Just Right

My favourite summer food is chocolate. This is because my favourite food is chocolate. In the winter time, chocolate is warm hued riches, a gratifyingly fatty sparkle of the exotic, a hug tinged with eroticism even as it holds you safe like a loving parent. In the summer, chocolate is….the same. But also, a little sickly and prone to melting. Like me, chocolate was not made for hot climates, and I, alas, was not made for chocolate, every dose plunging me into hours of lying still in darkened rooms, my head splintering in ultra slow motion. This is not an optimal way to enjoy the bounty of summer, and so let me turn my attention to other foods, if not rivals, then other runners, worthy of note.

In my experience, food of note is rarely food alone. It is food prepared by your mother, food shared with your lover, food as surprising and yet as fitting as a shooting star in a summer night sky. Let me tell you then, not about my favourite summer food, for chocolate, as we have already discovered, is a cruel mistress, but about my favourite summer eating.

Let me start with a pineapple. Let me conjure for you the wide, stony track, scuffling up the edge of the hill on a steady incline, scrubby crops of tenacious plant life hazed in yellow dust offering shade only to things that crawl in the dry dirt on either side. Don’t pause to admire the view; though it’s far reaching, there are no oases out there to give you hope of relief from the sun. No, you must keep moving, one dust dragging foot in front of the other, heat turning to fatigue as it washes the moisture from your nose, your mouth, your throat, swooping through your belly, your tired, hollow thighs, to those slow, rhythmic feet. Do not break the rhythm. Just keep moving. Forwards, up, forwards, up, forwards, up. This is fun! This is a holiday! At the top there will be a temple, centuries old, giant stones placed with one eye on the approval of the gods. And the other, no doubt, on the whip. Up, forwards, up, forwards, up, forwards. Head down, rocks, plants, your shoes, too stark in the brightness. Brain, too dazzled, too baked, too fried to process the shapes ahead. The path levelling, no sharp V turn, no track cut into the hill above you, but a plateaux here of flatter yellowish dirt, and on it, shapes. Dark, moving, human shapes. Gradually your heat addled mind grasps your imminent arrival, if not at the top, then to a point of change. What happens here? Are we there? Is there shade, is there water? What there is, is a boy. Eleven, twelve years old, all knees and angles, dusty sandals and bright eyes. And he is holding a pineapple. Nearby, he has a bag, full of pineapples, but this one, he is holding out to you. In his other hand, he holds a knife. He looks like he knows how to use it and yes, as you scrabble to hand over money you are too hot to do the maths to make sense of, he raises it and, committing both of you to this exchange, he slices away the tough scaled skin and the spikey top and reveals the flesh, yellower, brighter, more real than the heat paled dreamscape all around, and gleaming with juicy wetness. He slices the pineapple onto a paper plate and you walk just three steps away, angling your body to create the distance that your thirst has not got the patience to make. You pick up the slithery fruit, lowering your face to meet your hand, and push a piece into your mouth, allowing your tongue to just cup the cool, firm flesh as your teeth sink through that vivid yellowness, squeezing the first rush of sweet juice into your mouth and across your fingers, and then you throw caution to the wind, and you chomp and slurp and chew and suck, that glorious oozing sugar heavy juice running in a deluge down your hand, down your chin, but most gloriously, wondrously, across your prickling tongue and down your throat, startling your belly, reinvigorating those tired thighs, purifying your dusty feet from within, until, transcendent, you are ready to step into the temple.

The pineapple, of course, was perfect for that day, and has been unsurpassed by any pineapple since. To this day, that pineapple sits on a pedestal of perfection in my mind. Alongside it, under a calmer, bluer light, sits a muffin. Probably blueberry. Possibly apple. Definitely warm still, fresh from the oven, and completely unanticipated. In this picture, I would like you to stand on the rear deck of a small cruising boat. There are maybe thirty of you on board, crew and passengers, and most of you are stood now in gentle sunshine, chilly with your bare feet on the wet deck, preparing to launch kayaks out into the dark waters of the sound. Rising from all shores, steep sided mountains held in place by the net of tree roots which feed the thick, virgin forest cloaking the slopes from the water’s edge all the way to the peaks are punctuated here and there by improbable waterfalls. Were it not for this small cluster of humans moving on this boat you stand on, the water would be glassy flat, the forest still and the quiet disarming. This time, stop, look at the view, its extraordinary. When your turn comes, lower yourself into a kayak, and feel, with resignation, the damp soak instantly into the seat of your pants. Dip your paddle into the water and push, easily, languidly almost, there is no fight in this water. But it is deep, unfathomably deep, and cold, and the fight comes by attrition. For an hour, you cut your kayak through this obsidian expanse, coming in close enough to feel the spray from a waterfall, drifting out far enough to feel alone, speeding fast enough and smooth enough to feel like master of this world. A whistle sounds from the mother ship and with both reluctance and a measure of relief, you glide back home and clamber, soggy and tired, back onto deck. It is at this point that your realise that despite the pale summer sun, you are freezing cold. Shiveringly, helplessly cold. Hugging yourself with wet sleeved arms, soaked in drip after drip after drip from your swooping paddle, you set your heart firmly on the dry clothes and warm blankets in your sleeping bay and step inside the lounge. Here, you are met with the muffin. Unexpectedly, as you come through the door, a woman stands, holding a tray full of two dozen fresh baked, warm muffins, brownish fissured tops gently exuding warmth and the smell of comfort. You pause, this wasn’t on the meal plan, are they…? Can they be…? They can only be….. The paper muffin case is warm in your still wet hand, and the muffin soft, round, whole, like eating a circle, faultlessly encompassing. Stand now in your wet pants, and your wet sleeves, on your shivering legs, and let that warmth seep from your stomach into your arms, your legs, your rosy cheeked face. Feel the cold ebb away as you again notice that view, curtailed by the window frame, but there, ready for you, and that woman, who knew, and prepared these muffins, timed to perfection, to keep twenty passengers from dipping into misery in the most beautiful place in the world. I cannot remember whether those muffins were blueberry, or apple, or even cheese. But I cannot remember a muffin as divine, before or since.

There are other summer eatings; the vegetable chilli, infused with dark chocolate, made by my love in a gîte in France, the fresh caught fish eaten round candle lit tables on the quayside with new acquaintances before wandering back to sleep under the slap and hum of the lines of our sailing boats in the Croatian night breeze, the burrito, my first, from a nondescript coffee shop in Massachusetts, packed with things I was pretty sure I didn’t like, and yet a complex fiesta of flavours I have not managed to replicate since, the marshmallows which caught fire, before being blown out and eaten burnt, gooey and too hot to handle. But I reserve my last note for something less epiphanal. It is good, don’t you think, to be able to manufacture a joyful moment at will? And so I leave you with this assurance that this world must, after all, have been created out of love and goodness. Three things. Cheese. Cheddar will do but mozzarella or brie are perhaps better. Tomato, preferably sweet cherry or plum varieties. And basil. Stack them. Eat them. Feel glad.