'Take Big Bites'

TAKE BIG BITES
By Linda Ellerbee

I'm not crazy about Florence except for the pig museum. If, precisely speaking, it's not a museum, that's only because some fool in the Italian government doesn't recognize a national treasure when he sees one.
Consider this.

Out front there is a brown table covered by a red-checked tablecloth. Three once-living, now-stuffed pigs sit on little wooden chairs, red-checkered napkins tied around their throats, real knives and forks tied to their hooves. In their glasses is real red wine. On their plates is more dead pig. Enough to make a decent docent sit up and take notice, wouldn't you think? Or perhaps you think an embalmed sidewalk salute to anthropomorphic cannibalism is in bad taste? I say it's art and I much prefer it to the Uffizi; they don't let you eat the paintings, whereas the three little pigs are gatekeepers to the world's most perfect pig meat. They are also the only way I find the shop, which is the second best thing about Florence: It's easy to lose your way. I go the distance, nodding briefly to this statue and that church, following narrow streets that meet themselves coming back, stopping to ask directions of people as lost as I am—constantly flirting with personal failure and public humiliation on foreign soil—simply because I like to eat pig and because I like adventure, by definition an undertaking of uncertain outcome.

Another way to look at it is that adventure is to take big bites of elsewhere. I believe in elsewhere. I believe in taking big bites. Therein lies a book. I hope. Be warned. I'm not a food or travel writer. I'm not a chef. There is no show on the Food Network called Essence of Ellerbee. There are no books anywhere called Linda Jane's Guide to somewhere. What I am is a recovering journalist who's traveled and eaten her way around the planet and lived to tell some tales. A few have little to do with food and only indirectly with travel, but all make up that portable library I pack without regard to weight: Memory.

Adventures around the world, across the table—and from the heart. There's a connection. A memory of a different place, an unfamiliar taste, an old friend, a new love—the root word is passion. I carry mine with and inevitably on me. Eat this plate of pomme frites or just go ahead and paste them on my hips? I like to think I make the right choice. Pasting potatoes directly on your person probably calls for Krazy Glue. I have a bad record with Krazy Glue. What the hell, I like to eat. I like to travel. I like to talk about both. A starter set: I don't like Singapore, Brunei or Gibraltar. I'm conflicted about Turkey and turkey. I don't like nuts in sweet things or tomatoes on any sandwich but a tomato sandwich. I like to prepare and share food with friends and family as much as I like sitting all by myself at a café some place where I don't speak the language.

There's more: What it is to be eighteen, working as a missionary in Bolivia, eating strange foods seasoned with hypocrisy; how Thai chicken tastes on a rain-scored ledge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon after you've flipped your raft in the Colorado River; how chile con queso changed the course of American education; where in the world—and you will not, I swear, guess the answer—you go to find the best fried egg sandwich; how to escape one's captors in occupied Afghanistan in order to pursue mutton on the streets of Kabul; why I decided to move to Da Nang in the first place; how a ham-and-cheese sandwich in Malaga could possibly cost $500; what Elvis had to do with the Big-Hatted Baroness and the only three-star Michelin restaurant in southern Italy; why every everybody should spend one month a year alone on an island far, far away; who you meet and what you eat when you spend your birthdays alone in the wilderness, and how I came to follow the River Thames on foot, from its source to the sea, to celebrate turning 60. Or in denial of it.

My first food adventure was colored by a tiny misunderstanding. It wasn't my fault. Nobody mentioned anything about taking the plastic cover off the TV dinner before you put it in the oven. It's not that I didn't grow up eating real food. It's that when I was growing up real food was briefly extinct. Blame the Nazis. If America hadn't gone to war, a man named Birdseye wouldn't have figured out he could preserve food for our troops by flash freezing it in cold water. After years spent shelling peas, stringing beans, cutting the corn off the cob, peeling this and slicing that and then cooking everything—in a big pot of water with a big a piece of pork—until Tuesday, my mother thought Mr. Birdseye was a saint. She was not alone. Convenience food became the mantra of post-war motherhood. I understand. Preparing real food was and is more work. But it tastes better. Around our house, when not infected by the Birdseye plague, real food often meant chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and cream gravy, sugar peas, field peas, black-eyed peas, lima beans, green beans, all greens, ambrosia, okra, corn, tomato aspic, squash casseroles, pot roast, fried fish, chicken and dumplings, hot rolls, biscuits, cornbread, cakes, pies, fudge, divinity and Mama's homemade vegetable soup, which was world famous in our family. Labor-intensive stuff. But when I would ask to help, Mama would say, "Oh Linda Jane, it's easier to do it myself."

I hung around anyway. Willie Pearl Ellison, the African-American woman who worked for our family from the time I was an infant—a saintly human and my constant ally against my mother—let me help her in the kitchen when Mama was off playing bridge or having her hems shortened, or lengthened. When she made apple pies, Willie Pearl would give me pieces of dough and fruit to make a pie in my own little pie tin (when she made chocolate pies I ate the filling before I could make my pie). Willie Pearl also taught me how to do the dirty bop, which for some years was more useful than knowing how to make an apple pie.

If it was Mama who did her best to keep me from cooking, it was Daddy who gave me the idea that a foot in the road was not a bad place for a foot to be. He took me with him on business trips to other towns in Texas. Early in the morning, we would go walking and he would tell me about where we were; why New Braunfels had been settled by Germans, how the dome of the Texas Capitol came to be fourteen feet taller than the dome of the U.S. Capitol, how to read a street map and when to throw one away. He took me to a mill in Lubbock. I watched cotton bolls become thread. He took me on a fishing trip to Eagle Lake. I learned how to bait my own hook and not squeal when I caught a fish. In Galveston, he taught me to hear the sea in a shell. Everywhere we went, Daddy talked to people. When I was in high school, Daddy came home from a business trip to Missouri and told us that on his early morning ramble he had run into a fellow he knew, but had never met. My father said he had offered his hand to the familiar stranger.

"I'm Ray Smith from Houston, Texas."
The man shook my father's hand. Daddy said he had a good shake.
"I'm Harry Truman from Independence, although I was born in Lamar, Missouri."
"What a coincidence. Lamar is the name of my daughter's school. Named after the second president of the Texas Republic. Don't suppose your town was, though. How did it come by the name Lamar?"
My father and a former President of the United States stood on a street corner and talked for 30 minutes. The world was a curious place, Daddy said. I should go see for myself.
And so I did.

Some memories warm me like Pearl's apple pie or the sun hitting my face when the trail opens up near the top of the mountain. Others leave me sadder but wiser, knowing that no matter how much I eat, travel, learn or, impossible though it seems, occasionally grow, I still don't get it. Life remains more question than answer. I wanted more. I always meant to understand my world, and myself, and if I couldn't, I would settle for being great. I believe I may have waited too long. There are no longer an unlimited number of Saturday nights, summers or choices. It's too late to change my major. I'm not going to stop writing television programs and go be a shepherd. I'm not going to sail around the Cape alone. I'm not going to be an airline pilot, a rodeo clown or stop the show—and I'm never going to be a rock star, tragic, because I've always liked wearing tattered clothes and am certain I would enjoy having groupies. Oh yeah, George Burns won his first Oscar at 80. Golda Meir was seventy-one when she became prime minister of Israel. Michelangelo was seventy-three when he painted the Sistine Chapel. Grandma Moses didn't start painting until she was eighty. And George Bernard Shaw was ninety-four when they produced his first play. Which is all well and good for Golda, Grandma, Mike and the two Georges, but I don't write plays, perform stand-up comedy or paint terribly well lying on my back, and being prime minister of Israel is not a job for a lapsed Protestant and committed coward.

Frankly, my dear, while complaining may not be helpful, given a choice, I would rather be young again. I had a great time and want to do it over, to fall desperately in love with the wrong man and know there's time to get beyond it. Leave home for the first time. Learn how to saddle my own horse. Learn how to ride a high one, if that is what is saddled for me. I want my children to be kids again. We'll eat Cheeseburger Salads (shred iceberg lettuce, add anything you'd put on a cheeseburger except the bun, toss with a mix of mustard and mayo and serve it to kids—salad with training wheels). I want my 25-year-old body back so I can wear a two-piece bathing suit without fear of offending the general public. (I wouldn't object to having my breasts back, either.) I want to wear my hair in pigtails and run for the sheer pleasure of running, eat my mother's fudge pie in her kitchen with her still there, drive too fast and wear no seat belt, drink too much champagne, and walk again on the wing of an airplane 3,000 feet above New York. I want to be young enough to believe in my immortality one more time.
In a book, I can do this. I can go to back for second helpings. Not second chances, though. What was, is. Instead of dedicating my life to delicious gallivanting, I grew up to be a woman who worked, not because she had something worthwhile to contribute, but because she had already contributed her best shot—Vanessa and Joshua—her children, who had a habit of eating regularly. Reason enough to find a steady job. This being the case, I was determined to earn a living doing something I liked better than, say, waiting tables. Honorable work; but journalism paid more and you didn't have to wear a uniform. When you would rather be traveling and eating, working at anything is a compromise, but I was lucky. Thirty-something years as a journalist allowed me to travel and eat while pretending to be working.
I'm assuming you've no idea who I am other than somebody who probably has nothing important to say you don't already know, so here are the Cliff's Notes. I grew up in Texas, dropped out of college, gave birth twice and married thrice too often. For twenety years, I worked as a network television news correspondent. Always I worked for other people. Some said I was strange. I don't know about that; the world is a strange place. I recorded what I saw and heard. Some said the character Murphy Brown was based on me. I don't know about that either, but a network anchor whose mouth gets her in trouble—what's not to like? If I'm a maverick for not seeing the world the same way some of my colleagues do, so what? Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time.

Since the late eighties, when we both quit the network-news follies, Rolfe Tessem, my partner in life and work, and I have owned Lucky Duck Productions. For fourteen years, we've produced Nick News—a children's news program with serious intent—which airs on Nickelodeon. We've also produced programs, mostly documentaries (many networks, frightened that audiences will surely shy from something called a documentary, now call these "specials") for HBO, PBS, MTV, CBS, ABC, Lifetime, Court TV, MSNBC, TRIO, TV Land, SOAPnet WE: Women's Entertainment, A&E, TV Land and Bravo.
When we are in New York City, Rolfe and I live in an old brownstone in Greenwich Village. When we are lucky enough to be in North Egremont, in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts, we live at Huckleberry Hill, which began life as an old stone-and-wood hunting camp. Having traveled so long for television networks, Rolfe's idea of a satisfying trip these days is driving from Greenwich Village to North Egremont. But my foot is still in the road, my mouth still waters for new tastes and longs for the old ones. Even that particular dish I've been forced to eat more often than any other: a large helping of my own words.

Would I, the lady on the telephone wanted to know, take part in the March of Dimes Celebrity Cook-Off? A black-tie charity gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Five hundred guests. Twenty-four celebrity chefs. I was flattered. Among my sillier fantasies was the one about writing for the food and travel magazines I'd been reading for years. Linda Jane à Table with knife and forked tongue. Imagine being paid to eat, travel and write about that, instead of the bombing down the block.
Of course I said yes to the lady.

I was to supply the March of Dimes with the recipe for a "personal specialty," calculated to feed eight people. They would do the numbers to make it feed 500. On the night of the gala, a chef from the Plaza would prepare and serve my "personal specialty" to New York society. I would stand in the booth and take compliments. Sounded like a plan. Now—what was my "personal specialty?" These society folk, I said to myself, they must be bored to death with fancy food. They dine on hummingbird tortellini three nights a week. Surely they're tired of unborn vegetables, foie gras eight ways, vertical food, farcical fusion and The New White Meat, which we used to call pork, Normal people know when the emperor is short his shorts; the New White Meat sucks. No fat, no flavor. These days some New York restaurants wrap bacon around pork tenderloins before they cook them, as if taste were an accessory, like a Prada bag. And let's not forget foam cuisine, an especially dismal trend; foam belongs on cappuccino, beer, and the sea.

I would give the society folk something different.

When I was young, every town in Texas had a cafe and every cafe kept a big pot of chili on the back burner. If you ordered a Frito Pie, they took a nickel bag of Fritos, zipped open the top, ladled chili over the Fritos, tossed in a handful of grated cheese and chopped onion, stuck a plastic spoon in the mess, and you were on your way to greasy bliss. The recipe was foolproof. I know. One Sunday night when I was thirteen, my mother told me to go to the kitchen and make supper.

"But, Mama, I don't know how to cook. Remember the TV dinner."
"Linda Jane, any fool can make a Frito Pie."
She was right. You layer (how many layers depends on how many people) canned chili without beans, chopped onion, grated American cheese and Fritos (the little ones) into a casserole dish, adding extra cheese on the top, and then put it in the oven until it's heated through and the cheese bubbles. You don't have to be thirteen to make a Frito Pie, but it probably helps.
So why not make Frito Pie for the gala? The original fast food. Down-home. Witty. Easy. I was flying to Los Angeles when this brilliant idea struck. I called my office and dictated the recipe for Frito Pie to my clever assistant. It's often hard to hear people speaking on airplane phones, but we managed. She passed the recipe on to the Plaza. A week later, I arrived at the big charity gala barely in time to climb behind my booth, where a genuine French Chef—I knew he was genuine because he spoke barely enough English to tell me Americans didn't know "sheet" about food—was pulling the first of several giant Frito Pies from the oven in my booth.
"Taste thees. You weel love my Fry-toe Pee."
"Frito Pie. And it's mine, not yours."
"Whateever."

Mentally still congratulating myself for offering something newer than foamy foie gras on frappéd figs, I inspected our creation.

Houston, we have a problem.

The pie was a neon red runny mess. I put my spoon in and took a bite. It tasted like ketchup topped with cheddar cheese.
"What the hell have you done to my Frito Pie?"
Chef Froggie went pale.
"Madame, I use only your specialité recipe. I have eet here. See!"
He pulled out the recipe, faxed from my assistant. Where it was supposed to read "three cans of chili," it read "three cans of chile sauce."
The airplane phone.

No wonder it tasted like ketchup and cheddar cheese. It was. The Fritos had decomposed in shame. Wish I'd thought of it first. I looked down the room past Danny Glover's crab cakes and Joan Rivers' turnovers to see the first of 500 gowned, tuxedoed and bejeweled people, each of whom had paid $750 to sample our "celebrity Cooking," headed my way. I am resourceful. During the time it took to go to the bathroom and throw up, I figured out what to say. "Please do not eat this crap," I would say. Then I would leave to kill myself in the privacy of a taxi headed downtown. But when I got back to the ballroom, I couldn't get to my booth for the people around it. A riot? Worse. An adoring crowd. What can one say? They loved my mangled Frito Pie in uptown New York City. Many, including a fellow named Trump, came back for second, even third helpings. I could have said a variety of things to those people at the big charity food bash, including my planned speech, but I believe that under the circumstances, I said the right thing. I said, "Thank you." You may say this story proves how little New Yorkers know about good eating. I say you're a cynic. I say those people were merely being, in the best sense of the word, charitable.

Adventure, food, travel and memories from a life lived interestingly, if not especially intelligently. Growing older? My parents couldn't teach me much about that; they died too soon and, yes, it may have had to do with the chicken-fried steak. But I continue to be blessed with other teachers. After I wrote a newspaper column about turning fifty, I got a letter from a woman named Alice Warden, who lived in the state of Washington. Mrs. Warden wrote that she had something to say to me.

"Linda, on my 30th birthday, a friend said, 'Well, Alice, your life is over.' I thought of this as my birthdays went by. My life was still pretty good. My 50th came and went and I thought my friend had got it all wrong, but then my husband died when I was sixty-three and for a time my life was very dark. When I was sixty-five I met a man who told me he had only six months to live. I said don't let's worry about it. Let's go have adventures, instead. And so we did—for fifteen years—and what adventures they were."
I stopped reading long enough to try to imagine falling in love at sixty-five, having adventures at that age, but couldn't, so I went back to the letter. In the next paragraph Mrs. Warden wrote about a trip to California.
"We were getting into bed and he turned and said, 'Alice, do you know I love you?' I said I did. We slept. After a few hours I heard a sigh and said, 'Are you all right?' There was no answer. I called 911, but my good man had spent his last evening."

And this was supposed to cheer me up?
"It has been hard," she wrote. "I think of him when I look at the swallows' nest box he made over the window, when I walk in the garden and see the rhododendrons we planted and I work in that garden every day. I am now 86. Life is still good. Fifty years old? Oh, Linda, what a baby you are."
My trouble was, I had been allowing young to define old.
Wrong teacher.

I may be coming on to sixty, but there are still places to see, meals to eat, adventures to be had and memories to be made.
Come along for the ride, the food and the stories.
Go ahead.

Take big bites.

From "Take Big Bites" by Linda Ellerbee, Copyright © May 2005, G. P. Putnam's & Sons, a member of The Penguin Group, Inc., used by permission.