If it were your last meal, what would it be

Recently I read that great chefs around the world, when asked what they’d have for their last meal, never said something like salt-grilled sea bream with balsamic caramel or other sorts of things they cook. Instead, depending on where they were from, they’d say pasta, baguette with cheese, fish and chips, a hamburger, etc. This is supposedly because first memories of food often remain with us as somehow comforting and the dishes we are likely to have in our childhood through teens are usually very simple ones. I’m not a chef but I was intrigued by the question, and took a look at my own memories to see what my answer would be.

I’m five years old. We lived in Tel Aviv at the time, where my diplomat father was posted. I recall nothing of what we ate or drank at home, except just once at one of my mother’s tea parties where I watched women pouring milk into their tea, using delicate tongs to introduce sugar cubes, and a little silver fork for slices of lemon.

I found a few minutes when I was not under the Eagle Eye to imitate what I had seen: pour myself a cup of tea, and add milk, sugar and lemon. It tasted horrible, and I stayed well away from tea until much later when I realized it was either milk or lemon.

No memories remain either of what we ate at the school that I attended, Pensionat St. Joseph in Jaffa, which is probably merciful.

My sense of smell links me strongly to my first two recollections of food in Israel - my first two recollections of food, period. Memory one: the tantalizing odors of street cooking, spicy mixtures with lots of vegetables and flat bread made by Arab men crouched over low fires.

My mother always walked my brother and me the long way around these ad hoc kitchens, saying they were all Filthy Dirty, and hinting at the direst of consequences if we were ever to eat any of those things.

My father and especially our maid Ziporah were more easy-going, however, which is how I came to taste this food. I thought it was the best I had ever eaten, and if I don’t do a “slowly I sunk my teeth into the fresh warm bread, etc” routine about it it’s because my memory of the tastes and the textures is an abstract one. I haven’t a clue when or exactly where in Tel Aviv I had such food for the first time.

What I do remember is the feeling of sustenance, of well-being - as if the food were filling every part of me and nurturing/nourishing me in some very special way, as if finally I was getting real food that I loved tasting. I had never felt that before. I get the same feeling to this day when I eat Middle Eastern vegetable stews and dishes like fried eggplant, hummus, falafel with pita bread, but especially a rich hot veggie stew.

Memory two: the aroma that wafted from orange groves in Israel. The smell of orange blossom is etched in me as keenly as something visual or touched, and a few years ago when I was interviewing a perfumer, or “nose”, for a magazine piece I instantly understood based on that smell memory of mine how it would be possible with training to develop the repertoire of some 2000 smells that professional perfumers must learn.

That smell and the following story are why today I adore orange blossom tea, desserts made with orange blossom water - or just one perfectly ripe orange.

My parents had some close friends whose head houseboy was called Hassan.  Hassan was breathtakingly good-looking; even I at my tender age could see this. His employers entertained a great deal, often giving big parties with all ages invited, so everybody saw Hassan with fair frequency. Many a matron’s fantasies doubtlessly went haywire in his attentive, smiling presence.

One day all hell broke loose because when during such a party my mother absented herself to go to the loo, she happened to look up and there through a carefully crafted double peephole were Hassan’s  velvety brown eyes watching her intently.  This voyeuristic proclivity must have made him familiar with the nether regions and bathroom habits of the entire Israeli elite and diplomatic corps. Caught in the act, Hassan was fired forthwith, but it wasn’t the last time we saw him.

Not so long afterwards, on a trip to Lebanon, he turned out to be one of our waiters at a fancy terrace restaurant. Here’s where the orange comes in. He taught my brother and me how to peel one, applying the knife just so so that the white skin came off with the peel but the flesh of the fruit (or fingers) was never pierced, and putting the elegant spiral of peel he cut away so effortlessly on the plate like a decoration.  Not only could he do this, he could do it really fast, which gave Hassan (and oranges) undoubted dash in my eyes even if he was that Repulsive Man.

* * *

I have precisely three recollections of food when I lived just outside Paris, France, aged  8 to 10 - if I discount the hare stew at a local auberge: the meat had turned so the taste was memorably, sick-makingly foul.

The first is lunch at Mlle Chartier’s establishment for girls, Ecole Ste. Jeanne d’Arc. We all had to bring a clean starched napkin to school every Monday, where it was put in a napkin case with our name embroidered on it. These were lined up by the door when we trooped in to lunch and took a place at the long table.

The big-breasted, big-bellied lady who did the cooking would emerge from the kitchen and put a huge pot of steaming vegetable soup on the table and we would all pass our soup plates down, she’d ladle some in, and then we’d pass the full plates back.

Meanwhile, Mlle Chartier and her helpers would be slicing baguette and filling an inch or so of red vin de table from a liter bottle into each glass, followed by tap water from a pitcher. This yielded a palest pink drink with just the faintest hint of a winey taste.

The next course was usually a hearty stew, but my all-time favorites were the lentils cooked to just the right consistency and taste with carrots and lard and onions and garlic, and the whipped fromage blanc, with a little but not too much sugar, for dessert.

This food was the ultimate chicken soup food, I reveled and delighted in every bit of it, and all was right with the world during those lunches as far as I was concerned even if conversation was not really a going thing at Mlle Chartier’s table so hardly a word was spoken, and I was occasionally rebuked for having my hands in my lap (hands in lap at home, hands on table at school, and I sometimes got confused).

My second experience was a spontaneous invitation to lunch by the mother of playmates who lived across the street. She said, pull up a chair, went to the dining room cupboard and got out a plate and a soup plate, some cutlery, a glass and a linen napkin,  said “A table tout le monde” and we took our places.

She served wonderful homemade vegetable soup just like the one at school, also baguette, with wine-tinted water for the kids and a proper glass of wine for herself and her husband.

There was none of the fuss and bother that surrounded meals at my house, even when there were no guests. (At home, my brother and I ate separately from our parents, and our plates of food on a beautifully set table were arranged like pictures - e.g. a man with a cutlet body, mashed potato head, carrots for arms and feet, parsley and bits of tomato for facial features, and a mound of peas for hair. We were read something edifying so that mealtimes were also a learning experience. I’m sure the food was good but it tasted like nothing). Mme Dufetel showed utter disregard for whether things matched or were chipped, or even symmetrically aligned on the table. Not only that but the main course was a fried egg each!  Eggs fried in butter such as one might have for breakfast!

And mine was the freshest, most superb egg - I think to this day - I have ever tasted.

What a contrast with my third and final memory from those years, the summer trip to the States when we would take a United States Lines ocean liner from Le Havre and it took a week and we all needed a lot of clothes because every night dinner was black tie, and my brother and I also had to turn up in party finery. The glamour of the voyage, being at the captain’s table, the excitement of impending arrival in a country I considered to be extremely exotic, and the promise of the summer ahead - all that was summed up for me in the Shrimp Cocktail.

It was on the starter menu every night, and they served it in one of those mat restaurant silver-plate stemmed cups that was ice cold to the touch. The fat pink shrimps sitting there on a lettuce leaf were iced out of their minds as well (and hence virtually tasteless) and covered with spicy ketchup and a wedge of lemon. It was all so American, somehow, and I loved it.

* * *

That’s it. I have no more than a handful of food memories after we left France - which is not to say that globe-trotting eating experiences somehow didn’t seep in by osmosis, I realize they have added immeasurably to my food knowledge. But mostly,  actual recollections only start to filter in again in young adulthood. And while there have been plenty of new and wondrous eating experiences since, nothing has come anywhere near those first spontaneous, here-and-now, moments of authenticity, freshness, of really liking what I was eating, and feeling so deeply nourished. They’ve thankfully been repeated many a time since, but never surpassed.

So that means I fit right in with the survey results mentioned above and for my last meal get to choose between Middle Eastern cuisine with flat bread and the perfect orange, or French home-style cooking and the perfect fried egg. (Shrimp Cocktail wasn’t ever really in the running.)

It is with heavy heart that I let the lentils, the fromage blanc and that magnificent fresh egg, go; bring on those spicy dishes with all the vegetables and lovely warm pita.