Karl Klockars

I sit here tap-tap-tapping my foot to the rhythm of the timer sitting next to me. Hannibal Lecter , “Tick tock, tick tock, Clarice…” and certainly there are other quotes about time as well, but already I’ve spent 5 minutes searching them out, a fact I know only because of the aforementioned timer. “Quid pro quo.”

There’s a big pot of mess simmering on the stove, hence the need for the timer, all I’m waiting for now is the chicken stock to reduce down so I can add the white beans I soaked last night to the mixture of stock, vegetables, and lamb shoulder. After that, I will sit and wait another 90 minutes for the beans to become edible. Then I will pour all this goop into a large glass container, put it in an extremely hot oven for another 30 minutes, after which, hopefully the whole thing is entirely edible. Eatable. Edible.

There’s a rhyme about beans, isn’t there?

A year or two ago I was pinching myself over the success of an initial attempt at jambalaya. Somewhere along the line in these 28 years I decided I wasn’t going to be such a failure in the kitchen, and lo and behold now I can figure my way through a recipe with a little hope for success. Sometime soon I will figure out how to bake a quality pie, and then my transformation into Grandma will be complete. Now come here and let me pinch your cheek.

Since then I’ve devoured (get it?) just about every book about food that the library sees fit to own, as well as making a number of purchases of my own along the same lines. It was in the beginning of Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” that I’m going to try to rehash in my own clumsy way and with navel-gazing perspective.

This man knows oysters. And heroin.

He spends a few paragraphs traveling back to his childhood in France, where he realized the power that food has – he ate a raw, fresh oyster plucked straight from the sea, and when everyone else on the boat recoiled in shock and horror, he knew just what food could do to people.

Tony has oysters…I have snails.

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The grandparents came up every year from Florida around Christmastime and crashed with us for a week or two, lugging boxes of gifts for soon-to-be-spoiled spawn, and also dragging up large appetites for holiday-centric food. Not just things like turkey and stuffing and such, but rare once-yearly treats like homemade chicken soup and “kneffles” (sp? even I don’t know) , dumplings dredged in breadcrumbs and baked, pure carbohydrate orgies of boiled dough and butter.

Another yearly treat around this time of year was the plate of Escargot that was a late-afternoon appetizer, drenched in garlic (oh holy pants, the garlic!) and butter. The manhattans and martinis were less of a once-yearly treat for the grandparents, rather a once-or-twice-afternoonly, and godbless’em for it.

At some point around the darkening early afternoon, the smell of that garlic butter wafted around the house and any kid who’s ever had garlic bread with his cheap delivery pizza knows how damn good garlic is. It pulls those kids like a Pied Piper of Seasoning.

Pulls much like I found myself pulled that afternoon, down to the cocktails and old people and garlic and escargot. And those tools, those beautiful antiquated utensils used only for grasping snail shells and those tiny little forks for taking command of the tiny amounts of meat within.

Oh, and the fact that they are snails! “What are you eating?” asked Young Me (played by Haley Joel Osmont, naturally). “The adults are having Escargot,” Mom would say. “What are those? Ess-car-go?” YoungMe would say.

What’s wrong with you? Not only does that “gin” stuff you’re all enjoying smell like poison, now you’re eating snails? My world was crumbling. I’m sure I retreated to my Legos and my Construx blocks for consolation. Snails? That doesn’t even sound good with a grilled cheese sandwich. Or french fries! My parents are animals!

Construx: helping kids fight wars at home.

It was the first time I was faced with a world of cuisine completely new and frightening to me. This was not just something weird like stir-fry, or porkchops with applesauce (meat and fruit? inconcievable!), or even the idea of venison – I had overcome the idea of devouring Bambi years ago.

Snails? Snails.

Over the course of the next 11 months or so, the idea of snails swirled around my mind, as I watched nature documentaries, was taken to Florida and plucked them out of the Atlantic ocean, and generally considered the idea of putting them in my mouth.

At some point the same swirl of butter and garlic came wafting around the house. And man, was it good. It was time to give it a shot. I wanted to play around with those “tongs” used to grab the snails, I wanted to yank out that little hunk of snail meat. I wanted to try something new.

So while the convivial adults sat around the kitchen table talking and laughing and eating and drinking, I wandered up and probably yanked on a sleeve at some point. “Can I try one?” YoungMe requested.

“Oh-ho, you want to give it a shot? Are you suuuure?” said Dad. What the hell was I getting into? Eating snails? Well…they ate ‘em last year and they’re still alive. Let’s do this.

Slowly, with the kind of hesitation only a scared kid can create with a pair of stubby little arms, I put that tiny escargot fork to snail. I rubbed it deep in that garlic butter, hoping it would taste just like the bread I wasn’t afraid of. I raised it to my mouth…and ate.

Holy crap! What is this…thing! I just put a freaking snail in. my. mouth. And it tastes like pre-chewed bubblegum, without the sugar. Just the consistency, mixed with maybe some rubberband for good measure. What have I done!

But wait – what’s this rousing cheer coming from around me? Why are my parents and grandparents cheering and applauding? What’s the big deal? Did something happen on TV? Or is it…because I ate something?

Is it because I just put this tiny little brownish thing in my mouth and ate it? I just wanted to see what it was all about – what’s the huge to-do? Maybe….maybe it is because I ate a snail. No – because I ate escargot.

Very much like snail porn, eh?

At that point I believe I ran out of the room and back to the caring glow of a Nintendo or a Disney movie. But the damage was done. It was shown to a small kid, just what the power of one bite could do. What one little piece of meat could do to a room, to a family.

And somewhere along the way I remembered that power, that reaction. Fairly little has been off-limits since then, a piece of raw fish here, a bug there, some strange mass of vegetable here, and I don’t even know what this stuff is over here, but it’s Vietnamese. Good enough.

Food is adventure. Food is shock. Food is fun and wonderment and surprise and food is milkshakes. Sometimes it’s just milkshakes when you need them. Sometimes it’s a big mass of beans and lamb and tomato and so on. And sometimes, these brand new things that we try…they turn out pretty good.