Random ruminations on food

Sometimes, it is the simplest things, executed beyond perfection, to heights that you never even imagined existed, that grab your attention. I refer here to a bread pudding that I had at TRU last night. Part of a dessert collection, as they refer to it, my first dessert course, after the palate cleanser, of course, included a frozen lemon pudding thing, and a little teacup of bread pudding. These seemed to be fairly unremarkable items, and I must say that the lemon custard was, while not unimpressive, certainly not impressive.

The bread pudding was another story. This was a confection with little of the bombastic taste that so many desserts rely on to wow the diner. Instead, it was light, to the point of almost seeming without taste. Now, I do not say that it was tasteless. Rather, the taste required you to look for it on your tongue. It tasted like any other bread pudding that I have ever tasted, but better. What came to mind as an analogy was the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny. Every other version of bread pudding I had ever tasted were shadows of this. There is a single true bread pudding, and while it is impossible to claim that this was the one, it was certainly a deeper shadow of the central bread pudding than any other I have had previously.

For some reason, it has just occurred to me how Platonic the Amber Chronicles are. I wonder why the obvious never struck me before.

On another food-related note, I recently had a thought about foie gras. There are two classic methods of preparing this food for consumption. The first is the chilled mousse, the second is a seared block. It occurs to me that these represent two extremes of a philosophy of food. A chilled foie gras mousse gives the person who eats it a certain purity of experience, in both texture and flavour. The mousse, being a mousse, should be consistently smooth and uninterrupted in the mouth. The sensation is similar to spreading butter over your tongue. The taste sensation is also quite singular and uncomplicated. There is a buttery smoothness to the taste that is oddly pure and smooth, for all its complexity. Overall, the experience is one of unity, smoothness, consistency.

Seared foie gras is quite completely different. The aforementioned texture and taste still exist, of course. To this is added a contrast. The seared surface is slightly crusty, resulting both in it being rather difficult to cut in an elegant manner, and in it sort of exploding in your mouth. The crust gives way to the butter of the inside bursting into your realm of sensation. The saltiness of the crust too cuts a sharp contrast to the almost sweet flavour of foie gras. Seared foie gras is, for me, a study in contrasts, and it is these contrasts that make it such a shocking pleasure to eat. Seared foie gras elicits eyes widened in pleasure and exclamations of joy. A good foie gras mousse, on the other hand, closes one's eyes in appreciation.