepared by your Okaa-san, which is - of course - the same thing.

Coming soon: I consider what makes food good and, with great angst and introspection, decide that I need a teleporter and a time machine if am to miracle up my last supper.