The Golden Age

The labyrinths of flavour

One of the reasons I stayed so long on the island was its cuisine. When I spoke of the island as the territory of lotus eaters, this was meant as nothing more than an illustration; but the islanders’ food was certainly one of the more pleasing aspects of life on the island. It happened on several occasions that I was standing on a terrace in the upper town when a ship flying a Greek or a Spanish flag entered the harbour. Each time I asked myself whether it was time for me to leave. And then I would remember the feast to which I had been invited the next day and would say to myself, “I’ll take the next ship, there’s bound to be another one along soon.” (And there always was, but there was always another feast, too.)

When I was first invited into the houses of the islanders, I found it surprising that there was never a stove or an oven to be seen. As the island lies on the Tropic of Cancer, there is no need for the islanders to heat their dwellings, but as for the preparation of food, it remained a mystery to me where the islanders performed this. I noticed that every house had a room where glass jars and pots of a great variety of sizes were lined up on shelves; all of these were filled with liquids and pastes and were aglow with bright colours. Only later did I learn that these rooms were pantries and kitchens in one: on the island the storage and preparation of food merged into a single act. One of the most striking features of the island’s cuisine was the suspicion with which the islanders treated fire. Changes brought about by fire seemed to them too quick and violent and as such incapable of producing anything to interest them. The seamen in the harbour who fed on roast or boiled meat, they viewed as barbarians. They thought that foodstuffs did not exude their most precious flavours when subjected to crude treatment by fire, that it was necessary to wait patiently for these flavours to show themselves and to learn and be alert to the signs of their coming. The islanders considered flavours to be dreams, perhaps even the thoughts, of foodstuffs, as ever-present melodies which foodstuffs held within, of which we caught a snatch when we dined. For the islanders, fire was too fierce and too crude to draw from a foodstuff its inner melody. Only the processes of gradual maturation were gentle enough to wake the dreams in a foodstuff, slow enough to allow us to hope we would catch the foodstuff at the moment its most splendid tones were sounding.

So the islanders left crushed berries and fruit juices, the shredded leaves of herbs and trees, pulverized roots — either separately or in mixes with varying proportions — to mature, disintegrate, melt and crystallize, to soften and harden, to dry out, go stale, curdle, ferment and swell. The preparation of a meal would take several days; a lunch or a dinner was often matured for several weeks, even months. But usually the result was worth the wait: the juices, jellies, pastes, purées and powders which these mysterious processes produce are celebrated by European and American gourmets, and I have heard they are used in the most expensive items on the menus of luxury restaurants in Paris, London and New York.

Naturally it was difficult to pinpoint in these processes of transformation where maturation gave way to decay. This is why initially I was mistrustful of the islanders’ cuisine; indeed, I had the impression that all the island’s meals were half-rotten. I took me a long time to get accustomed to them, to learn to appreciate them. It is quite true that when confronted with evidence of what happens to foodstuffs in the pantry-kitchens of the island, people where we come from would, in many cases, observe, “That food’s spoiling.” But by what gauge should we distinguish fairly between the process of the purging of a foodstuff — or, as the islanders call it, the waking of its hidden dreams or the sounding of its inner melodies — and the process of its spoiling and decomposition? Why should we not assume that foodstuffs dream only of sweetness and purity, not of the darker realms of ruin and decay? Even Aristotle, who called dreams matter in forms, conceded the difficulty of determining whether the emergence of vinegar from wine is the genesis of a form or the demise of one.

Once I was accustomed to the island’s cuisine I stopped thinking about what was matured and what was spoiled, stopped searching anxiously for signs of degeneration and decay in its flavours, stopped wondering whether the sweet aftertaste on my palate had in it a tone of growth or a sound of the juices of death. I came to take pleasure in the labyrinth of flavours, which was perhaps still more puzzling and insidious than the maze of the island’s grammar or that of the island’s script. I learned to wander around this new labyrinth, where individual flavour-tones appeared, each with its own world, each world acknowledging, supporting and denying the others. These tones formed a complex figure in which one was mirrored by another; the reflection showed a great, lavish world of foodstuffs, with inner landscapes populated by men and beasts with flowing bodies, where things occurred which were nothing more than the fizzing of energy yet — or so it seemed to me — were no less interesting than stories of Italian lovers from feuding families or irresolute princes in gloomy Danish castles. To lose one’s way in this labyrinth was a joy; it was impossible to extract from it — as things that were foreign — tones of decay, as even rotten tones were part of the maturation of a foodstuff, which as it matured also rotted into pure tones which appeared in its dreams.

On my return to Europe I was once invited to a restaurant where food from the island was served as something very rare and special. I was incensed by the way the European gourmets chose to enjoy it but I did not attempt to explain to my table companions that they did not understand the island’s cuisine and that their interpretation of it was wrong. The flavours of the island were translated carelessly into the language of European cuisine and the result was something extremely banal. The half-rotten tones were taken to be of the same order as high game; the presence of these tones was interpreted as a sophistication that afforded a frivolous delight from being on the edge of the normal, a delight engendered by the risk implicit to being on the border between the eatable and the uneatable. I could not blame my fellow diners for this as they had only a slight knowledge of culinary hermeneutics which was born out of the world of boiled, baked and fried foods and which was of no use to them beyond this world. An islander would have eaten something different in that restaurant, even if he had served himself from the same dishes. For the islander no flavour-tone was on the edge: flavour-tones appeared in a labyrinth which had no centre and no edges.