Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

SALAD DAYS AND NIGHTS

237 Leonia,฀New฀Jersey,฀2003–2005 The voice on the phone is light and cheery, somewhat at odds with the formal diction. I imagine a woman who used to wear white gloves to church, even in eighty-five-degree heat. “I’m your Leonia neighbor, calling on behalf of United Way,” she says. “A close neighbor, actually. My husband and I can see your lovely dining room from our house on Eastview.” I hesitate, at a loss for words, before promising to put a check in the mail first thing in the morning. “How extraordinary,” I announce, as if to a room full of guests. After years of observing other eaters, after intruding on their meals and conjuring their secrets, the tables have been turned on me. The dining room, which faces a rear garden, has floor-to-ceiling windows but no shades. My life at the table is an open book, it turns out, especially at night, for those with good spying equipment. I’m relieved that my caller does not live in the house directly behind my back garden fence, where I might catch a glimpse of her peering at me, but on the far side of that street. I imagine the woman and her husband, bird-watchers perhaps, pressed against their dining room window, passing the binoculars back and forth. What do they think when they observe me eating alone, maybe three or four evenings a week, at the head of the oval table, with the New York Times piled neatly to my left? Do they zero in on the oversized salad of mesclun, cherry tomatoes , yellow peppers, cucumbers, jicama, and calamari, decorated with fireengine -red peppadew peppers, oil-cured olives, and feta cheese? Do they comment to each other on the omnipresent wineglass filled and refilled with pale white wine? Do they remember Eli sitting to my right, facing the garden? Do they happen to check in when I’m entertaining a lover? I’m not spooked; I am the spook. These neighborhood spies are too old and too genteel to be dangerous. If they are tracking my dining habits, they are probably too fixed in their ways to appreciate my game with salads. Like my mother, they probably think of salad as a pretty little plate of lettuce and tomatoes with a garnish of parsley that precedes a larger plate of meat, vegetables, and a potato or rice. They might be surprised to learn that over the past several years in my house, the eight-inch salad plate has become obsolete, as is the case in many restaurants. SALAD฀DAYS฀AND฀NIGHTS฀ EATING ALONE 238 In its place the eleven-inch dinner plate, plain white Wedgwood, offers itself as a canvas for salad making. My mother, to be fair, adapted to the salad revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. Born in New York in 1903, she lived to the end of the twentieth century. Her embrace of my salad-as-meal—the greens, the cooked and raw vegetables, the cubes of leftover meat or fish, the artichoke hearts and olives, served with raspberry vinaigrette—is a measure of the distance she traveled as an American eater. Your salad platter, I remember her saying, puts the whole garden right on the table . That there hadn’t been a garden in our backyard since Adam was in junior high was beside the point. I didn’t pull my weight in that garden, sad to say. Weeding gave me a sore back. Squatting among the zucchini made me short-tempered. In those years, I hid behind the gendered division of inside and outside work. If Eli and Adam would give the garden their sweat labor, I’d honor it by trying out a new vegetable recipe from Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book. These days, my romance with salad has a different, outside labor base. Julio’s is its name. At Julio’s, now a Korean-owned greengrocery, Latino kitchen workers do my prepping. FromTuesday through Saturday and a half day on Sunday, a crew of four in the back kitchen wash leaf lettuce, iceberg, watercress, and spinach. They spin and cut the greens. They chop red, yellow, and green peppers; they slice carrots , cucumbers, red onions, red cabbage, and white and red radishes. They also dice scallions, grate zucchini, and divide broccoli into bite-sized florets. When I’m shopping for myself, I fill a plastic half moon container, about eight inches...