Tabasco karma
It's always a special moment when you realize that you're the recipient of karmic backlash. It's humbling. If you're paying attention, it's usually educational. Sometimes, it's even possible to see the humor in it. It happened to me most recently last week in the Des Moines airport as I began my fortnightly homeward journey. As I sat in the sole airport restaurant, sipping my panacea, I noticed that the burger I had ordered looked as though it had seen better days. I asked the waitress for some Tabasco to add a little flavor. When she returned, I chuckled to see that the Tabasco was a watery, murky sort of brown. I texted ginger_rose immediately. I haven't seen brown Tabasco since I served it to her on the day she came over for dinner to meet my parents.
We were still in high school, and I think my mother was serving chicken divan (a bland, creamy casserole of chicken and broccoli). In addition to shaking copious amounts of pepper onto her serving, ginger_rose asked if we had any Tabasco in the house. I fetched it from the refrigerator, the small, thin bottle that seemed so exotic to me back then. I noticed an expression of revulsion that briefly danced across her face, quickly hidden, and she gingerly shook a few drops of the hot sauce onto her supper. She asked me later how old the Tabasco was, and I couldn't think of how many years we'd had that bottle in the fridge. My guess is that my mother bought it to add the required "dash" in some recipe when I was in middle school. It was in this private conversation that I learned that Tabasco is supposed to be red in color. The McIlhennys would have been as shocked as ginger_rose when seeing for the first time that the bottle at my house was old enough to have turned brown. Today, I would consider brown Tabasco a sin. I'm not sure how it took decades for karma to catch up with me on this one, though.
These days, most friends would probably use the word "foodie" as a core element in any description of me, but it wasn't always so. Rare ingredients, sinkfuls of dishes and a plethora of home-rendered duck fat may be a mixed blessing to ginger_rose today, but it was actually her cooking that opened the door to my learning about food. We were teens heading out on a date, not long after that Tabasco incident, and I hadn't yet eaten. She efficiently fried up some leftover ham and rice for me to eat while she went downstairs to change. I remember looking at the plate, seeing little black flecks everywhere and thinking, "Oh how cute! She burned some ham skin. I'll be a good boyfriend and eat it anyway." I looked across the table at my best friend, feeling rather smug, shoveled a forkful of food into my mouth and then time froze.
You see, the black flecks weren't burnt ham skin. They were black pepper. I had never eaten anything which contained enough pepper for it to be visible in the dish. I was raised on bland midwestern fare that was many generations removed from the Pennsylvania Dutch roots of my mother's side of the family (by way of Nebraska and the Oregon Trail). This was definitely the spiciest, most pungent dish I had ever put in my mouth. There was a sneeze beginning to tickle the back of my throat, my tongue was burning with lemony-pine heat, my eyes were beginning to water. The smugness melted off my face, somehow leaping across the table to reappear on the face of my best friend. I couldn't spit it out now, not after I'd gloated in his face about how my really hot girlfriend had so wonderfully made me a snack before we went out and left him all by his lonesome! If I couldn't eat this plate of food, was I going to hurt her feelings? This was the moment that the first seed of doubt was placed in my mind, a seed that would germinate and grow into a concern that maybe I wasn't going to be able to handle the heat of her cooking. I don't think I'd ever even grilled a cheese sandwich at this point of my life. I was pretty sure I was going to spend the rest of my life with this woman, so how was I going to be able to eat?
I forced my jaws to move, blindly ignoring the aching heat on my tongue, the prickling and tickling in my nose, blinking back the tears welling up in my eyes, grinding pepper and rice and ham between my teeth, swallowing again and again what I imagined to be shards of glass. I shouldered the mantle of the a "good boyfriend," my ego smarting over how much harder the job was proving to be than I had thought just moments ago. Mechanically, I shoveled fork after fork into my mouth until the plate was clean, focusing my mind anywhere but on my tongue. My buddy gloated, swallowing his own laughter, a toothy grin spreading from ear to ear. When ginger_rose came upstairs from changing, my face burned red. I'm sure she asked me what was wrong, and I diverted her attention. We went out to see a movie or something, but that moment changed my life. Mind you, there was nothing wrong with the food she served me. I might make it the same way, today. I just had zero tolerance for pungence and spice. I'd probably serve it with Tabasco, though.
It was that moment that sent me into the kitchen. I worked in a few kitchens, at schools in Amsterdam and Singapore, eventually becoming the dinner cook at a family restaurant back in the tiny Northern California mountain village where I grew up. I cook a little differently now, but I started working in kitchens so that I could control the level of spice in my food. You see, if this woman was going to cook for me, I needed to learn to eat food the way she prepared it. I needed to build some tolerance to spice and heat. I cooked chili for the Dutch and then shoveled extra sambal oelek into my own bowl, until it made me cry. Of course, while I did this, she was in the South Pacific, where spicy food is practically unknown. She lost tolerance, I gained, and in a Jack Sprat sort of way, we ended up meeting in the middle. As a bonus, I learned to cook and started what would become a lifelong love affair with food. It wasn't until later that I became a little more egalitarian in my thinking about household chores...
We were still in high school, and I think my mother was serving chicken divan (a bland, creamy casserole of chicken and broccoli). In addition to shaking copious amounts of pepper onto her serving, ginger_rose asked if we had any Tabasco in the house. I fetched it from the refrigerator, the small, thin bottle that seemed so exotic to me back then. I noticed an expression of revulsion that briefly danced across her face, quickly hidden, and she gingerly shook a few drops of the hot sauce onto her supper. She asked me later how old the Tabasco was, and I couldn't think of how many years we'd had that bottle in the fridge. My guess is that my mother bought it to add the required "dash" in some recipe when I was in middle school. It was in this private conversation that I learned that Tabasco is supposed to be red in color. The McIlhennys would have been as shocked as ginger_rose when seeing for the first time that the bottle at my house was old enough to have turned brown. Today, I would consider brown Tabasco a sin. I'm not sure how it took decades for karma to catch up with me on this one, though.
These days, most friends would probably use the word "foodie" as a core element in any description of me, but it wasn't always so. Rare ingredients, sinkfuls of dishes and a plethora of home-rendered duck fat may be a mixed blessing to ginger_rose today, but it was actually her cooking that opened the door to my learning about food. We were teens heading out on a date, not long after that Tabasco incident, and I hadn't yet eaten. She efficiently fried up some leftover ham and rice for me to eat while she went downstairs to change. I remember looking at the plate, seeing little black flecks everywhere and thinking, "Oh how cute! She burned some ham skin. I'll be a good boyfriend and eat it anyway." I looked across the table at my best friend, feeling rather smug, shoveled a forkful of food into my mouth and then time froze.
You see, the black flecks weren't burnt ham skin. They were black pepper. I had never eaten anything which contained enough pepper for it to be visible in the dish. I was raised on bland midwestern fare that was many generations removed from the Pennsylvania Dutch roots of my mother's side of the family (by way of Nebraska and the Oregon Trail). This was definitely the spiciest, most pungent dish I had ever put in my mouth. There was a sneeze beginning to tickle the back of my throat, my tongue was burning with lemony-pine heat, my eyes were beginning to water. The smugness melted off my face, somehow leaping across the table to reappear on the face of my best friend. I couldn't spit it out now, not after I'd gloated in his face about how my really hot girlfriend had so wonderfully made me a snack before we went out and left him all by his lonesome! If I couldn't eat this plate of food, was I going to hurt her feelings? This was the moment that the first seed of doubt was placed in my mind, a seed that would germinate and grow into a concern that maybe I wasn't going to be able to handle the heat of her cooking. I don't think I'd ever even grilled a cheese sandwich at this point of my life. I was pretty sure I was going to spend the rest of my life with this woman, so how was I going to be able to eat?
I forced my jaws to move, blindly ignoring the aching heat on my tongue, the prickling and tickling in my nose, blinking back the tears welling up in my eyes, grinding pepper and rice and ham between my teeth, swallowing again and again what I imagined to be shards of glass. I shouldered the mantle of the a "good boyfriend," my ego smarting over how much harder the job was proving to be than I had thought just moments ago. Mechanically, I shoveled fork after fork into my mouth until the plate was clean, focusing my mind anywhere but on my tongue. My buddy gloated, swallowing his own laughter, a toothy grin spreading from ear to ear. When ginger_rose came upstairs from changing, my face burned red. I'm sure she asked me what was wrong, and I diverted her attention. We went out to see a movie or something, but that moment changed my life. Mind you, there was nothing wrong with the food she served me. I might make it the same way, today. I just had zero tolerance for pungence and spice. I'd probably serve it with Tabasco, though.
It was that moment that sent me into the kitchen. I worked in a few kitchens, at schools in Amsterdam and Singapore, eventually becoming the dinner cook at a family restaurant back in the tiny Northern California mountain village where I grew up. I cook a little differently now, but I started working in kitchens so that I could control the level of spice in my food. You see, if this woman was going to cook for me, I needed to learn to eat food the way she prepared it. I needed to build some tolerance to spice and heat. I cooked chili for the Dutch and then shoveled extra sambal oelek into my own bowl, until it made me cry. Of course, while I did this, she was in the South Pacific, where spicy food is practically unknown. She lost tolerance, I gained, and in a Jack Sprat sort of way, we ended up meeting in the middle. As a bonus, I learned to cook and started what would become a lifelong love affair with food. It wasn't until later that I became a little more egalitarian in my thinking about household chores...