大象传媒

My wife Marilyn was pondering today why my way of relating to people so often seems to involve food. She was surprised when yesterday, despite having just returned from Seattle at 4am that morning after a harrowing trip, I invited our neighbors Tom and Jane and their two boys over for dinner. She often recalls that when we were dating I used to take meals to her (her favorite was cauliflower cheese), while she was on overnight duty at a mental health care clinic in Northern Virginia. She also notes the pleasure it gave me last weekend to prepare a pot of turkey chili for her daughter Maria and her husband Ben the day they moved into their new apartment.

As I reflect on this, I am taken back to my experiences during the War in Britain when, despite a very efficient rationing system, food was often quite scarce and very much at the forefront of our minds at any time of the day or night. During the leanest times, our evening meal was often a piece of bread fried in beef or pork dripping or, if we were lucky, the remains of a cheese sandwich that my father had brought home from work that day. I shall never forget the cold winter evening when out dear neighbor Mrs. Muir came to our door with a pot of Scotch broth concocted from some scraps of mutton neck, some barley and a few vegetables. My mother shed tears of gratitude as we all tucked eagerly in to the steaming bowls. It was a meal the taste and fragrance of which remain with me today.

June 30, 2004

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