Food is like art, and recently I have been an artist without a muse.
In Italy, England and Wales, I found inspiration in my environment, my friends and my family.
In Texas however, I remain completely uninspired culinarily and anyway, I have only a fridge and a microwave in my dormitory and I am fed at the university dining hall. Fortunately, when the team I am part of travels for competition, we eat out on university expenses. Despite what would at first appear to be a saving grace, I have not been impressed with the quality of the American restaurants that I have been to. Most of the places that we go to are chains; in four months I have only been to one restaurant that was individual and did not assimilate another. That restaurant was Crown Pizza in Beaumont. An intimate place, Crown Pizza serve pleasingly fresh Italian food in an old shipping container.
Otherwise, all of the steakhouses and “Italian” restaurants have been disappointing. Famed for their steaks, the Texans certainly won’t be beaten on size but there is nothing special about their flavour. I have also learnt never to order the popular accompaniment to them, the loaded, baked sweet potato. Although my expectations of Italian food here were not as high as those I had of Texan steaks, I was equally as dismayed with it. Every pasta dish that I have been served so far, claiming on the plastic menu to be ‘authentic’ , has been bastardised. The lily has been gilded in suffocatingly sweet or rich sauces that have far too many ingredients.
Perhaps this was why I was so enamoured of a pocket-sized cocktail bar that my old friend Erika introduced me to in Cambridge on my return home at Christmas. The menu was handwritten on good paper whose stains added romance, the inky letters in an elegant scrawl. Artful candlelight, beautiful glassware, provocative photography and fantastic classic cocktails were the perfect accompaniment to such a long-awaited reunion. I drank a smooth sidecar. The gentle warmth of the cognac and cointreau was a wonderful antidote to the cold night. Having blushingly reprimanded the barman for attempting to remove my glass without my having completely drained it of its dregs, I followed my sidecar with a whisky mac as one last guard against the frosty walk home.
During my stay, Erika also demonstrated just how easy it is to make wonderful food when she smudged some avocado onto slices of bread for lunch putting a poached egg on the top and smattering it with a little salt and pepper. Another example of the wonders of a simple combination of ingredients whose flavours just compliment each other was the bruschetta of goat’s cheese, roasted grapes and walnuts that I made for our solstice party at home. Why is it so difficult to find such classic combinations in America without them having been meddled with and overelaborated? As the Italian saying goes, “Don’t tell the peasants how good fruit and cheese tastes together”.
To give an overview of my culinary homecoming, I cooked and cooked over Christmas and New Year and almost everything was Italian. Venison ragù made with the pici that Mum had stashed away from her last trip, Gennaro Contaldo’s tiramisu al limone, the youtube recipe for which I watch every time I make it even though I have it written down. I just enjoy the way he says “eaps” of sugar and the part at the end when we exclaims incredulously “sometimes, I can’t believe I cook so good!”. Me neither Gennaro, me neither…
I can’t believe how much I have longed for the most basic of dishes that I used to cook regularly for myself, that both of my parents always cooked for me and that somehow just tastes better when they cook it. That dish is pasta with tuna, garlic and anchovies. It is my ultimate comfort food and was probably the most satisfying meal of my entire christmas holidays. 
Not absolutely everything was Italian however. At New Year, staying with my Grandma, Dad and Stepmother, I touched upon some French cuisine. Dad and Kate had presented me with two beautiful cookbooks for Christmas, and as they are now living in France, one was of course, a French one by Rachel Khoo. To treat my Grandma, we cooked a masterpiece each to conclude the three courses of our New Year’s Eve meal. My father created the starter, inspired by Rachel Khoo, of scallops and brown shrimps in filo pastry. As usual it was pure wizardry from the boyish old man in the cowboy hat and the chocolate cigar. Kate served up a fabulous piece of roasted pork with the most moreish of crackling around. And as if we weren’t all gluttoned out already, I really went for the sucker punch with the darkest of chocolate cakes you could ever imagine for pudding. One of Rachel Khoo’s, it was called “The Black Beret” and the cointreau that we drank with it cut it better than a knife.
Yes, I unapologetically prefer Europe to the United States based on the food alone. It makes me feel homesick and my heart (which would appear to be in cahoots with my stomach) simultaneously longs to be taken back to my beloved Italia. I won't even start on the other things that depress me about America. Yet I feel that I am being hard on the stars and stripes. I am sure that somewhere there is good food hiding away waiting to be found. We shall see...
On the plane I read some F. Scott Fitzgerald and I was struck by a line which read “It was not an American bar anymore - he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it.” Kinda says it all.
On the plane I read some F. Scott Fitzgerald and I was struck by a line which read “It was not an American bar anymore - he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it.” Kinda says it all.
On my arrival back in Texas, I had to pass my lunchtime in Houston IAH airport while waiting for the shuttle bus. Dehydrated, I was shocked to find that water was more expensive than soda. Welcome to America.
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