Guest Writer: Megan Hobza
I grew up eating well, but almost exclusively at home, to save money. My mom’s subscription to Sunset magazine had us eating the latest in fusion cuisine, like spicy beef on watercress vinaigrette and toad in the hole with Italian sausage and marinara. Once a month, we ate out at affordable restaurants, either Chinese or Mexican food. As a child, I learned to love the sensation of cold salsa burning hot in my mouth and the crunch of deep fried pork in thick, cherry-red sweet and sour sauce. On our annual visit to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, I was allowed an appetizer in place of a child’s plate, and I would order clams steamed with white wine and garlic, with enough sourdough bread to mop up the hot clam broth.
My grandma had money and would take me to posh restaurants around Sacramento for lunch. Morton’s introduced me to the Waldorf salad – a pile of fruits, vegetables, and whipping cream that tasted like candy. At La Salle’s, I ate French onion soup with Swiss cheese, escargot in garlic butter with baguettes, and bittersweet whipped chocolate mousse. A few times, we drove an hour to The Nut Tree in Vacaville for Chinese chicken salad. The brainchild of Hollywood chef Madame Wu, this dish was all the rage and brought sesame oil into the culinary mainstream. Like my mom and grandma, I grew up to become an avid cook, and know how wonderful it is to feed a child who loves food. I was encouraged to eat adventurously, but there remained many foods left to try for the first time, as I came of age.
In my senior year of high school, I lived as an exchange student in Germany, where I learned to love curry ketchup, currywurst, and curry chips. A friend’s host parents had a dairy farm where I was allowed to drink as much fresh milk as I liked. I swooned over special occasion German dishes like carrots and peas in cream sauce, good bread thickly buttered and topped with Danish ham, and schnitzel fried in butter. A visiting band of Italians made us a banger of a noodle dish with just garlic, olive oil, and crushed chile peppers, served with their homemade chianti. European desserts were intensely flavored: Rum raisin ice cream tasted like rum, hot liquid zabaglione tasted like marsala wine, and the darling little sculpted marzipan candies sold at bakeries tasted like bitter almond.
In college, the dorm life was fantastic, but the cafeteria food was execrable. Desperation for big, bold flavors drove me to learn how to cook. I found a book at the library called Cooking of the Maharajas that taught me to make vindaloo soured with tamarind, ground spinach and fresh cheese with garam masala and cornmeal, and a red lentil soup with green chiles and garlic that has remained in my regular rotation for three decades.
The first time I ate a raw oyster was at the rehearsal dinner for my cousin’s wedding. I never thought I would find a food as delicious as a soft boiled egg, but the egg had met its match. It was a revelation. I must have eaten 40 oysters that night. Loving oysters led to an adventure in seafood that introduced me to caviar on cold new potatoes with sour cream, steamed seasoned monkfish liver with grated ginger and soy sauce, shaved bonito on silken tofu with scallions, and the exquisite texture of a fish gently poached in broth. My seafood search reached its zenith on the day I first tried sea urchin. This briny, glorious melt-in-your-mouth orange delicacy is not universally beloved, which I figure just leaves more for me.
The tantalizing search for an exquisite meal has driven me to visit countries with complex, culturally rich cuisines – Greece, Turkey, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Spain, Honduras, and Belize, to name a few. In closing, I’ll offer love for the unlikeliest of cuisines: England’s. With apologies to the Anglophiles in the room, England’s cuisine is widely reviled, and my expectations were low during a visit to a friend who lived there. However, even England did itself proud with creamy sweet tea, buttery toast with Marmite, a magnificent celery Stilton soup eaten within a stone’s throw of Blenheim Palace, and in London, tender, crispy fish and chips still sizzling from the fry basket that I ate standing, from one hand, while swinging from a public bus pole with the other, on my final ride to Heathrow by way of Paddington Station. Like Proust’s madeleine, the memory of that vinegary, salty fry-up captures, for me, a complex adventure in one tasty mouthful.
