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.