The Spaghetti Chronicles
“This is too great a night to go home. Let’s go to El Morocco and have some spaghetti.”
I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately.
I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been eating ten packs of Scooby-Doo fruit snacks an hour for the past six months, but after a business associate recently recalled the above Nixon quote to me I noticed that a distinct culinary theme had been developing in my life for the past few weeks. Since food is, after all, one of those odd things that are so monstrously ubiquitous in human life that we forget they exist—oxygen, the concept of doors, sleeping in darkness instead of light—I sat back at my kitchen table, put my thinking apron on, and pieced my memories together like pasta wrapped around a fork.
It started several weeks ago when my roommates, girlfriend, and I had the remarkable good fortune to see GoodFellas in theaters. GoodFellas, if you’re a human being with eyes and a brain, is Martin Scorsese’s brilliant 1990 mob flick about a couple of the good old boys raising hell in lawless 1970s New York while wearing comically gaudy suits and stolen watches. Like all the great mafia films, in between the violence, tough talk, and endless instances of Italians yelling at one another in fancy restaurants, there are several scenes where all the characters do is prepare, discuss, and eat the most delicious-looking food possible.
Pastas, soups, sauces, bread, sausages—it’s all there in loving detail, including extreme close-ups of characters slicing garlic by hand while others argue about how many onions to put in the sauce, which looks so red and tasty that by the time the movie ends you’re starving. I’m pretty sure I was licking my lips in the theater while my mouth watered at the food onscreen, but that may have just been Dr. Gonzo sitting in the back row munching on the Sour Patch Kids he smuggled into the theater.
Funny enough, GoodFellas is set during the Nixon presidency, and I find myself laughing at an admittedly improbable but undoubtedly spectacular confrontation between the President and the mobsters that takes the form of a spaghetti bake-off. Something tells me the bad guys (who are actually the good guys) would take that round with superior cooking skills, though Nixon’s FBI cronies would have their revenge years later by throwing the whole lot of gangsters in prison.
A week or two after we saw the movie, Kate made a pasta dinner that could have challenged the finest 70s New York Italian restaurants. Red sauce with caramelized onions and fried peppers, served over spaghetti with warm cheese bread on the side—getting hungry yet? While eating, I had a thought that shouldn’t have surprised me, but did anyway: food is to be enjoyed. Too often I forget this—since my overarching demeanor is one of an impatient child, I usually eat dinner standing up, finishing one dish while another heats in the microwave, all finished in less time than it typically takes me to tie my shoes. As Richard Nixon, Chief Food Critic for the Pentagon Papers, once declared, “Why waste an hour or two eating? I can eat in ten minutes.”
I’m eating an Oreo. Note the elite receding hairline performance.
But I slowed down to savor each bite of that pasta dish, marveling at how good it was. Did you know your tongue has 10,000 taste buds, which together can sense five distinct tastes? Eating Sour Patch Kids, for example, engages three of these: Sweet, Sour, and Shit That Has the Same Health Effects as Battery Acid. Seriously, they are terrible for you. One of those little blue or green or red or yellow things contains more calories than six slices of chocolate cake. Really? No. But it’s a lot. Nixon, the interim Chief Justice of the Vietnam War, also once told his aides, “I said, ‘Goddamn it, forget the law!’” This has nothing to do with Sour Patch Kids or battery acid, but I still think it’s interesting.
And continuing my recent string of food-related events, I was attempting to explain the incredible power of exponential growth to someone last week when I recalled the famous tale of the king’s rice. A poor villager, so the story goes, visited the king to beg for food for his starving town. The king, feeling magnanimous, offered to grant the villager any request if the villager could beat him at chess. The visitor won the game and made what the king believed to be an absurdly meager demand: place one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next, four on the next, and so on for all sixty-four squares, doubling the amount of rice each time.
The king commanded the villager’s request be granted. By the twentieth square, the king was in shock, as he owed his visitor over one million grains of rice, and by the fifth row the kingdom’s rice reserves were far overrun. If he had made it to the final square, the villager would have collected 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice, which would be a pile of rice larger than Mount Everest. (For the record, 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 Sour Patch Kids would be bigger than the Pacific Ocean and about as healthy.) The story ends with the king, an angry rice simp, ordering the villager executed for his impudence and the wager declared void. If you, the insightful, intelligent reader, are looking for a moral or brilliant and wise lesson from this—well, there isn’t one. I just think it’s a weird story and sort of relates to food (“theme” has never been my strong point as a writer). Nixon, who briefly served as Chief Housekeeper for the Watergate Hotel, never said anything regarding this particular fable (at least not publicly), but he did once remark, “We have all this power and aren’t using it. Now, what the Christ is the matter?”
Anyway, all of these things combined have led me to a recent re-evaluation of my approach to food. I’ve tried eating slower, enjoying different spices, and appreciating the variety of flavors that even simple dishes can provide. For example, I don’t (can’t) make anything more complicated than three ingredients. This means sandwiches (peanut butter, jelly, bread) are on the Chef Rhodes menu, as are my famous bean burritos (refried beans, cheese, tortillas), chicken alfredo (pasta, chicken, sauce), and cereal (Frosted Mini Wheats, milk), but things like chili, stir-fry, or anything they serve at Applebees is out of the question. Yet even my simplistic meals have taken on a new depth, and someday I might even graduate to things with four ingredients.
Who knows. Maybe one of these days I’ll visit the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and order a big plate of spaghetti, just to see what happens. I’d probably get kicked out, but as the man himself once said, “Just say this is a comedy of errors.”
P.S. Are Sour Patch Kids supposed to be human kids? Is consuming them actually cannibalistic? Is anyone talking about this? And while we’re at it with questions I want answered, when can we all admit that it’s time we go nocturnal and avoid sunlight like we’re supposed to? I want a work day that’s 9 to 5—pm to am. I’m sorry, folks, but if humans were meant to frolic in daytime then we would be immune to sunburns. Ever hear of moonburn? Me neither. Anyway, even if Sour Patch Kids are simply the children of some non-human species known to scientists as SourPatchus Sapienus, it still is unsettling to me that we eat the infants of said species rather than their adult counterparts.
