Synchronicity

A few days ago, I was in a coffee shop writing my post for Taste Canada: “Strawberries and Lobster”, and in it I was saying how I though that our Canadian lobsters were the tastiest creature to walk this earth (so to speak) on eight legs.

I had finished the draft of the post and my laptop batteries being low I saved my work, closed the computer and took the book I’m currently reading.

It is “Endless Feast, Sixty Years of Writing for Gourmet” edited by Ruth Reichl. I had found it in a used book store in downtown Montréal a few days before.

I was reading the chapter on James Beard which I found fascinating as he is hardly known in French Canada although we had our own Julia Child in the person of Jehanne Benoit at that time who wrote “L’Encyclopédie de la Cuisine” which was a tome of about 1500 pages. Almost everybody had her book which was at first published as fascicule in a weekly paper that you had to bind yourself.

So back to the lobster, in the middle of the chapter “James Beard, an American Icon: The Early Years” I find the following passage that I quote here extensively:

““The Pacific’s greatest blessing, though, was the Dungeness Crab, to my mind unequalled by anything in the shellfish world.” Beard still finds the Dungeness crab supreme among crustaceans. (…) In matter as subjective as consideration of the relative merits of the Dungeness crab vis-à-vis the Main lobster or red shrimp, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, the Louisiana crayfish, the Texas Gulf shrimp, the Alaskan king crab, or the Florida stone crab or rock shrimp, it is of course impossible to separate pure gastronomic delectation from nostalgic reflex. The oldster who as a youngster, cut his teeth on his own harvest of soft-shelled crabs will never be convinced that any other crustacean remotely compares, especially if his experience of any others is colored by the unavoidable loss of immediacy and natural ambiance entailed in the transport of regional shellfish from one place to another.”

Well, it may very well be so, but last time we had lobsters, we had guests from Brazil who had tasted in situ pitú (a fresh water shrimp about the size of a crayfish) and lagosta and France who had been fed on Brittany lobsters and tourteaux. And they all agreed that our lobster was the best.

This type of coincidence I call synchronicity. Events that seem related but are not obviously caused one by the other but seem to have a literal, poetic or physical link.

Like the time, two years ago that I was sitting on a terrace in Cologne, Germany, having a beer after having spent the day at a customer site. Cologne is my favorite German city, beautiful city, with good restaurants, small yet not provincial probably because of the proximity with France and the Nederland with which it is connected by high speed trains. It is late afternoon; over the row of buildings that close the square where I’m sitting I can see the tower of the Cologne cathedral, the Dom. It is, with the Mezquita of Cordoba (admittedly not a church anymore), the most awesome church I ever saw. I say awesome as in I was in awe when I first saw it up close, overwhelmed by it dark grandeur and beauty.

Sipping my beer, I start reading the book I had brought with me. It was one of Mordecai Richler novel, that most Mont realer of writer. I can’t remember which one it was but right there, in the middle of the book I had started on the plane to Paris and continued to read on the train from the Gare du Nord to the Köln Hauptbanhof, Richler is writing about the Cologne bombing of WWII. If I had been reading about the war, Nazism or Bomber Harris it would have been less of a coincidence but there I was reading a novel set mostly in Montreal and Paris, I had a relatively short time to read in Cologne but still while I’m there I happen to fell on the two short paragraph that talk about the city.

Talk about a coincidence!

Another coincidence was that in the Endless Feast there is a story about dandelion wine by Ray Bradbury and another story where mention is made in passing of pork with dandelion greens. There is no recipe for it. Well, I happened to have dandelion greens in the fridge and thick boneless pork chops in the freezer so I decided to make just that for dinner.

I washed and chopped up the greens and cut up the pork in cube. I sautéed the pork with salt and pepper in olive oil until it was nicely caramelized. In another pan, I put olive oil and a chopped onion. When the onion started to get some color I added the greens. When they wilted, I added the pork mixed everything well and served with sautéed potatoes and a nice chilled rosé from the Languedoc.

Unlike most people in Montréal these days, I don’t complain about the heat but on the other hand I have been drinking nothing but rosé for the last 2 weeks. It is the best thing to drink during a canicule.