The Joy of Eating
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
A motley crew of Positive Thinkers have taken it upon themselves to write books aplenty and articles more than aplenty about The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Sex, The Joy of This, The Joy of That, and The Joy of Nearly Everything Else Under the Sun, just barely short of The Joy of Having a Root Canal.
Over the recent holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year`s Day, however, the Joy of Eating has washed over my psyche time and again. Why not extol the virtues of this special joy ere the days come on, as the author of Ecclesiastes says, when "I shall have no pleasure in them" (12:1)?
Holiday feasts are really wonderful events. Why let the Blue Noses of this world play the grinch to steal the pleasure from this wonderful experience? I think, therefore, that I want to slip with you into a small season of reverie about the Joy of Eating.
Let me share with you some precious memories, memories that come readily to mind about marvelous meals that, pardon the expression, flesh out these thoughts about the joy of eating. I will limit myself to ten of them though I could as easily square the ten and present a hundred. But then you might accost me as a glutton. Just remember that our blessed Lord, for going to parties and feasts and eating out often with sinners and publicans, was dubbed by his detractors "a gluttonous man and a winebibber" (Mt 11:19). Please permit me to note that I myself have never ever bibbed wine.
1. My childhood home was not one of food deprivation. On the contrary, my Mother was a splendid cook and my Father was a willing and eager co-dependent in the enterprise. The boys in the family also fell to with a vengeance, leaving no biscuit unbuttered, no hot cornbread unslathered, and no heaping platter of fresh pork ribs unattended. Gastronomically challenged we were not. Of all my Mother`s masterpiece meals, this one stands out with special stars, asterisks, and trumpet flourishes: succulent roast pork with velvety brown gravy, corn fresh from the field, cut off the cob and then scraped and stewed a little, potatoes in a cream sauce that was to compose odes about, hot biscuits which were without any peradventure of a doubt the best in the county-no, make that country-and when baptized in that fabulous brown gravy inevitably called for more. There was always an offering of dessert, but my own favorite was nearly always two or three of those marvelous little biscuits buttered back and then consumed with ample helpings of the homemade fig preserves for which my mother regularly took the blue ribbon at the Van Zandt County annual fair. (The judges would have deserved to be horsewhipped and banished from the county for life if they had denied my Mother those blue ribbons for those glorious fig preserves.)
2. Another homemade dinner comes to mind. This one is my wife`s doing and is one of my all-time favorites: baked turkey-tender, moist, and hot-giblet gravy, cornbread dressing, not dry, with plenty of onions and lots of sage, fresh cranberry sauce, a sweet potato soufflé about which to become unabashedly lyrical, whole green beans wrapped in bacon and then broiled to crisp perfection, hot cornbread, and after that, hot, fresh coconut pie. Talk about the joy of eating!
3. To go a little farther afield, I invite you to consider Brennan`s in New Orleans, although their Houston establishment is equally outstanding. Their fried oysters are simply the best on earth, with or without pearls. They will offer you a dab of potatoes and something akin to a salad, but the fried oysters are their piece de resistance. Then their Bananas Foster are required to leave a body in an ecstatic state of exquisite torpor as one arises with substantial effort and waddles out the door.
4. Still more distant geographically but quite near and dear to my heart, is the world-famous Peking Duck. When this incredibly tasty dish is served up with Chinese delicacies, there are few things better to eat in this whole wide world. As for the details of those side delicacies, suffice it to say
All things wise and wonderful,
All things great and small,
All things bright and beautiful,
The Chinese eat them all.
5. Once upon a time I was on a preaching mission pressing the cause of Christian Ethics over the length and breadth of the Hawaiian Islands (21 sermons in 21 days) when a preacher friend and his wife took my wife and me to the windward side of the Island of Kauai, found a cozy little shelter under a high bluff, hollowed out by high tides and occasional tsunamis, made a fine charcoal fire in his hibachi, and cooked ample quantities of teriyaki steak which he had marinated overnight and then laid lovingly on the grill over those hot coals. I do not recall whether there were any accoutrements, but the memory of that teriyaki steak with plain bread will linger with me, through thick and thicker, to my dying day.
6. In the old days New York City offered nothing more memorably delicious than dinner on a night out at Mama Leone`s. More money can easily be spent at the Twenty One Club or dozens of other places, but the food was simply never as marvelous as it was at Mama Leone`s: fresh shrimp cocktail, half a dozen oysters on the half shell, broiled fresh fish, stuffed deviled crab, steaming new potatoes, and then a generous rasher of spumoni befruited and benutted as if there would be no tomorrow. The glitz and the bustle left something to be desired in the realm of the aesthetic; but the food was sheer, unalloyed joy.
7. One of the best eating places on earth was, is, and I hope ever shall be, the Stagecoach Inn at Salado, Texas. For more than fifty years I have contributed materially to keeping them in business. To begin with, you are served a cup of exquisite, scaldingly hot chicken broth and about a half bushel of very special hushpuppies, water cornbread delicacies rolled up in little bitty rolls about the size and length of your little finger and served crisp and brown and hot with real butter from genuine cows. Then comes tomato aspic garnished with a dash of mayonnaise and a generous sprinkling of capers. Then they bring a plate of freshly barbecued chicken slathered with homemade tomato-based sauce and accompanied by fried bananas and oven browned potato wedges. Cold iced tea and a slice of lemon chess pie to top it all off are enough to make a dog break a logging chain to get loose and get to it.
8. For many decades the best seafood feast I ever found in all in the world could be relished at the San Jacinto Inn hard by the Battleship Texas some thirty miles outside of Houston. Hungry landlubbers would be inundated from a set menu with fresh shrimp, fresh oysters, steamed crab, fresh fried fish, stuffed deviled crab, hot hushpuppies, hot biscuits, and tomato preserves. Wow. Joy.
9. For decades the world`s best roast beef has been served up at the Monocle on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. If you are fortunate you may get the end piece with an ample supply of au jus. You can then take a small salad and a small baked potato and simply inhale the whole thing with a goodly portion of hot sour dough bread. Small wonder that famous men and women cross all lines of party and class to patronize this place. It`s not the location. It`s not the ambience. It`s not the clientele. It`s the roast beef.
10. For the nearly three decades that I lived in Nashville, the best eating place in town was the Satsuma Tea Room. This was a downtown establishment which served only lunch, five days a week. Presided over by Miss Arlene Ziegler who was the owner, manager, buyer, meal planner, and sometime cook, the Satsuma had one special meal every year just before Christmas. The whole city oriented itself to this Happening from about 3 p.m. until the food ran out about 9 o`clock. The spread was fabulous: baked ham, roast turkey, boiled shrimp, spiced round, Swedish meat balls, fish, chicken, even a plump roast pig with an apple in its mouth, salads, aspics, delicious vegetables (cooked, not the raw ones that yuppies pretend to like), salads, deviled eggs, turkey hash, sweet potatoes, boiled custard, all kinds of great desserts, and bottomless cups of steaming hot coffee. One entered into this incredible experience without having eaten a bite of lunch and then exited some two hours later with no earthly intention of ever eating again.
Time and space have fled. As the author of Hebrews says, "Time would fail me to tell" of fried chicken and chicken gravy and hot biscuits served up at the world-famous Loveless Motel and Restaurant near Nashville, mouth-watering barbecued brisket all over Texas, Regas` world-class restaurant with unfailingly delicious meals in Knoxville, Mrs. Dickey`s fried pies, Mrs. Wenske`s glorious coconut cakes, Mobile`s Original Oyster House, Hong Kong`s fabulous Peninsula Hotel`s storied Sunday buffets, the Kahala Hilton`s coconut pies, Chuck`s hamburgers, Mrs. Margurette Price`s chicken and dumplings, and the stoned Mama`s Fish House on the windward side of the island of Maui.
Suffice it to say that of all human joys, not the least of these is The Joy of Eating. Bon apetit.
