Pat Perkins

It’s hard not to think of Oliver Twist pleading for pork sausage and mustard when one thinks of food. And it’s difficult not to think of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, the doyenne of American food writers and her 60-plus years of essays, articles and memoirs, when one thinks of food.

Her sensuous description of tangerines eaten on a brutal winter day in France in the early 1930s is a fond memory.

And it’s impossible not to think of food and my favorite Europe-on-five-dollars-a-day moment without thinking of a certain place. But let’s start with MFK Fisher.

One bitter cold February morning in Strasbourg, Ms. Fisher discovered a secret eating pleasure quite by accident. She and her student husband escaped their drab and freezing two-room apartment. They pooled their money and headed to the most expensive pension in town for a short, comfortable stay. The large room had central heating with a radiator and starched white curtains framed a wide window facing the street. MFK Fisher had four tangerines that she peeled into segments, carefully removing the white strings holding the fruit together.

Next, she placed a day-old newspaper on top of the warm radiator and put the segments on it. Hours later, she found them plump, hot and much fuller, and ate them with great pleasure. She cherished that moment.

I think of her remembrance and recall Oct. 28, 1968, my own perfect day, at Cape Sounion on Greece’s southern tip. The warm sunny weather was a welcomed joy after slogging around Europe since August, and the setting was a relief from the very hectic Athens, 43 miles away.  Gail and Michael, my two fellow travelers, and I sat for hours in the afternoon sun, nibbling Greek bread spread with a white, pungent cheese and drinking several bottles of a dry Greek white wine.

I wish I could describe this wonderful sustenance and the Aegean setting as eloquently as MFK Fisher would have. I wish I knew if the distinct cheese was from goat or sheep’s milk, and what region the wine’s grapes were grown. And I wish I could weave memorable vignettes of Greek civilization and Dionysius, the god of wine, into this essay. But most of all, I wish I could return there and relive that day once again.

Pat Perkins is a member of the Jottings Group at the Lake Oswego Adult Community Center.