Funny, isn't it, how some things from our childhood scar us indelibly for life, while others become lasting favourites, smiling sense memories or stories that bring tears to our eyes.
Lemon Meringue Pie, for instance, is something that even at the age of 41, I couldn't quite bring myself to eat. I know of course on some rational, grown-up level that there are great chefs who make the perfect meringue, who make their own lemon curd and bring the two together on sublime pastry...
But for me, the dinner ladies at my primary school, with their fizzy dishsoap meringue, sickly sweet sherbert lemon curd and damp and barely cooked dough have barred me forever from the potential pleasure of that dessert.
On the other hand, something that in most ordinary cases would be regarded as a complete and utter failure fills me with not only pleasure but a nostalgic longing for one of the three things my gran could really cook.
Have you ever boiled a pot of rice beyond the point of extinction, and then left it to burn to buggery on the bottom of the pan? Have ya?
Gotta tell you, if you haven't, you've never really lived. Prising great lattice-works of brown or blackened, brittle as a celebrity marriage rice off the bottom of a pan, dosing it with a couple of drops of dark soy sauce and eating it like a weird amalgum of popcorn and peanut brittle and caramel and love.
I mention this merely because there are women who love me, and today, two of them who know about this admittedly mad but entirely overpowering culinary nostalgia-bomb have made this amazing dish for me - had it at both Ma's, and at home.
Ahhhh, good days...
Sadly, this will go into my little mental rolodex, and when things suck - as they probably will Thursday morning, and definitely will tomorrow morning during a misplaced UberCommute - I'll flick back to the day of Double Crunchy Rice and remember that life as a Disappearing Man really isn't that bad after all...
Years and years ago, I edited a biography by a woman from Iran and she described the fight that ensued in their kitchen for that burnt rice at the bottom of the pot and the sad fact that, as the youngest, she never got it.
ReplyDeleteI never really understood that part of her story, but this must have been what she was talking about. I'm a little worried about trying it...but I will.
Thanks for the great read.