It was Ben’s birthday on Sunday. I found him in Yoyogi park reading Naked Lunch and concealing a bottle of ume-shu and some olive bread.
Delicate - New Food Culture recently published by Gestalten is “an exploration of a worldwide scene that sees eating as a creative challenge.” We’re in there somewhere.
Mr. Palomar is standing in line in a cheese shop, in Paris. He wants to buy certain goat cheeses that are preserved in oil in little transparent containers and spiced with various herbs and condiments. The line of customers moves along a counter where samples of the most unusual and disparate specialties are displayed. This is a shop whose range seems meant to exemplify every conceivable form of dairy product; the very sign, “Spe-cialites froumageres,” with that rare archaic or vernacular adjective, advises that here is guarded the legacy of a knowledge accumulated by a civilization through all its history and geography.
