Now Your Tongue Is Coded
Why I re-read Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter at least three times a year and a heatwave-friendly pazzy sal.
Food For Thought.
When the world is either spinning or stagnant and I am the same, I reach for Sweetbitter. It's like coming home in that way that your parents house is always your 'home' but it's not you anymore. Because you've moved on, you have your own life and own home now. Tess's story feels like my history, and whilst I'm past that part of my life now – the lustful, toxic longing; the not knowing who I am; the getting lost in you so I can't breathe but isn't this what love's supposed to feel like; the, as Danler writes, " sedated, sentimental middle of it" – each time I re-read this book, I discover something new. I relate to different characters. Or just simply, I find constant pleasure in how Danler uses food as a device to describe our deepest, most human desires.
Let's say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turn up to some impossible hopeful pop song, open, open, open.
This won't be a cut-by-cut dissection of Stephanie Danler's bildungsroman about a 22 year old girl called Tess who arrives in New York with nothing but an urge to forget, to escape and be moved. It's not a review, because obviously my review is: this book is fucking amazing, and if it resonates, thoughts will echo between the pages and reverberate for as long as you can read, taste and breathe. But I want to speak to the book's culinary lexicon – not just the restaurant-speak (the story revolves around cooks, back waiters, servers and bartenders working at a renowned Union Square restaurant), or the vocabulary of taste. But how specifically and intentionally Danler describes appetite, or the searching for taste, the hunger for a language that binds love and lust and longing and desire.
You will develop a palate. A palate is a spot on your tongue where you remember. Where you assign words to the textures of taste. Eating becomes a discipline, language-obsessed. You will never simply eat food again.
If you allow yourself to think of food as more than just fuel, as more than just a pastime, as more than just a social tool, but to think of it as an act of passion or self-reflection or a lesson, then every bite becomes an opportunity to challenge and question. I love how Danler uses this concept of taste to show this. She describes each taste with such specificity.
Salt: "salting the most nuanced of enterprises, the food always requesting more, but the the tipping point fatal".
Sweet: "We've tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood."
Bitter: "The mouth still hesitate at each new encounter. We urge it forward, say, Adapt. Now, enjoy it."
Sour: "Chef yelled, This needs acid!, and they eviscerated lemons, leaving the caressing sting of food that's alive."
Umami: "It’s the taste of ripeness that’s about to ferment. Initially, it serves as a warning. But after a familiarity develops, after you learn its name, that precipice of rot becomes the only flavor worth pursuing, the only line worth testing.”
One of the book's characters, Simone, a demi-goddess in Tess's eyes – the epitome of naive, obsessive girl crushes that are belied by the total humanness and insecurity masterfully masked by red lips, Chekhov references, European sojourns and 'experience' – tells Tess, "tasting is a farce. The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and let it change you." Pretentious, yes. But true. You learn about food, its provenance, its story, its impact, through taste. And taste does not happen immediately. It takes time for your tongue and your brain to synchronise. To understand all the nuances of flavour. Why it makes you feel a certain way. When you first tasted salt, could you explain why you liked it? Or hated it? Can you categorically say you hate one flavour when you haven't tried it with another? Taste is both absolute and ever-changing.
Taste, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.
The parts I used to enjoy in the book – the love story, the uncanny reflections of my own past life – have been replaced by the descriptions of food (although it was always about that, too). How oysters are "breathing seawater. Metallic, musky, kelp. My mouth like a fishing wharf." How a certain cheese is like "butter but dirtier." Or how "Sancerre is like the grape's true home". I relish these words like a Kumamoto oyster, or a glass of Sancerre, rolling them on my tongue and holding them there so I can taste them, commit them to memory and recall them.
Here's to the books that feel like home, and the food that feeds them.
Cat x
Recipes-not-recipes™️
It's too hot to cook properly, and realistically we're more hungry for freezer-cold, shimmering pale rosé at sunset than slaving away in front of a hot stove. Cue: a Greek pazzy sal that takes half an hour to make and less than three minutes to wolf down.
For two people you'll need half a packet of a pasta shape like fusilli or radiatori – the grooves retain all the bits. Place in salty boiling water and cook to your taste. Then slice one courgette lengthways, thin-ish, place them in a large baking tray, drizzle with olive oil so they're covered on both sides and season well. Place under the grill for about 10 mins, then flip. In a big bowl, add some chopped black Kalamata olives, and a few roasted red peppers from a jar (heatwave lifesavers) all chopped up.
When the pasta is done, drain and rinse with cold water (you want the paz sal to be warm but not hot; cool but not cold). Then add to the bowl, mix with the olive and peppers. When courgettes are done, add to the pasta bowl with all the oil and mix through. The courgette should come apart and spread out through the pasta. Then crumble 3/4 packet of creamy Greek feta – keeping the chunks fairly big – and pour some more extra virgin olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and a big pinch of salt. Mix and finish with a handful of chopped basil leaves. Enjoy with a bottle of Picpoul De Pinet, and if you're like me, a few stuffed vine leaves on the side.
Leftovers.
I spent last Sunday evening drinking martinis in The Hoxton and getting lost in Anthony Bourdain articles.
Pasta but make it soupy – even in this heat, I’d dive into this.
“So – some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.” – nothing but the truth in Sweetbitter, I tell you.
More tomato content – blitzed tommies on toast with padron peppers via Joe Woodhouse.
Onions or potatoes in a Spanish tortilla? Both for me.
The only sandwich I need is one filled to the brim with different hams, like this one from Food 52.
Will be making this rosemary honey lemonade to quench the heatwave thirst.
Ethaney, aka @tenderherbs makes a strong case for a full English at any time of the day.