Larry FloerschIt’s almost spring! That means it’s time for me to go through my closet, sort through my collection of polo shirts from last summer, and replace the ones with the most food stains on the front.
This is an annual ritual, but one that keeps getting more expensive as I grow older. I don’t know whether my inability to neatly get food into my mouth is because of the types of food I eat, because I’m losing dexterity in my hands, or because my lower lip has become flaccid from all the napping I do. Sometimes I can go from putting on a spotless shirt first thing in the morning to having a shirt that would make Oscar the Grouch envious by breakfast time the same day.
Rather than blaming myself, however, I’m more inclined to blame sadistic chefs for this state of affairs. I once ordered a seafood stew at an Italian restaurant in Burlington. The menu described the stew as an assortment of delectable marine creatures cooked in a tomato-and-herb broth. It arrived at the table featuring a whole Maine lobster still in its shell floating atop a deep pool of blood red liquid. Along with the stew came the standard array of lances, harpoons, torque wrenches, and brake spring tools for extracting the lobster meat. However, not being in a typical Maine seafood establishment, I was not offered one of those cute plastic bibs with the image of a lobster printed on its front.
A liquid-y stew with a whole hardshell lobster and tomatoes? What was the chef thinking? By the time I wrested the lobster from its shell, I looked as though I was ready for a trauma bay at Fletcher-Allen Medical Center.
My personal history with lobsters and polo shirts even has an international and interpersonal chapter. In a restaurant in Rome recently, my daughter-in-law, using one of the dissecting tools provided, launched a lobster knuckle at me from across the table. Her intent was not clear, and fortunately her aim was off. The chunk of crustacean was intercepted by the mouth of the carafe of wine between us. “Solo rete!” [“nothing but net!”] as they say in Rome. Great amusement for everyone, including the restaurant staff and the diners at the four tables around us. True to form, however, my polo shirt was fouled by the spatter.
Too often cooks do not seem to give thought to how hard it will be to eat a dish. Take the ubiquitous sandwich. Humans have been using bread to pick up other foods and eat them long before the Fourth Earl of Sandwich lent his name to the technique by requesting meat be delivered between slices of bread so he would not get grease on his fingers, and thus on his playing cards, while gambling. But today cooks seem to go out of their way to upend the Earl’s idea of neatness and make sandwiches treacherously messy by adding extra amounts of mayonnaise, mustard, and other viscous ingredients so that when you take a bite the condiments goosh out and onto your shirt.
Or consider the taco. I think the taco may be Mexico’s revenge for being forced into the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. To consume a taco, you must awkwardly tilt your head sideways when you bite into it so you don’t dump the contents onto the front of your shirt. And if the taco shell has been slightly overcooked, and thus brittle, it shatters, with similar fallout.
And why have hot dog buns become so tiny that any toppings other than a small amount of mustard (or ketchup if you are from anywhere except Chicago) squish out from next to the dog and fall overboard?
And while I’m on a roll, so to speak, who decides how many hot dogs and hot dog buns are in a package. You can get packages of ten hot dogs but the buns come in packages of eight, or you can get eight hot dogs in a pack but only six buns, or six hot dogs and eight buns. It’s like buying tickets for the rides at the fair! No matter how many sheets of tickets you purchase, the math never works out with the required number of tickets for the rides. At the end of the day either you do not have enough tickets to ride the Whirling Boom of Death without buying another sheet of tickets or you are left searching the crowd for a family with a lot of kids that looks worthy of receiving your leftover tickets as a gift on your way to the exit. Either way you lose. But I digress.
Sorting through my polo shirts is like paging through a food diary. Each stain provokes a bittersweet memory — sweet in the reminiscence of some food greatly enjoyed; bitter from the necessity of replacing another shirt.
In such circumstances the only ones who can find joy are the Beans of Freeport, Maine.
