First there was parsnip, followed by a sheep's milk cheese. No, was it the scampi, and then the artichoke? Anyway there was bread, I'm sure of that. Bread and a smoked butter with kelp. Or was it the jelly that came with the kelp? There was snapper, anyhow. Definitely snapper. Yes, it had been "line-caught". A single tomato. Some kind of umami custard. Savoury icecream. And actual icecream icecream, too. Something chocolate. With blackberries, I think. Possibly dehydrated. It was an 11-course tasting menu. Or was it nine? Who knows. We lost count somewhere around the second palate-cleanser. Lost the will to go on shortly after our waiter's address on the merits of sous vide-ing. We could have bought a really cheap car on Trade Me for the same price, but with a backlog of wine matches gathering on our candlelit table and the big hand inching on to midnight, when my husband suggested we forgo the final course of our anniversary dinner at one of Auckland's top restaurants, I gladly acquiesced. And when we had finally shed our fancy clothes and lay, unmoving, on our bed, and he asked if I would mind terribly, if, despite the momentousness of the date, we forwent sex, I could have wept with the relief.
Food pleasures me like little else in life. Part of what makes my marriage work is a mutual greediness. My husband and I talk with unabashed eagerness about what we shall eat next. Away from home we merrily go to great lengths to seek out a certain dish. And back home will tenaciously go to equal lengths to recreate it. However, food for me is not sexy. It might look it on the telly. It might sound it in books. You only have to google "aphrodisiac" to find yourself in a sea of listicles tabling all the various comestibles purported to get you going; dark chocolate for one, but after we went halves the other night in a bar of Whittaker's Hawke's Bay Black Doris Plum and Roasted Almond, a shag was the last thing on my mind. I feel sexiest when I am hungry. Every sense on high alert, hunger gives you an edge, unlike the hebetating state of being full. Stomach empty I am a tigress, wild and impetuous, tummy stuffed more teddy bear. And as for food being sensual, ask anyone foolish enough to buy a bottle of that chocolate body paint, so fashionable back in 1993, and they will quickly put you straight.
I do, though, believe food is intimate. To really know someone is to know they like feta but only cow's not goat's. That they'll eat the hot-smoked salmon but not the cold. It's to trust they won't baulk when you slip them the olives off your bruschetta at a party. In the fledgling stages of a relationship, someone's attitudes and behaviours around the act of eating can offer vital insight into their true nature. When my husband invited me for dinner and used up a kilo of prawns to feed two, it was a fairly good indication of his excessiveness. Eighteen years later we are still arguing over what I like to think of as my frugality, and he calls stinginess, with my insistence on making nachos out of one can of kidney beans. Subsequent to moving in together, and all loved-up, we decided to go on a liver detoxifying diet. When he found me crying over the colour of the contents of the toilet bowl, convinced I was dying, he was able to persuade me, that after 10 days of vegetable juices, it was more likely the beetroot than bowel cancer.
My grandparents didn't have the most affectionate relationship, but on the couch every night my grand-father would peel an apple and pass my grandmother thin slices with the tip of his paring knife. Young and stupid, blind to the inherent tenderness of their post-prandial ritual, I thought true love was all pashes and lingerie, but I see now that a life, long and shared, is made meaningful by a piece of fruit divvied up between two.
