Evocative Plates (title cred to Beast)

This record keeps skipping on the part where everyone is raving about how sexy food is—hell, even literary grande dame Margaret Atwood likens recipe books to porn. (What happens in her kitchen stays in her kitchen, apparently.)

I don’t often get to enjoy leisurely meals with friends. In fact, it’s all too common for me to dine al desko morning, noon, and night: most of these are unsexy, cold-cream-on-your-face kinds of meals. And yes I realize how L7 that sounds. If it’s too sad, skip to the next paragraph and just be glad it’s not you.

Last night, one of my favorite riot grrrrrls in the whole world threw open a dollhouse-sized window of opportunity to share a cheese-and-wine outing. I gleefully squeezed through the bars of my workaholic cage to join her.

Once we’d made our choices, the waiter—looking for all the world, disconcertingly, like a young and way-too-eager-to-please version of Hugh Laurie—brought us the cheese course.

The food before me, ‘le plat,’ comme on dit, was summer itself, to my mind.

Who says there isn’t time travel? Because I’m telling you truly that when I bit into the perfectly textured French bread, piled high with bleu cheese and grape halves, I was transported to the age 16.

No sommelier can convince me that the rush I felt was all about the perfect pairing of two kinds of controlled mold.

Anyway, who cares about what strange chemistry was happening on my tongue? I was awash in flirty teenage glances, blustery cycling trips between the forest and the sea, and in not giving a fuck about what my teachers thought of my drinking and smoking and shaving boys’ legs. In short, I was enjoying the kind of experience that made me the mole on the belly of an exquisite whore. I am happily not the same person I was at the age of 16, and I wouldn’t want to go back to my past and relive it any more than memory permits, but I’m fortunate to still be enjoying such pleasure in my life, such good friends and good meals.

So join me in a toast and lemme get back to work, willya?

--Misc. Romance says “vite, vite, vite—santé!”