FoodSexLit

Friday night, as my title suggests, I had my first foodgasm of 2010.  The place—Spring Hill, in West Seattle.

I’ve had foodgasms before, of course, but this was my first one of 2010.  I’ll be honest, I had multiple foodgasms Friday.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I always am, whether it’s an orgasm (in the conventional sense of the sexual) or a foodgasm (caused by sublime pairings and triplings and quadruplings of flavors and colors and textures.)   When it comes to sex, it’s hard to make me cum– I’ll just say it now– and so when someone can I’m first shocked, then pleased, and then grateful, grateful, grateful.

Foodgasms, fortunately, are easier for me to achieve.  Maybe it’s because my family, while restrictive and Catholic in terms of sexual appetites, have always been unabashedly lusty and catholic when it comes to eating.  When we sit down to a beautiful dinner, we will first discuss each part of the meal, bite by bite, and then, when we’ve exhausted that subject, the conversation turns to anticipation of our next meal.

While I don’t have multiple orgasms in bed, (although I own a lot of books that explain how to), I am easily multiple when it comes to meals– which makes me no less grateful when they occur.  And, with the exception of the first time I ate at Spring Hill, (the first week it opened, which is more than understandable), Spring Hill has consistently been a site of multiple foodgasms.  Plus it’s owned by Mark Fuller, former executive chef of Tom Douglas’s flagship restaurant, The Dahlia Lounge, another one of my favorite Seattle spots for gustatory eroticism.

You know you’re in the throes of a foodgasm when you take the first bite and all you can do is make some primal, guttural noise of satisfaction—a grunt, perhaps, or a deep-throated long sigh that starts from somewhere around your epiglottis.  The bodily expression that signals a foodgasm may also take the form of a delighted exclamation, almost like a scream.  Sometimes it’s a sort of choking laugh.  Just like orgasms from sex, not every foodgasm elicits the same sound.  A foodgasm is subtly different every time.

My friend Marcie, one of my dinner companions, and I accompany our noises (and together, we have quite a range) with this sort of pointing action—you’d have to eat with us to truly get a visual.  Basically, we are struck speechless, so we gesture at whatever we just put in our mouth as a signal for you to put what’s left in your mouth, immediately, and share in our experience.

A few seconds later, when we’ve recovered somewhat, we will begin to stammer, “so good!  So good!” and, then, in a sort of adaption of Tank from Old Skool mid keg-stand, we will add, “once it hits your lips, it’s so good!”

It’s like sex in the sense that really good sex will stay with you, revisit you in the form of flashbacks.  You’re just going along with the mundane activities of life, driving, let’s say, or maybe just picking up a few things at the grocery store, and then BAM—suddenly, you’re back in the moment: your leg sliding over a lover’s belly as you straddle him, perhaps, or that moment you were flipped on your back for a new position.  It’s real, for me: my face flushes, my body heats up, and I am so distracted that I go home with the wrong kind of milk or a different kind of eggs.

And like sex, especially if you practice any kind of yoga, the more practice you get at losing yourself in a foodgasm, the more you fully experience it.  Sometimes I actually wonder if I’m going to go blind, or if I’m going to be able to stay inside my body.  It’s ecstasy, in more than one sense of the word.

If you look up “ecstasy” in the OED, the first definition is this: “The state of being ‘beside oneself’, thrown into a frenzy or a stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion.”  When I read that definition, I think of Friday night’s first course: cave-aged gruyere, toasted baguette, caraway onions, beef jus, parsley salad.  The cheese was warm and oozing; the bread both butter-soddened and crispy; the onions a silky, unctuous slide; the jus had the dark, deep flavor of a demi-glace; the parsley a sharp tang of green.  Taken together inside my mouth made me move, just for a moment, outside my body—I suddenly saw myself sitting in the green chair at the table, the window behind me, the black shirt I was wearing, the fork still clenched in my hand.

Ecstasy, in one sense, is a paradox: you are outside your body– you watch yourself, shocked into awareness that your body is having, put plainly, an experience.  It’s a contradiction—what I referred to rapturously in graduate school after writing a paper on Pynchon—a “simultaneous occupation of seemingly opposing positions.”  Ecstasy is when you are mentally shocked outside of your body while simultaneously being joyfully, sensually, luxuriously inside your body.

It’s why people take drugs.  It’s why people have sex.  It’s why I eat food.

Next up was a duck egg yolk ravioli: described on the menu as green sauce, duck ham, garlic chips.  Did I mention how much I love the actual menu at Spring Hill?  They give the name of the food, followed by a list of ingredients.  Spare.  Clean.  Enticing.  I walk my dog past Spring Hill on my way to my favorite coffee shop, Hotwire, and almost every time I stop by the door, just to read the menu.  For me, it’s sort of like reading erotica.

I’ve had the duck egg ravolio as an appetizer before, and even though I’m expecting it, it’s always still a surprise when the duck yolk, tucked inside two pieces of handmade pasta, explodes in my mouth.

And speaking of handmade pasta, our final first course, our primo, if you will, was amazing: handmade tagliatelle: house-cured pork belly, hen of the woods, lacinato kale, parmesan.

First off, truly handmade pasta is sublime.  I had my first taste of it in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, of all places, with my friend Karina and her parents at a restaurant called Theo’s.  I don’t remember ordering at Theo’s.  I do remember that Karina, my closest college friend, and I loved to eat out together: we would order one dish each and then share it so we could maximize our flavor experience.  Since she had eaten there many times, I’m sure she must have recommended the pasta alfredo.  What I most clearly recall is the first moment I put a forkful of the strands in my mouth.  I was literally shocked.

I’m sure that I cried out, involuntarily, and then, when I could speak, asked “What is this?”  The texture, the mouth feel, the taste, was like no pasta I had ever eaten.  I wish I had recorded it in a journal, because now all I remember is the moment of ecstasy—when I was thrown into a stupor and placed, temporarily, outside my body.

Yes, the ecstasy– even though that moment was over ten years ago.  That’s how important foodgasms are to me– how vital.

At Spring Hill, pasta is truly handmade: if you go to Spring Hill on a Monday night (the menu on Monday nights is family style) and you sit at my favorite table, the one right across from the end of their open kitchen, you can watch the line cooks actually roll out the dough, by hand, then cut it into strands: tagliatelle, of course, which I’ll get to in a minute, but also spaghetti, served with your choice of lemon, olive oil, anchovies, and parsley, or tomato sauce and Parmesan.

But back to the tagliatelle.  This dish comes with voluptuous chunks of fried pork belly (one foodstuff almost guaranteed, in my experience, to produce a foodgasm) tons of perfectly cooked wild mushrooms, crispy bits of fried kale, and a heaping of Parmesan.  There’s nothing like a soft bite of tagliatelle in your mouth combined with the lush sweetness of a wild mushroom, the thick salt crisp of the pork belly, and the thin green crisp of the kale, finished with the soft dust of Parmesan.  It will make you moan.  Which I did.

Did I mention that Spring Hill cures their own pork belly?  Jesus.

For our main courses, we all ordered beef.  A rainy Friday night in Seattle makes you crave red meat.  My two companions had the wood-grilled, dry aged rib steak: “pot roast” vegetables, Oregon truffles, cured butter.  I had the beef steak hot and cold: raw steak tartare, grilled Wagyu sirloin, potato cracklings, yolk.

The rib steak was grilled perfectly—seared on the outside, a thick strip of fat along the side, juices oozing from the center.  “Pot Roast” vegetables turned out to be tiny cipollini onions, baby turnips, and sweet little carrots, all cooked perfectly al dente.  And I love butter, so when presented with a thick slice of it, melting on a hot steak and flecked with green herbs, I just about have a foodgasm then and there.   And my dish, the tatare paired with grilled sirloin, was executed well too: there’s something about potato chips that taste like upscale pork rinds topped with the piquant, meaty tatare, which I then sopped in the glorious yellow yolk.

For dessert, we had baked hot chocolate.  None of us had tried it before, and therefore, another surprised moment of ecstasy—a triple foodgasm at a sort of chocolate cake that oozed melting chocolate when you bit into it, paired with ice cream and a sort of hazelnut crisp thing.  The tiny portion was served in an enormous bowl, which, drunk and high and sated on food, I read as whimsical.

I think the thing I love most about Spring Hill is that it so perfectly matches my cooking pedagogy and my rudimentary understanding of the elements of seduction.  The food: local whenever possible, perfectly prepared, elegant in its simplicity, extravagant in its quality.  The presentation is clean, what with the white bowls and perfectly composed plating, and yet there’s a simultaneous sloppiness, a messiness, like in the explosion of a poached duck egg in your mouth (duck egg yolks are bigger than chicken eggs for more explosion in your mouth– yes, go there, you of the dirty minds), or a gigantic tangle of tagliatelle with too-much-but-just-enough-because-less-would-be-stingy grated Parmesan.

And speaking of stinginess . . . one of my favorite books is The Art of Seduction, by Robert Greene.  One of the laws is that seduction, that he establishes in the section on the anti-seducer, is generosity.  The anti-seducer, he says, is frugal to a fault.  I have always had a horror of being stingy–in my kitchen, at my table, in my bed.

Of course, another element of seduction is surprise.   Greene insists you must keep your victim in suspense, that planned surprises will give the seduced a delightful sense of spontaneity.  Spring Hill, it seems, has the calculated surprise down.

I’m a very good cook, and I often give myself foodgasms.  But eating out, or eating food someone has prepared for you, is like the difference between masturbation and an orgasm with a lover– more importantly, an orgasm with a lover who matches your sex style.

When it comes to food, Spring Hill has me, and seduction, all figured out.