From the Editor’s Desk: Eat (Premium)

Last Thursday afternoon, my wife and I headed into Philadelphia for an appointment at the Mexican consulate, where we were granted temporary residency in the country, allowing us to stay there for longer than 180 days at a time. It was a rainy, dreary, and stressful day, and so we decided to relax after our appointment at a nearby restaurant that I had previously starred in Google Maps for a drink and a snack before making the 90-minute slog home in the dark.

It was 4 pm and so the place was mostly empty, and the happy hour menu was … interesting. It featured tinned fish, country pate, duck rillettes, liver mousse tart, and pickled vegetables, all of which are unusual and, I’d guess, not particularly popular with most people. But this menu was curiously perfect for me, seemed almost custom-made for me, as this is exactly the type of thing I like to eat. Indeed, I am infamous among my friends, who consider my love of things like sweetbreads, Andouillette (basically pork stuffed into pork intestines), steak tartare, and the like to be strange if not somewhat suspicious.

I don’t know how this happened. I grew up in what can only be described as a normal, middle-class American household, and we ate out very rarely, and only on special occasions. But I do have specific food memories, steps that got me to where I am today.

I recall being at a fancy restaurant, where we had been forced to dress up, and tasting the curiously pale butter on some bread. At home, my family followed the incredibly misguided food advice of the day, and we used easily spread, bright yellow margarine on our whole grain bread. But this was the real thing.

“What … what is this?” I asked my parents, astonished.

“That’s butter,” one of them answered, adding, “real butter.”

“Why don’t we have this at home?”

“Because it’s not good for you.”

“I don’t care. We should always have this.”

I had a similar experience a few years later when my family arrived at a rented cottage on Cape Cod---our vacations were, with rare exception, short, local, and drivable---and, famished, opened the refrigerator to discover just a single item inside: a big jar of curiously large pickles. I asked my parents whether it was OK to eat them---the only pickles I had experienced to that date were small, sweet pickles---and was given the OK, but with a warning.

“You’re not going to like them,” my mother told me. “They’re not like the pickles you’re used to.”

She was right about that latter bit, but I loved these large, dill pickles, with their mouth-puckering sourness, and I once again asked why we never had such a thing at home. By this point, I suspect my parents were counting down the days until I was ready to fly on my own. Regardless, I was headed down a path of steadily escalating food experien...