"If you won the lottery, how would you spend the money?"
"If you no longer had to work, how would you pass the time?"
"If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
As speculative inquiries, such questions purport to solicit deep insights about one's dreams and desires. But they are most often speculative only in form. The answers are, almost without fail, less pressing than the inducement to generate further questions. The game's true pleasure— if you ask me— consists in coming up with the most outlandish question just as everyone else is drifting off to sleep. That way, you never have to answer it yourself.
This post, though preceding sleep only by a matter of minutes, represents a preliminary attempt to resurrect the sleepover question by limiting it to the arena of food. After all, the mode of speculation that animates so much culinary chatter is itself essentially a sleepover question: the notion of the ideal meal. Is there such a thing?
For the sake of keeping the cheesy rhetoric of the late-night conversation alive, I'll put the question this way:
You have been sentenced to death, and you are mandated to request one last meal before your trip to the gallows. Based on some perverse adherence to moral law, you are guaranteed to receive whatever meal you demand, regardless of its rarity or expense. The meal will be made with the best and freshest ingredients and prepared by the top chefs in the land. What would you choose?
It was, I think, Lacenaire who ordered an exquisitely undercooked roast chicken, thus taking delight in consuming what might otherwise have proven fatal in itself.
Would your own choice extend to the otherwise unsanctioned or impossible? Why not a final exploration of taboo: at long last, a chance to discover cannibalism!
Would you choose the baroque route, demanding a banquet so sumptuous as to induce discomfort— or so far-fetched as to involve great nuisance on the behalf of the executioners— or, in the manner of Scheherazade, so prolonged as to stave off the execution itself?
Or would the meal be spartan, purist, nostalgic? A scrambled egg; a slice of cheese pizza; a masterfully-cooked omelet.
Here's where H. usually grows annoyed, and rightly so: having posed the question, I find myself at a loss when it comes to answering it. What makes this question challenging is that it strips dining of all its contextual elements: its environment, its company, its futurity. The hypothetical death-row meal is one you cannot share with anyone. Nor will you have occasion to remember it. The pleasure— provided such a meal could ever be pleasurable— would be limited to the immediacy of the consumption of the food itself. Aesthetics under pressure.
Immediately I find myself imposing conditions rather than menus: if the meal arrived in time to satisfy a great hunger, then it would afford visceral as well as aesthetic satisfaction. Come to think of it, such a precondition seems essential. How meaningful, how ideal, could a last meal possibly be if the penultimate meal— a gruesome trip the the slop-house— were to occur mere minutes beforehand?
Of course, one can start imposing all sorts of other conditions on top of this, death-row circumstances notwithstanding. Ooh, I hope I wouldn't be too cold, or too injured, or too ill, or have stomach cramps. I hope I'd still have the ability to taste and smell. Would the prison cell be too smelly for me to enjoy the meal?
Phooey.
You are mandated a final meal, and you must decide what to order. What would it be? Consider this a survey. I'll post my own answer as soon as I determine what it is.
I'm sure it will come to me as I drift off to sleep.
ADDENDUM: Friday, March 21
H. read last night's blog post and was, as expected, disgruntled. "This is my least favorite post," she said. "I know, I know," I responded, "I posed the question and then refused to answer it."
"There's an unfairness to this," she explained. "You demand that someone else answer first, but offer nothing." H. does, incidentally, use the subjunctive in her daily speech.
But I stand by what I said last night: the answer would, and did, come to me as I drifted off to sleep.
At first I imagined that my death-row meal would be dim sum, the perfect serial meal. How can one not fantasize about the possibility of steam-dish after steam-dish of elaborately prepared dumplings and tit-bits, from tripe and tendon to sticky rice? But I then realized that part of dim sum's pleasure is its appeal to infinity. You can only eat so much on a single visit. But there's always another visit. Such a possibility falls away in the case of a final meal.
As I was drifting off to sleep, it came to me: my death-row meal would be high tea. A testament to my residual Englishness? Though a decision perhaps tainted by the attendant stoicism of the British Empire— we shall face death and refuse to quail!— I realize that high tea affords a near-perfect combination of exquisite preparation, variety of flavor, and, perhaps most importantly, an implicit finitude. It's a tea, after all; not a dinner.Lapsang suchong tea, finger sandwiches, pastries, clotted cream, fresh jam, and petits-fours. That's what I'd end with, given that one final choice.
4 comments:
My respect for H. is unbounded, but in this post she comes across as a grump! I want to know her answer!
As for me, I thought about a meal my parents might make, including a butterflied leg of lamb, marinated by mother in wine, olive oil and garlic and then barbequed by my father so that it would be crisp on the outside, but moist on the inside, accompanied by Marks and Spenser's dauphin potatoes, mange tout, and capped off with my mother's Toblerone Mousse - but this was accompanied by so many memories that I got tearful - one doesn't want to be bawling into one's meal. And, as I was writing it, I began debating it - surely my mother's chocolate chip cookies were the best I've ever eaten, and so a massive ball of my mother's chocolate chip cookie dough would be the meal to end all meals, etc Or, what about my favourite condiment, ketchup, which I love over a juicy hamburger, especially with raw onions . . . My point is this: perhaps one would have to eat something that isn't too evocative, because one would want to enjoy the meal per se, rather than flooding the brain with memories of family, of camping trips, etc That is why I like the formality of your High Tea. The High Tea belongs to everybody, and though it may have personal meaning, that meaning is not central to your enjoying it. So, then, why not take a risk? Why not say, "Chef's Choice!" The meal will be something new, something which may conjure memories, but which also must be appreciated and - crucially - unanticipated. And, even better, it may be repulsive. Or, even better still, it may be something you thought repulsive and now discover is delicious. Would this not be a bit like a small, compact portion of life itself - aesthetic, finite and surprising?
Out of my boundless respect for the lovely SW, I'll observe without comment that he too defers answering the question.
Here's the correct answer: a plate of thin, extra salty French fries. An Istrian Sunset, the cocktail of limonata and Campari invented by my favorite Slovenian. Vietnamese rice paper rolls with shrimp, pork and tofu. Oeufs en cocotte, which we ate magnificently in a restaurant in the Marais. For dessert, lemon-berry souffle from a Martha Stewart magazine recipe.
I don't have the taste, aesthetic or gastronomic, to know if these dishes are meant to go together. But I know that they offer what I would claim of my life: salt, sharpness, cleanness, piquancy. And bacon.
I admit to being flummoxed by the whole thing.
This morning, as I jogged, I was thinking about how I would answer the question, coming up with a banquet that would begin with the cheese-and-banana dish I had at a small stand on a highway outside Guayaquil and include a main plate that would be large enough to serve as a sled for a small child, loaded with such things as H's "thin, extra salty french fries" and, expanding on something alluded to by Gianni, a slice of New Haven brick oven pizza with sausage and artichoke, as well as "a sliver of steak from Pete Luger's" and "a croissant from the Parisian baker who is on that street below Monmartre"; in short, I designed an entire year's worth of blogs compacted into a meal that could never come into existence, and which would probably be a rather disgusting buffet.
The answer then is much simpler. A platter with pita bread and hummous as an hors d'oeuvre; a bowl of cream of tomato soup; and then a nice plate heaped with bangers and mash - nothing fancy, not venison-and-lime sausage from a gastropub, just cheap, overcooked pub grub, in an onion gravy - and completed with a chocolate buttercream-frosted cake. All of which will be accompanied by a gin and tonic. Or four.
Would this reflect my life in some way? I don't know. But, if I had to have one meal that wasn't cooked by my mother (I stand by that caveat, introduced above) - I'll settle for that.
Now that I'm reading this all with a bit of time for reflection, I think I'll revise my response. Instead of high tea as my final meal, I think I'll follow the general thrust of the Monty Python sketch about the Scotsman ordering dinner at a fancy restaurant:
Waiter: "Would you care for a starter, sir?"
Scotsman: "Aye, a whiskey."
Waiter: "And for your main course?"
Scotsman: "A whiskey."
Waiter: "And for pudding?"
Scotsman: "A whiskey."
Waiter: "And to drink— I imagine you'd care for a whiskey?"
Scotsman (taken aback): "No! I'll have white wine."
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