table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Learning To Eat

A culinary bildungsroman. Part I.

(March 5, 2009)  Even in sleepy Tucson of the 1950s, I knew there was more to food than I had experienced. Tantalizing smells and tastes were embedded in my reptile brain: White Castle hamburgers, for instance — the scent of onions steaming in beef suet. Chess pie, from a Tennessee roadhouse. Asparagus plucked from the ground, thin and crisp, eaten raw. Sour-smoky salt-cured country ham. All things I hadn’t had since 1942 in Louisville.

There were flavors in Tucson, if you knew where to look. Avocados, in those pre-chemical fertilizer days, were richer (the best I ever tasted came from a tree with a rabbit pen at the base). Mama didn’t cook much, but she made a killer pecan pie, a thin layer of crushed pecans bound with brown sugar, egg and dark Karo syrup, all slightly burnt. I had two maiden aunts who would occasionally buy a tiny piece of foil-wrapped Roquefort and mix it with an equal amount of cream cheese, served on Ritz Crackers.

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And one thing that was a constant presence, even though I didn’t know it, was lard. At 16 I used to drive downtown to buy “bean burros” from El Charro. Made with oversize Sonoran style paper-thin flour tortillas, they cost 75 cents, a dollar with cheese. I usually didn’t get the more expensive kind; the cheap ones were magical enough. Only years later did I discover that they were filled with long-cooked frijoles refritos, enriched each day by minced onion and lard. When the amount of lard was about equal to the beans, they were ready for burros. (By the way, remember the original Ritz Crackers? Guess what gave them that rich flavor. Yep.)

I didn’t fully appreciate Mexican ranchero cuisine until I moved to New York, because it did not exist there during my three years and I had to learn how to make everything myself or go without.

But my true introduction to the world of food came about when I left Tucson for graduate school at Stanford in 1959. Palo Alto was within striking distance of San Francisco, and two restaurants in the city were my introduction to the culinary arts: Omar Khayyam’s on O’Farrell and Des Alpes on Stockton in North Beach.

Omar’s was in a cavernous basement. Displayed on a table in the lounge was the largest piece of cheese I’d ever seen, a wheel of Emmenthaler the size of a concert bass drum. While waiting for your table, you took a knife and sliced off a snack. It all seemed very cool and grown-up.

We were seated in a curtained chamber out of The Arabian Nights. Flat bread, olive oil (was this the stuff my uncle took for digestive problems?) and marinated salted vegetables were on the table. Also “madzoon” (yoghurt) as a condiment (at a time when it was disdained by most Americans as “health food”) along with wheat germ, brown rice and kelp.

George Mardikian, elegant in a Brioni suit, was our host, an Armenian immigrant who had introduced Persian and Greek cooking to the U.S. Seeing we were lost, he suggested the Kouzou Kzartma, roasted lamb shank in a paprika/tomato sauce, and his famous spinach salad. Raw spinach? I’d never heard of such a thing; all I knew was canned (which we had at home) and frozen (which tasted bitter).

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