Kafisatz

Coffee addiction quenched for now, I am able to give due attention to short-crust K that balances on the spoon next to my hand. Pondering the remnants of foam that are encrusted on the metal, my mind retastes memories that I have recently chowed down in the past few months.
I have been travelling – capturing pictures of foreign lands and people, deleting whole roles of pictures from foreign lands and peoples, following people across countries, across seas, ravenously searching for an ‘authentic’ paella or confit’d Canard. Eating so much white bread in Spain that it was coming out of my ears and, being spectacularly and unexpectedly taken out to dinner by two Finnish business-partners in Zurich.
I have munched on perfectly juicy, slightly bloody Wild Deer and had tar-tare of Blue-Fin Tuna topped with Wasabi Mousse roll around my mouth. I have been baptised (or could have been) in a bucket of hostel-made Sangria in Barcelona and swamped my taste-buds with Tinto-Verano (a brick of red 0.60 euro Spanish wine with Coke) in Bilbao.
When comfort has been needed I have spread an essential but luscious amount of butter on Zopf and swathed that in turn with Nutella (Meret you are right, the combination just seems to work). While travelling and sleeping in a car in the south of Spain we barricaded ourselves against the wind with Bunsen-burner-cooked porridge and honey-sweetened Chai.
Oh that places I have been! They have been etched into my body via my stomach and tastebuds. The people to have been connected to my soul via the food we have shared and talked about. I can’t help it. If I can sit down with a stranger and talk food for a good half an hour, all the while making them and myself salivate, they will inevitably become a friend. In Paris, Sylvie offered up basins of Cous-cous and tagine that without a doubt made anything I ate (yes the touristy places) in Marocco look and taste like a toilet-turd. With Claudia I dreamt about Almond croissants and duck done in all ways . In Nice I bonded with someone dear to my heart by handpicking Tortellini. In Edinburgh my Haggis-cherry was plucked and delighted, and in Barcelona I drooled over pistachio ice-creams and olives with new-found friends.

Madame Fromage

One of the first people I met in Switzerland, who I was thoroughly entertained by, was a shop owner who I would like to call Madame Fromage. Tall with a Parisienne swan-long neck, she tossed around her arms as she chatted away faster than a TGV train racing between Paris and Zurich. Eine Schauspielerin (an actress) by nature, her shop named Pain et Fromage (Bread and Cheese) was not a place where you could duck-in and out of to purchase last minute ingredients.

Luckily, I was not in a rush. Having just landed in Zurich, I had all the time in the world, or at least four hours, to wonder the streets near my temporary home. I walked into her shop wanting to sniff out her wares, and was granted much more than olfactory experience. Her sales face was like a theatrical mask; she wore bright red lipstick, 100-strokes of mascara and had breasts perked up to her chin. With these she flirted and charmed -or at least tried to- both her male and female customers. However, there is only so much Rose Syrup that you can smell and sample before you realise once again that the queue has not moved; you look up and there she is, languorously draped across the counter poetically espousing the creaminess of Sheep-milk cheese. She is a French version of the domestic goddess Nigella Lawson, minus the curves. And like the majority of French women, it looks like she has never eaten anything other than celerey.

After promising to give the customer a special tour of the shop in her afterhours, suddenly the eyes, lips, boobs and cheese-stroking fingers of Madame Fromage are focused on me. She is physically striking with an accent as thick as bricks and her cheese selection is delectable partly because it is native solely to France. Proud and patriotic,the innocent question of whether the cheese is a product from the Swiss Jura is met with an indignant galluf! Of course it is not!

France, however, is not completely perfect in her mind either and she describes the Côte d'Azur as touristy and kitsch, whilst wearing sequin-pocked skyscraper heels at ten am in the morning.