Infected with the new crown, after seven or eight days, the self-test has been "negative", but there is still no sense of smell and taste at all, and it took at least ten days to recover. A world without smell and taste, like a world of plastic, comes to life, yet fake. In the evening, the smell of other people's kitchens began to slowly flow in the kitchen, and the recent new neighbors were probably young people, who had to cook hot pot at every turn, and the spicy taste drifted into the houses in the building in the complex ventilation system, and they understood this kindness, but they didn't like the smoke at home. I could only turn the range hood to the maximum, open the window of the room, and light a few sticks of incense. Not pleasant, just to get rid of the smell. However, this problem can no longer bother me lately. I couldn't smell the kitchen at all. I just felt that at this moment, on the stove of the neighbor's house, frying and frying, they used to come to "ventilate the message", but suddenly "abruptly stopped". I was terrified. What exactly are the neighbors eating? I stood in the kitchen, near the range hood, breathing deeply, accompanied by a few weak coughs, never as eager as I was at this time, concerned about the food of my neighbors to prove that my sense of smell was normal.
- I really can't smell anything. Why can't you smell the oil smoke, this sense is still a "good thing", some beautiful smells, can only be made up by association. For example, in the winter, I would buy daffodil cut flowers every week, tie them in a bunch with fine hemp rope, put them in a white antique deep bowl, and open them in a few days, single-petaled, white flowers and yellow hearts, and the smell of daffodils is strong, like white waves crashing on the shore. But I can't smell it either. Even I realized a long time later that daffodils are flowers with a strong fragrance, but in my moment, I can't perceive it. In addition, flowers like hyacinths, and even good agarwood, after being lit, the shadows floating in the room, these rely on previous experience, in order to make the affairs in front of you smudge a little smell layer.
Imagine this, they actually have a taste.
Those delicate, if absent, pleasant, soft and uplifting smells, like the slight bitterness and refreshing of orange blossom essential oil in Darjeeling tea; The coffee is ready, the mellow taste of cinnamon powder, thick, very solid warmth; After the old white tea is boiled, it should give off a rich aroma, sometimes with a citrus-like floral smell. All of this now requires additional brain supplements. The picture is just a beautiful, cold picture. Smell is the magic hand that sets the atmosphere, turning over the clouds and rain, making beauty come alive.
Loss of taste. I eat and only feel salty, this saltiness, not salty, but salty and bitter. For the first few days of my illness, I had a fever, medium and low fever, but I had a lot of appetite, three meals a day, white porridge, stir-fried vegetables, pasta, pizza, all came refused, no sense of taste, but did not delay eating. However, as the patient gradually receded, I returned to my old appetite of picking and choosing, which was not very appetizing. And there is no sense of taste, and after a while, there is more and more no expectation of food. And it's all its own problem, and you can't be angry with the food itself.
Suddenly I wanted to remember the wonderful food I used to eat. It's as if to compensate for the loss of the temporary disappearance of taste. Thinking all over the world, having eaten so many times, there must be some food that I can't forget. I really want to write, but in fact, I don't. If there is, it is nothing more than a "eating atmosphere" at that time. If I say so, I often recall eating greasy tempura in the snow of Otaru, Hokkaido seven or eight years ago. It was a snowy Otaru, and the ground was covered with hard falling snow. We came out of the station, it was already noon, looking for places to eat everywhere, according to the information of a platform, there was a Michelin-starred sushi restaurant nearby, looking all the way, stumbling, there were almost no pedestrians on the road, fighting big snowflakes, completely confused fantasy. Found a restaurant but did not make a reservation and was not accommodated. Later, I walked around in the vast snow, and saw a tin house with a sign written on tempura, and when I entered, it was a simple house, a husband and wife shop, and no other customers, half a pot of oil in front of the stove, floating breadcrumbs, a little dull oil, not so clear. However, I couldn't care less, so I ordered prawns, scallops, eggplant, green peppers, sweet potatoes, and finally ordered small shrimp to save a large shrimp cake. It's all delicious. There are reasons for this deliciousness, one is hot, and the other is that the fried heat is more scorched than ordinary high-grade tempura stores, and it is fried until the color is burnt yellow to dark, this oil is obviously not exquisite, so it has the original taste of fried food. Also, hungry. Therefore, on this snowy day, eating hot fried food, hot white rice, and drinking hot miso soup is the perfect meal.
Fried foods are an indicator of whether your appetite has recovered... I began to recall these foods, probably in the process of healing. There are actually no good tempura restaurants in Shanghai, and by my standards, this simple food is easy to get started, good done, and difficult to do high-class. I once ate at a Michelin-starred tempura restaurant in Ginza, Tokyo, and it was very elegantly furnished, and the oil used and the ratio of oil (sesame oil and rapeseed oil) were very exquisite. The menu is long. In a nutshell, everything can be fried. But when I tasted fried konjac, I still couldn't swallow it. But everything else is delicious. The subtlety of the flavor has a reason why it can pick stars. But it's not worth it, and it depends on the subjective consciousness of the individual, I don't want to spend thousands of dollars to eat tempura. But now I don't go to expensive restaurants. Even if I didn't pay for it, I wasn't enthusiastic.
I like to read articles about food. But I don't look at food recommendations. Fisher's books on food, about what to eat and how to do it, I almost forgot about it as soon as I put it down, but in one passage she wrote that in her Swiss country house, her brother brought a pretentious, delicate, manipulative, rude young girl who had no interest in a table of food and tried to get everyone's attention with his pretentiousness. I do remember these scenes. Lifelike characters, against the background of a bunch of food, it seems that food is the touchstone of human nature, and people who don't like food are more or less abnormal and not liked. That's not my opinion. This is probably Fisher's subconscious thought.
Food is nothing but a pleasure on earth, with melancholy in it. This is a problem that you have to face once you have a full stomach, meet your food and clothing, and eliminate hunger. Otherwise it's indulgence. A person delves into eating, and without degree, which is not a virtue. Therefore, those who really write about food entry are not food writers, but all of them are completely inadvertent strokes in the works of big writers. Because of "Memories Like a Watery Year", Madeleine cake has been popular until now. I don't really love this simple sweet, but I like to eat a piece of Darjeeling tea. Kawabata Yasunari maintains the traditional Japanese aesthetic in the text of his novel, but he rarely writes specifically about eating and what to eat. Many of his characters are lovers of tea ceremony, but they are limited to tasting utensils. He seems to have mentioned Ayu in one of his novels. Glimpse. —I love sweetfish. It is a freshwater fish that can only survive in the clear water of the mountains in the clear streams. June is the season to enjoy sweetfish, a palm-sized one, baked with bamboo skewers on charcoal ash, grilled into a curved, like a tail of fish in an ancient painting, slightly bitter in the mouth, but with a strange aroma, in short, it is a kind of elegant food. I haven't eaten ayu in four years. This fish is actually in the Yandang Mountains of Zhejiang, or used to exist, but I don't know how it is now. Japanese legend, potter, calligrapher, but more famous for the public is his foodie identity, Kitaoji Lushan, there is a short article about sweetfish, like most of his articles, half of the page is scolding, scolding the world for not understanding beauty, not understanding food, based on beauty illiteracy and lack of insight. But his article is interesting, at least for Ayu's admiration is correct. A little earlier than the time of the Hokuoji Lusan people, Japanese female writer Kanako Okamoto wrote a novel "Devil Eater" in the novel collection "Old Prostitute", about a young man with a bad fate, a withdrawn personality, who has been under the fence since childhood, arrogant because of low self-esteem, using food as a means to make noise among sentient beings, eating to the extreme, but in the end it is in a sad situation of delusion. The young man was also nicknamed "Turtle Shiro". It is said that this novel is an allusion and mockery of the Lushan people of Kitaoji. Presumably, the two had a brief and unpleasant intersection in real life. However, Kanako Okamoto did not in the food section, and even praised the achievements of "Turtle Shiro". But what's the end of food? On cold winter nights, with light snow, boiled radishes on charcoal stoves, and searching for roots in the simplest foods, this profundity comes at the cost of great disgust with the world, including disgust for oneself.
The description of food in these literatures is the essence of food. The general joy of food only needs a platform such as public reviews. Flatten, standardize, and machine human emotions. Man is a slave to food, a slave to consumerism. That's all.
The Lushan people of Beidalu have been to China, and his articles do not have any positive reviews about Chinese food, and whatever dishes he writes, including utensils, are completely rough and unusable. Perhaps the background of his time, China is in the era of divided warlords, food culture has been quite weak, but also in modern China, food neglect of utensils. Ryunosuke Wasagawa's travelogue to China also wrote about Chinese food, and he had no negative comments about the food itself, but he repeatedly described the dirtiness of the restaurant and the roughness of the utensils. It seems that the restaurant at that time was so careless. Hou Xiaoxian filmed "Flowers on the Sea", the scene is extremely complex and beautiful, which is a beautiful painting style of small mountains overlapping Jin Mingwan. I don't think the long three halls in the real situation are so delicate. In the novel "The Legend of the Flower Train on the Sea", it is written more than once that the details of the prostitute's meal and withdrawal of the table, melon seed skins and chicken bones are directly thrown to the ground. These details, in today's eyes, are scrawled everywhere. Therefore, the memories of childhood are unreliable. Food, the cuisine of an era, will never have a good taste that appears out of thin air, it is based on an era, loose, strong economy and culture, bringing pickiness on the tip of the tongue, harshness of the eyes, and even the excellence of everything around.
I haven't been to a formal restaurant for a good meal in a long time. Either they are sick, or others are sick, one after another, and the game that has been dating for a long time has not yet made the trip. I didn't really want to eat, and my appetite still didn't recover. At first, I remembered the fried food, but slowly it became light again. I want to drink clear soup now. This clear soup is a soup that must be found in traditional kaiseki cuisine. Clear soup, usually with a piece of white radish and moray eel meatballs. This soup uses only kombai, bonito flowers, and dried shiitake mushrooms, all of which are fished out before the water boils away. It's a pot of fresh stock. It is simple to say, but also ever-changing, just the ratio of three materials, there will be thousands of subtle different tastes. Kyoto has a "soup soup cooking class" for industry insiders, and it is said that it specializes in dashi stock. Water, a very unsimple reaction with simple ingredients. This spirit seems to have nothing to do with food, it is a means of cultivation.
Speaking of which, I remembered that once at Tofukuji Temple in Kyoto, there was a big banquet. The huge tatami room with a chef's desk at one end is filled with vegetables, fresh wasabi ground into puree, a variety of raw fish and seafood, and a screen like ukiyo-e. Early summer evenings, outdoor courtyards, modern dry landscapes, green lawns, in retrospect, it was a wonderful evening. The food is good, but not so good that you can write a food report alone, but it is a kind of mirror-soaked, comfortable atmosphere, almost touching and unforgettable. In the temple again, without pure rules and precepts, the contrast between secular hedonism and intensive cultivation is really an incredible realm. Delicate as such, but also rustic, it is a flower that appears out of thin air.
Travel, patients, food, all of these things all came to mind at once. There are so many insignificant details in the memory, between worth recording and not worthy, all depending on the thought of the self. The only time I went to Portugal, first to Porto, then to Lisbon, all the way I had a bad cold, the situation is very similar to the other day I contracted the new crown, fever, headache, nausea. As a result, eating becomes a great burden. I've tried a lot of food and I can't swallow. Later began to eat Portugal's "national dish", sardines and boiled potatoes at every meal. A picture of its salty taste. One borrows its lightness without taste. Eat until the illness is almost better. This simple, crude, commoner-style food is my fondest memory of Portugal. When I think of it, I think of the discomfort of being seriously ill, the kind of depression, irritability, weakness, in a foreign country, no interest in traveling, and I can't come back for a while. If you are sick, it is better to be in a familiar place, even if you are alone. Just like being infected with the new crown, seeing the two bars of self-inspection, my heart sank, and it was also a reassurance, and the things that will come sooner or later will always have to be faced.
Day by day is getting better. Other than that, don't give yourself other bad hints. I want my appetite to get better. I want to eat mapo tofu. Eat grass oven baked cakes. Eat winter bamboo shoots. Eat pine leaf crabs. Eat everything that cheers you up and makes you happy in the moment. I want to smell the fragrance of narcissus and the fragrance of plum blossoms. It's all seasonal flowers. Time does not wait for flowers, flowers do not wait for me. Flowers are soothing. - The people take food as the sky, and the sky is based on the people. Thinking of those foods, those who have eaten these foods together, the vast land, the flight of a thousand birds.