Keeping it simple

The best meals I've ever eaten were also the simplest

Here are the three best meals I’ve ever paid for (not cooked by me or for me by family or friends):

- Eggs on toast with harissa at Toast, a restaurant in Louisville and New Albany that, sadly, is no more. Every time I went to Toast, I thought I should get something fancier—more elaborate. Eggs on toast with harissa was too simple for a going-out meal. Every time I was wrong.

The eggs were local and free-range and poached, a technique I can get right in my own kitchen only if the stars are perfectly aligned. The toast was bread from Blue Dog Bakery. The harissa was made in their kitchen.

There was nothing fancy about this dish and yet it was perfection. I’ve been eating a recreated version for breakfast lately and it’s still good. My eggs are also local and free-range. My bread is not from Blue Dog. My harissa I ordered from Amazon. It is an echo of that perfect meal.

- Mixed berries with soft cheeses and bread, all from a farmer’s market in Portland, Oregon. If you are traveling and you stumble onto a farmer’s market, always go to the farmer’s market. In Portland, we didn’t stumble onto the market. I sought it out. It was a wonder. Blocks and blocks or produce and cheeses and breads. And berries. Oh, the berries.

Photo by Zach Inglis on Unsplash

We bought some raspberries and blueberries, along with a soft cheese—maybe a brie? And a loaf of French bread. Then we walked for a bit, looking for a place to sit and eat our berries and cheese and bread. In the walking, the cheese melted. The berries got crushed. What we pulled out was a sort of cheese-jam mix. We spread it onto the bread and moaned with delight. Let me simply say that you have not really eaten a raspberry until you’ve eaten one from a farmer’s market in Portland. I don’t know what those things in our grocery store are, but they are not raspberries.

- Grilled cheese at the International Beer Festival, also in Portland. We did stumble on the beer festival. It cost $20 to get in, so we said why not? We sampled many lovely beers. But you have to keep your stomach full at a beer festival, so we stopped for a grilled cheese at a food truck.

We weren’t drunk—just a little buzzed. That doesn’t explain why the grilled cheese tasted so good. The bread was thick and full of flavor. I can’t even tell you what sort of cheese it was. There was nothing else on the grilled cheese and, yet, it was perfection. I still haven’t had it’s equal.

None of these meals cost much over $10. I think people (and maybe especially people in the Midwest?) mistake good food for expensive food when they eat out. It’s as if they believe that if you price your steak at $30, the price itself will magically make the steak delicious. This isn’t how it works.

I could go on listing some of the other best meals I’ve had that were neither expensive nor fancy. Falafel from a tiny place in New York where there were no seats and you had to stand up to eat, but, wow, was that falafel delicious. And the fries! The crepe from another farmer’s market in Dublin. Every single meat and three place in Mississippi or Alabama. Also, shout-out to the pimiento cheese grilled cheese at a dive bar in Birmingham and the roast beef special at the Cherokee bar in Jackson, Mississippi.

I’m thinking about these meals and food in general because I’m putting together my sociology of food course for the winter term. But also just because I’m craving really good, simple food. I wish we had more of it in Madison.

What makes good food isn’t obscure and inaccessible cooking techniques. I mean, most people can make a grilled cheese. But most people are not obsessed with making the very best grilled cheese possible.

Simple food is elevated by craft and mastery, perhaps with a healthy does of obsession and sometimes luck (like the berry-cheese mix that happened in our farmer’s market bag). Maybe you have to have had that experience yourself—tasted something so amazing that you have to figure it our for yourself and then share it with the world.

Good simple food rests on the assumption that food—all types of food—is more than just a bland substance we shove into our mouths to stave off hunger or boredom or the meaningless of our lives. If you eat enough good, simple food, the stuff that gets served at a lot of restaurants in America will make you mad. What is wrong with us that we accept this as food? What kind of people and culture can be so indifferent to what they eat?

No doubt, there are lots of experiences we seek out to take the place of a really good meal. A really good meal should be social, too, and we’re not much into that anymore either. Instead, we scroll through social media. Eat that $30 steak and convince ourselves it’s delicious. None of it much compares to the taste of a fresh, bright raspberry bursting on your tongue.