"On your visit to Minnesota, you will sooner or later come face to face with Minnesota's most popular native food, hotdish. ... A traditional main course, hotdish is cooked and served hot in a single baking dish and commonly appears at family reunions and church suppers. Hotdish is constructed on a base of canned cream of mushroom soup and canned vegetables. The other ingredients are as varied as the Minnesota landscape. If you sit down to something that doesn't look like anything you've ever seen before, it's probably hotdish. ... Here are eight hotdishes taken at random:

Spaghetti-Tuna Hotdish
Garbanzo Bango Hotdish
Velveeta-Hamburger Hotdish
Ketchup Surprise Hotdish
Back of the Refrigerator Hotdish
Doggone Good Hotdish
Turkey Wiener Doohah Hotdish
Organ Meat-Cashew Hotdish

"The Minnesota Salad is an appetizing complement to any hotdish and is composed of Jell-O in any flavor, miniature colored marshmallows, canned fruit cocktail, and a generous dollop of Cool Whip on top. ... Don't make the mistake of calling the Minnesota salad dessert or saving it until the end of the meal. The Minnesota tossed salad consists of a few leaves of iceberg lettuce floating on a sea of french dressing.

"Lunch can also occur at other odd times of the day. It is then called 'a little lunch.' ... Little has no more to do with size and variety in the phrase 'a little lunch' than it does when you say 'I had a little trouble' after the parking brake fails on your car and it rolls through the wall into the No Smoking section of Perkins Family Restaurant. Whenever two or three are gathered together, a little lunch will be forthcoming: at 4-H, poker games, Lutheran Circle, piano recitals, town councils, funerals, weddings. The little lunch is always larger than the mid-morning and mid-afternoon lunch, with a better selection of bars and meat sandwiches."

"Abrupt and eager acceptance of any offer is a common mistake made by Minnesota's visitors. ... We never accept until the third offer and then reluctantly."

"Most of our vices are relatively harmless to other people, two- or four-legged -- that is, I doubt that I taint more than my own liver when I happily, indeed voluptuously, tweak open a cellophane packet of salt-encrusted, preservatives-loaded, additives-flavored, crispy-crunchy, and machine-made potato chips. (They used to be called Saratoga chips, I think.) It seems logical, or at least convenient in a somewhat jesuitical way, that I have earned this latter-day respite from my early dedication to the pursuit of The Perfect. I have tasted the best, I argue, and therefore am justified in solacing my last years with no matter how unreasonable facsimiles, since the best is unattainable. It is unattainable here and now, anyway. Occasionally, and always alone, I put some substitute for the Perfect Potato Chip in a little wooden bowl (this is all somewhat dubious and fetishistic from a Freudian or perhaps Jungian or even est-ian point of view) and eat it before lunch. (Never dinner or supper.) The ersatz potato chips are not good."

"When Proust recollected the precise taste sensation of the little scalloped madeleine cakes served at tea by his aunt, it led him into his monumental remembrance of things past. When I recollect the taste sensations of my childhood, they lead me to more cakes, more tastes: the great razor clams, the succulent Dungeness crab, the salmon, crawfish, mussels and trout of the Oregon coast; the black bottom pie served in a famous Portland restaurant; the Welsh rabbit of our Chinese cook, the white asparagus my mother canned, and the array of good dishes prepared by the two of them in that most memorable of kitchens. The Kitchen, reasonably enough, was the scene of my first gastronomic adventure. I was on all fours. I crawled into the vegetable bin, settled on a giant onion and ate it, skin and all.

"One of my memories of this period is the sight of my mother ... cooking dozens of freshly opened oysters in butter by the pound. There were two big iron skillets on the fire. The oysters were floured, dipped in egg and cracker crumbs and cooked quickly in deep butter till they were golden on both sides. ... A squeeze of lemon and some freshly ground pepper were all they needed, except for a garnish of bacon and crisp, buttered toast. ... Sometimes after an early morning session of clamming we had a breakfast of fried clams, fresh from the sands. ... Supper on the beach changed with the seasons. We often had salmon grilled over the coals of the fire and brushed with bacon fat or butter. ... For a beach luncheon, we frequently had sensational hamburgers of beef, onion, herbs, garlic and salt and pepper, which Mother formed into thickish cakes and cooked on a griddle instead of broiling over the open fire. ... She would also provide pickled salmon, or cold ham, salad, relishes and pickles and very often a pan of her baked beans boiled till tender with onion and bay leaf and then baked with salt pork, mustard and seasonings, with the addition of meat broth ... or sausage ... . Mother taught me to detest beans done with molasses or brown sugar. I remember once going to a picnic given by other people where canned beans of a famous make, thus sweetened, were served. I thought they were very chic and told my mother her beans were old-fashioned. At the next picnic of ours, Mother brought a huge mess of canned beans and insisted that I eat them instead of hers. I never complained again ... .

"These days on the Oregon shore were among the most memorable in my life. I can remember several occasions when an equinoctial storm came up suddenly, catching us still on the beach. I reveled in being out in the driving rain and high winds and in watching the surf go wild. It was equally exciting to scurry home, draw the shutters and sup on good food while listening to the wind and the beating rain."

"I spent two weeks at the Rancho La Puerta health spa ... in order to quit smoking ... . Almost incidentally I lost seventeen pounds in two weeks. ... The menu was total vegetarian with fish twice a week. ... At the Rancho one day at lunch I told some ... ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a chateau up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch. The land, owned by a friend, doubled as a horse farm and a vicious brood mare had tried to bite me, an act I rewarded with a stone sharply thrown against her ass. Two old men I hadn't seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs of a jug of red wine. ... A simple snack but indescribably delicious. I waited only a moment for the ladies' reaction. CHEESE, two of them hissed, CHEESE, as if I puked on their sprouts, and WINE! The upshot was that cheese was loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar.

"At dawn the next morning I decided to skip human life and spend the day in the mountains. ... I took my binoculars, an orange, a hard-boiled egg, and a one-once bottle of Tabasco for the egg. ... Four hours into the mountains I ate the egg and the orange with relish. ... Then out out of the chaparral appeared a tough, ragged-looking Mexican who asked me if I had anything to eat. I said no, wishing I had saved the orange. He smiled, bowed, and continued ... presumably toward the United States and the pursuit of happiness, including something to eat.

"I remembered, in my wandering starving artist years in the late 1950's, spending subway fare for a thirty-five-cent Italian-sausage sandwich and walking seventy blocks to work the next morning, eating free leftovers given to me by Babe and Louis at the Kettle of Fish bar, buying twenty-five-cent onion sandwiches on rye bread at McSorley's. I had wonderful meals working as a poetic busboy at the Prince Brothers Spaghetti House in Boston; I often devoured two fried eggs after Storyville, the best jazz club ever, closed at dawn. In the San Francisco area there were two-for-a-nickel oranges, the oddly delicious macaroni salad at the Coexistence Bagel Shop for a quarter, the splurge of an enormous fifty-cent bowl of pork and noodles in Chinatown. And let's not forget the desperation of eating ten-cent cafeteria bread and ketchup in Salt Lake City or the grapefruit given me by an old woman in the roadside dust near Fallon, Nevada."

"Mrs Jones lived in a granny flat next to her daughter's house on Collins Green. ... Mrs Jones was dying to the ticking of a grandfather clock. Her daughter made cake. Lemon cake, date cake, chocolate cake, aniseed cake, cherry cake, walnut cake, round cake, square cake, plain cake, fancy cake. Best of all she made coffee cake, thick, light sponge the colour of milky coffee, with nubbly bits of walnut in and two thick layers of walnut frosting. I would love to say I went to see old Mrs J every week to cheer up a lonely old lady, but I cannot. I went for the cake.

"One Tuesday visit had included two slices of particularly wonderful coffee cake, and I figured there would still be some left the following day. I knocked at the door but it was already open. I called her name, then peered inside. A neat hallway, a kitchen sink, clearly visible, full of cake tins and mixing bowls. Suddenly something hit me from behind and I fell forward on to my hands and knees. Before I could call out a single word two huge paws slipped around my shoulders, two hind leg tucked behind mine, and the smooth chest of Miss Jones's pet Alsatian pushed down on my back. I froze, waiting for his teeth to sink into my neck. Instead, I just felt something cold and wet against the top of my bare leg.

"The humping -- frantic, breathy, his wet tongue lolloping against my ear -- seemed to last for ever. Part of me wanted Miss Jones to come round the corner and rescue me, but another part didn't. I would rather no one ... witnessed a sex-starved Alsatian pumping away at me like a sailor on leave. ... I loved that cake dearly, as I do to this day, but never again did I visit that dear old lady or eat coffee and walnut cake to the sound of a ticking grandfather clock."

"The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. ... In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

"The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter's hours on the road.

"If ... the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference to the size of the total. ... The reference room where I pursued my own first earnest researches as a feeder without the crippling handicap of affluence was the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts ... in 1926-27. I was a student, in a highly generalized way, at the Sorbonne ... . A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost. ... A drastically poor man, naturally, has even less chance than a drastically rich one to educate himself gastronomically. For him eating becomes merely a matter of subsistence; he can exercise no choice. The chief attraction of the cheapest student restaurants in my time was advertised on their largest placards: 'Pain a Discretion' ('All the Bread You Want'). They did not graduate discriminating eaters. During that invaluable year, I met a keen observer who gave me a tip: 'If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that it is good. Those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth.' ... Failing the sure indications cited above, a good augury is the presence of French newspapermen."

"Food is my great extravagance. I really spoil myself, but then I try to compensate by scrupulously saving all of my food leftovers and bringing them into the office or leaving them in the street and recycling them there. My conscience won't let me throw anything out, even when I don't want it for myself. ... The leftovers usually turn out to be meat because I'll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it's done I'll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place -- bread and jam. I'm only kidding myself when I go through the motions of cooking protein: all I ever want is sugar. ... People expect you to eat protein and you do so they won't talk. (If you decided to be stubborn and ordered the cookie, you'd wind up having to talk about why you want it and your philosophy of eating a cookie for dinner. And that would be too much trouble, so you order lamb and forget about what you really want.)

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a tastier Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

"And New York restaurants now have a new thing -- they don't sell their food, they sell their atmosphere. They say, 'How dare you say we don't have good food, when we never said we had good food. We have good atmosphere.' They caught on that what people really care about is changing their atmosphere for a couple of hours. ... My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain, American lunchroom or even the good plain American lunchcounter. The old-style Schrafft's and the old-style Chock Full O' Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I'm truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing. No matter what changes or how fast, the one thing we all always need is real good food so we can know what the changes are and how fast they're coming. Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you, 'An orange what?' I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDYMATS -- 'The Restaurant for the Lonely Person.' You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.

"When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: ... pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; ... neighborhood grocery stores; ... the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; ... the donuts, pretzels, gum and grape soda in the subways; ... the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; ... cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; ... fruit stands in all the different seasons -- strawberry, watermelon, plum, peach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple -- and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings."

"I was powerful lazy and comfortable -- didn't want to get up and cook breakfast. ... Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float them off because they always go right to the drowned carcass and stop there. ... A big double loaf come along, and I most got it, with a long stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out further. ... . But by-and-by along comes another one, and this time I won. I took out the plug and shook out the little bit of quicksilver, and set my teeth in. It was 'baker's bread' -- what the quality eat -- none of your low-down corn-pone.

"Mornings, before daylight, I slipped into corn fields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn't borrow them anymore ... . So we talked it over ... trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But towards daylight we ... concluded to drop crabapples and p'simmons. ... I was glad the way it come out, too, because crabapples ain't ever good, and the p'simmons wouldn't be ripe for two or three months yet.

"I hadn't had a bite to eat since yesterday; so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage, and greens -- there ain't nothing in the world so good, when it's cooked right -- and whilst I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time. ... Once there was a thick fog ... . A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing ... but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I says, 'No, spirits wouldn't say, 'dern the dern fog.' ... It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.

"The hunk of butter, big as a person's fist, was where I had left it, so I took up the slab of corn-pone with it on ... but here comes Aunt Sally with a candle, and I clapped the truck in my hat, and clapped my hat on my head, and the next second she says: 'You been down cellar?' ... I was that scared; and the place getting hotter and hotter, and the butter beginning to melt and run down my neck and behind my ears ... and a streak of butter come a trickling down my forehead, and Aunt Sally she see it, and turns white as a sheet, and says: 'For the land's sake, what is the matter with the child! -- he's got the brain fever as shore as you're born, and they're oozing out!'

"Imagine a New York City apartment at six in the morning. ... Coffee is bubbling in an electric percolator. On the table is a basket of rye bread, an entire coffee cake, a few cheeses, a platter of cold cuts. My mother has been making breakfast -- a major meal in our house ... . Right now she is the only one awake, but she is getting impatient for the day to begin ... she barges into the bedroom and shakes my father awake. 'Darling,' she says, 'I need you. Get up and come into the kitchen.' ... He leans against the sink, holding on to it a little, and obediently opens his mouth when my mother says, 'Try this.'

"Later, when he told the story, he attempted to convey the awfulness of what she had given him. The first time he said that it tasted like cat toes and rotted barley, but over the years the description got better. Two years later it had turned into pigs' snouts and mud and five years later he had refined the flavor into a mixture of antique anchovies and moldy chocolate. Whatever it tasted like, he said it was the worst thing he had ever had in his mouth, so terrible that it was impossible to swallow, so terrible that he leaned over and spit it into the sink and then grabbed the coffeepot, put the spout in his mouth, and tried to eradicate the flavor. My mother stood there watching all this. When my father finally put the coffeepot down she smiled and said, 'Just as I thought. Spoiled!'

"For the longest time I thought I had made this story up. But my brother insists that my father told it often, and with a certain amount of pride. As far as I know, my mother was never embarrassed by the telling, never even knew that she should have been. It was just the way she was. Which was taste-blind and unafraid of rot. 'Oh, it's just a little mold,' I can remember her saying on the many occasions she scraped the fuzzy blue stuff off some concoction before serving what was left for dinner. ... My parents entertained a great deal, and before I was ten I had appointed myself guardian of the guests. My mission was to keep Mom from killing anybody who came to dinner."

"It was the winter of eighth grade, and I thought that I was on the cusp of being discovered by boys. ... I couldn't even imagine how a conversation with a boy might proceed. When I pictured my ideal encounter, it consisted of an initial dreamy gaze, filled with a silent understanding of mutual attraction, which led immediately to making out. ... The eighth grade ski trip was coed. The idea of getting onto a coed bus without a pre-established seating partner was inconceivable, so Lucy and I signed up together, and promised to sit next to each other. I brought a large bag of conversation hearts as our bus snack. ... Lucy kept pace with me, and by the time we had gotten to the New Jersey Turnpike, the bag was empty. ... In an almost too-perfect delivery, halfway through the sentence, 'I don't feel well,' she vomited between her knees, onto the floor of the bus. ... So much for being noticed by the boy creatures.

"A person can only take so many conversation hearts. After the third full bag of the season ... they start to taste sickeningly chalky. But they have charm. Their palette is as tied to spring as candy corn's is to autumn. They are hopeful and convincing. When you are alone, you can use them like a Magic Eight Ball, thinking, If the next one says 'true love,' I'm set for the year. I am not alone in my consumption of conversation hearts. They've been around (originally as Motto Hearts) since 1866. According to Necco (the New England Confectionery Company), in the Valentine's season they manufacture more than eight billion hearts, which sell out in the space of six weeks. Once, walking in Cambridge, I stopped in the middle of the street, 'Necco is nearby,' I announced, sniffing the air. Tracing the scent, my friend and I turned the corner, and there was the factory. Every year I consumed more than my share of the eight billion, but this year I wanted a change.

"No boy had ever given me conversation hearts, or anything else for that matter, for Valentine's Day. Ever since the eighth-grade ski trip, conversation hearts were a reminder of the absence of romance, the admirers who never emerged, the flirty conversations that never happened. Now I finally had Neal, a flesh-and-blood boyfriend, and I wanted my Valentine's Day, dammit."