Butter and Such

I wish I could dig out my "All About Me" essay from my first weeks of graduate school. In it I talked about geographic place and food and identity. The first page and half, if I remember correctly, was a list of sublime meals from different hometowns and destinations. (I had just read Tim O'Brien for the first time -- it must have been The Things They Carried -- and I thought listing was a very cool technique.)

Come to think of it, the article I published in an educational journal during my first year of teaching began with a food reference too. I compared the art of teaching to the art of making pasta as described by Marcella Hazan, maven of Italian cuisine and publisher of my favorite cookbooks. Really, the analogy held up under peer review!

So now I am the mommy of a family obsessed with food. We each have our own spin on that. I am fussy about ingredients and buy almost nothing pre-made. Yes, there was that two year affair with Trader Joe's frozen products while I was working full-time. But that is OVER. I am especially fussy about meat and haul myself all the way to Baltimore each week to get the right organic, ground in the store, no antibiotic, no animal byproducts kind of stuff. And it's yummier, too.

Eleanor loves food, too. She is especially passionate about desserts and has meals from holidays and trips and local urban foraging expeditions filed in her head. When she was in the third grade and writing a Cinderella story set in Paris, she talked me into lunch at our favorite French bistro in Baltimore, Petit Louis, for "research" and savored the soupe à l'oignon gratinée.

Ethan is picky . . . but not picky. Meatloaf, spaghetti, pork chops -- no. Pickled jellyfish, mussels, sushi -- oh, yes. While he does appreciate my crème brulée, I fail as a cook for him because I do not make authentic pad thai at home. His favorite food story about himself is that he ate the beef with red chili at Ollie's in New York that the Zagat guide said was "unsuitably spicy for children."

Scott is a lover of great food, too. Our courtship was marked by forays into Chicago neighborhoods in search of real food. I think we bought the Chicago Magazine cheap eats issue our last year of college and sought out many of their recommended holes-in-the-wall serving authentic and handmade Polish, Greek, Indian and Thai foods. As our budget has grown, we have come to love fine food and make it a priority in our nights out.

This is a long prelude to my favorite butter story, promised in a recent post.

When we were in Paris this summer, our daily habit was to eat an extravagant lunch out and dine simply in our apartment for the first and last meals of the day. Breakfast was croissant and pain au raisin. Dinner was salad, baguette, butter, and cheese. (And wine.)

One evening, exhausted from miles of walking, we sat at our table with our humble meal before us. We broke the baguette, appreciating its crackle. We tossed the oil and vinegar through the greens. The butter sat at the center. And as we all spread the golden stuff onto hunks of still-warm bread, Eleanor asked, "Is the butter better in Paris than it is at home? I think it may be." And Ethan said, "Maybe it's because the bread is better."

In these quiet family moments, our priorities shine through.