Why mess with perfection?
The recipe started with a watermelon, and I was pulled in.
The social media chef sliced through a huge watermelon with the silver sound of a sharp blade. There were almost no seeds, and the flesh was bright red. Watermelon is my favorite food and my favorite season, so I watched to see what was coming next.
The melon was cubed and added to a bowl, followed by blueberries and raspberries. Then came lime juice and chopped mint leaves.
For a moment, I thought this might be something I would try: I would poke around the berries to get to the melon. But then came the olive oil and the toasted pistachio nuts. And finally, worst of all, the large, white chunks of feta cheese.The last thing I witnessed before clicking away in horror was the chef sprinkling salt over the whole thing.
Why? Why must we festoon the most perfect food with things that are similarly sweet and also incongruous? (While you’re at it, why not toss in some chunks of salami and maybe a chocolate chip or two?)
I await watermelon season in the way Steeler fans await training camp. While the rest of you are kvetching about the dreary late-May weather, I take myself to the supermarket to dig through the melon bins for a first taste of summer. In a back-killing move, I lift the melons off the heap to find the perfect one: round and not oblong, dull not shiny, and with a large and flat yellow spot on one side or one end. This approach to selecting rarely fails me.
At home, I crack it open with the same hopeful suspense I feel when starting a new book. The deeper red and crispier, the better. The fruit is healthy for the kidneys, but even if watermelons carried a black-box danger warning, I’d gobble a dozen of them every season.
So why mess with perfection? Of course, social media is the land of the superfluous new ideas. The people who add olive oil and cheese to watermelon are probably the same people who decorate the insides of their refrigerators with artwork and floral arrangements, or make chocolate candy out of garbanzo beans.
Sure, I’ve been to picnics that featured scooped-out watermelon rinds that are then carved and refilled with the melon and berries and grapes. And I once drank a watermelon martini that wasn’t so terrible.
But these weird concoctions are, as they say, gilding the lily. I wonder if this might be the result of the genetic breeding that got rid of the seeds. We used to sit on the front porch with a smile of watermelon, spitting the seeds over the railing. Now, we look around the kitchen to see what else we can toss into the bowl – time that would otherwise have been spent picking out the seeds.
I’m not much of a cook, and I don’t have the most adventurous palate. But if I were to name a food that’s the opposite of watermelon, it would be something in the salty and fatty family – feta cheese, for example. And maybe that’s what the social media chef was after, a sophisticated culinary counterpoint.
In my fridge right now is what’s left of an early-season watermelon. I devoured half of it a day ago, and I’m saving the rest for later today. The crispy, red spears are lined up in the container – no salt, no oil and no cheese. Just naked as the day it was picked. Perfect.