Food and Drink

Cleaning out the tea cupboard. It sounds so domestic. So tidy. So British, even. What the process actually resembled was an archeological dig. The only difference was that the layers by which I could date my discoveries went from front to back rather than top to bottom. I didn’t really find anything that could be considered treasure, but there were definitely some significant artifacts.

Like several lumps of stuff formerly known as cocoa mix that had hardened into free-form sculptures. These relics indicated that the inhabitants of this site liked chocolate and had access to it, but tended to forget about it once it was shoved toward the back of the cupboard. This theory was further supported by the discovery of two faded boxes containing a few desiccated blocks of Mexican chocolate.

Then there was the ancient container made from plastic tentatively dated to the mid-1980’s. Its label was long gone, but its size and shape indicated that it may once have held citrus-based powdered drink mix. This hypothesis was supported by the fact that the concrete-textured residue in the bottom of the container, when flooded with hot water, still smelled slightly of lemon.

Scattered throughout the cupboard were little plastic bags containing unknown herbaceous substances. Assuming these were tea, I had no qualms about considering them fully legal. Beyond legal, in fact. Most of them were clearly old enough to vote.

One of the most significant artifacts in this cache was an intact, unopened can of coffee. The Turkish lettering on the can was a strong indication that the inhabitants of this site had either traveled to Turkey or at least traded for Turkish goods. While the precise age of the container couldn’t be determined, it was clearly one of the oldest artifacts at the site. Not only was it made of metal rather than plastic, but it was designed to be opened with a T-shaped metal key. This was used to pull off a narrow strip of metal that circled the can just below the top.

The key was still attached to the top of the can. I couldn’t resist. In violation of all the accepted protocols for archeological sites, I decided to open the can. The little metal tab on the side didn’t come loose until I pried it up with the tip of a butter knife. Then I slid the tab through the slot in the key and started turning it.

I remember opening cans this way when I was a kid—not just coffee, but also ham. It came in flat cans, oval with one end wider than the other, that were vaguely ham-shaped. Opening the cans, which in today’s world would no doubt be considered child endangerment, was then a privilege and a challenge.

The biggest risk with this system was cutting your fingers. As the metal strip pulled loose and wound around the key, it ended up as a circle more than half an inch in diameter with lethally sharp edges.

The other difficulty was making sure to wind the metal strip around the key tightly and precisely enough. Otherwise, you would end up with a wobbly spiral rather than a tight circle. This not only increased the likelihood of getting blood in the coffee, but it sometimes meant needing to abandon the key and finish pulling the strip loose with a pair of pliers.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to resort to that with the Turkish coffee. The key worked just the way it was designed to, and I pulled the lid off without any risk to my fingers. The inside of the can was mottled in a way suggestive of way too much time in the cupboard. The contents had settled into unappetizing clods and clumps.

It still smelled like coffee, though, even when I dumped it onto the compost pile. Combined with the lumps of old cocoa mix, it provided a sort of backyard mocha latte experience for the browsing deer. I hope they enjoyed it; there was enough old sugar and caffeine to keep all of them awake for a week.

I was told this week that the origins of Halloween go back some 6000 years. I have no idea whether that's true, but it certainly explains why some of that candy is so stale.

The dilemma of buying Halloween candy is always whether to get some you like so you can eat what's left over, or whether to get some you don't like so you won't eat what's left over.

Or whether to get the cheapest junk you can find, which not even the kids like. Like those individually wrapped bits of sugar and corn starch with a vaguely toffee-like consistency that tend to show up months later as petrified little lumps in the dusty corners underneath the kids' beds.

Or candy corn. It is mildly decorative, I suppose, and will keep for weeks in a candy dish—mostly because even kids will only eat it when it's the only sweet stuff left in the house. As a child, the only reason I found to eat it all was for the entertainment value. The process was first to bite off the white tip, trying to sever it precisely without leaving any white behind; then to nibble off the broad yellow end, and then finally to gobble down the boring orange part in the middle.

We didn't go Trick or Treating when I was a kid, so we missed spending the first week of November glazed over in a sugar high. Most of my experience with Halloween candy came later, second-hand from my own kids. I would dutifully look through the candy like responsible parents were supposed to do, supposedly checking for hidden threats or active health hazards but mostly conducting an inventory of the dark chocolate.

I usually asked each kid for a "donation" of one piece of chocolate, which they gave graciously. A couple of them (you know who you are, and yes, your names are spelled right in the will) even were generous enough to offer more than one.

Where we live now, on a dead-end road in a house that's a long, dark driveway away from the street, we tend not to get Trick or Treaters. Since the neighborhood is changing, with several young families recently moving in, I did buy candy this year and leave the porch light on, just in case. No little vampires or princesses or super-heroes rang the doorbell, though.

Oh, well. Dealing with the leftover candy is a huge responsibility, but sometimes a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do. Especially when she was smart enough to buy M&M's instead of candy corn.

For a photograph to make it to the cover of a magazine about "gracious living"—which one would think ought to mean showing kindness and impeccable manners but which apparently means doing a lot of decorating—it has to be perfectly posed and lighted. The one I noticed this week on the cover of Martha Stewart Living was no exception.

The picture didn't show a retouched celebrity or a gorgeous model. It was a s'more. The chocolate was perfectly placed. The melted marshmallow oozed symmetrically over the sides of the graham cracker. The graham cracker itself, though, was what made this s'more so exceptional. It had a star cut through its exact center, so the delicately browned marshmallow goop was artistically exposed.

I noticed this creative bit of campfire cuisine while I was in the checkout line at Safeway. My 11-year-old granddaughters and I were buying food, s'mores ingredients and all, for a camping trip. Bright girls that they are, the twins had the same response to Martha's s'mores as I did. Our view was:

A. How in the world could you cut a star through a graham cracker without breaking the whole thing into inartistic crumbs?

B. Why in the world would you want to put a hole in the cracker in the first place? The whole point of the graham crackers in a s'more is to keep the gooiness of the melted chocolate and marshmallow contained so most of it goes into your mouth instead of dripping all over your shirt and oozing down your chin.

Perhaps the answers to these questions were provided in the article. Since I didn't buy the magazine, I may never know.

Creating an elegant display with food so it appeals to the eye as well as the taste buds is an art. Just because I have no talent in that direction doesn't mean I don't appreciate it.

But some classic foods are best left alone. S'mores aren't meant to be "gracious living." They belong in the sticky hands of enthusiastic, underage amateurs where the only decorating involved consists of random patterns of marshmallow goo and chocolate drips on their tee-shirts.

When it comes to campfire desserts, less is s'more.

"How would you like your eggs?" The waitress waited, pen poised over her order pad, while the customer pondered for a moment.

"Basted," he finally said.

Basted? Scrambled, sure. Over easy, okay. Poached, perhaps. Sunny side up, sometimes. Even Eggs Benedict, if you're up for something fancy to feed your brain while you wonder who Benedict was.

But basted? How many people order their eggs "basted?"

Especially when they (the people, not the eggs) are only seven years old. Several of our friends meet at a restaurant for breakfast every Saturday, and on this particular morning one of the women had brought along her grandson.

Listening to him order his eggs with such aplomb, I was jolted back in time to the first time I ever ate breakfast in a restaurant. We were on a rare family vacation, right here in the beautiful Black Hills. I was ten. With a little encouragement, I asked for eggs and toast, and the waitress asked me, "How would you like your eggs?"

I didn’t have a clue what to tell her. Oh, I knew how I wanted my eggs, all right—fried, with the white cooked all the way through and the yolk still soft. Just the way my mother cooked them, in other words. What I didn't know was how to describe them.

Seeing my baffled expression, my father chuckled and told the waitress, "Over easy."

It was the first time I'd ever heard that term. Eating in a restaurant was a rarity in itself for us. Until that day, it hadn't occurred to me that people would actually get breakfast at one. I knew all about where eggs came from and had a painful first-hand familiarity with the term "hen-pecked," but I had no idea there were various ways to fry eggs and various words to describe them.

For seven-year-olds like my friend's grandson, eating out is simply one of the available options for any meal, including breakfast. Watching him chat with the adults at the table while he ate his basted eggs, I didn't know whether to be amused or amazed at the different set of skills little kids learn in today's world. Of course he knows how to order his eggs just the way he wants them, just as he knows how to text or take pictures with a cell phone.

Trying not to feel too out of touch, too unsophisticated—okay, let's face it—too old, I shut up and ate my own eggs (over medium, thank you).

Later, pondering eggs basted and otherwise, I did some research. I discovered that there is some dispute over which of several contenders gets the credit for Eggs Benedict. Benedict Arnold is not one of them. I also confirmed my guess about how to baste an egg, which essentially is a matter of scooping hot grease over it instead of turning it over.

Learning all of that was simple; I just looked it up on the Internet. It only took a minute, and then it was over. Easy.