I do not like to touch food. Anyone who knows me has seen me do something completely fucking insane that exemplifies this point: I have tucked into a cheeseburger with a knife and fork. I have laboriously peeled shrimp with silverware; I have re-organized sandwiches to create the perfectly-level tomato foundation from which no tuna salad can topple. I have never eaten buffalo wings in public–the combination of greasy finger-food with nuclear hot sauce is too much for me to bear without the comforts of eight different forks and thirty-seven napkins.
When, over lunch earlier today, SuomiChris joked that I should never, ever go to India, I laughed it off, saying I much prefer Europe, where when one orders a salad, one can be sure of getting a fork AND KNIFE with which to eat it. Shoving an impossible forkful of hugely chunky lettuce and fist-sized cucumber slices at my mouth is the stuff of nightmares–never mind those long, stringy slices of green peppers. Better to hack them into manageable pieces, I think. Completely sensible. It’s so much the worse when the salad is dripping in some wretched dressing–I have stopped dating guys who couldn’t keep the ranch dressing from coating practically their entire upper bodies. I have a name for it: Pudding Mouth (because this happens in its worst incarnation when eating pudding, that most horrible of all foodstuffs).
It’s true, though: Europe has a much better silverware situation than we do here in the U.S. They have the beautifully curlicued tongs with which to grasp a snail shell. (Point of note: squeezing the tongs loosens the grip. This is crucial in those situations where the snail doesn’t want to exit the shell and one reflexively might tighten one’s grip: Do. Not. Tighten. The snail, still snug in its shell, will shoot across the table. Not that I know this from experience; I am merely a student of cutlery-based physics.) They have adorable tiny forks for fish; brutal wrenches for cracking a lobster shell; the lean, efficient sommelier’s knife; and that most beautiful of all utensils: the lovely sieve-like spoon that manages to suspend a transient sugar lump above a little glass of Pernod.
Am I wrong to romanticize eating utensils like this? Does my food-based neurosis betoken some latent sexual frustration? Surely not. Any sane person knows it’s best to focus on the sweetest things in life: a good, solid forking followed by a long, cozy spoon.
0 Responses to “ain’t no thing but a chicken wing? surely not.”