Fresh Direct

Just got back from Julius Meinl, perhaps the most wonderful place in Chicago. It's a Viennese coffeehouse whose NYC equivalent would probably be the somewhat more posh cafe in the Neue Gallerie. I basically went all out--got something called frittaten soup, which had noodle-type things made of some kind of crepe--whatever it was, it was delicious--plus a walnut and goat cheese salad, apple strudel, and a cappuccino. This might not be all-out by Chicago standards, as neither steak nor deep-dish nor cheesecake were involved, but anything multi-course, i.e. not just pasta or cereal, strikes me somehow decadent.

I realize as I write this that I am terrible at describing food. OK, that's not exactly true--I'm pretty good at describing bad or disappointing food. I nearly broke down once several years ago in a cafe when a sandwich I'd ordered and was very much looking forward to turned out to be nothing but two sad, cold pieces of sliced brown bread with slimy strips of overcooked zucchini between them. I could give in-depth accounts of this, of a "hamburger" I bit into at a barbeque in Germany that most certainly was not a hamburger (white, gristly, and almost certainly from a pig snout), and of similar bad-food experiences. But I couldn't explain why the soup I had tonight was good, it just was.

The one thing all good good-food writing has in common, it seems, is that ingredients are described as "fresh." I mean, even dining hall slop is probably fresh, since where would they store all the stuff long enough for it to go bad? But adding "fresh" to a description of a meal suggests a farm nearby, a lack of refrigerator-taste, in short, a better-than-average meal, conveying tastiness to those who could not possibly know if a meal was actually good, but in a more subtle and thus more convincing way than just saying, as I said of the soup I had tonight, that it was "delicious." Ever watched Martha Stewart's old cooking show? Everything she tossed into a bowl or threw into a blender was "fresh." Over at Crescat, Waddling Thunder recounts cooking scrambled eggs: "Seeing that my local supermarket produced some good looking Mitake mushrooms, I fried them in high fat European butter, and then slowly le[t] my fresh eggs cook on a low, gentle heat." What, then, made his eggs "fresh"? Does he own a hen? According to health guru Jane Brody, eggs can be kept for a "month or so" past their expiration date. "Fresh" can either mean from a nearby farm or not-yet-spoiled, and unless a farm is mentioned, I assume the latter definition is the one being used. So technically eggs are still fresh when they are two months old. Which means that there's not much we can really say about Mr. Thunder's eggs other than that they were not yet ready to be trashed. But when reading his description of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, I for an instant forgot that I don't like mushrooms and am no great fan of scrambled eggs. Because, after all, "fresh" sounds good, and, as one of Patsy's dippy fashion-magazine co-workers on Absolutely Fabulous said of a complex description of a new wrinkle-removing cream, "it's forcing me to believe it."