When I was a kid, my family loved to eat.
That doesn’t mean we were terribly adventurous eaters.
Meat was well done. Bread was white. Eggs were scrambled, pork chops fried. Cabbage and collards were boiled for hours with ham as they had been for generations. Though we were a commercial fishing family, the thought of something like sushi was anathema.
Somehow, my sister and I became the rare two members of the family to escape this culinary inertia, to venture out and taste new things, to become evangelical about them. To this day, now in our 30s and 40s, we’ll text each other photos—things we didn’t know existed, things we had to try, things we now must share.
I was thinking about that last weekend, having breakfast at the Green Valley Grill. As I ran my finger down the seasonal menu, I stopped at a collection of words that would have made my mother choke.
GVG “Reuben” Benedict: rustic pumpernickel, zesty Russian dressing, Giacomo’s corned beef & pastrami, sauerkraut, Gruyère, poached eggs, hollandaise, GVG hashbrowns.
Pumpernickel? Sauerkraut? Poached eggs atop corned beef and pastrami? The very thought would have put her off of even the hashbrowns, had her averting her eyes if anyone else dared to order it.
And, for too many years, that would have been my attitude as well. Received wisdom. I’d have gagged at runny eggs, fermented cabbage, aged alpine cheese. You aren’t born with this fear of the unknown and untasted—you have to be carefully taught.
And then, at some point, probably around the time I decided my parents’ musical taste wasn’t for me either, I began to suspect I’d been cheated. How could it be that nearly everything with which we didn’t happen to grow up was not for us?
I cannot describe to you the relish with which I tore into this Benedict. I will only say that I’m glad you didn’t have to watch it. Its inherent deliciousness was heightened by its novelty. I’d never even thought of putting these two things together. Now I’ll think about it every time I have either. That’s the benefit of trying something new, something that’s not always on the menu, any time you can.
As we finished our coffee and got up to leave, overfull and fully satisfied, I saw a small kid—ten months maybe, a year at the outside. Beside him, his mother was carefully cutting small pieces of her avocado ciabatta toast, dabbling them in hollandaise sauce and feeding them to him. His eyes lit up each time like he was seeing his first sunrise.
“Start them early,” I said to her. “You are doing this so right.”
“You know it!” the mother said. “He loves it. He loves it all.”
Keep it up, kid.