With Love and Quiches (31 page)

• The Poisonwood Bible
  by Barbara Kingsolver
  
• A Fine Balance
  by Rohinton Mistry
  
• The Alexandria Quartet
  by Lawrence Durrell
  
• The Cairo Trilogy
  (
  Palace Walk, Palace of Desire
  , and
  Sugar Street
  ) by Naguib Mahfouz
  
• Angle of Repose
  by Wallace Stegner
  
• Postcards
  by Annie Proulx
  
• Love in the Time of Cholera
  by Gabriel García Márquez
  
• Geek Love
  by Katherine Dunn
  
• Cutting for Stone
  by Abraham Verghese
  
• Let the Great World Spin
  by Colum McCann
  
• The Sweet Hereafter
  by Russell Banks
  
• March
  by Geraldine Brooks
  
• The Beet Queen
  by Louise Erdrich
  
• The Beans of Egypt, Maine
  by Carolyn Chute
  
• What’s Bred in the Bone
  by Robertson Davies
  
• Paris Trout
  by Pete Dexter
  
• Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
  by Anne Tyler
  
• Cambridge
  by Caryl Phillips
  
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
  by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
  
• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
  by Steven Millhauser (1996 Pulitzer Prize)
  
• The Known World
  by Edward P. Jones
  
• Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
  by Jeannette Walls
  

Last, in case you have not read anything by John Updike, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, E. L. Doctorow, or Pearl S. Buck, I urge you to do so now.

This should keep you busy. I could go on and on; I have, most probably, read thousands of books. But it is too late to count them all.

________

I simply must recommend one
film
“above all” both for the
appetite
and for the
soul
—
Babette’s Feast
. This is a Danish drama from 1987, based on a story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (It’s available on DVD.) Magnificent!

S
ome of my fondest memories of traveling around the globe include the following:

• Driving through the Cotswolds in the early eighties while visiting my daughter, Joan, who was doing a college semester in London. We stayed at an exquisite country inn and were served a marvelous dinner, but the featured dessert was a Rice Krispies Pie (no kidding!).
  
• During a Greek Island cruise, we had a spectacular lunch with some new friends from what was then Rhodesia whom we had met on board. The restaurant was situated near
  Istanbul alongside the Black Sea. We had delicious grilled fish and shrimp, crisp vegetables, salads, tomatoes, and the like. We were already finished with our dessert, literally dripping with honey and crushed nuts, check in hand, when we saw the waitstaff serving the largest and most beautiful lobsters we had ever seen. We all nodded to each other briefly and started our meal all over again.
  
• Returning to Rome for the fourth time, we went back to a classic restaurant—Ristorante Passetto, which we had once visited on our first whirlwind tour as young marrieds—to savor their fettuccini with white truffles, one of the dishes I had replicated fairly well while I was still throwing my storied dinner parties. The maître d’, a true professional, greeted Irwin, twenty years later, with “long time no see!”
  
• Trying to recall our most favorite foods in Italy is useless because there is no such thing as bad food in Italy; we have eaten our way from below the boot in Sicily to the lake region up top, marveling with each visit about the cheeses—especially those in Sardinia, the best of which they do not export—the pastas, the gelato, the pastries (especially the macaroons in Sicily), the breads, the Florentine beef, the seafood in Venice.
  
• For over-the-top decadence, I would point out Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where all the hotels, restaurants, and food markets are quite remarkable; an ever-changing mirage surrounded by desert. The philosophy here is
  more is better
  . There is no cuisine that cannot be found, and you can buy a $3 million necklace in the mall right alongside a souvenir shop. I always seek out the Gulf or Middle Eastern (especially Lebanese) restaurants while there on business.
  

We traveled more than once behind the Iron Curtain before it fell, and certain foods still stand out—vividly—in my recollections. In Budapest, a beautiful city, I ordered a dish of foie gras and was served three huge globes of it fanned out atop a mountain of sinfully rich mashed potatoes, so creamy they were unctuous. All of this was smothered with yet another mountain of supremely crisp tendrils of fried onion, somehow all standing at attention. This was tall food before there even was a Gotham Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village in New York City. Then, while we were in Warsaw, our waiter tried to sell us black market caviar that he had hidden under his apron. In Prague, which was known as the Paris of Eastern Europe, there were already what were then called
free
(private)
restaurants
, and we enjoyed many sophisticated meals while there.

The first night we arrived in Moscow from Warsaw, we arrived at the hotel rather late in the evening and had missed dinner. Irwin followed his instincts, and we found a bustling restaurant (at midnight!) tucked behind all the banquet rooms on the second floor. We were the only outsiders there and had a great steak dinner, albeit
very
well done, the only way you could have it … Our waiter was already quite drunk, and he wanted to know where Irwin’s gun was—he thought all New Yorkers had a gun! This was a great dose of local color.

We hit the streets, seeking out the places where Muscovites shopped and ate. In the food shops, we found that there was absolutely no variety. There would be lemons one day and oranges the next, cucumbers one day and lettuce the next. But for foreigners and diplomats living and working there, there were other markets, closed to the ordinary citizen, that were crammed with every fruit, vegetable, meat, and delectable foodstuff imaginable. The contrasts were startling.

On to Leningrad, long before it was renamed Saint Petersburg, where we found everything freer and more plentiful, including the food. There we had afternoon coffee at the Literary Café, a far better precursor to Starbucks, and where Pushkin spent his afternoons.

If I had to vote, Italy would most probably win out over France—but only just—as my favorite place to eat simply because pasta is my favorite food. But French food is very serious business indeed. In my opinion, it is far more classical and formal, even the bistro food. Just as we have done in Italy, we’ve been to France many times and have eaten our way through it from top to bottom. In Paris itself, we have had our share of three-star meals, one being at Guy Savoy, where I still remember my ethereal appetizer of caviar and truffles floating on very soft and creamy egg yolks and butter. We also had a meal at the original Le Bernadin in Paris, then an up-and-coming restaurant opened by Chef Gilbert Le Coze and his sister, Maguey, who hailed from Brittany, until they decided to move their successful bistro to New York after winning two Michelin stars. We had met Chef Gilbert during our meal there thanks to our dining companion who knew him; the chef had confided to us his dream of owning a restaurant in New
York. His dream came true. He died young quite a few years ago, but Maguey has run it with her new chef ever since, and Le Bernadin has remained one of the finest restaurants in the United States ever since it opened in 1986.

Paris has always been on top of my list as the best walking city of all. We have been up and down
every
street, seen
every
neighborhood with its own particular flavor,
every
food hall,
every
bakery (which exist in countless numbers; the bread, in my opinion, is the best in the world). Paris has always had quite a few permanent open air market streets peppered throughout the city, and we have seen them all. These are groups of many shops offering a dazzling array of fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, fish, cheeses, chocolates, pastries,
croissants
to kill for, and countless other delicacies. These markets are a way of life for all Parisians.

I always do my research before setting out on a trip—we never allow ourselves to be confined to the typical tourist routes—and that is how we have always been able to stumble upon things that more truly define the city, village, or town that we find ourselves in.

In Santiago, Chile, for example, at the end of a cruise around South America, we went
with
our taxi driver for lunch at the Central Market, where there were many food stalls. The three of us ate together. We let him do the ordering, and we had, among other things, a Chilean specialty of razor clams with cheese—don’t say “no” until you’ve tasted it. Despite the common perception that pairing seafood and cheese is a mistake, I have found during my travels that doing precisely that has rewarded me with some of my favorite dishes, and I often combine the two when I cook.

There are so many other memorable food moments, from the Indonesian
Rijsttafel
—the Dutch word for “rice table”—that we ate three
days in a row in Amsterdam, to an astounding brunch at the Arab-run American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, to an exotic
nouvelle cuisine
dinner at an Athens restaurant called Spondi (sadly marred by an American couple who sat stony-faced and scrolling through their BlackBerrys the entire meal).

We visited China in 1996, when it was still fairly difficult to navigate between cities independently, especially if you wanted to cover a lot of ground, which we did. We joined a small tour group of eighteen people.

We first spent a few days in Hong Kong on our own, and as usual, we hit the streets and the food markets—and flower markets and bird markets—both on the Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon sides. Although there is always a mix in any city of the old and the new, Hong Kong exudes money; you can almost smell it. We had high tea served in the exquisite lobby of the landmark Peninsula
Hotel, the
grande dame
of the city. I have never quite seen more beautiful, more confident and important-looking, more glamorous, more well-dressed people than we did here—even the children, of which there were quite a few.

In mainland China, each city that we visited had a mood and flavor of its own. The must-see places are unforgettable: the Great Wall, where we saw, halfway up, what must have been some
very
high-level people picnicking, complete with table, china, and silver settings, servants in formal clothing, and champagne; the Forbidden City in Beijing with its nine hundred buildings and thousands of rooms, which was the Chinese Imperial Palace and seat of government for five hundred years beginning in the early 1400s; the Terra-cotta Army in Xian (thousands of them) sculpted to be buried within the mausoleum of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, in the third century BC.

It was in Xian that we had a special dumpling dinner, served ritual-istically and made up of exactly twenty courses followed by one more fairly plain one that we were expected to be too full to eat, or else our hosts would be sadly disappointed that they had failed us. Many of the dumplings were fashioned in the shape of what the filling contained: a little duck, shrimp, fish, eggplant, and so on, each more delicious than the one before it.

We spent one night in Chongqing, where we had the pleasure of visiting one of the most fantastic and vast covered markets that we have ever seen, rivaling Mumbai, Istanbul, Paris, Santiago, or any place else. There were snakes, pigs, goats, and myriad varieties of live poultry; there were spices, exotic fruits both fresh and dried, fish and seafood, vegetables, candies, filled buns and sweets, baskets, clothing, and on and on. We were put up at a slightly seedy Marriott—another surprise—but the dining room served very traditional Chinese cuisine, and we had another fabulous meal. We all had learned by then not to question too closely what we were being served.