Fine Dining

While ferreting around in the fridge one day among the plastic containers and nearly empty bottles of mustard and pickles and jam in search of something for supper that didn’t smell like late summer road kill I suddenly had a vision of meals enjoyed in distant times and places.  Memorable meals. Joyful meals.  Like that wonderful duck back in 1978.
It was a soft sunny late summer late afternoon in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.  I had promised my sweety that I would cook a duck and there it was in the oven already smelling pretty nice.  The rice was on and the salad ready to go. We were kicked back on deck chairs out in front of the kitchen door blinking like lizards on a rock while the chickens pecked at the driveway.
He had come straight from work, a talking to clients day, and was still wearing a tie and a shirt that had been recently pressed.  Pants with a crease. Shoes.
I’m not sure how it happened exactly.  I think we had originally planned on a picnic under the sprawling apple tree, but the apples had already begun to fall and attract wasps, and besides here was this duck, so as a compromise we spread out the picnic blanket in the living room, put the duck in the middle of it flanked by the other stuff, and then added plates and forks and such and then hunkered down ourselves.
I started cutting chunks off the duck, an awkward project from floor level, producing little splats of duck fat flying off in all directions.  He looked down at his client tie, fingered it thoughtfully for a moment before getting up again and putting it at a safe distance from The Feast.
He had very nearly sat down again but was now looking down at those fine client pants with the creases.  “There’s going to be duck fat everywhere isn’t there?” he mumbled.
“Take them off,” I suggested salaciously.
“You first,” he rejoined after a millisecond’s reflection.
So I did and then he did, and one thing led to another and before you knew it there we were dressed only in the clothes God gave us, hunched over the rapidly cooling duck trying not to spill our wine.
We tried using plates and forks like fine folks, but if you have never tried this sitting on the floor in your altogether, then I can only assure you that you can get seriously distracted when you drop food in places foodstuffs are just not supposed to be, not to mention the surprising difficulty of manipulating food on a plate that is slithering around on bare thighs increasingly lubricated with duck fat.
It was not long before we had abandoned all pretense of standard dining customs and were tearing the duck apart with our fingers, eating rice using the three-finger-scoop method, taking up salad in bite-sized pinches.  We had duck fat running down our chins, down our bellies. Rice and bits of scallions and lettuce stuck here and there.  The wine glasses were so slippery we had to hold them by the stem.  We ate and laughed and laughed and ate until the duck was gone, and the rice had started to creep off the blanket. This we gathered up in a bundle and threw out the door before getting on with the rest of our evening, which was not a public event.
Years passed before the next meal rears up out of the tangled stew of events leading across the years and the continent.  I was at a loose end one Saturday and dropped in on friends looking for maybe a beer and a laugh. The house was filled with the mouthwatering smell of roast lamb.  I thought maybe I had wandered in just when everybody was sitting down for dinner, but discovered only Bora whose wife, Deane, had cooked up a leg of lamb and then left for the afternoon.
“Get a plate and sit down,” said Bora.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch.  I’ll come back some other time,” I responded, never taking my eyes off the lamb.
“Get a plate and sit down,” said Bora carving off a chunk of lamb.
“Well, OK, just a little bit then,” I agreed, got a plate, and sat.
The chunk was quickly gone, and another magically appeared.  This too was devoured in silence, maybe not quite so fast.
“More?” said Bora, dangling another slab.
“Sure, thanks,” I replied unnecessarily.
We managed to get through this latest piece in a genteel manner, partaking of idle conversation between bites, funny stories about provincial politicians, gossip about co-workers, speculation about the weather and so forth.
We had worked our way down to the end of the roast where it was tricky winkling out the nuggets with a knife so while we nattered on about this and that we were picking little scraps off the bone and gnawing the tendons and gristle.
By the time we had completed our analysis of the political scene and solved most of the world’s problems, there was nothing left of the lamb but a polished bone and some gristly scraps.
It was with sad reluctance that I returned to the reality that was my fridge.  Supper that night, something retrieved from the freezer, was a pale ghost of those glorious memories.