© Paolo Dala
Unforgettable Meals
...I wasn’t necessarily interested in the most magnificently prepared, heavenly tasting food they’d ever eaten. I was looking instead for meals made unforgettable by their occasion. Occasions that extended the culinary circumference beyond how things tasted to include the more complex palates of love and loss, of welcome and return, of comedy and error, and on and on. For what makes the subject of food the scrumptious stuff of story is not the perfect balance of the recipe or the genius of the chef; it’s the narrative of what’s humanly at stake as we sit down to eat; what thoughts and emotions are stirred, revived, put in play, by the table we’re called to, by those who call us to it...
Food as bait. Food as bestowal. Food as magnet. But as varied as the stories are in tone - deeply humorous to wistful to melancholy to antic - the thing that’s common among them is the part food plays as offering, as consumable commerce. Food as a gift.
Douglas Bauer Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals
