Discerning Travelers Never Forget A Meal

A couple I know were shaking their heads the other day over what they saw as their own private obsession.

“We remember our vacations only from the food we eat,” my friend said. “We’re always saying things like, `Remember that summer we stayed in Astoria on the way down the coast? We had the cracked crab and that really good chowder?’ I can’t believe we would even remember that. It’s ridiculous.”

No, it’s not ridiculous. A good chowder is something the discerning traveler never forgets.

Not long after that, we were having dinner with a new acquaintance and he was describing one of his wife’s peculiarities.

“She remembers every thing we’ve ever eaten, anywhere,” he said in wonderment. “We’ll be driving through some little town and I’ll say something like, `Have we ever been here before?’ And she’ll say, `Yes, we were here in 1984. We went to dinner at that little Italian place two blocks over, and you had the veal marsala, which was nicely done although a little light on the mushrooms. I had the linguine with clam sauce, which I thought was odd because they put chopped tomatoes in it. What were they thinking?’ “

My wife, Carol, and I looked at each other and had the exact same thought: We need to meet this woman.

That man’s wife doesn’t have a peculiarity. She has a talent.

Here was a woman who clearly has her priorities straight. Plus, she possesses a kind of native genius when it comes to the important things in life. She has a photographic memory for food.

I have begun to realize that the world is full of people who define their vacations by the meals. Some would call this an unhealthy compulsion, since after all, shouldn’t more important things stick in our memories? The grand cathedrals we have visited, the historic buildings we have toured, the hallowed museums we have paid homage to?

I’m not saying that we don’t remember those, too. I’m just saying that we tend to record them in our diaries like this: “Visited Smithsonian today. Saw many treasures which shed light on the vast majestic history of the human race. Excellent foot-long hot dog in cafeteria, but was disappointed because no spicy brown mustard.”

Do you think I am making this up? The sad truth is, I am not. This struck me forcefully today when I decided to leaf through the diary that Carol and I kept of our honeymoon to England and Ireland back in 1977.

Here is a typical passage:

“Took tube to Westminster Abbey. Bones we especially liked: Elizabeth I, Edward the Confessor, Disraeli. Went to Drones Club for dinner. Carol had crab which she couldn’t figure out how to eat.”

The only truly remarkable thing about that passage is that we neglected to specify what I had eaten at the Drones Club. Most of the passages in the diary contain far more menu detail, including the following: “Went to dinner at The Monastery. Carol had veal escalope and Jim had Dover sole. The vegetables were especially good.”

Occasionally, we lapsed into bizarre fits of food criticism at even the most mundane places, as in this account of Papa Joe’s Pizza in Rye, Sussex: “J had pizza, C had ravioli, not very spicy, tomato sauce seems mild.”

Later, at Sweeney Todd’s Pizza in Bath, we recorded this timeless passage: “Pizza good, but little if any tomato sauce.”

What was this obsession with tomato sauce? We were in England, for crying out loud. We were lucky we weren’t eating pizza with kidney sauce.

I suppose we shouldn’t be astonished that many of us remember food above all else. It’s an evolutionary trait, developed as we wandered the prehistoric plains and our survival depended on whether we could remember that nice berry patch we found 11 summers ago. Still, I don’t understand how this mutated over the eons into a compulsion to analyze Britain’s pizza deficiencies.

I keep thinking about our friend’s wife and her uncanny memory, and I am filled with admiration. My wife and I must rely on our journals to remember anything about our vacations. We were crushed when I realized that we had lost the journal for one of our earliest trips together, to the Olympic Peninsula a quarter-century ago. Now, the memories have vanished; the trip is but a haze.

Except for that little diner in Quinault. For some reason they put runny tomato sauce in the ketchup bottles. What were they thinking?