When I was a kid, my sister and I had special rules for eating pudding with cream. As we each took a first spoonful, cream would flow into the depression. We would then imagine there were girl scouts standing on a dry surface area of the pudding. Why girl scouts, I have no idea. After each spoonful the cream would flow into a newly formed depression. We would try to eat our full cups of pudding without causing any girl scout drownings. It’s a bit morbid, I grant. I want to believe it was my sister who thought this ritual up, but it was probably me.
I have always had a certain fussiness about how my food sits on a plate. I like the square plates they have nowadays because they accommodate a certain precision. Round plates are confusing. It’s hard to calculate the food boundaries. It’s also hard to orient the plate when setting it down on the table. There’s no neatly defined up, down, left, right for how the food lies.
Back in the day, my family had a set of blue and white porcelain plates with a type of Currier & Ives design. Each plate had three compartments that were separated by ridges. One compartment was larger than the other two, presumably for meat, though I often used it for mashed potatoes. I absolutely loved these plates. They made eating a joy. My brother and sister, for reasons I find very hard to fathom, have no memory of these plates. How could they let this memory lapse?
As a kid I also had special rules for how to eat mashed potatoes and gravy, rules which I still hold dear. First one has to create a sizable well in the center of the potatoes. Into this, one pours a massive amount of gravy. Despite careful construction of the well, the gravy invariably spills out and flows into the green peas or whatever veggie is on the plate. This is why the ridged plates were so very special. They made the gravy behave. Nowadays, my gravy simply runs riot.
INSTANT NOODLES 