On Being An Adventurous Eater

When I was about nine years old, my parents took our family to a restaurant in Boston called Durgin Park. As the story goes, I asked if I could order the leg of lamb off the menu. My mother said, "Absolutely not. She'll never eat the whole thing." And my father, probably with some sort of twinkle in his eye, said, "Let her order it. She'll eat it." And so I ordered it, and ate the whole thing. This anecdote is trotted out as proof that I've always been an adventurous eater, eager to try new things. My memory corroborates this; I recall being taken to the Candlewood Inn for our annual fancy dinner out, at which I invariably ordered a lobster, and requesting Perrier with my meal. Why? Because it had an aura of chic glamour about it. The word, "Perrier," with its French pronunciation, and the drink itself in its distinctive green bottle.

I'm trying to raise Oscar and Ike to have curious palates, or at least to be game to try just about anything. Oscar is being conditioned like a child in a gustatory Skinner box to have a slightly broader food-horizon than most kids his age, but Ike seems to have a genuine gourmet streak. At the grocery store recently, he spotted a display of enormous globe artichokes on sale and immediately seized one, requesting it as his "treat." When asked if he had ever eaten an artichoke before, he responded, "Yes! You dip the leaves in melted butter and scrape off the white part with your teeth!" I think he may have even pantomimed the consumption of an artichoke leaf right there in the produce section. (I suspect he was given one on a recent trip to visit my mother, who likes a good 'choke.) So we brought the thing home.

I had to consult the helpful diagrams in my ever-more-warped copy of "Joy Of Cooking" to dismantle the thing preparatory to steaming it. An artichoke, as it turns out, is a type of thistle. It has to be extensively defanged before you can even think of ingesting it. This one had a lot of fight in it. Once the beast was trimmed and de-choked, I steamed it and served it to the boy with a teacup full of melted butter. He was happy. This will likely become the incident we talk about years from now when we are discussing the early indications that Ike, the James Beard Award-winning chef, had an innate interest in food. We hope.