Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin

Author:Calvin Trillin [Trillin, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49387-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

9

British Boiled

“Don’t you miss England?” Alice, the family intellectual and crypto-travel-agent, asked me one winter. “If we flew from Halifax, we’d have all the money we saved by not flying all the way from New York, so we’d have money left over.”

“I suppose we could use the surplus to endow a chair of economics somewhere,” I said.

It was rather late in the year for Alice to be making summer travel plans. Usually, she likes to have them in the ground by the autumnal equinox. I knew she was itching to go somewhere. A few years before, a bizarre plan we had concocted for a cut-rate trip to China had fallen through—it entailed joining an organization in Kansas City that I remember as the Cricket Camera Club—and not taking a trip to China is, according to Alice’s Law of Compensatory Cash Flow, the equivalent of a small killing in the New York State Lottery.

I don’t mean that Alice is the only one in our family who likes to travel. I go along cheerfully, even though I spend so much of my time in hotels during the year on business that I can sometimes feel like Eloise all grown up. When I can’t seem to find the key to my own house, it occasionally occurs to me that I may have absent-mindedly dropped it into a mailbox, postage presumably guaranteed by Abigail and Sarah.

“England is not a bad idea,” I said to Alice. “The potato latkes are dynamite.”

“Is that what comes to your mind when you think about England?” Alice asked.

The potato latkes were definitely in my mind. I could see myself on Wentworth Street in the East End of London. It was Sunday morning. We had just come from picking our way through Cheshire Street, where an acquisitive tourist can obtain such national treasures as a pair of fatigues from the Suez campaign. I was standing at the counter of a store called M. Marks, ordering a hot, thick potato pancake that is served on a piece of waxed paper and is eaten while standing up—a method that gives the eater the additional pleasure of being able to jump up and down occasionally in delight.

“That’s amazing,” Alice said.

“You’re right,” I said. It was amazing. England’s reputation for such food is so low that a foreign correspondent of our acquaintance who was posted to London some years later—a ferocious eater I’ll call Charlie Plum—arranged to have shipped from the United States among his belonging not just four bottles of Arthur Bryant’s barbecue sauce and several jars of crunchy peanut butter but also an entire case of kosher dills. Plum is an awesomely energetic ferreter-out of facts, but how would anybody know that right there among people who don’t even know how to spell bagel—they spell it beigel, which, oddly enough, is the way they pronounce it—a wayfarer can purchase the single best stand-up potato latke in the English-speaking world.

“When most people think of England, they think of the changing of the guard

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