Dinner, though they called it brunch, had just finished. It had been a splendid one. A young Spaniard from Barcelona, a scientist who was doing research on the cellular structure of mammary glands, had cooked his own personal version of paella. Paella is a Catalan word originally meaning "pan," since it's cooked in a special, large, shallow, circular pan used almost exclusively for this dish. In case you weren't quite sure, paella (pronounced pah-A-yuh) is a saffron flavored rice dish covered with rich-tasting pieces of shrimp and crayfish still in the skin, mussels and clams still in their shells, pieces of chicken, various vegetables and, if you like meat, quarter-inch thick slices of chorizo, a very tasty, garlic-flavored Spanish sausage with a diameter about the size of a quarter.
The kitchen aromas had been magnificent, so much so that I, in a kind of broken English made in an attempt to harmonize with the Spanish flavor of his speech, commented that the smell alone was sufficient to satisfy one's hunger. He smiled and replied, "Yes, the smell is the best part; that, and how it looks! Then, if you feel in the mood for eating... well, you can do that too!" That one sentence made me recognize that this fellow was going to create for the world something very unique, whatever it was he did. The person himself, was already so.
Our host, a lovely German lady named Susanne, photographed the Paella along every step of the way, the last being the satisfied looks on our faces. On thinking it over, the dazzling, casual elegance with which she presented the entire dinner was her way of expressing the complexity and refinement of her own soul. Rather than words, she uses shapes and colors, tastes and aromas, light and shadow, translucence and opacity, bluntness and nuance and texture and pattern to talk about the marvels existing within this strange and awesome world. These make up the robust vocabulary of her subtle speech. The actual words she speaks are very basic. She leaves all the nuances to her physical arrangements and the vital spirit of the friends she chooses to be with. Even her sweet, old dog, Bacca, has glistening eyes that tell you fascinating stories gathered over generations of genetic intrigue, whimsy, mischief, misfortune, and endurance.
The brunch started with an intricate yet simple, very fresh, delicate yet hardy salad of seven or eight types of leafy greens, each with its own uniquely aesthetic shape, creating a blending of subtle tastes that you might miss if you didn't pay close heed to the surprised but delighted messages clamoring for attention from your taste-buds. The lettuces were lightly sprinkled with the mildest vinaigrette, just enough to raise their flavors half a notch. Long, thin, crispy carrot slices complimented their color. The paella was decorated with similar-shaped, translucent red-pepper slices radiating out from the center of the large, completely circular pan like lines from a starburst. Most of the guests by-passed the peppers, thinking them to be mere decoration but I ate mine and found them to be quite delicious.
Three or four extremely long stemmed glasses held stubby, pale-peach colored, boat-shaped, lighted candles whose bottoms rested roughly but comfortably in the width of the inverted conical shape of their elegant, elevated containers that varied in height none less than a good foot high. The light they emitted gave a quiet magic to the entire table. The whole effect made me think of egrets standing on one leg with patient stillness at the edge of a shallow bay. We all praised Jordi for his delicious paella and to our surprise, he honestly replied that it was the first time that he had made it, at least in such an extremely wide pan, and that he wasn't as satisfied with his creation as he had hoped to be. I suppose the rice was a bit mushy, and Jordi said the strange white beans that occasionally appeared were undercooked, but who would care with such a fabulous meal?
The guests are a mixed bag; Scott, a young psychotherapist, and I are the only Americans present but he has the look of a an Eighteenth Century Dutchman with his near shoulder-length hair, and my Welsh-Irish heritage seems to balance the teeter-totter with the two Azerbaijanis, Sabina and Dmitriy while the two Germans, Katrina and Susanne look across from David, the lone East-Indian, and of course our chef, Jordi, the Catalonian who, as we move onward toward Turkish coffee and the gorgeous butterfly-shaped flan dessert accompanied by a tiny but potent glass of prune brandy, winds up spending most of his delicious time sitting in Katrina's lap.
Everyone likes Chewbacca, Susanne's charming old, black and tan sausage of a dog named after the co-pilot in "Star Wars." She's so polite that she's allowed to come to the dinner table gently hoping for a scrap or a nibble of something. She gives you a look that says, "I'll eat absolutely anything you slip me: lettuce, carrots, whatever. It doesn't matter what it is."
"Susanne," says I, getting Bacca's message, "Bacca eats carrots doesn't she?" "Of course," replies Susanne, tossing her dog a large, round, foot-long carrot with that funny looking, little hair-thing on its very tip. "Snap! Crunch, crunch, crunch," goes Bacca and, just like that, the carrot is lost from sight. One of the Azerbaijanis remarks that that's probably what gives the old dog her shining eyes. Katrina breaks out laughing; "Haven't you heard the story of how we Germans were tricked with carrots by the British during The Second World War?" None of us has heard it so we ask her to go on.
"Well," she replies rather hesitantly, carefully looking sideways to see if she can get Susanne's approval to go on, "It's really rather hilarious! Susanne, is it O.K. to tell the story?" Susanne looks up, mystified. " I don't know the story myself. It's about carrots? No harm in that. Let's hear it." It turns out later that Susanne, for our benefit, is playing totally dumb but in reality she knows the story quite well and as you will see, has a rather interesting anecdote to add to it.
To make sure that all of us are listening, Katrina's eyes sweep around the room. The afternoon sun, gleaming through all the crystalware, gives a mischievous glint to her lovely eyes, and her soft, alabaster skin glows with the radiance of a Greek sibyl about to proclaim the fate of the seeker's kingdom. She starts the story.
As I said before, it's a Second World War story; I wasn't born yet, but I heard it from my usually taciturn, old uncle who had been a colonel in the German Air Force. I had to coax it out of him, he didn't think it was funny at all, in fact he got rather cross with me when I started rolling around on the carpet laughing so hysterically that I could hardly see. It took months of excruciating politeness on my part before he'd even talk to me again. Even now, whenever I think of him I have to bite down hard on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from giggling. Anyway, here's what he told me.
"The British pilots were shooting down an exceptionally large number of German warplanes during night time raids. The German Air Command was at a loss as to how such pinpoint accuracy could take place during the darkness of the night. 'How could those damned Brits see so well in the dark? They must have a secret weapon for night fighting!' And of course, they were right. The British had invented infra-red glass goggles, the same kind of strange contraption that you see worn over the head of a policeman in a thriller movie with his gun stretched out in both hands, looking for a killer hiding in a dark basement.
"But at that time, infra-red was a military secret. The British knew we Germans would catch on sooner or later but a, how-do-you-say-it? 'wild-ass' English army cook came up with a way to slow us down. If you could make Germans think that the sharpened eyesight came from the night pilots eating some kind of special food that explained their greatly improved vision, then we Germans might be distracted from finding out about the infra-red goggles. There was a school of thought, though some said it was nothing more than an old wives' tale, that eating carrots greatly improved your vision. If carrots, raw, boiled, fried, frickasied or whatever, were fed to all the British night pilots at every meal, German counter-spies were bound to find out about this and thus it would distract them and slow down their efforts to discover the real truth about the improved night vision. None but the highest command including of course, Winston Churchill himself, was allowed to know the truth about the carrots. Naturally MI5 couldn't take any chances so corporal Roland Hickey, the poor fellow who thought up the idea, was kept under special guard until right towards the end of the war when, by that time, the Third Reich finally found out how it had been duped. Hickey no longer uses carrots in his cooking.
"Now here's the really funny part; the Germans started switching their bombing raids from military targets such as munitions plants, seaports and airfields, and started bombing British carrot fields! Can you imagine? Bombing carrots? Actually, they were pretty successful at it and it pissed off a lot of farmers although the farmers just assumed that it was accidental, that it was just due to sloppy targeting. Well, so many carrot fields were bombed that the English started running out of carrots and that made it quite difficult to keep up the ruse. They were about to give up the ghost when good old quick-witted Winston, waggling his cigar in its characteristic little up and down motion, got on the radio and the newsreels and pleaded with the people of London to do their patriotic part by growing carrots in their backyards for the British night fliers.
"At that point, Hitler and Goring got so obsessed with the carrot program that they nearly stopped bombing military targets altogether and mainly concentrated on the bombing of London itself. Some people say they might have defeated the English if they had stuck to the logical military stuff rather than aiming for some poor bloke's backyard carrot patch.
"Even after the Germans found out the truth about infra-red, the carrot myth went on for years. My own mother forced carrots on me until I finally broke my promise to keep the secret. But, like Uncle Wilhelm, she didn't think it was funny either. Ah, the older generation, they're so stuffy!"
Then slowly, majestically, Katrina plucked one of the long strands of shaved carrot from the last remains of her now somewhat wilted salad and tossed it to Bacca. "Snap! Chew!"
And it was gone. Oh, those shinning eyes.
EPILOGUE
Now it was Susanne's turn to add her two cents to the story:
After we picked our giggling selves up from the floor and the laughing calmed down a bit, Susanne confessed that her father (horror of horrors!) had been inducted into an elite Nazi SS program and was assigned the challenging job of training a special vegetarian breed of dogs to dig up and ravenously devour carrots. The idea was that the dogs would be smuggled into England aboard U-boats and set loose upon British carrot patches. This one was Heinrich Himmler's brainchild and he defended it to the death.
The death, in this case, was the six hundred drowned dogs that never escaped the treacherous waters of the English channel when all three of the clandestine submarines that had been in the process of each transporting two hundred dogs to the innocent and vulnerable British shores were sunk by warplanes equipped only the week before with newly developed highly accurate sub-hunting devices.
"Now," Susanne went on, "there were only a small few of the trained dogs left and they were still quite young, call them 'seedlings' if you like, so the project was scrapped and the various trainers, my father being one of them, each took one home as a pet. I guess once something is bred into you it stays with your progeny. Bacca is the granddaughter of the dog my father took home with him.
"So now you know why Bacca loves to munch so much on carrots."
And tossing a whole batch of them to her lovely old dog, she softly sighed in her quiet, touching, mellow way, "That's it! Go get 'em! Do what you're bred for! Chew Bacca!"
© 2003___Muldoon Elder
Photographs by Susanne Kaspar