Lydia’s Blog

I am not a foodie. I wasn’t brought up foodie. After school was always about either Elio’s pizza (it’s cool to be square), or Eggo waffles (leggo), depending on whether I was in the mood for salty or sweet. Dinner was often cold cereal. Crates of Pop Tarts and Hot Pockets and Fruit Roll-ups and Oreos and Corn Nuts and Doritos were stacked in delicious little mountains in our basement, a magnificent testament to the awesome powers of wholesale shopping. Fruit and veg were approximated by individually portioned cans of cling peaches, and big boxes of potato buds. I ate my first alfalfa sprout at age 24.

Now this of course led to the standard hackneyed catalogue of weight and body image problems, about which I won’t bore you.

The real shame about my anti-foodie upbringing, is that I wasn’t raised to appreciate when anything was technically, quantifiably “good”. There isn’t a lot of qualitative difference between starchy shit and salty starchy shit, if you get me. There was never a sense of joy or discretion about food. It wasn’t about letting the colors of a delicate souffle unfurl on the tongue. No. for me it was more about throwing another batch of frozen mozzarella sticks in the microwave and hoping my mom wouldn’t catch me before I could smuggle them back to my room.

I’ve run into the remains of this problem on several occasions as an adult because, strangely, opera people tend to be foodies. They tend to love to cook, and love great, tiny, exclusive restaurants, and when it comes to wine, forget it. Leave your two euro supermarket merlot at home.

While in Austria, I was invited out into wine country to sample rustic indigenous cuisine and some of the world’s greatest white wine. It was my friend Martin, his girlfriend Nicole and I, and while they sat there rolling their eyes in food- and drink-induced ecstasy, I tried my best to fit in via imitation. So, I drank through two bottles of 54 euro-a-bottle white something (as if it were Boone’s) and grunted and moaned and pointed, nodding and rolled my eyes around in what I believed to be the spirit of the event.

Then I was informed I’d been eating sausage rind (wax) for the past ten minutes. Fuck. They’d found me out. If you charged me thirty euro for a bowl of Dinty Moore, I’d call it Haute Cuisine because I JUST DON’T FUCKING KNOW.

My dear friend Beth and her dear husband James have taken me out on many an occaision, to sample the work of great chefs in both London and Berlin. I love these occasions, they make me feel like such a star, surrounded by people of such taste and class. Still, when it comes right down to it, I notice that the portions are far smaller (and there are many more of them), and arranged with far more aesthetic flair than you’d find at, say, a Denny’s–but deeper than that, you might as well slap me up some moons over my hammy.

What a fucking embarassment. Me, who’s future brother-in-law is one of New York’s hottest chefs. Me, who can dismiss a Haendel recording because of unidiomatically executed ornaments. Me, who can draw you up a compare and contrast chart between Marc Jacobs and Prada this season…how can I not have this most important of neo-dandy-esque traits? Where’s Joris-Karl Huysmans when you need him (maybe if I stick foie gras up my asshole I’ll enjoy it more…?)

Despite my apparent handicap, I do seem to be making progress in one area:

Cheese.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve pretty much gone totally gay for artisanal cheeses, the kinds that are only sold at street markets from specialty carts.

I have two preferred groups: old and hard, and soft and stinky.

With the former category, I’ve learned that time of make plays an enormous part in taste…for instance, if the milk was harvested and used in early spring, it’ll never have the nasty bite of a late summer milk cheese, due to the high moisture content in newer grass. You end up with some great cheeses, like this Dutch number I tried a while ago, aged 24 months, bright orange and so brittle you had to boil the knife to cut it.

The soft and stinky is my passion. I was happily maintaining my love affair with Saint Agur when just last weekend, I discovered Fourme d’Ambert.

With my first bite, I knew I’d never be able to eat a Kraft cheese product again. No. My life had changed forever.

After buying a decent-sized chunk of the cheese, I decided to go back to the cart for a second slab, for prophylactic reasons. After getting the cheese home, I tried spreading it on one of my ghetto-supermarket crackers. No no no.

I had to go back to the market to buy some nubby, fresh, whole-grain lesbian bread, in order for my precious cheese to be supported by an element of similar quality. While I was back at the market, I also bought organic vine tomatoes.

If I were only so lucky as to hope that a little slab of Fourme d’Ambert could be my gateway drug into the world of being able to tell a twinkie from a millefeuille.

Fucking unlikely, though.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 10:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.