Keeping things hot.

Silence Dogood here. Apologies to anyone who’s rushed over here hoping to find steamy sex tips. This post is about food.

As longtime readers know, one of my food hangups is temperature sensitivity, and I don’t think I’m alone. Every time I read some diet guru screaming that people should eat their food slooooowly so they don’t overeat, I think: Has it ever dawned on you that maybe the reason some people eat their food quickly is so they can enjoy it before it gets cold?

No doubt there are lots of people who shovel food down mindlessly in front of the TV, who wouldn’t know if they were eating potato chips or shredded paper (as long as the paper was salted). But those of us who are temperature-sensitive eat quickly because, once the food we’re eating has stopped being appropriately hot, warm, cool, or cold, we don’t want anything to do with it. And that’s true even if we’ve only managed to eat one bite before it’s lukewarm, congealing, melting, or what have you. Or drink one sip before it’s watery or the milk’s coagulating on top. Eeeewwww!!! 

I keep hoping that some inventor will take pity on us temperature-sensitive types and invent a contraption that will actually keep food hot at the table, so you can take your time over a meal and not know, with a sinking heart, that three bites will be about all you can manage before the temperature doldrums set in.

My own vision for this has tended to focus on the plate itself—some ingenious device that keeps your plate or bowl at the perfect temperature so that food stays appropriately hot or cold, sort of like an electric blanket or one of those mugwarmers or a thermos or even a tea cozy. But this morning, I discovered that the Chinese—who’ve led civilization in so many ways for thousands of years—had already come up with an alternate solution.

My computer opens to the MSN home page, and of course I can never resist scanning all the headlines to see what’s up in the world. This morning, some headline I can’t even recall caught my eye, so I clicked on the link. And after reading the story, I saw a link to another post I just had to read. Called “Ouch! Hunanese Hosts Turn Down the Heat in Our Food,” it was about how Americans on assignment in Hunan Province, which is apparently famous for its mind- and tongue-numbingly hot cuisine, were served flavorful but bland dishes and wondered what had happened to the fabled heat.

Mind you, Adrienne Mong, the author of this post, was referring to chile-generated heat, not the actual temperature of the dish. (Apparently the Chinese hosts, concerned about the feeble American palate, had provided separate bowls of “stewed, pickled, dried, diced, fried” assorted chiles, aka chilies or chillis, for their bolder guests.) The post is very informative, and even provides the origins of General Tso’s Chicken, so I encourage you to check it out at http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/.

But, well, the idea that chiles/chillis/whatever are hot isn’t exactly breaking news. So what was it that caught my attention in this post? It was the photos of the tables where the dishes were being served. The wooden tables looked conventional enough up to a point. But unlike our tables, the Hunanese tables were constructed with several burners embedded in the center. The dishes that comprised the meal were brought to the table in their pots and set on the burners, with bowls of condiments set all around them. Diners could help themselves, taking just as much as they could eat hot, then helping themselves to more as their appetites dictated, and all at the perfect temperature. Nobody needed to load up a plate or gobble their food. There was plenty more, and everyone knew that whenever they chose to take a bit more, it would still be perfectly hot. A meal could stretch for hours without anyone feeling rushed or disappointed by cooling food.

Talk about a civilized arrangement! I realize that it would be a bit of an adjustment for us to become accustomed to the sight of burners on our tables (or cooking pots in the middle of the table, for that matter). But I think the aesthetic tradeoff would be worth it. After all, our own tradition of plain wooden tables arose not just because we had no access to burners, but because there were historically servants rushing hot food to the table from the kitchen. God forbid that the soup or peas or breakfast eggs should arrive cold—someone would pay for that, probably with his livelihood.

These days, most of us are on our own. But the problem of getting and keeping hot food on the table remains. I’m so inspired by the example of Hunan. I’m not about to stick a burner on top of the tiny round oak table where our friend Ben and I eat our meals; we have enough problems without a house fire. But perhaps heat distributors on every burner with the gas turned to the lowest possible setting, and smaller portions with hotter refills… hmmm…

             ‘Til next time,

                           Silence