What's For Dinner?

Was reading The New Yorker online when I came upon essays on family meals. More than food, they were about sharing meals with families and the pleasures or disappointments one experienced during such times.The best was I think Anthony Lane's Choke, about an artichoke which, according to him, is defined by OED thus: "Its eatable parts are the fleshy base of the involucral leaves or scales of the gigantic thistle-like flower, and its receptacle or 'bottom,' when freed from the bristles and seed-down or 'choke' "! Like Lane asks - "Can you imagine a sentence more likely to damn the salivary glands?" His heroic struggles with this vegetable have been recorded with a touch of humour; you simply have to smile sympathetically as you read about his plight. To get to the fleshy part which you eat, you first have to fight valiantly through the dense foliage that surrounds it; hence the line - "Like the Prince in 'Sleeping Beauty,' I once hacked a path through thorn and briar to reach the enchanted castle."

Real Food by the Nigerian author Adichie was pleasant. I have finished reading her second novel Half of A Yellow Sun and am now reading her first one, Purple Hibiscus. She uses Igbo terms for food - some of which are translated. In this essay, I finally learnt what jollof rice ('rice, soft-cooked in an oily tomato sauce') and egusi soup ('made of ground melon seeds and vegetables') are! Adichie, in her childhood, disliked her native food because of which one of her aunts called her a foreigner. I can relate to that; once at Grandma's, when I refused to have a vegetable dish since it was too bland, my Aunt had indignantly remarked: "Oh! Madame's a Bengali now! Will have only spicy dishes!"

Rationed by Aleksandar Hemon was about his years when he was conscripted into the Yugoslav People's Army & craved for home-cooked food. Slightly touching ('Perpetually hungry, I often recalled my family dinners before I went to sleep, constructing elaborate menus that featured roast lamb or ham-and-cheese crepes or my mother's spinach pie') and slightly mawkish at the end - "The first bite of spinach pie - that sublime blend of spinach and eggs and phyllo pastry - brought tears to my eyes."

Sixty-Nine Cents by Gary Shteyngart is about the Russian immigrant experience in the US, about rejoicing in new-found American delights. He is horrified when his family refuses to buy food at McDonald's and his parents and their friends eat the home-made food they have brought inside the restaurant. He has been dreaming about the 69-cent hamburger and though he can afford to spend his pocket money on one lil burger & a Coke, he too clings on to the few dimes like his parents since life is hard. Though he understands his family's travails, he refuses to participate - "Disgruntled, he watches them have an authentic Russian meal inside McDonald's from afar, refusing to blend into that togetherness, while American families have the 'happiest of meals.' "

A Man in the Kitchen by Donald Antrim was touching too. The worst piece was Grandmother's House by Nell Freudenberger which describes a meal in Bangladesh; perhaps it was chosen to give an ethnic flavour to the collection since neither the subject nor the writing deserved to be selected! Another bad one was Tasteless by David Sedaris; am still wondering what the editors saw in this sad piece of writing! But yeah...I could identify with one thing that he has written. Like on him, good restaurants are wasted on me too!