Flavor Awakenings

I remember the exact moment my taste buds came of age.

Throughout those early years, when my single parent, working mother was flush enough to splurge on donuts for my brother and I, that burst of brown sugar and cinnamon on crumb donuts was comfort food. Breaking off a portion of the corn syrup-infused crusty ridge on an Old Fashioned was pure decadence, requiring china plates and fresh lemonade in mini tea cups on my folding card table with rusty hinges in the back yard, next to the wall of hydrangeas. There was more sugar in those outer ridge chunks than dough. Like hard candies; little icebergs of glucose calving off of tooth decay glaciers. A conspiracy to find uses for subsidized corn, overflowing in silos somewhere.

My brother on the other hand, already freckled front and back like an exploded pomegranate, would emerge from the pink pastry box with his face, arms, hair and tee shirt decorated in red goo. Jelly donut filling always reminded me of the globs of blue ooze passed underhand from desk to desk, front to back in 4^th grade classrooms when The Blob was first terrorizing small airstream diners. If there was a shred of real fruit in there, then my beloved Big Stick popsicle qualified for that food group. Even fruit flies are fooled.

When I started baking pies, about age 10, I preferred mince meat or pumpkin, nothing that ever mimicked that gooey stuff my brother wore. Maybe that was a sign I was destined to be different.

Enter The Moment: There I was sitting on the neighbor’s back porch, I was 11 or 12, listening to another neighbor play guitar perched on a rock in the sloping grassy yard. He was a carpenter, and a surfer, like everyone else in the canyon. Bonnie sat down next to me, the essence of a Nature Girl, with brown hair to her waist and a parade of dogs, horses and birds dancing along behind her wherever she went. Her skirt was full of ripe loquats. They must have been magical loquats. With one bite the Matrix was revealed; the difference between tree-ripened fruit and facsimiles fermenting on the windowsill was the story of Portuguese armadas being launched to secure a steady source of spices from over the edge of the Known World.

At that moment, I’m sure clouds of butterflies emerged from an earthen carpet of fallen leaves, lions shook hands with gazelles and tropical birds spread their wings protecting rainforests from bulldozers. Now the figs and apricots and oranges in the trees around my own house became three-dimensional. I waited patiently for the apricots to turn from orange to red, for the figs to blush burgundy. I woke early and watched out my bedroom window on almost-ripe days for the moment I could rush in and beat the orioles to the harvest.

And then came avocados.

Now that refined sugar was unmasked as the Grim Reaper of natural flavor, I was willing to try again some “adult” foods, so long as they weren’t white or boiled. But avocado had a stigma: it was rich – too subtle and filling, bland like butter or whole milk. Foods that couldn’t be chewed were suspect.

I remember this moment too. Getting off the school bus with Claudia, another fifth grader, the only other girl in the neighborhood anywhere near my age. We’d head into her family's beach house with the glass wall facing the surf at the point, sit on the floor outside her room, throw on a vinyl of Carole King’s Tapestry and do macramé till it was time to raid the kitchen. That’s where she introduced me to matso topped with a healthy scoop of ripe avocado, sprinkled with salt. It became a ritual, and one of my forever comfort foods. Of course now I honor salads by lacing them with avocado.

 

  Then came coffee: age 13 or so, after a 30-hour storm while on a sailboat with family at Thanksgiving. We grabbed the mooring lines from buoys both front and back while attempting to secure shelter on the lee side of Catalina Island in Avalon Bay. Two of four heavy lines we were tied to snapped overnight and the seas in our harbor were so high we clocked 8 miles while at anchor. Chilled to the bone, tired of working wet deck lines, breathing the stench of the diesel engine, my stomach empty from seasickness, when the ocean calmed enough to assess the damage, my mother made us all thick cups of freeze-dried coffee. I wrapped the damp, salty sleeping bag around me, perched on top of the cabin and watched the dawn. Coffee became the taste of survival.

Through the years, I have picked wild herbs and artichokes with Hmong refugees in vacant lots in Seattle. Lived off guavas and mangoes on a jungle trail. Cut sugar cane with a machete and boiled it into cane syrup at my brother’s place in Florida. Feasted on wild mushrooms carefully selected by aficionado Cate Hawthorne in the forests of Ft. Bragg. Admired but declined Jeff Laxier’s fresh-plucked-while-free-diving abalone being grilled, but the story’s the same: fresh, ripe, organic. Anything else is sucking the life out of us.

To quote Mary Pipher’s lovely book “Writing to Change the World,” she says, “We are a nation good at consuming, but poor at savoring.” Elsewhere she adds a quote from comedian George Carlin, extending the metaphor to include consumption on a grander scale: “Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.” Nuff said.