The Inquiring Mind of Wonder-as-I-Wander

Dear Tamar,

Do you buy ingredients when you travel? On a recent trip to Oaxaca I was delighted but overwhelmed by the markets. So much to discover! I took home a small variety of dried peppers and a snack of peanuts with toasted garlic, leaving behind 99.99% of the offerings untasted and unknown. How to decide what to purchase? And if you choose to bring foods home with you, how do you decide which ones?

-Wonder-as-I-Wander

Dear Wonder-as-I-Wander,

There is a man in the mountains by Ax-Les-Thermes who’s proud of how he feeds his geese. He works behind a little restaurant whose name I don’t recall. The restaurant and he are through a small blue gate, labeled simply: Ferme. (This means “farm,” not “closed,” which I learned by pushing the gate open and calling out.) My husband and I ate lunch there, our bicycles against a fence, ashamed of our cycling shorts, but too hungry to mind. We ate what the restaurant’s owner/manager/waitress/maitress d’ brought: a plate of salad and charcuterie and bread to share, and two half glasses of red wine (12 euros.)

The patés and confits and cured meats that had come smeared or heaped on our plate were among the most delicious I’d ever tasted. Where were they made? we asked. The restaurant’s owner/manager/waitress/maitress d’ pointed beyond a garden, to a stone building past a pen of geese. We finished coffees and limped over. Inside was a man with thick brown hands, each finger the circumference of a slice of goose salami. He stood behind a counter and pointed at shelves lined with tins. We browsed: foie gras, goose fat, goose confit, goose paté. In a combination of French, Spanish, and Italian, we ascertained that he raised the geese and filled the tins. High above the well-stocked shelves I noticed a collection of funnels—the instruments of gavage, by which a foie gras farmer feeds geese or ducks as much corn as they can eat, which had always figured in my imagination as pure torture.

Seeing me transfixed by the funnels, the man laughed and stood on a stool and brought one down. He demonstrated stroking a goose’s necks while he fed him, using his hand as big and brown as a baseball mitt, each finger a sausage, to pantomime. We nodded, and he got back on the stool and pulled down more funnels. The oldest was ancient, clearly once used by a broad-palmed ancestor for the same purpose. He continued to pantomime. The newer funnels were brightly colored, yellow and blue, and clean. He laughed again, and put them all back up on their high ledge.

We could have left the shop and squatted to jot everything we’d seen into journals. Instead we spread all the money we had on the counter and asked the man to pick tins for us until the money was used up. We clanked down the mountain, hooting every time one of us was knocked on the back of a head by a volatile tin.

It was more than a decade earlier, and with a different love, that I sat at a dark mahogany table being lectured by a hippy Italian aristocrat on the indignities she’d seen Americans commit while dining. The worst was our tendency to choose the biggest glass at any setting for wine.

We guffawed, looking at our own place settings. We’d filled goblets with wine and little tumblers with thimblefuls of water, while the aristocrat and her boyfriend had done the inverse: filled goblets with water and poured themselves demure tumblers of wine.

We all tipped even smaller glasses—little etched glass ones—toward each other and drank limoncello, sweet strong lemon liqueur. We refilled and toasted more times than dignity would dictate. The next morning, heads quaking, we gathered our luggage, waved goodby to the aristocrat, and headed off, stopping to buy as much limoncello as we could fit.

On the same trip, I learned how to say “vacuum-packed” in Italian. We’d bought a huge creamy truffle to smuggle back to New York and needed a way of disguising its intoxicating aroma. I scurried from butcher (macelleria) to butcher, inquiring: Avete forse un sottovuotto? (Do you by any chance have a vacuum-sealer?)

Blue tin spoons, packets of molé, stone-pressed olive oil, kilos of newsprint-wrapped salt cod, tiny sausages studded with walnuts, wine, vinegar, hard cheeses, crackling cookies made with almonds that taste like blossoms or maybe like the sea, a mortar and pestle of volanic rock, a mortar and pestle of marble and wood. (Does a pestle count as a weapon? This question will pass all the way up the chain of command, before a final, executive, sigh, and a shrug.) That is a partial list of food and food-related items I’ve brought home with me from travels. It doesn’t even contain the tins of foie gras, or the tins of squid in its ink (Peck, Milano) or sardines packed in salt (a bottega, Catania,) or, or, or.

Dear cook, I hope my point is clear. Do a better job adhering to Customs regulations than I have, but buy and bring it all with you. Roll socks around the jars. Stuff bottles inside pant legs. Wedge tins inside your fancy shoes. Press capers, squid, chili paste, tea leaves, and vacuum-packed truffles into gaps among laundry. Wear as many layers as you need to to fit it all in your bag.

How else will you really remember what you have lived, what roads you’ve traveled, trains you’ve made and trains you’ve missed? Select and wrap your memories carefully. Sit together, you and them, and others, and open the bottle—Oh right, this one is fennel liqueur! Soak the dried fish. Cook it in olive oil. Open the window and be here, with the fullness and freedom of everywhere else you’ve been. Let each bit of edible, tangible evidence of your life remind you that existence is slippery and you must dig in.