Rasam

Rasam. The brothy soup has almost no substance but more blast in the mouth than any dish I know.  Salty, spicy, sour, umami in equal proportions--the flavors converge and ignite. An Indian friend ordered it in a South Indian dosa restaurant years ago and I thought it too hot, but my taste buds have grown up, and now I ask for it, hoping even in North Indian restaurants where I know it would be out of place.

When I do get a chance to eat rasam, I approach it seriously.  This is not a comfort cup to sip casually like miso. I pause after each spoonful, catch my breath, and down some water or lassi, but to little avail. The fiery, tangy taste has seized my mouth. All I know is I’m distinctly uncomfortable and craving more.

I didn’t want to divide the archetypal taste into ingredients, but then I decided to try cooking it. My homey Indian cookbook called for tamarind, tomato, coconut, chile, black mustard, and an earthy yellow lentil called toor dal.  I trekked to a Berkeley Indian grocer, picked up the toor dal, followed directions, and blended it smooth, but the alchemy did not take place.  I tasted spicy and sour and salty and savory, but the flavors seemed lopsided. They would not ignite.

I'm not sure I want to know the secret. I like to be presented with a bowl of perfect synthesis.

Enough time to cut fruit

The time I felt luckiest on my trip to Hawaii was the half hour I spent puttering in the kitchen and cutting and arranging pineapple, papaya, apple banana, and cream apple.  The baby was sleeping, my husband was surfing, and my in-laws were coming over later to make us brunch.  I had finished all the chores I could think of. So I set about cutting the baby pineapple from the farmer's market, which turned out to be intensely sweet and tangy, almost excessively flavorful.  I did not neglect to sample. By comparison, the "strawberry" papaya was cool and quiet, but I liked the melting texture.  The apple banana seemed only slightly more firm and tangy than a regular banana, but the cream apple disconcerted me: milky, fibrous flesh with embedded gelatinous slivers that encased hard seeds. It didn't matter: the treat was not the taste so much as the encounter itself.  As I ate and cut and arranged layers of bright slices, I felt free, a consciousness exploring. I was alone but not lonely, working but only for pleasure. What I offered my family would be a pure gift.

Miracle of the purple yam

Beni imo.  Okinawan purple yam.  I crave this food first because of its color: a kind of blooming purple, a purple that blends with midnight indigo, a purple that glows at me when I slit open the drab pale brown skin.  The yam's taste and texture are miraculous too, especially when it starts to caramelize at the edges after long roasting.  The flesh is smooth, dense, sweet as dates.  I eat it with yogurt and cinnamon, or with salty black beans and coconut rice, but mostly I eat it plain, meal after meal, hot or cold.  Complete.  

The intensity of that purple makes me a little afraid, a little thrilled.  In the heart of my kitchen, my comforting routine, comes this acute beauty, the opposite of safety.

Mariage Freres French Breakfast Tea

I woke up in a friend's tiny apartment on a gloomy day on the Upper West Side about ten years ago, rummaged through her tea, and selected a black canister with a funny French label, which I translated as "Marriage Brothers."  A few minutes later, I reflected, "This is the best tea I've ever had."  It still is.  Hints of malt and chocolate, but light and integral to the black tea taste, not added in.  A sip is just very delicate and whole.  I know I am influenced by the aura of French luxury, but I want to describe the flavor, and my resulting mood, as exalted.  Maybe I haven't changed so much since I memorized Baudelaire at 16: "Be intoxicated.  By wine, by poetry, by virtue, as you wish."  I wish tea.

The smoothness of eggplant

As a food lover, I fixate; I rarely get bored. It takes a long time for my longings to detach themselves from any one object. This summer, I have made the same recipe at least five times: Deborah Madison's "Eggplant Stew with Tomatoes, Peppers, and Chickpeas."  It's just a dressed-up tomato sauce, and the eggplant sort of disappears, then reappears as this mysterious smoothness to the taste. The paprika and the little bit of burning that usually happens in my cooking give it a smokiness.  And I cook the chick peas almost to mush so it's all very, very soft. It doesn't really need pasta: I'll be eating it as a meal unto itself now for an unbroken string of lunches and dinners.

My sister sits in the yard with her tomatoes just to spend time with them. Now the harvest. And I, the non-gardener, am lucky enough to roast a few pounds of these.

Simple beans

Dried red beans with water and a pinch of asafoetida in the crockpot around the clock develop this most amazing thick red gravy, which gets even better when you add sauteed onions and garlic and salt toward the end. (Asafoetida or hing from an Indian grocery adds this savory edge and is supposed to make the beans more digestible.) Without any labor, you get to smell this earthy, rich fragrance through the house hour after hour. The result makes canned red beans seem as flavorless as a long-distance winter tomato.

This kind of slow food I can manage.