Wishin' and hopin'

I steamed an artichoke yesterday, set it on a Wedgewood plate, and ate it with lovely dollops of hollandaise. It was a chilly, grey, rainy day, and I wanted the sunny hit of of spring inherent in the lemon and butter. It was good... and not as good as my mom's.

My mother had always been a good cook, but I remember very clearly when she became an adventurous one. There was a Pivotal Event. She met a woman named Alice at our church, and Alice invited her to join a ladies luncheon at her home, where she served whole artichokes. Mom, raised in Wisconsin, had never seen one outside of a book before, but Alice showed her how to dip the leaves in melted butter and scrape the flesh off with her teeth. Something in my Mom became more alive from that first leaf, I think.

Then, with exquisite timing, my father's company transferred him (and all of us) first to Paris in 1964. This changed my life irrevocably. When your school lunch is braised rabbit in red wine, you are not in Kansas anymore. You're not even in New York, at least not the part of New York I live in now. This city boasts some of the finest restaurants in the world, but it is safe to say that not one of them is anywhere near where I am now living. There are a lot of restaurants in the area - no one is starving for lack of a deli or diner or Chinese restaurant - but there is a uniform fair-to-middlingness about them: all OK, none great. Has my memory been gilded by time, or was there really a good bistro or café on every other block of the 7th arrondissement? Well, either way, I wish there was a decent French bistro nearby. And while I am wishing, I would love to see an English tea room along the lines of Tea and Sympathy (down on Greenwich Avenue in the Village). That's my wish list. Oh, and a pony, because I have been practicing the theological virtue of hope for a very long time.