Best Food Writing 2015 (36 page)

Yeast Are Never Depressed
Yeast Are Never Depressed

B
Y
D
AVID
L
EITE

From Leite's Culinaria

          
Founder and editor-in-chief of this award-winning gastronomical website, David Leite is also the author of the cookbook
The New Portuguese Table
. Though he's known for the humorous spin he puts on food writing, Leite is now writing a book about his struggles with another, darker side.

I am depressed.

I can't choke it down any longer. Like a fat birthday boy demanding the largest chunk of cake by moving his hands farther and farther apart, my depression has eyed me, everyday wanting a bigger and bigger piece. This morning it took all of me.

Maybe I'm still sick with the flu
, I think when I awake. It's possible. I'd been pummeled for more than twelve days with it. That could be the reason. I consider calling my assistant, Annie, and telling her not to come to work. Annie is cheerful. Sometimes relentlessly cheerful. I want to murder relentlessly cheerful people when I'm depressed. But I flutter the idea out of my mind. Isolation is the worst thing, I've learned from a lifetime of experience. Then I remember the bread dough that has been rising on my counter for almost twenty hours. I'm happy until I walk to the bathroom and forget I'm happy.

A walk. I will take a walk
. And at the unholy hour of eight in the morning, I am outside, walking down the gentle slope of our road. I smell wet: damp leaves, sweet; soaked bark, earthy and dark. Crows caw and warn the others of my approach. My stomach clutches. When
I'm depressed, everyday pleasures cause me such angst and guilt. I'm reminded that I'm constitutionally unable to be buoyed—no matter how momentarily—by something outside of myself. I prefer dark, obliterating skies, or better yet, night; the cold shoulder of winter; lashing storms, like yesterday's downpours—anything that a normal person would consider depressing because I find refuge in them. Unlike an animal that changes its appearance to blend into its surroundings, I am camouflaged by bleak, gloomy, and untoward surroundings, and I don't have to explain myself to others. Doesn't everyone get down on rainy days and Mondays? They even wrote a song about that.

Depression is cunning
, I think, watching the floodwaters gush over the falls down at the bottom of the hill. It first figure-eights between my feet like a cat trying to trip me up. I can usually outmaneuver it—a few quick steps and I fox-trot out of the way. But then the seduction begins. It slithers up, licking my calves, the insides of my thighs. For the past several days, I've felt it trying to lace its fingers between mine, wanting to pull me to it so we can waltz. Me listless, feet dragging while it, haughty and victorious, sweeps us through the rooms. When this happens, The One usually steps back, watching from a distance. He knows I will, in one vicious swipe, attack him. Twenty-two years of trial and error has shown him that only when I reach out should he comfort me. And I like to call him to me when I'm sitting down. He wraps his arms around me and strokes and kisses my head. The thrum of his voice deep in his chest soothes. At these times, I need to feel smaller-than, to feel someone bigger in whom I hold the childlike hope that he can make it all go away. When I am well, I will again tower over him, but not before this leaves.

Back from my walk, I turn on the oven and inspect the bread dough. The top is a riot of bubbles, like winking eyes. Although I'm a baker of sweets, I turn to bread when I'm down. Single-cell microscopic fungi springing to life, not just surviving but thriving, give me hope. For each loaf, they have the equivalent of a frat-house kegger, gorging themselves then farting, belching, and gorging some more. I think how apt that “yeast” rhymes with “feast,” for that's what they do, that's their sole job. To feast.

“Yeast are never depressed, I bet,” I say to no one. I fold the dough over itself several times, place it on a floured towel, and cover it. I sit
watching, knowing I will grow too distracted to notice it rising. It will take more than two hours to double in size, but I hope some of the party atmosphere will rub off on me.

I write. I clean. I sigh deeply. I miss my mania. I want somehow to ignite those fireworks that have sparked and exploded in me, whispering, “You can do anything,” making plans for me that I will never keep. I want to sing; singing is always a sign I feel good. But no song comes. Just two lines from
Hedwig and the Angry Inch:
“I put on some make-up, I turn on the eight-track . . .” loop through my head. I try to divine meaning in it, but there isn't any, just some detritus left over from a Times Talk.

After the dough has risen, I flip it into the searing-hot Le Creuset pot, and it sticks to the dish towel. I try to shake it off, but the clump hangs above the pot, pendulous. “This dough is a piece of shit!” I yell, which expands to include
this recipe is a piece of shit
, and inevitably bleeds into
I am a piece of shit
. I am a screw-up. I claw the dough from the towel, throw it into the pot, and slide it into to the oven. Any joy I had derived from baking the loaf is gone. It will be a mess, look freakish, and I will have failed. I will feel no modicum of accomplishment, which can, sometimes, lift me, just for a moment, when nothing else will.

Pulling the loaf from the pot 45 minutes later, I marvel,
yeast is amazingly forgiving
. The loaf is not even misshapen, and it's richly brown, with pockmarks and desert-like cracks ripping through its surface. That's why I turn to bread when depressed, I believe: It bears no grudge. Puff pastry, brioche, and
pate à choux
are punitive doughs. But this ordinary bread, with its punch-drunk yeast, can cope with being cursed at and mangled. Bread is the dough of the depressed, the worried, the anxious, the burdened.

I am still depressed, but at least I now have the carbs. I cut myself a slice.

Mexico in Three Regrets
Mexico in Three Regrets

B
Y
J
OHN
B
IRDSALL

From
Chow.com

          
In this impressionistic travel piece, John Birdsall—once a cook, now a food writer based in Oakland, California—repeatedly visits Mexico on vacation and keeps on making the same classic tourist mistake. Sometimes off the beaten path really is where you want to go.

Cancun 1997

We're on our honeymoon. Perry and I got married last month at an art gallery in Chicago; we had a Southeast Asian theme and served lemongrass Kamikazes and Singhas and everyone got drunk. Perry said, “Let's go to Mexico.” Neither of us had ever been. We bought the all-inclusive plan at Caribbean Village, maybe the homeliest hotel on Boulevard Kukulkan, Cancun's
zona gringo
. It's cheap. There's a swim-up bar and a cluster of country boys with the jug-eared look of U.S. military.

The swim-up bartender has a nametag:
Eloy
. Eloy sets up the drinks in plastic cups that hold a lot of ice (they say the water goes through some big filter they bought for the tourists so nobody gets sick). You'd need to drink a lot of Eloy's margaritas to get drunk, maybe more than you could take (Perry says they're watering down the booze). The country boys are unfazed, they're chugging. I want to chug but feel bad bothering Eloy so I pace it. I think I'm starting to feel a little wasted, then I don't—it's like the tequila's on a Slip 'N Slide that goes dry near the end, just before the alcohol can go skimming into my brain.

That night Perry and I take the hotel shuttle as far as it goes, to the very end of Boulevard Kukulkan. We walk the rest of the way into Cancun City where the hotel workers live, including, probably, Eloy. I smell the charcoal grills of the taco vendors on the street, the savage scent of tallowy beef grilling over
carbon
, of corn masa blistering on portable comals in the darkness. I'm afraid to eat (I don't want to get sick). We end up at Señor Frog's, where I lie back in a dentist's chair as a girl pours tequila in my mouth. Hey! I'm buzzed! But the ghost smell of meat on charcoal—that dogs me like a hangover.

Puerto Vallarta 2001

Perry finds this gay guesthouse (a guy named Craig owns it—he's from San Francisco). It's in the hills above town, beyond where the paved road ends, a beautiful old adobe casa with
cupulas
and a pool, views, and a monkey raiding the mango tree that hangs over the terrace. It's off-season and we're the only ones here besides Craig, who's always on his laptop. We take a swim.

Craig comes asking if we want mango margaritas; we feel like we have to say yes. Meanwhile I'm thinking
How much are these going to cost?
but they taste good and we order a couple more. Next day we decide to go to a gay beach-bar and hangout you have to take a boat to; it's called Paco's Paradise. We get to the beach and a boatman looks at us and says, “Paco's Paradise?” I think
It's that obvious?
He drops us off on a rocky inlet where a couple of boys with a net are catching small fish. An old man has a pair of bigger fish he's split and impaled on sticks in the sand, roasting over a little fire.

Paco's place is up the beach: a few lounge chairs and a tattered volleyball net. There's a wide-open casa that feels abandoned, except Mariah Carey is blasting and a couple of girls are mopping the floor. They look up and smile. We decide to bail—down to the beach and across an outcropping of tumbled slabs jutting into the sea. Beyond, where the stones end, we can see another beach; there are people there. When we get to it, we realize it, too, is an isolated place you get to by boat, except this one's not gay. I think it's some eco theme park. You have to pay to get there and everything's included, only we didn't pay, we crashed it.

A woman in an embroidered campesina costume waves us to the
lunch buffet, a waiter in a straw hat brings us beers. There's no bill, no cashier when we leave to go lie on the beach. Bells clang. “Are you part of the green group?” a man asks. “Your boat is leaving now.” We file onto the boat. I'm thinking
When they figure out we are not part of the green group we are so busted
but we don't get busted. We help ourselves to more beers from the cooler on deck—we have no clue where we're getting dropped off until we see it: the cruise ship pier! We're laughing.

After a long ride in a taxi on unpaved switchbacks we're at Craig's again, but no longer alone: Two Latino guys are sitting by the pool, holding hands. They're from LA. “Get the mango margaritas,” I say. “They're good.” We tell them about Paco's, and right about then it hits me: Why didn't I buy that old man's roasted fish?

Tulum 2012

Roberto, our one-armed driver, is taking us down the narrow highway on the way out of Merida, languorous capital of the Yucatan. He's driving us to Tulum, a 3½-hour trip by road, through long stretches of dry tropical scrub. Perry and I have reservations at Adonis, a gay resort with a name that kind of embarrasses me when I have to repeat it to Roberto but whatever; we're going for it. “
Ahhh
, A-
DOAN
-isss,” Roberto says, his inflection signaling that he gets what's up, as if we'd asked him to take us to a brothel and don't worry, amigos, because he'll be totally discreet about it.

Roberto is an enormous man in a crisp white guayabera, the redundant sleeve pinned to its tunic. He has a deep, sonorous voice, and sings while driving—I think the entertainment is considered part of the ride service. After a couple of hours we approach a town, actually a pretty little colonial city, Valladolid. “I'll take you around so you can see it,” Roberto's voice booms in the cramped headspace of his Jetta. “Then perhaps we can eat.” The car creeps through streets of narrow sidewalks and high stucco walls, past machine-gun
federales
with faces like Mayan temple glyphs, to pause before the 16th-century Convent de San Bernardino de Siena, jagged and fortress-like. “I know a little place where we can have a
sneck
,” Roberto says. “Nothing fancy.”

He parks on the street, leads us to a covered arcade with tables in the middle, ringed with tiendas and loncheras. The one he stops at is a sloppy counter peppered with flies, with a line of plastic buckets holding
sauced meats and salsas in shades of red and amber. Perry gets a couple of tacos. I follow Roberto's lead and get panuchos, craggy corn-masa purses filled with refried black beans of a mineral potency and a lardish gloss, piled with pink pickled onions and shredded, achiote-stained turkey with the deepest flavor you can imagine. They're amazing. I go get another, and one for Perry.

A couple of hours later we've said goodbye to Roberto and dropped our bags in our room at the Adonis, which is enormous and austere, all hard stone surfaces and AC nobody knows how to turn off. We retreat to the pool, where everyone's eyeing the pair of fleshy-looking French guys with tattoos, Russian lesbians are chain-smoking, and the big American bear and his buddy will not get out of the churning spa pool.

By the end of the night we'll have paid San Francisco prices for a mediocre dinner with the other tourists at Hartwood, which offers a little bit of Brooklyn on a boutique stretch of beachfront. In the dark, as we'll try to flag a taxi to take us back to the frigid charms of the Adonis, we'll wonder why we aren't in Valladolid, drunk out of our minds on panuchos and bottles of beer. Maybe next trip we'll learn.