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This wonderful essay by Lara Vapnyar cost me € 15.35. I was so intrigued by her ideas of imagining food that I thought she must be good. The book has been worth every cent I paid for it. And below is a shortened version of the article which so tickled my fancy.
"Around 1979, when I was a child living in Russia, my teacher once assigned our class an essay: if a Magi promised to grant you a single wish, what would you ask for? I knew what I wanted, and I wrote about it with passion and sincerity. I thought it was a beautiful wish until my teacher read my essay and said she was appalled — she couldn't believe anyone would waste a wish like that. She leaned close and whispered, "Wouldn't you rather wish for world peace?"
….. Yes, world peace would have been very nice — but what I still really wanted was a magic pot that could produce any food I fantasized about. And since in Russia at that time the variety of available food was very limited, my magic pot would have a lot of work to do.
I had always paid close attention to the descriptions of food in books. ... Asparagus was another mystery (along with the cheesecake a wolf used to entice victims into a trap). I didn't know it as a child, but once I started reading adult novels set in 19th-century Russia or 20th-century Europe and America, asparagus seemed to be the primary food a literary character would eat. I would read the asparagus pages over and over, trying to conjure a picture of it....
Nobody I knew had ever seen asparagus. I couldn't even find it in the huge Household Encyclopedia that had pictures of various fruits and vegetables I had never tasted, like mango or kohlrabi. I constructed an image of asparagus from bits of novelistic description...
And then there were oysters. From one book to the next, characters gorged on them. But as was the case with asparagus, the authors didn't provide much detail. I applied the same method of deductive reasoning and came up with a sea creature...
When I saw oysters for the first time in a small restaurant in New York, I was shocked. ... I was instructed to swallow them whole. "Swallow them whole?" I asked. "But I won't be able to taste them." "You will. You will taste them while they're slipping down your throat." I put an oyster in my mouth, but I couldn't bring myself to swallow it. I bit on it first. The taste was amazing. I tried to swallow the next one, but I was overcome by the same desire to bite on it, and so I did. I simply couldn't believe that if I swallowed it the taste would be any better. I've eaten hundreds of oysters since, but I still haven't swallowed one without biting on it first.
The first time I tried asparagus I was equally disappointed... I ate it many times — raw, boiled, steamed, puréed — and once, only once, did I have a revelation. We were at the house of our friends Inna and Alex in Manhattan for a spring-themed dinner. Alex served fresh farmers' market asparagus, very simply prepared. The texture and the taste were exactly as I had imagined. It had been steamed, the stalk perfectly tender, the head soft but not mushy, with a faint buttery sweetness. It tasted like an old fantasy suddenly coming true.
Today there is hardly any opportunity for food fantasies. If I see a description of an unfamiliar dish in a novel (for example, lamb biryani in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Namesake"), I can look it up on the Internet, and within minutes I know what it looks like, what it's made from and how to cook it. And then, if I still feel like tasting it, I can order it at one of the many Indian restaurants in New York City. Every dish we can think of is within reach. It feels as if we have been granted that magic pot without ever asking for it.
So, I guess my teacher was right: I should have asked for world peace.
Lara Vapnyar's new collection of short stories is "Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love” and is available from your local bookseller for whatever your country demands for $ 20.00 U.S.A.
The abbreviated article was taken from: www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/27/news/25foodt001.php
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