Food for memories and food for thoughts

The subtle line between what we learn to like and what is actually objectively good

This is extra Virgin Olive Oil from Northern Portugal. It is marvellous and its flavours are green, tart, spicy and blended. I really love it and is one of my favourites in this country. Produced by the Oenologist of Winery “Quinta de Monte d’Oiro”. Do you see the name in yellow on the label? It’s the olive variety! As important as the grape on a bottle of wine. And you should be spending the same amount on a bottle of EVOO as you spend on a bottle of fermented grape juice.

Recently, something highly unpleasant happened at a very fancy restaurant that will remain unnamed.

I was tasting one of the new menu entries, a beautiful plate that combines a vegetable and tempura-fried seafood, held together by a juicy pink sauce.

A twist on the concept of a Russian Salad, if we want. It is not a very sophisticated plate: the idea here is to have something to gluttonously desire on a hot day, together with a glass of perfectly refreshing bubbles.

Everything was perfect: the vegetables were crunchy, the tempura too, and the seafood of excellent quality.

Some say, the best in the country.

And yet, there was a lingering bad taste.

We started dissecting the plate, one piece at a time, until we concluded that something in the sauce was very wrong. Our first hypothesis was that the ketchup was of bad quality, throwing off the balance.

But, on a closer look, we spotted some little speckles of dark in the sauce.

Pepper, maybe?

We were brought all the ingredients: mayonnaise was fine and nice, and ketchup was ok-ish (not of the best quality, as it was more on the sweet side than on the tangy side, but we could live with it.

Then, there it was.

The abominable culprit of this culinary disaster.

The homemade spicy oil, aka the “picante da casa”.

I can see the surprised looks on your faces: me, always sharing my love for home-cooked meals and for homemade things in general!

Yes, me.

Because the most important thing in culinary arts after ingredients and knowledge is TIME.

Time to prepare, but also time to throw away what expires.

Time matters.

And too much time had passed since the homemade spicy connection was produced: sadly, the lifespan of olive oil infused with herbs and spices is even shorter than the normally short already lifespan of a bottle of olive oil.

Even unopened olive oil gets old, and this irreversible ageing process speeds up when we open the bottle and start using this liquid gold to enrich our lives. Olive oil isn’t Adaline, from the movie…

So we asked: “How long before had it been prepared?”

The waiter, as astonished as we were, said: “Last summer”.

Oh, boy.

Let me tell you something.

I have tasted this same “off-taste” from very frequently here in Portugal but also in Spain and in many many other places, and it was a quite frequent encounter in Italy when I was a kid, in the form of spicy oil for pizza.

I never grew into this flavour because at home we spiced up things on the spot, and we always had fresh ingredients.

So much so that my mum carried in her purse a “magical pen”, as I called it. A tiny pen-shaped flask with spices in it. It helped us get through a lot of food, and now as an adult, I inherited one of her pens, and I, too, use it.

But time and again, out and about I was finding this very recognisable bad taste. It is bad, but not offensive.

I call it a mixture between dull and rancid, like licking a plate that was used long ago and wasn't cleaned well after being used, but meanwhile, it also accumulated some dust in a closed wooden cupboard in a humid room (do not ask how I came to this very specific image).

This taste is in many, (too) many homemade spicy oils that you find around Portugal.

Some time ago, Manuel Cardoso, a Portuguese comedian, published a video about "that guy" whose only personality trait is that he likes spicy condiments and spicy food.

In the video at some point, you can see him asking for the "Picante da casa”.

It is customary for it to arrive in a reused bottle, and in the video, the comedian happily states that “When it comes this way, you know it is good”.

I have my theory here: if you get used to eating it because at home it is what you have and because you go to places that use the same rancid oils, your taste will be used to it.

We educate our tastes, yes.

But also, we accustom our taste to whatever standard it is: and if it is slightly old and rancid spiced oil, we could come to think that “that is the flavour it should taste" of”.

We spoke about it extensively some weeks ago, analysing the situation of Slow Food in Portugal.

Education to taste is something we grow into. But what if the taste we grow into is an off-taste?

The expiry date is paramount. But, what about the date of production?

I give you another example, that has nothing to do with olive oil.

This time, it is about fish.

I grew up in a mountain-enclosed hamlet where seafood and sea fish were exotic and expensive extravaganza: we had beautiful shrimp cocktails for Christmas, but we did not really have any other regular influx of fish until larger supermarkets opened in the village, and the supply chain improved - well into after 2000.

Therefore, the only fish I got was when we were going on holiday: France, Spain, Greece mainly, and a bit of Portugal.

My very picky father, whose nose was perhaps even more subtle than mine, always managed to order the right thing, and I never bumped into farmed fish. I had a lot of frozen fish as a student on a budget - but never farmed one. Even back then I knew better.

One day at dinner, we were presented with a large fish cooked in the oven.

It was a seabass, not my favourite but a tasty one.

If it had been fished in the Ocean, that is.

Unfortunately, this sad fish carried a miserable life being farmed and managed to make us very miserable in the act of consuming it.

Holy fucking moly.

I have two ragdoll cats that live a very jolly life, being fed the absolute best food one could buy so I splurge on kibbles for them: all grain-free and protein-packed, once or twice a week I give them a package of fish kibbles.

The fish on our plates tasted and smelt of my cats overly expensive fish kibbles.

We did not say a thing and ate it trying to forget it as soon as possible. Everyone else did not notice the off-taste of kibbles.

Accustomed to this taste, the others at the table did not find it off, they found it normal.

I came home with a burning desire to wipe that flavour from my mouth, and so we mercifully gifted ourselves with a lunch on the following day at the best seafood and fish eatery in town. This time, to eat perfectly prepared, cooked to perfection, fish captured in the high seas.

Many times, alas, as I stroll around Lisbon, I can smell and see the cooked fish on plates, and patrons delightfully eating these fishes that, to my nose, taste of my cats’ food.

Needless to say, it is not very appetising.

So why am I telling you these two stories that have a bad aftertaste?

Because memories play a very important role in our gastronomic journey, albeit overlooked.

It is not just the critic of Ratatouille (the movie) that was dreaming with the first mouthful of ratatouille (the food) prepared by Ratatouille (the rat).

And is not only the crazy-ass chef of The Menu (the movie) who goes all kind and mellow when a fellow working-class lady asks him for a burger instead of a pithivier.

It is all of us.

We all have our taste memories that can be good, bad, awful, commercial, cringey: it doesn’t matter.

They are our memories, developed through experience and softened by time.

But then, we lay over a slather of education, another layer of awareness, and we bury deep those memories into the past.

Until we find our own ratatouille (mouse, or food).

And then?

How do we live with that?

I for once have an almost visceral pleasure in eating Kinder Country.

I must have eaten once or twice as a child, and yet, to me, it is a delicacy worth of a celestial table with archangels, angels and seraphs and cherubs and all those weird things.

I do not even eat milk chocolate normally, but that specific and oddly satisfying in a very industrial post-modern way flavour combination ships me to memory land.

I am, as you see, human.

However.

As we educate our taste, there are some flavours we will never be able to eat again.

I will never be able to eat farmed fish again, without gagging at the thought of cat kibble.

I will never be able to tolerate any rancid picante da casa.

And so many more tastes, that once you go big, bold and perfect you never come around to get back to the half-assed flavours.