Regina Schrambling writes about food and travel for the Los Angeles Times and other publications and on her Web site, www.gastropoda.com.
So I'm lying in a hospital bed in Italy thinking about how it has been 27 hours since my last meal. And what a last meal it was. We had gotten off the plane in Turin and gone straight to lunch at our hotel out in the Piedmont countryside. The owner was a wonderful chef and he brought a big laughing table of us excellent frittata and tuna-stuffed roasted peppers, a mushroom tart sitting in a pool of fonduta, veal-and-spinach agnolotti and then braised guinea hen, with a sort of apple torta for dessert.
I insisted on trying everything that was poured into a glass: a lovely white Arneis, Barbera d'Asti, moscato d'Asti and even the grappa so potent it could burn the hair out of your nostrils. And then my consort and I went for a walk in that gorgeous countryside and I tripped on a rough patch of road and fell and snapped my femur in the very worst place. One ambulance took me to the closest hospital and the next day another one took me to another hospital for surgery -- and no one ever fed me. And now here I lie, miserable and starving while my roommate in the knee cast chatters away with her visitor about sushi restaurants in Torino. Can't they talk about anything else but food?
My surgeon, who is one of the very few people I will meet in the next 15 days who speaks English, has been by to discuss my scary options and has also managed to inform everyone who will listen that I am a "giornalista gastronomica" from New York. I'm liking the sound of that. But mostly I am very ready for dinner.
Which turns out to be the saddest meal I have ever faced down -- and I have eaten at Le Cirque. It's Dickensian for the industrial age, gruel that arrives on a tray fitted with a pliable plastic sheet with indentations for each "course." One square holds a lump of what passes for Cream of Wheat. A second, larger one, holds a pasta that has the look of Cheerios in a slimy, almost mucousy broth. There is a packet of something processed and bland resembling cream cheese, a hard roll jacketed in plastic and a container of pink yogurt that is mostly sugar, but at least has one thing everything else lacks: a taste. Have these people never heard of spices, let alone salt and pepper? Adding insult to injury, there is nothing to drink with any of it -- but the tray is imprinted with a taunting little wineglass emblem. I muscle it down because I'm beyond starving, but I privately swear I will never, ever denigrate airline food again. It's five-star by comparison. How could they bring such slop to a giornalista gastronomica -- even one who is so immobilized that she has already learned that "padella" means "bedpan" and "tiralisu" is not a dessert but an order to "lift yourself up."
And then, long after the nurse has come and cleared the depressing detritus away, I look over on the bedside table and notice a sheet of paper lying there. It's a menu -- and it has been there since I was wheeled in. All I had to do was check off what I wanted for the week and, it turned out, I would have been given food at least as good as what the average New York Italian restaurant dishes up: turkey with rosemary, risotto milanese, cheesy penne with garlic, meatballs with black olives, spinach agnolotti, tortellini with sage, turkey pizzaiola. What I'd been brought first was just the equivalent of the standard invalid's meal anywhere in the world.
So the arrogant food journalist who never bothered to learn Italian missed the most important detail. And she swears she will never denigrate hospital food again.
I'm back to trashing what they serve on planes.
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