No Idea What We Ate…But It Was Delicious
The simple promise:
Eat something totally new;
Report the results.
As I prepared to travel, I promised one of my favorite bloggers that I would eat something different, daunting, and mysterious — and report back on the encounter. During her own recent travels, she ate a nasty-sounding dish called smushed peas and was stunned by how much she enjoyed them.
Simple enough promise, right? We were going to Italy for ten days. How hard could it be to stumble upon something unfamiliar, try it, and share the experience — from a country renowned for delicious food and wine?
In our first hours in the country, I accomplished it. We ordered “pomodori con mozzarella” — tomatoes with mozzarella. At home, during summer’s luscious tomatoes onslaught, we make this simple dish often. Jet-lagged, staggering in the bright sun of fashionable people talking fast in a language that we don’t know, this dish was a warm, welcoming beacon. I’d pick up the challenge later, once I devoured every last bite of a beloved favorite.
The beaming waitress set a basil-strewn dish on the dark wood table. It was like nothing we had ever eaten before. The tomatoes were proud, alluring, complex slices lavished with homemade mozzarella cheese and dashes of dark-green olive oil. While we are fantastically good cooks, we’d never approached such casually expert perfection.
The entire meal was a revelation. In a foreign country, bewildered and wary, we’d discovered genius in the familiar. Be it the land, the air, the rain, or the people speaking flowing poetry and cooking with everyday brilliance, we were stunned at potent, delicious simplicity.
A few days later, I actively sought something wild and different in a restaurant famed for exceptional cuisine. Their take on smushed peas would be life-changing. Scanning the menu, we couldn’t make up our minds between the enticing options, so we asked our waiter and sommelier to guide us to an incredible meal. Delighted at the challenge, the staff conferred, argued, and ultimately agreed upon what we would enjoy that evening.
Sometime during our first course of small bites presented and described with great enthusiasm, I realized that I had no idea what I was eating. It was so good that I didn’t care. Attentive wait staff would have identified the magnificent dishes, but that would have taken away from delighted not-knowing and not-caring. Words would diminish our animal thrill.
Moleskine notebook tucked firmly back into my purse for careful notes about the tasting experiment, I devoted myself to the food. Our table fell silent except for happy grunts and fork entanglements over the last bit of the amazing thing on the pretty plate.
For the rest of our travels, I enjoyed every meal with happy gusto, ordering the unfamiliar as well as the familiar, because in this foreign country, every sight, sound, every experience was delightfully unknown. Time and again, we put ourselves in the hands of the waiters, sommeliers, tour guides, and anyone with suggestion of what the wide-open, smiling Americans would most enjoy from the bounty and wonders of their country.
During that time, the familiar was a thrilling discovery, the unknown was a newly discovered favorite. So, while there were no smushed peas and no straightforward story about what I tried, all was glorious revelation.
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