Toward My Own Theory of Description: Pasta and Clams

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

What does toasted grasshopper taste like? Hannah Goldfield, in her “Tables For Two: Oxomoco” (The New Yorker, October 8, 2018), tells us:

On a recent evening, a pair of appetizers made for a thrillingly terrifying spread. A hamachi and peach aguachile, a dish similar to ceviche, was powdered so aggressively in crimson chile puya that it looked almost bloody. “It’s like lava,” commented one diner. “Or surgery!” said another. A beef-tartare tostada was bloody, the raw meat as sweet and juicy as fruit with a slight metallic tang. Its garnish of identifiable segments of toasted grasshopper was not for the faint of heart, but it rewarded the brave, with a flavor that went from nutty to bitter to honeyed.

Description of taste isn’t mentioned in Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (2020). Zhang defines description as “a form of textual visualizing.” But description is much more than that. It’s a form of textual touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing, too. Today, I’ll focus on tasting. One of my favourite descriptions of taste is Bill Buford’s evocation of the flavor of a plate of pasta and clams, prepared in the Manhattan restaurant Babbo: 

This is what happened: Mark, having cooked up a large quantity of linguine for its regulation six minutes and thirty seconds, emptied it into a pan of New Zealand cockle-clams, sloppily dripping lots of that starchy water on them in the process, a big wet heap of pasta on top of several dozen shellfish. He swirled the pan, gave it a little flip, swirled it again, and then left it alone so that it could cook, bubbling away, for another half minute. (This was curious, I thought, watching him – you don’t normally leave a pan of pasta on the flattop.) Then he took a strand and tasted it. He gave me one. It was not what I expected. It was no longer linguine, exactly; it had changed color and texture and become something else. I tasted it again. This, I thought, is the equivalent of bread soaked in gravy. But what was the sauce? I looked at the pan: the cockle-clams had been all closed up a few minutes earlier, as they cooked their shells had opened, and as they opened they released the juices inside. That’s what I was tasting in this strand of linguine: an ocean pungency. “It’s about the sauce, not the little snot of meat in the shell,” Mario told me later. “No one is interested in the little snot of meat!”

What I learned in an Italian kitchen was that a meal is about the pasta, not the sauce. But here, in tasting this strand of linguine, I was discovering that it wasn’t about either the pasta or the sauce; it was about both, about the interaction between a pasta and a sauce, the result – this new thing, this highly flavored noodle – evocative of a childhood trip to the sea.

Pure poetry! It’s from Buford’s superb “The Pasta Station” (The New Yorker, September 6, 2004; included in his 2006 Heat). Again, as in Whitney Balliett's description of Elvin Jones’ drumming, quoted previously, the passage blends two kinds of description: action and taste. We see the dish being prepared; we taste the result: “an ocean pungency,” “evocative of a childhood trip to the sea.”