Passing Thought

I think I have realized what makes good food good: ingredients a poor person could afford prepared with the palette of the relentlessly classy in mind (not the pretentious goat-cheese-eaters of our day). In the 1950’s, when American housewives made everything with marshmallows or into jello salad, my mom’s working-class friends were eating sweetbreads in their sandwiches. Nowadays it’s on gourmet menus. Huh. No wonder the newspaper columnist in Dublin, who wrote an article reviewing the American reception of Julia Child, assumed that most of us have the palette of a chicken-tender-addicted six-year-old. I read this over a breakfast of black pudding, tomatoes and rashers and when I complained rather irately to the Johnstons, they told me I ought to write the fellow a letter and set him straight. Instead I miffed about in silence and visited an abbey. Now I wish I had, so I am doing the next best thing.