In the days when we were still young, before children, my husband and I delighted in holding ‘dinner parties’. These included an invitation to four or six friends, all of whom were ‘foodies’ like us, to offer friendship and fine dining.
My husband likes to cook. To him it is an art, one he first cultivated in the kitchen of his mother’s house, but did not practise there so much as he observed her strictions and restrictions and decided what might be a better approach to vegetables drowned to death in boiling water or to meat drained of all juice.
To this day he jokes that I led him to believe I, too, was a good cook. For the two or three years before I met him when I was with another partner, this man and I held what we called Gourmet Dinners This during the early seventies.
People don’t write about the seventies much, not that I’ve noticed, but in these years, restaurant eating seemed to arrive in Melbourne and many elaborate establishments sprang up.
My specialty was Coquille St Jacques; scallops seated in the base of a cup and stewed in the oven under a thick covering of cream cheese and milk. Such a crucifixion of the humble scallop but I thought the dish magnificent. Only it was not.
It’s not that I can’t cook. Or that I don’t care too much about the basics of cooking. It’s more my heart is not in it. Any more than I can speak for the effort required first in chopping – boring – and then the slow process of cooking one vegetable after another, in layers, as does my husband, according to which foodstuff needs more time under the flame.
We have long given up gourmet dinners and dinner parties but still the desire to eat well continues, especially for the evening meal which remains sacrosanct in my household.
Lunch and breakfast more of a free fall. Whatever you fancy and usually eaten in front of a newspaper, computer screen or book, often alone. But dinner is sacred.
When he’s not here, I revert to smoked salmon and avocado on rice cakes or some such, easy and tasty with lashings of taramasalata. And boiled eggs mashed in with mayonnaise. I love a boiled egg or poached. Something I could live on.
What is it about food that causes people to write about it ad nauseum? Travel writers who write for a living about their adventures elsewhere and food critics who write about their encounters with restaurants and other people’s cuisines.
In those early days in the happy dinner parties with beloved friends, one of whom is now dead, my husband was particular in his choice of wines. He and this friend joked about the quality of red wine, detectable if it there was a brown rim around the meniscus. The first time I learned this word.
The meniscus a crescent shaped descriptor like the crescent moon.
And I have loved the notion ever since. My life feels to me to be a meniscus these days. Waning but still vibrant around the edges.