"One indescribable instant"
Nobody knew how to describe an instant like Natalie Babbitt, who in Tuck Everlasting describes the end of summer so perfectly that I’ve never been able to think of it any other way.
The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
Everyone, I think, has these freeze-frames where the world stops turning and everyone holds their breath, where it seems like the totality of human history has taken place in order to lead to that here and now. These are the moments that you can always remember with perfect, dream-like vividness, that you tell other people about because you want them to understand, because understanding those moments is somehow a shorthand for understanding you in your entirety. Either you are alone when they take place, and so it is forever impossible to ever fully share what it felt like to be there and then and the person you were, or you are with somebody else, and both of you carry the moment around like a haunted mirror, one that will always reflect a shared past that you can step back into any time you want.
Here are some perfect moments I remember: the night in my teens when I climbed all the way up the ladder of the water tower on top of the building where my parents live in Brooklyn, and what it felt like to be that far above the ground, unbounded by railings, bare hands on its rough roofing, the skyline wide open in front of me like nothing I’ve seen before or since, wind pulling at my sleeves. Standing barefoot on a fire escape in the East Village, drinking wine out of a mug, listening to the music from one of the three dive bars across the street and talking about everything and nothing, never sleeping and always looking for the next cup of coffee, the next story, the next excuse to keep talking. The first time I stepped off the platform of a flying trapeze rig, chalk on my hands, sun on my shoulders, and didn’t fall.
There’s a perfect moment in Allie Brosh’s comic “Depression Part Two,” which you’ve probably read before, since you’re here and online. If you haven’t, and especially if you have depression, you should.
At some point during this phase, I was crying on the kitchen floor for no reason. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.
I don’t claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped. And then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don’t understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.
I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.
That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it’s funny. I don’t even know why. If someone ever asks me “what was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?” instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I’m going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I’m going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor… it was so alone… and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I’ll get the same, confused look. So maybe I’ll try to show them the piece of corn - to see if they get it. They won’t. Things will get even weirder.
Smell and taste are so strongly related to memory, as senses go. That’s why you can probably still remember the tastes of your childhood, why so many people are drawn to dishes their parents used to make as comfort food, why people find specific brands of detergent or soap and so on to be more homey, more soothing, than others. I am convinced that this is Yankee Candle’s entire business model. I hate the flavor of Choward’s Violet Mints, and I’m not entirely sure that they’re edible in the first place, but for years I carried an unopened pack in my bag so that I could have a little pocket of air with me at all times that smelled like a time in my childhood I could not identify except by the comfort it brought me. If you walk across the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, the last few blocks or so before you reach Canal Street have a particular warm smell — a combination, I think, of drying laundry and warm soymilk and the steam that a rice cooker emits just before it’s done. That smells like home, to me. It grounds me immediately in time and place and self.
“Radishes with sweet butter and coarse kosher salt is so early, so seminal a food memory that I cannot remember my first,” Gabrielle Hamilton wrote for the New York Times a few years ago. This is the kind of moment, the kind of food, that I’m talking about.
It’s a staple in France — neither exotic nor particularly haute — that resonates here as an intriguing and curious and somehow sophisticated combination for those who have never encountered it before. The peppery, fiery radishes are tamed by the swipe through the cool, creamy butter, and then the flavors of both are brought out by the salt. The radishes are so cold and crunchy and spicy, and they have a mildly sulfuric note. The butter is unexpectedly sweet in contrast. It’s addictive.
You can’t explain it, clearly. Either you understand or you do not. One of my perfect foods is very simple: bread, mayonnaise, sliced tomatoes, sea salt. I have a few preferences regarding those components but not many. I prefer white bread or a milder levain, though you can use a full sourdough if you want, or a whole wheat loaf; I prefer a tomato with above average acidity and sweetness, like a Kumato; for salt, I prefer Maldon. You assemble this food exactly the way you’d think, by spreading the mayonnaise on the bread, layering the tomatoes on top, and generously salting. Demonstrating the same commitment to originality I had when I named my childhood pet (a frog) Frog, I call this tomato bread. It is a perfect dish. It is temperatures in the nineties and high humidity and the way the heat lingers even after the sun goes down, so that for a few weightless hours you can linger over an iced drink in the dark. It is the flavor of cherry tomatoes you grew yourself, pulled from the vine and eaten in the garden: summer lightning.
I spent my summers as a child taking classes at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, assigned to a plot in the Children’s Garden where I learned to tend carrots and tomatoes and corn and radishes and all kinds of leafy greens. In the garden in my mind, I am always the same height as the tomato stakes, learning that Galinsoga, or quickweed, is easy to spot with its daisy-like flowers and a joy to uproot, but that Houttuynia cordata is impossible to ever get rid of, little clusters of heart-shaped leaves connected by rhizomes like the sort that orchids grow, segmented root systems that break easily and grow new sprouts at every juncture. People say all the time that nothing tastes as good as food you grow yourself, and that’s only partially true in general — I’ve grown some very uninspiring salads — but it’s always true about tomatoes and strawberries.
If you can’t grow your own tomatoes, you can always buy them from someone else and then confit them, which is the only preparation I’ve found that even comes close to tomato bread for joy on a plate.
This is the recipe I used, with some adaptations (it’s very forgiving). We didn’t have fresh basil, but dry worked just fine. One of the times I made this, I completely forgot about the smashed garlic, and it was still so flavorful it tasted like tomato candy. Yesterday I pulled one of the jars out of the freezer, and today I spread it on toasted bread I baked on Thursday — it came out all right, though it proved extremely oddly, so elastic that it could have been the product of an extra-long autolyse — and I could have eaten the whole loaf that way.
If you have a perfect food, I’d love to hear about it. If it’s a secret, and part of the joy is in the singularity, then that’s just as good, and don’t tell me anything. On Saturday, Dylan and I picked up three bags of ramps from a local farmer — pocket-sized alliums that are sweeter than scallions, stronger in flavor than leeks, and less pungent than garlic. You can sear them and serve with coarse sea salt (Maldon, please), which is what we did last time we managed to get our hands on some in 2018. This year we’ve been trying to think of ways to make them last longer, perhaps in oil or salt. We’ll probably use some in risotto, where they can replace the onion you soften to start, and beyond that I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about galettes lately, ever since I made pastry for a Marsala chicken pot pie earlier this week.
Babbitt’s best-known book is Tuck Everlasting, probably, but the one I remember most clearly is The Search for Delicious, a book about — not to give away the entire plot — a royal pollster on a quest to find out what the people of the kingdom think should be used to define “delicious” in a new dictionary.
And all of a sudden everybody was in the water, splashing and laughing and slipping on the rocks, drenched instantly from head to foot. Gaylen stood with the Prime Minister and the General near the King’s horse and watched, grinning with relief. “Delicious!” a man called to his neighbors, and they answered, “Yes, yes, delicious,” and bent to drink again.
“Why, listen to that!” said the King. “There’s your definition, DeCree. After today no one could ever disagree with it.”
“You’re right!” exclaimed the Prime Minister. “I do believe you’re right. That’s it, of course. That’s it at last! ‘Delicious is a drink of cool water when you’re very, very thirsty.’” And they all laughed and clapped each other on the back.
Talk about a poll-tested perfect moment. Eat your heart out, Nate Silver.
—R.
P.S. This newsletter’s title is from a song that Adam Schlesinger wrote for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Schlesinger, who was 52, died earlier this month from complications related to COVID-19.