a plate of the warm south

Sitting at an outdoor table at The Dervish, with a glass of house white and some meze — now, this is what summer’s about! At this time of the year all I want is Turkish food. I love the plump, pale green, squeezable broad beans and the thick creamy yogurt sprinkled with paprika, the eighty different ways of cooking aubergine, in fact the amazing abundance of vegetables. The whole time I was growing up it was as if there was something wrong with me, I loved vegetables so much. You weren't supposed to if you were a kid. I can remember asking my mother why I wasn't supposed to like spinach and just standing there with a perplexed look on my face. But even if I had ordered meat here, some gorgeous grilled lamb, it would only be a part of the meal and I would leave still feeling replete with that wonderful vegetable-nourished feeling.

And I know this is going to sound silly, given the food-porn pages in the Sunday papers and all that, but do we really experience our food enough? I was eating a plate of sliced, grilled pastourma sausages the other day, trying to savour each aromatic, chilli-tasting, meaty slice (expensive and fatty as they are) to the utmost. Even as I thought about all that, though, the thought led to another thought and another, and before I knew it I’d eaten about three slices without even noticing.

The situation isn’t helped by my situation. At home during the day I find myself eating bread with peanut butter on it. Is this the sort of food you CAN savour - well, no, it isn't, because you are too busy trying to unstick the roof of your mouth from your tongue so you can a) finish your sandwich and b) live. And yet I love peanut butter. (The inspirational lessons of my childhood still contribute to this: the hero George Washington Carver, who saved generations of children in the post-Civil War South from rickets or worse, through his discovery that you could nourish them with the humble, unconsidered peanut, makes me love it. And now our overfed millennial children are allergic to it.)

But you know what? I'm talking about experiencing our food as something to savour deliberately, like an intellectual pleasure, and I'm sitting here eating delicious Turkish meze, dripping in olive oil and washed down with a crisp cold white, and writing about peanut butter. I must be - well - nuts!