Interview Questions

The questions, from MamaT of Summamamas, are in bold. My (egads, lengthy) answers are in plain text:

1. Not for you something ordinary, is it? Bull-fighting????? How did you get started as a bull-fighting aficionado?

It all started when I was twelve years old. I was in Spain with my family and was somewhat curious about the whole thing, so I begged my parents to take me to one. My father had been to bullfights in Mexico City, but found them boring and my mother had never been but was willing to go once. I can’t say that I liked that first one, a novillada in Madrid. But I was certainly not horrified by the thing, rather I was more overwhelmed by everything. So I decided to learn more about it and turned to the book that is everyone’s first text in bullfighting, Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. From that Sunday afternoon in Madrid to the following Thursday I read the whole thing, including the entire glossary, the supplemental notes, the interviews with people who had seen the bullfight for the first time, etc. Cover to cover. The Whole Enchilada. I had copied all of the action and livestock photographs (and how I wish I could find those drawings).

So, it was that Thursday that we were driving very late into Valencia. We went into some roadside restaurant (I think calling it a restaurant dignifies it too much) for dinner. There was a bullfight on the television, and I was mesmerized. All of a sudden those motions all made sense. I could identify several lances and passes: the Veronica, the Mariposa, the Natural, the Derrechazo, and a few others. A week and a half later we were in Barcelona and were going to be in Barcelona on a Sunday. Somehow I convinced my parents to go to the bullfight again (the one in Madrid did not fulfill their worst expectations: my father was not bored silly and my mother was not as horrified as she was planning to be), this time in Barcelona’s rather Byzantine Plaza Monumental de Toros. The cartel featured Emilio Muñoz, Paco Ojeda, and Espartaco. I did not like Muñoz’s style, but loved watching Ojeda and Espartaco. I was just learning photography that year, so I was having fun trying my hand at bullfight photos. Ojeda and Espartaco both cut ears (Espartaco was especially good with his first bull, although his second bull broke a horn on the wall, and the president refused to change the bull, resulting in a volley of seat cushions and a nothing faena). That was it. I was hooked.

Living in California meant that Mexico has been fairly accessible, so I have been able to fuel my aficion by trips to Mexico City, Tijuana and Mexicali. In college I used to go to a taqueria that often had bullfights on the television, so I could somewhat keep up with the rising stars. I also read a lot more about it, talked to other aficionados, and have come to realize that Hemingway was wrong about much of the bullfight. I will not trash Hemingway, though, because I respect him greatly as a writer, and appreciate that he led many people into the aficion, most of whom (at least the ones who stuck with it) learned more later and grew beyond Death in the Afternoon. Also, if it weren’t for Hemingway, I would not have tasted percebes (goose barnacles), which are some of the best seafood I have ever had.

A number of years back I stumbled on a website that talked about the bloodless bullfights in California. I had to go, so Melanie and I drove off to Tracy one June afternoon and had a blast. The funny thing is that I am related to a lot of Portuguese folks in the Central Valley, including some involved in the bullfights, but I had never heard about this. I guess that they assumed that since I was not Portuguese myself, I would not be interested, and never told me. Anyway, during the summer I go almost every week, and have grown to appreciate the Portuguese style much more, and my Portuguese has gotten better (although I still follow my old rule of speaking Spanish with a French accent when I can’t remember the correct word – it usually works).

So that brings me to today, where I sit, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, because it is only a couple of months now to the start of the temporada! I will hopefully be going to Tijuana a couple of times this summer, because a diet of all velcro gets tedious.

2. I read somewhere that you can learn to like any food if you just make yourself eat it for 6 weeks. Do you think that's true? Can picky eaters become more adventurous eaters? How?

Yes. I do think that it is true, because I have systematically worked to eliminate all but one of my food prejudices. What I did was make a list of the foods that I did not like. Then for each one I did a lot of research to find the best recipe out there (quite possibly the reason I did not like something was that I had never had it properly cooked – turned out to be true in several cases as most people do not know how to cook vegetables), then I cooked it and that was its final chance. Guess what? Nothing failed. I regularly eat all of the vegetables from the list.

I would do this approach rather than the force yourself to eat it for 6 weeks, unless you have the discipline to cook it differently, to really get to know it, then the 6 weeks rule might be ideal, although if you are doing this correctly it was probably the first time that really did it, the next times were just to reinforce. In a way I do this, because once I decide that something is not of the devil, then I want to explore it and really get to know it.

I might warn you that it is a lot of fun and potentially expensive to get into the exploration of flavors. Once you have gotten into Brussels sprouts, cardoni, radicchio, cauliflower, and so on, the next thing you know you will be hunting for unusual wines, scotches, tobacco, grappe, mescal, and so forth. Of course most folks, when they are trying out their new-found abilities to explore flavors, go through a phase where they are trying all sorts of things (these are the ones who go to a different ethnic market every week, going to scotch tastings, smoking European cigarettes (different brand each time), basically charting a part of their brain that was underutilized). Then you settle down. For one thing, you start to explore a subtler level of nuance in flavors. One day you taste an extra virgin olive oil that was once just “fruity.” But this time something is different. Sure you still get the obvious: green apples, grass, but you start to notice something that you realize was there all along. You have isolated yet another thing in the complex mix of aromas.

Then it happens. You go to taste some junk food item you used to love. One bite is a homecoming, but the second bite tastes, well, fake, one-dimensional, with a nasty aftertaste. Not all junk food is like this. As I have expanded my food universe I have actually gotten to like Cheetos more than I did before (even though I worked at a lab that designed products for the company). It just goes to show that there is craftsmanship in making junkfood, too.

Now, this brings us to my last food prejudice. I think that there are some foods that had such an effect on us that their aroma etches itself into our brains as “toxic,” and there may be no way of undoing that. I had a childhood allergy to egg white. Of course egg white is not a very aromatic ingredient, so my brain identified the yolk as the toxic smell. I ate a meringue cookie when I was about ten and had no ill effects, so I have been eating meringue and other egg white preparations since then. Allergy gone. But the smallest whiff of a hard cooked egg is enough to make me feel queasy. I have been working up the egg dish family, going to dishes that have less and less other stuff in them. So far I am able to do souffle, Spanish tortilla, fritatta, quiche, and will probably have omelet down by the end of the year. I actually ate hard cooked eggs, when they showed up (unexpectedly – a move that would have cost the restaurant a star and a half if I were reviewing it, you don’t lob secret ingredient bombs that are that big) in a spinach and gruyere gratin. The smell of the gruyere completely overpowered the sulfur death smell, so I was able to eat the bits of egg and to enjoy the dish. After omelet I might try something like that again.

3. What's the funniest thing you can remember your sweet Amália saying/doing?

She was looking at a picture of a pasture with a lot of baby horses. She said, “that’s a lot of foalage!”

4. What is your all-time favorite country-western song, and why?

That is really hard, because there are so many good ones. Probably “King of the Road,” because it has a fantastic melody and captures a certain mood. But then there is “Mama Tried”, not to mention “Streets of Bakersfield” and “What Made Milwaukee Famous (Made a Loser Out of Me),” even though that is a bluegrass song (but could work as a c and w number). Then there’s “Ring of Fire” and “Delia” and “I Walk the Line” and a host of other great Johnny Cash tunes.

Recently we have been listening to a lot of Waylon, and I have been finding myself more and more drawn to the pedal steel (something that I have always liked, but it really sounds good these days). Buck and Merle are still at the top of my list, and it is not just out of Californian loyalty.

5. What is your all-time favorite book, and why?

You know, the other four questions, I got done quickly. This one I am still hesitant to answer, because I just don’t know. So, I am going to say, for now: The River Why by David James Duncan. The writing is rock-solid. He creates preposterous, yet somehow believable characters and makes them grow. It is also centered on fishing, which wins it points in my book.

Runners up:

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
At Play in the Fields of the Lordby Peter Matthiessen
The Little World of Don Camillo By (Antonio?) Guaraschi
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Oh yeah, I think I am supposed to ask for interview subjects, so if you are interested, comment or email me at EKeilholtz [at] aol [period] com, and I will come up with five questions.

Posted by erik at February 25, 2005 11:41 PM | TrackBack