Read Steal the Menu for Free Online Page B

and utterly natural, had much in common with language learning. As a matter of fact, I was operatingin the same indiscriminate, sopping-up mode with French that summer, taking in every new word that came along, looking each one up obsessively in the dictionary, forcing myself to check every word I didn’t know in the paperback of Dumas’s
La dame aux camélias
I’d bought from a
bouquiniste
on the Quai Voltaire near my
hôtel garni
, thus acquiring a large vocabulary for discussing tuberculosis and coughing.
    In restaurants, I acquired a huge new vocabulary of dishes,
andouillette, marcassin, cou d’oie farci aux lentilles, râble de lièvre—
none of which I had eaten before, or even known about in English; nor would I see them in America for decades. These dishes were a bit like the words for tubercular conditions in Dumas: not likely to be useful in my daily life in the States but part, nevertheless, of a growing collection of factoids that entered my consciousness, my self.
    Obviously, my food experiences contributed more than lexical entries to my memory of those meals. I tasted every one of those dishes with gusto and could still give you a vivid account of the flavors and textures in many of them. But those sensations—the ugly technical term for them is organoleptic—were not the important ones. For me, they never have been of primary importance, except at the time I was experiencing them. What mattered most was the dish, in all its aspects.
    Take
sole meunière
. Yes, I love this flat white fish’s tender, smooth flesh and the way its mildness is set off by the lightly browned butter and the acid of the lemon juice it’s cooked in. Because I have eaten the dish many times, I’m able, as a critic, to judge a restaurant’s specific presentation, comparing it against others from my past. But even that kind of judgment rests primarily on my sense of what defines the dish, of what might be called its Platonic form in my mind.
    I am thinking of a canonical sequence: four boned filletsdredged in seasoned flour, quickly sautéed tableside in browned butter, which, just as the fish is cooked through, sizzles from the addition of the lemon juice. It is this sizzle, at the climax of the waiter’s enactment of the dish, that defines my sense of
sole meunière
. I am also interested in the epithet
meunière
, collapsed from
à la meunière
, in the manner of a miller’s wife. Like many French names for dishes, it is probably entirely fanciful. But the philologist in me can’t help wondering if there once was some kind of connection, in folklore or in a chef’s experience, that honored a miller’s wife’s way with a saltwater fish that was clearly not pulled up from the family millrace. Perhaps it was the flour coating, the miller’s product.
    Other people no doubt give their organoleptic memories pride of place. Not me. I am, first and last, attracted by the concept of the dish, its definition, the kinds of information you’d find in Gringoire and Saulnier’s
Répertoire de la cuisine
or, for a more detailed description, in a standard recipe.
    I have a philologist’s sensibility. I see an unfamiliar term on a menu and I want to order that dish, add it to my vocabulary. In 2009, at the excellent Chicago restaurant Spiaggia, I spied the unfamiliar word
pagliolaia
on the menu. The waiter said it meant “dewlap.” I thought of the hounds in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
“Their heads are hung / With ears that sweep away the morning dew; / Crook-knee’d, and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls; / Slow in pursuit, but match’d in mouth like bells.”
    Spiaggia cooked its dewlaps with diver scallops and wild mushrooms over a wood fire. I ordered the dish, amused that a midwestern chef was one-upping the trend for beef cheeks started by Mario Batali in New York with an even more arcane part of the bovine head. In my review, I hewed to the organoleptic: “The hearty beef fragments and earthy fungus highlight the