More than one person has been encouraging me to write my memoirs, tired as they probably are of hearing my oft-repeated stories. My mother died recently and while that may seem irrelevant, it would have been impossible to write the memoirs while she was still alive. She was simply too sensitive. I would have shocked her with my various exploits. While she was on her death bed I wanted to get a reaction out of her so I talked about once going to an opium den in Pakistan. That peeked her interest and got her head to move.
The whole idea intimidates me because I’ve never written anything of any length that wasn’t a cookbook. A cookbook’s text is interrupted with recipes and that makes the writing easier. Other questions pose themselves. Exactly how frank and honest should I be? Too honest and the book is liable to read like smut (not necessarily a bad thing but something I’d want to learn to manage) and not honest enough and the book would be boring and much abridged.
There’s plenty to talk about including my trip around the world in the 1970s. In those days it was possible to go all the way from eastern India (Calcutta) to Paris by land which is exactly what I did. I won’t go into details here because that’s what the memoirs are for but a few of the high points were crossing the Kyber pass, almost getting knifed in Burma, eating raw fish for the first time in Japan (this was before they even had Japanese restaurants in the United States except perhaps in New York) and living on a houseboat in Kashmir.
While the trip is the source of lots of stories, its real impact was that it introduced me to France. I had never been to Europe before (I arrived in Europe by bus, crossing the Bosporus) and was completely amazed at how the French ate, drank, smoked, and talked. I had always had an interest in food and wine but never thought about pursuing a career in food until I went to France. My taste of a Bresse chicken simmered in cream with tarragon was like the first listen of the Bach cello suites. I simply had to know how they did it. So began the beginning of the long saga of learning about cooking which I will no doubt tell, at least in parts, one of these days.