The Vinyl Café Notebooks (16 page)

Guava is not an answer that would ever have occurred to me. I haven’t, to my knowledge, ever eaten a guava. Nor have
I examined one with curiosity in the produce section of my local grocer. I haven’t eaten, haven’t touched, haven’t even seen a guava. To be honest, I wouldn’t know a guava if it fell from a tree and hit me on the head, or rolled out from under a bush, or tumbled from a vine, or whatever guavas do.

But it didn’t totally surprise me, it didn’t shock me that something as strange, and rare, and exotic as a guava was the silver bullet of health; what knocked me for a loop was the fruit that came in second.

The fruit that edged out the grapefruit, and papaya, and the kiwi, and the cantaloupe, and the blackberry, and what am I saying? It didn’t edge them out. It demolished them. The blackberry, for instance, which I had been thinking was a virtual antioxidant nuclear bomb, only scored 124 points on this scale. The fruit that came second place had 311 points. That’s more than double. And the fruit that came in second place was
the watermelon
.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love watermelon. But I have always felt it was no more than coloured sugar water. Nature’s Kool-Aid, as it were. And now I read that two cups of watermelon have the same amount of fibre as two slices of pineapple. If you would have asked me a week ago, I would have told you the only way to get fibre from a watermelon would be to eat the rind. (Pineapple, by the way, received 47 nutritional points.) But watermelon’s real boasting rights are its high levels of lycopene—a proven cancer-fighting agent.

There were other shockers on the list. The papaya outstripped the orange. Persimmons trumped bananas, and most shockingly, the apple, the apple of fame and folklore,
came in a dismal 33rd in the rankings, after rhubarb, for heaven’s sake.

And this was when my view of the world began to totter, and I began to wonder if maybe my entire food choice system was misguided. If I could be so wrong about watermelon, what other nutritional crimes was I committing out of ignorance?

Maybe I should be eating
more
doughnuts. Maybe two cups of coffee a day is
not
enough. Maybe I should have started smoking at fourteen like all my friends said.

All I can say with certainty is that it’s pretty clear I haven’t been eating enough watermelon—which is understandable.

It isn’t the most convenient of fruits. You can’t throw a slab of watermelon in your backpack in case you get hungry on your way to work. And it is a fridge hog. Even a modest watermelon will fill an entire fruit drawer, and not leave room for, well, even a guava. You pretty much have to own a car to transport a sizable watermelon home from the grocery store. You are not likely to pick one up on a whim when you are out for an evening stroll. Buying a watermelon, unlike, say, buying a nectarine (39 points), is a commitment.

And it isn’t exactly versatile. You will not, in the depths of winter when fresh watermelons are scarce, find cans of watermelon chunks with the other canned fruits. There is no such thing as fresh frozen watermelon, or jars of watermelon sauce, homemade or otherwise. And I can’t imagine the wretchedness of attempting to make, or eat, a watermelon pie. Furthermore, if there is such a thing as fresh squeezed, un-reconstituted watermelon juice, I have yet to hear of it.

At
www.watermelon.org
you can find the National Watermelon Promotion Board and download an impressive list of
watermelon recipes if you feel so inclined—like grilled watermelon cheddar burgers or watermelon stir-fry with chicken and capers.

Misguided, I would say.

I would like to put forward that the watermelon’s drawbacks are its strengths. They aren’t shoved into every muffin or cake like the ubiquitous raisin. They are somewhat of a rarity. A transient portent of good things to come. A sign of summer. When huge cardboard boxes filled to the brim with the enormous, unlikely fruit show up in the grocery store, they signal the beginning of hot, lazy days. Like summer, melons are fleeting. Those boxes won’t be there for long.

You have about two months to indulge in as much lycopene as you want. What are you waiting for?

As the famed tenor Enrico Caruso once said, “Watermelon. It’s a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face.”

12 June 2005

ODE TO THE POTATO

My ode to the potato,

that humble little tuber,

which looks like a hippopotamus

or something rather ruder

if you leave it in a bag, that is,

instead of in the pot,

and it goes all soft and wrinkly

and smells like stuff

I’d rather not talk about

while standing on this stage,

for the purpose of my little ode

is really to engage

your imagination,

and your taste buds,

I’m not here to nag.

I have come to praise potatoes

I’m not here to make you gag.

You can mash them, bash them, put them in a pot.

You can freeze them, or fry them,

you can eat them cold or hot.

They’re not mentioned in the bible.

Yes, that makes some folks wary.

And they are high in glyco-alkaloids

and that can make them scary,

causing headaches, cramps, comas

and in rare cases death.

But there’s something else they cause,

I should mention in this breath:

sheer delight

if you slice them long and thin

and fry them up in oil.

Oh, let the sin begin.

I am talking of the French fry,

sprinkled liberally with salt.

I would die for French fries.

Is there anyone who’d not?

The humble
pomme de terre
,

the apple of my eye,

drenched in dill and butter,

or a sour creamy sigh.

A generous bowl of gnocchi,

a steaming bowl of soup,

a loaf of bread,

potato head,

a most congenial root.

I knew a woman once who grew one in the shape of a duck. She was living with a certain man, who planted her potatoes for her that spring. But she had a new man living with her in the fall when it was time to dig her potatoes. As she watched him, through the kitchen window, working the garden, the clothes snapping on her clothesline in the wind, she thought to herself
, Love can come and go but a potato ... is forever.
Oh yes, they endure. Endure indeed they do
.

On the plates of kings,

the potato sings

a creamy song of cheese,

a saucy song of succulence,

a crispy tune of cheer

of butter lakes,

potato cakes,

pepper grinders,

parsley flakes.

Or in a pot,

a peasant stew,

a fire of flickering meals,

the darkening night,

potato blight,

an Irish sigh,

a teary eye.

One potato, two potato, three potato, four.

Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.

And out you must go as fast as your flipper

flapper floppers can carry you.

potato feast,

potato famine,

boiled alone,

scalloped with salmon,

my bud,

my spud,

my sweet potato pie,

my Yukon gold,

I’m growing old,

stay with me till I die

7 September 2008

THE BAY LEAF

I have harboured doubts about bay leaves for years. Whenever I have come across one (and I have pulled my fair share of bay leaves out of soups and stews), I have rolled my eyes, either literally or figuratively, privately or publicly, depending on the company, because, well, between you and me, I have never seen the point.

More to the point, the bay leaf is the only spice that has ever humiliated me. Surely I can’t be the only one who has, on more than one occasion in my case, removed a piece of bay leaf from my mouth and signalled my wait staff, my plate pushed discreetly forward, my head dropped, as I stare at this thing I have worked out of my mouth. Then, as politely as I can manage given the circumstances, allowed that I wouldn’t be finishing my soup or stew or whatever it was, having found this bit of
whatever
in it. I have handed the wet leaf over in my supercilious way, calculating all the while in my cold little heart the free meal I have undoubtedly scored, only to be told that that little bit of
whatever
wasn’t
whatever
at all.

Maybe I
am
the only one who has done this?

But surely it is reasonable to harbour doubts, grave doubts, about a spice that can reasonably be confused with
any number of things? Some of them plastic. A bay leaf doesn’t seem to undergo any physical transformation even after bubbling in a pot of beef stew for literally hours—your beef is as tender as beef tends to get, and your bay leaf is still hard and plasticy enough for me to ... to, well, you know what I did.

It has long been my contention that the bay leaf hangs around the spice rack like a dim relative. The plumber’s helper. The photographer’s assistant. The vice-president of spices. The guy who doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all but is on the payroll just in case. The placebo of the spice rack.

It has been my belief that a pot of stew
without
that bay leaf would taste no different, not at all, not one whiff, than the pot
with
it. Or for that matter, a pot full of them. Go ahead. Double up
whatever
the recipe calls for and tell me you can tell the difference.

Try that with garlic. (Garlic, which, incidentally, was worshipped by the Egyptians. And, I would put forward, with good reason.)

Or try that with cloves. Wars were fought over cloves. Cloves have played a pivotal part in world history.

Tradition tells us that thyme was in the straw bed of the Christ.

The only thing I know about bay leaves is that if you keep them in a dark place, they last for years, maybe even lifetimes, with no evidence of change.

Have you ever
tried
a bay leaf?

I did this week.

I had nothing better to do, and before I knew it, I was
standing in front of my spice rack, like a photographer’s assistant, and something came over me ... guilt? Who knows.

Anyway, I popped one in my mouth, and I can report that slipping a bay leaf into your mouth and letting it marinate there, between your teeth and cheek, for, say, a half an hour, like I did the other afternoon, is not unlike walking on a piney mountaintop with the Aegean Sea stretched below you. At least I think it was the Aegean. It was an azure blue, that’s for sure, and it smelled like pine, although there was also a distant scent of mint on the wind.

Bay leaves are, it turns out, flavourful in their dry Mediterranean way, and if you give them little nips with your teeth every so often, they release bursts of sappy flavour, not as strong as
pine
sap, more a memory of sap, with a tingling pineyness and hints of menthol. My leaf put me into a sort of Mediterranean ennui.

Before long, I was thinking how W.O. Mitchell was known for his snuff, and Mordecai Richler for those nasty little cigars, and wondering if maybe I should be known for something too. And why not for chewing bay leaves?

I could get a little silver box from Birks or, better, from the Bay, to carry my bay leaves around. A writer needs something like that to make him stick in the public’s mind. And I’m not that big on snuff and cigars.

Perhaps a bay leaf isn’t like the vice-president in charge of nothing in particular but is, instead, that fellow in the office with the indeterminate title, who despite being overlooked by just about everyone is really the person who gets everything done, who makes everyone else look good.

The Delphi oracle, I just read on the web, used to sniff the
smoke of burning bay leaves to promote her visionary trances. There is a lot to read about the bay leaf if you do a little poking around. It turns out the bay leaf grows on the bay tree. And the bay tree is also known as the laurel tree, and the Greeks used to give laurel garlands to athletes at the Olympics. There is much, it turns out, to recommend bay. A baccalaureate means laurel of berries, and we have poet laureates, and well, bay leaves are my new thing.

I feel like I owe someone an apology.

18 May 2008

CHERRY SEASON 2006

The all-too-short 2006 cherry season has come and is almost gone where I live.

These days, when you can get a box of strawberries in the dead of winter, cherries may be the last of the seasonal fruit. They come, around here anyway, during the first few weeks in July.

And when they come, you know you have to move fast because by the time August arrives, cherries will be long gone. And you can mark me down in favour of that, in case you were wondering.

Not the going. But the
coming
and the going. I like to measure the passing of the years with things like that: the return of the warblers, the departure of the geese and, yes, our annual visit to the pick-your-own cherry orchard.

Cherries may be the most convivial of the summer fruits, the only fruit served communally. Strawberries require individual bowls. Put a single bowl of cherries on a table and one thing is for sure: people are going to hang around.

And what could be better than hanging around a bowl of cherries with your friends on a summer afternoon? Except maybe cherry-picking.

A cherry orchard may be the perfect place to while away some of the summer—like all orchards, it’s blessed with the grace of shade; but unlike any other orchard I can think of, a grove of cherry trees has perfected the rhythm of summer. Which is to say that time in a cherry orchard moves languidly. You can pick more apples than you know what to do with in about five minutes. But a bucket of cherries can take hours, and that is about all the work that should be required of anyone on a sunny Sunday in July.

What could be better than to be sent out to the orchard and told not to come back until your bucket is full, and it is just you and that flock of starlings who are honing in on you like guided missiles, immune, apparently, to the banging of the propane bird clapper? The birds and the berries and the whir of the cicada and, of course, the red stain on your lips and fingers.