There are a lot of great beers, wines and food in the world, but one thing I’ve noticed every time someone begins a sentence with “The Best (whatever) I ever had was…”, the story is usually 30% about the food and drink and 70% about the setting. When a friend recently told me about the best wine he’d ever had – he described the music, the weather, the people and the setting that accompanied it at great length. I thought about the greatest meal I ever had. It was a salami sausage.
The best meal I ever had was in the Basque country town of Zarutz in northern Spain. My wife and I were backpacking from Amsterdam to Santorini. I had purchased the salami earlier that afternoon from a barrel-chested Basque countryman in San Sebastian. Unable to find decent accommodation in San Sebastian we boarded a train for the surf-town of Zarutz and on the train met a girl who agreed to share a campsite with us and split the cost. It was late at night when we arrived at the packed campsite and we were tired from walking in the heat of a particularly hot Spanish afternoon.
We pitched our tent on a clifftop site looking over the beach where the Atlantic ocean met the Spanish shoreline. Everyone settled down for the night for a quiet drink so I opened my backpack and retrieved the salami and a bottle of red we had been carrying with us since Bordeux.
It was dark and I was exhausted. The girls took splashes of the Bordeux in plastic cups but refused (on vegetarian grounds) the salami. I peeled back the casing on the salami and took my first bite. I’m told I was then quiet for some time. I was eating the greatest salami of my life.
The spicy pork sausage was intense. The spanish paprika’s sweetness vied for supremacy with hot spices. Amidst this epic assault, a barrage of buttery-soft pork fat explosions sounded like artillery on my tongue. I took a sip of the red and everything got real quiet. The pork sausage remounted for another charge. I bite in again.
Soon I was halfway through the sausage, its juices running down my chin like a ripe peach. The only visual memory I have of the event is a snapshot of this barely-lit, half-peeled salami that looked like fruit in my hand and the faint purple haze of the sun setting over the Atlantic ocean. The smell was of sweet paprika, pork and ocean breeze. This was one of the greatest food experiences of my life thus far.
To take the same ingredients and change the setting would have changed the experience completely. No one, that I have met, has recounted the greatest meal of their life as being had in front of the television or in a mall foodcourt. If the food is great, the setting has poetry to it and we have belief in the authenticity of our experience – the meal can become something transcendental. One that people recall for years afterward.
It’s something I’m keeping in mind when I try new beers. The setting should be one to let a phenomenal beer become the best beer I’ve ever had. So far, the beers I’ve enjoyed the most have been in the company of friends on patios and around kitchen tables. I noticed this today after separating 30-odd finished microbrew bottles into a liked and okay pile that most of the bottles in the okay pile were had in quiet at home alone. The pile that I liked – almost exclusively with friends.
Or maybe I just save the good stuff for company.
Oh and if you’re wondering about the best beer so far – it was Southern Tier Oatmeal Stout and was had with English Stilton cheese around my kitchen table with friends.
Cheers!
Here’s a picture of the campsite view the morning after.
Let There Be Beer 