Current Enthusiasms #2: pomegranate

Earnest recommendations.

Paul Cézanne, Still-Life with a Watermelon and Pomegranates, 1900-1906. Personally, I think these pomegranates look like onions, but I trust the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which says otherwise.

I have been grumpy, lately, about cooking. Once upon a time, I cooked constantly. I enjoyed it. But something has shifted, the past couple of years; maybe inevitable fatigue, only. But I could feel myself first losing interest in cooking, then I felt that harden almost into antipathy. Then I could feel this apply to both cooking and eating.

This is an unexpected evolution. When my older son was only a baby, a coworker—a hopelessly glamorous woman—told me that I mustn’t feel bad about sleep training him. (If you don’t know what that means, bless you.) There were, she said, but few worthwhile pleasures in life. One was sleep, another food. She made it sound my responsibility to teach that little baby both.

I’d not previously thought about it this way, but I agreed. I love sleeping, I love eating, I love pleasure! I consider this one of the only useful bits of childrearing advice I’ve ever received. It was imperative to teach my child, then later, his sibling, to similarly enjoy life. I know kids can be picky about food or high strung about sleep, and forgive them this, being kids, but to my mind some of the worst kinds of adults are the sort who are high strung about sleep or picky about food. I hardly wanted my children to end up those kinds of adults.

A few years ago, I documented everything I cooked for a week. When I reread this, recently, I barely recognized the person who wrote it. But I know what motivated me: the desire to raise children who valued what I did. Also, this diary dates from a time when my office was inside my home; cooking is the perfect refuge for the procrastinator.

Just before Christmas, A. and S. invited us for dinner. They ordered in, an astonishing amount of food. One of the dishes was a salad that had pomegranate arils in it. Pomegranate is a food that was very much in vogue a few years ago; it’s funny how foods are subject to the cycles of fashion. (Recently, people have been pointing out that the folks who produce that bottled pomegranate juice use some obscene percentage of California’s water supply for the cultivation of almonds. Cycles of fashion lead always to backlash.) I never had any especial interest in pomegranate. But its presence in this particular salad galvanized something in me. Here was a flavor I liked. I should cook with it.

I bought a cup of pomegranate arils (I like the word arils) and sprinkled them into a salad of shredded Brussels sprouts. This dish was very well received by my family. Perhaps my teens—for thus they are now—had grown as fatigued as I had of all the food I usually make. Maybe all we needed was some novelty.

I’ve been sprinkling pomegranate into yogurt for breakfast, sometimes with strawberries, sometimes with this ridiculous cereal I eat because I pretend it’s healthy. It’s a simple thing, and though I hate eating breakfast, I’m middle aged and everyone tells me I have to. Some mornings it tastes good, this little bite of beautiful red fruit. Some mornings it satisfies something. Some mornings it feels near enough to pleasure.

Also, my first name is derived from the Arabic word for pomegranate. I don’t think that means anything, though.

*

Current Enthusiasms is a newsletter about things I like. I’ll send it every two weeks.