Henry Badger had grown up on meat and potatoes, Mom's pot roast, canned peas, and peach cobbler. Dinner was part of the day no different from getting up, milking the cows, chasing the crows from the corn, and wringing the necks of chickens. It was filling, welcome, and plentiful, a hearty meal for the family - sustenance, replenishment.
He never thought twice about making more of food than it was until he left Ohio for the East where the mix of Jews, Italians and a raft of other immigrants introduced him to fettucine, lox, tacos, and innards. It seemed like these foreigners ate everything that crawled. A colleague told him of his first trip to rural Africa where when served a plate of unrecognizable food, was told it was bush meat - field rat, monkey, snake, bat. 'If you can catch it, you eat it', his African companion added.
This is what it was like for Henry Badger from Bolivar, Ohio, small farm community which had neither the time, the interest, or the resources for anything other than what grew or was raised on the farm. This array of unidentifiable ethnic foods was indeed bush meat.
The same colleague had been invited out for dinner and dancing in the neighborhoods of Kinshasa. Food was cooked in large cauldrons, scooped up by bandanaed mamas and heaped onto palm leaves. 'It looked like caterpillars', he said, lost in the bubbling sauce but floating to the top, netted and served; and so it was that Henry picked and poked at the food he found everywhere until he got used to the surprise and began to differentiate.
It was all strange but in a way tempting. Taste buds that had never been challenged by anything more than boiled meat and mashed potatoes suddenly were exposed to sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and acid sometimes together in mystifying but satisfying combinations.
A foodie was born. Food became artistry, innovation, uniqueness, and near ecstasy. Where had he been all his life? Why had such Persian, Tuscan, Anatolian, and Greek delights not made it to his Bolivar, Ohio table? Squid, octopus, branzino, mahi mahi, and tile fish were on sale at the Grand Street fish market and Washington state oysters and Maine mussels next door. The charcuterie on Hudson Street had foie gras, cervelle, and sweetbreads.
The preparation and presentation of these foods was not simple - a Bolivar three-sectioned meal, ingredients partitioned, separated for space and convenience. These foods were plated architecturally with height, dimension, and proportion. They were garnished with springs of green shoots, fruit coulis, and an assortment of grains, nuts, and berries. An artist's palette, a display of food rather than a meal.
As he earned more - intern, adjunct, associate, then junior partner - he was able to afford more and was soon known as a connoisseur - a man who frequented the best restaurants with the most innovative chefs, the most interesting wine list, and a variety of dishes blending unusual traditions from Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
By and by he furnished his kitchen with the most sophisticated five-star equipment, and began to prepare his own dishes. He cruised the New York markets from the Upper West Side to Houston Street, meeting and greeting purveyors of the finest and most sought-after products and ingredients. In a short time, her was a master of cuisine, knowledgeable about wine, expert in terroir, merroir, and climate.
He foraged New Hampshire tide pools, Georgia marshes, and South Carolina low country wetlands and created dishes that were of the land but confected into his own creations. His home became a salon for food sophisticates where the talk was of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and Faroe Island cuisine. The conversation was diverse, high-toned, and deep.
The farm boy from Bolivar, Ohio had been transformed - so much so that he felt he had come from another planet. Food - cuisine - had taken the boy out of Ohio never to return.
Or so he thought. One day as he was curating freshly foraged sea grass and periwinkles a la Rene Redzepi, deciding on their geometric arrangement, he was distracted - disturbed for a moment, his fingers delicately holding periwinkle, poised above a plate already artfully presented and arrayed.
He sucked the tiny morsel of flesh out of its shell, opened the refrigerator, looking for that something that had disturbed him, and found nothing but odds and ends - devices, grommets, mini-hinges and bolts. There was nothing to eat, snacking had become passe, an appetite intruder, an unwanted filler; but that niggling phantom of a thought had something to do with the growling hunger in his stomach. His creations, as artistic and tastefully presented, as curiously inventive as they were, left one empty. An hour of looking at Rothko and Miro and leaving the museum wanting Raphael.
It was not an epiphanic moment nor anything like it. The clouds did not part and he did not see Norman Rockwell's painting of a farm family's Thanksgiving dinner and did not go immediately back to basics, but something changed as he looked into his Bosch three story, deeply dimensioned appliance and saw nothing to eat - Rothko's tubes of cerulean and ochre.
The meal went well, applause all around, especially for the periwinkle sea gras first course. The conversation was lively and congenial but rarely strayed from food and wine. His table had become an altar, his kitchen a sanctuary, and his living room the nave. The scene was like Renoir's Boating Party but without the lambency, the pure, relaxed enjoyment of the simple food, the summer evening, the women, and the company. It was an ironic inversion, a distortion, an intrusion.
Again, Henry did not rush over to Zabar's for a pastrami on rye - again, epiphanies are for novels - but the refrigerator moment became amplified and again, borrowing from a Victorian novel, a metaphor for what he had become. An idler.
Change is rarely abrupt, and so the reversion of Henry Badger back to meat and potatoes was gradual. Little by little there was divestiture - the Bosch refrigerator and the Viking stove went on offer on eBay, the hours of foraging and cruising open markets became desultory and insignificant. He made more trips home to Bolivar.
Some people who grew up in a a time and place of simple food wonder how they got along without balsamic vinegar, Vietnamese fish sauce, harissa, tahini, and cold pressed olive oil; but these things simply crowded out the basics with which everyone was happy. They were clutter, unnecessary add-ons, displacement of essentials with nonessentials.
Not only did Henry resign from haute cuisine, he left New York, another metaphor for his retraction from upscale clutter. He didn't go back to Bolivar - that would have been a stretch - but he did move to somewhere smaller, more livable, and above all uncluttered.
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