Pork Bellies

This past July, pork bellies, a central commodity at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange since 1961, were delisted from the Exchange. At the very same moment I heard of their economic demise, I also learned that they were not a metaphor for something else – that, in fact, actual pork bellies (at least in terms of weight) were financially assessed and traded. Granted, bacon is made from the cut of the belly, so it wasn’t entirely surprising to me that they were a popular commodity to trade. After all, I’m sure bacon has kept more than one person from becoming a vegetarian (or staying one), and it’s become such a popular ingredient that it appears even on Voodoo Donuts’s maple bar and in high-end chocolate bars. Come to think of it, though, perhaps that trend was part of the pork belly’s last gasp to remain on the Exchange. Hard to say for sure.

Last night I took some reading out for dinner. What I really wanted at the moment was a beer with my dinner, which narrowed my options. I considered my favorite pizza place, though I knew if I sat at the counter (which I prefer when I’m on my own), it would be harder to work. I was also in the mood for a veggie burger – with bacon, mind you – but my favorite place for them in town doesn’t serve alcohol. So I chose the local fancy pub where I thought I might have a salad and a beer while reading. Bizarrely, they didn’t have a special salad on the menu last night, and before I really thought it through, I decided to go with the waitress’s suggestion to try the special pork belly tacos.

I’m going to have to say this was a learning experience. Lesson number one: I don’t think wait staff are as prepared to talk about texture as much as taste. When I asked, the (very sweet!) waitress said that the pork was a bit “stringier” (which she admitted might not sound appetizing, though she promised it was also “rich”). I said my concern was that it would be “soft like a belly,” and she assured me that it was not.  Lesson number two: If I am worried something called “pork belly” will actually resemble a belly and if I am tempted to use the phrase “soft like a belly” in a conversation with wait staff, I should not be ordering said entrée. For many this would probably be a no-brainer. But the problem, too, was that I had also considered tacos for my night out, though I had forgotten once I started focusing on beer. So the possibility of the special tacos with the beer I already chose seemed perfect!

When the plate arrived, the food resembled exactly the image I had in my head when I was talking to the waitress. (Lesson number three: I have very good instincts!) As a means of distracting myself from the image, I tried rearranging it on the tortilla, I removed my reading glasses to make it blurry, and I started with the side salad. Finally I took a bite of the taco…and it freaked me out. I tasted literally nothing – I could only feel the sensation of the meat. I tried another, and it was very much the same. At this point I shifted my attention entirely to the tiny salad and beer, as I read the work I’d brought with me. But the reading was on television drama, and I found myself accosted with the (rhetorical) image of an exposed brain.

I know, in my heart and in my mind, that my accrued aversion to meat does not have to do with my own exposed brain. It has to do, rather, with my non-functioning nose. I am not thinking about eating my own brains when I eat meat! But at this moment of coincidence between the pork belly on my plate and the brain surgeries on the page, I began to wonder.

Discretionary Tastes

Almonds. Salt. Almonds and salt. Almonds, chocolate, and salt.

Nuts. I blame them for at least one increase in dress size since my surgery. Possibly two. For months in early 2005 my most obsessive repetitive compulsory eating habit -- not counting Tootsie Rolls -- was eating peanuts. They tasted like nothing, other than the salt they were bathed in. But even the salt was unsatisfying as I couldn't taste what it coated. I loved peanuts. Earlier in my life they were also my downfall (thanks especially to a boyfriend in my early twenties, who I am convinced was attempting to fatten me up -- for what, exactly, I was never sure, though I believe some deviousness was involved). Now I couldn't taste them. In general I couldn’t taste fatty foods, including other past favorites like avocados and ice cream. I would eat nut after nut with a futile (maybe unconscious) hope that the taste might become cumulative.

I’ve grown to like almonds for their shape and texture. I can’t make my weekly pans of granola without them, and I save one for my last bite of granola and yogurt in the morning. I slice them and sauté them with green beans or kale or other savories. I became addicted a year ago (thank you, Alex Keller, from whom the first box was free) to Trader Joe’s almonds covered in chocolate, sugar, and salt. In the case of these treats – or Theo’s salted almond milk chocolate bar – the combination is key.

But this week I tasted an almond again. Roasted, unsalted. Wednesday night I went by a store I fell in love with when I first moved to the Pioneer Valley – Atkins Farm, home of the perfect cider donut – to pick up some apples. They sell nuts, dried fruit, and sweets in small square plastic tubs. I saw the almonds and thought to myself, “I liked these, didn’t I?” I was thinking not of seven years ago, but rather through a vague recollection that these particular nuts were unusually good. But what I tasted Thursday wasn’t what I remembered. It wasn’t a memory of an almond, and it wasn’t the trace of an almond. It was an almond in and of itself. The texture is now clearer to me: first the skin outside, then the revelation of its oil when it breaks naturally at its own seams when I bite it, a kind of soft crunch. What a perfect morsel. Grown in its own little case, it’s a natural gift. But how do you describe its taste? A “discrete flavor,” my friend David said. And I have a sense of an almond now as a discrete, distinct, even regal little thing. I’ll still eat them with chocolate, with oats, or green beans. But they no longer have to become part of something else to make up for the fact that I can’t taste them as what they are, all by themselves.

A Pound of Flesh

I used to hate the smell of garlic on my fingers. I thought about this Sunday night as I was making lentil soup for me and my upstairs neighbors. It would seem like the smell would last for days. I wish I could describe it. It's difficult to define it aromatically, but I always thought of it as a sticky sort of smell. It stuck to my fingers as a smell, yes, but it was also a smell with a very particular texture: the tiniest of dense, sticky ridges on my skin. I knew the smell itself obviously wouldn't bother me on Sunday, but I rubbed my fingers with dish soap to remove any trace of smell or texture anyway.

This is relevant, I think, for many reasons. For one, smells are never only smells: they emanate from something, they have a texture even if we don't explicitly touch them. (Lilacs smell sweet and dense. Mint is thin, airy; it's more of a veil, whereas lilacs might be something like a chenille throw.) And then when I do smell these days, I believe I smell through my skin. I wish I could make it happen – rest my elbows in lemon dish soap (a trick my friend Nicole learned from a fashion magazine and included in a story) and then smell the lemony scent. Or better yet, put my elbows in lemon halves (doesn't Susan Sarandon's character do this in Atlantic City?) so that the aroma wafts not through my nose, but into this other invisible neurological space where I sense it.

Sunday night was the first time I made dinner for guests in so long that I can't possibly remember the last time I did it. I've lost confidence in my cooking, and I'm just not sure if the things that I have grown to like will taste good to anyone else. I trust my cakes and pies -- partly because of texture (cake is about texture, after all, as well as the proper ratio of ingredients, and at least I know if something is too salty...) and partly because I've determined what pies work for me (apple, lemon meringue, blueberry and lemon curd, chocolate and peanut butter). But savory things are something else; since I can't taste herbs and most spices myself, I've given up using them. Cooking in my head has been helping me of late: I imagine combinations more than specific flavors. I can imagine a complexity that's born out of a few simple ingredients. And in an attempt to please others, I try to bear in mind Julia Child's approach to butter.

So here is what I did:

I started cooking dry French lentils in boiling water. Meanwhile, I fried four slices of bacon left over from my Thanksgiving cornbread-bacon stuffing. To that I added a couple tablespoons of butter and then an entire white onion, chopped into relatively small pieces. Once they began to become translucent and bacony, I added two lovely diced Yukon gold potatoes to begin to cook and to take on the flavor of the onions, bacon, butter. At this point, things became complicated for me. Since I had decided on a one-dish meal (along with cheese and fresh bread on the side and a tiny apple pie for dessert), I worried about the heartiness of the stew, but I hadn't wanted to add in too many additional vegetables because I had a particular, simpler flavor and texture in mind. So I had gotten two pieces of sausage to increase the heartiness (seemed it might be nice with the potatoes, and I thought my guests would like it). In opening up the casings and adding the meat to the mix, I realized once again why I do not cook with meat and why, in fact, I often don't want to eat meat. Texture. It is unmistakably flesh. I can't make an ethical argument here, as my own habits are wildly inconsistent and largely dependent upon a balance of desire and denial (remember the bacon). But my relation to meat since the surgery has had everything to do with texture; I cannot taste particular meats as they specifically taste. They function as delivery apparati for other flavors, but I know meat in and of itself mainly by texture. The sausage in my pan did not look like a particular piece of an animal (as do chunks of beef or a bite of chicken), but -- well -- it looked an animal all ground up, and my powers of denial could not stop me from thinking about it until I threw the lentils into the pan, added the vegetable broth (I said I was inconsistent!), and allowed the ingredients to come together as one big stew. I turned my attention to the more virtuous kale at this point – simmering it a bit before tossing it into stew. Gaining just a little distance – and I'm not proud that I needed it, my vegetarian friends – I began to think, again and again, "I need to go whole hog vegetarian."