Burning Bridges Like Matchsticks

Last night I broke down and bought a bag of littleneck clams from the excrutiatingly self-satisfied organic co-op down the street. They may be snooty, but they've got the best seafood in Madison. The craving had been building for several weeks, sneaking into my idle thoughts, insinuating itself into my meals and generally being a pest. Last night it was satiated, at least temporarily, by a double handful of clams cooked with caramelized shallots and white wine. As the clams opened their little shells, unfolding like new leaves, I thickened the sauce with cream and poured it over fresh linguini.

Biting into each plump, savory clump of visceral mass and foot, I have vivid memories. They're not of seafood shacks on the coast of Massachusetts, or the sweet saltiness of rotting seaweed in Puget Sound, but rather my mother ordering clam chowder in a Friendly's off Rt. 434. She offered me a few bites. It smelled delicious, but as I raised the spoon to my lips, I looked down at the chunk of clam sitting in its little pool of broth and thought back to the diagram that I'd seen in "Seashells of North America" that morning. I could recognize the coiled ball of the intestine.

It was many years before I would eat clams again.

These days I still think about the anatomy of my food before I bite into it, but it only serves to enhance the flavor. I doubt Richard Feynman gave any interviews about how much better his steak tastes knowing about the structure of the myofibrils that make it up. Seymour Benzer, however, might well have.