Past Taste

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, November 2, 2009—

OVER AT HER FOOD BLOG our daughter Giovanna writes today about food nostalgia — the longing for the familiar food of another time, another place; often of our childhood. She's more prone to it, I think, than I am; her childhood offered more to long for, perhaps. She wonders why there seems to be no English word for food nostalgia: I don't think it's surprising, given the comparatively recent development of food worth longing for in anglophone cultures. (I generalize, I know.)

And what should Lindsey make for dinner tonight but fried egg sandwiches! They loom large and leaden in my childhood; a fried-egg sandwich often nestled in dubious taste against a peanut-butter-and-honey one in the lunchbucket I carried to school. Cold fried-egg sandwiches have little to recommend them, particularly on home-made bread that rarely found the right state — it was either overly leavened and full of holes or completely unleavened, chewy and tough. (The honey had bee bits in it, too, but that's another story.)
Lindsey's fried-egg sandwich is delicious. She fries the eggs in olive oil, congealing the whites but leaving the yolks soft; she salts and peppers judiciously; the bread tonight was Como bread from the Downtown Bakery.
With it, as you see, tomatoes from the garden, and little green beans cooked with chopped shallots, yum.

Pouilly Fouissé, Louis Jadot, 2007