Oysters, Cheesecake and a Russian Girl’s Magic Pot of Faraway Food

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  05.28.08 | 12:09 PM ET

imageWhen Lara Vapnyar was a child living in Russia, she wrote an essay for school about the thing she most wanted a Magi to give her: a magic pot that would create any food in the world. She had grown up reading European and American novels that featured exotic delights such as cheesecake, asparagus and oysters, and she longed to know if they tasted as good as they did in her imagination. The descriptions of these foods were not only words; they took on a power that transported her to other worlds.

In a wonderful essay in The New York Times Magazine, Vapnyar describes how these strange foods connected her to these yet-unknown worlds. She extrapolated details based on what she already knew: Cheesecake was “something like my grandmother’s grilled cheese sandwiches, only infinitely better,” while asparagus “was shaped like two teaspoons put together, forming a hollow locket on a long stem” and “filled with exactly two teaspoons of buttery juice inside.” And even though she imagined oysters as sea creatures that crawled around the plate, she figured “they must have tasted completely wonderful for all those characters to put up with that.” These images were corporeal and sensual, and they gave her the first tastes of another world.

Sometimes that new world lived up to expectations, and sometimes not. When Vapnyar moved to the U.S. as an adult and tried the real food—in New York, one of the cuisine capitals and favorite literary settings of the world—the cheesecake was too sickly-sweet and the asparagus only hit that perfect buttery note once.

The oysters, though, were amazing.

Photo by avlxyz via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Tags: Food, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


1 Comment for Oysters, Cheesecake and a Russian Girl’s Magic Pot of Faraway Food

John M. Edwards 11.02.08 | 1:50 PM ET

Hi Joanna:

Just as in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” the Madeleine acts as a catalyst for memory, our sense of taste is often the most transporting.

Vapnyar’s idealization of the food she reads about, and eventually tries, forces us to remember our own gustatory djinnis. In Bermuda, when I tried Vichysois (cold potato soup), I thought I was being introduced into the grand world of my businessman Grandpa, where deals were made at the dinner table, with cigars and cognac.

And at the other end of the spectrum, my first greasy “pastrami” sandwich was essayed at New York’s Penn Station. That was a tough one to survive.

John M. Edwards

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