Looking at some pearl onions, which were soon going to join pieces of fatty pork in a Kerala recipe I was trying out, I suddenly felt sorry for the shallots. I am not much into English poetry, having always preferred Urdu and Hindi verse, but I recalled a poem that had popped up on my computer screen a few days ago. What kind of a life did an onion have, I thought, grown in one end of a country and gobbled up in another?
Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘The Traveling Onion’ put it well:
“When I think how far the onion has travelled/ just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise/ all small forgotten miracles…”
A fortunate blunder
It got me thinking. I’d never given much thought to poetry on food (barring the occasional “The pig/ if I’m not mistaken/ supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon”). But clearly poets have. Pablo Neruda, known more for lines such as “Come and see the blood on the streets”, had actually penned an ode to tomatoes. And while the tomato in the poem is believed to be a metaphor for the times, I have been reading the lines for the sheer beauty of the words, and the whiff of a roast. The union of tomatoes and onions is being celebrated:
“…pepper/ adds/ its fragrance,/ salt, its magnetism;/ it is the wedding/ of the day,/ parsley/ hoists/ its flag,/ potatoes/ bubble vigorously,/ the aroma/ of the roast/ knocks/ at the door,/ it’s time!”
Clearly, food is a metaphor somewhere, signifies irony somewhere else, or simply makes us chuckle. There is no one to beat Ogden Nash, of course, when it comes to food and humour. Consider his thoughts on the Yorkshire pudding:
“Let’s call Yorkshire pudding/ a fortunate blunder:/ it’s a sort of popover/ that turned and popped under.”
Oysters dear
In another work, Nash laments the fact that people tend to overwhelm a crunchy piece of lettuce with sauces and dressings — a sentiment I share. In this heart-felt poem, he writes:
“Hark to the lettuce lover/ I consider lettuce a blessing/ and what do I want on my lettuce?/ simply a simple dressing.”
Jonathan Swift did not do a bad job either. A poem called ‘Mutton’ goes:
“Gently stir and blow the fire,/ Lay the mutton down to roast,/ Dress it quickly, I desire,/ In the dripping put a toast/ That I hunger may remove —/ Mutton is the meat I love.”
There is a rather sharp poem by Shel Silverstein that should be read by those who want their breakfasts in bed. The first line — “The ham’s on your pillow” — should tell you what the poet wants to say. And it’s called ‘Sorry I spilled It.’
A big fat book called A Poem for Every Day of the Year has been occupying considerable space on a bedside table for a while. Last week, while watching a video on oysters, my attention was drawn to the poem, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, in the collection. These were the lines that caught my fancy:
“A loaf of bread, the Walrus said,/ Is what we chiefly need:/ Pepper and vinegar besides/ Are very good indeed —/ Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,/ We can begin to feed.”
There are some haiku lovers — and therefore collections — around me, so I fished out a little verse on melons written by the 17th-century Japanese poet, Basho. Called ‘Coolness of the melons’ (in an English translation), it says:
“Coolness of the melons/ Flecked with mud/ In the morning dew.”
After all this, I have been inspired to pen my two bits too: Food/ is good/ for every mood.
Not quite Basho, I know, but it’s a beginning.
Rahul Verma likes reading and writing about food as much as he does cooking and eating it. Well, almost.
