Salt & Powdered Sugar

I had COVID in October 2021, but I never lost my sense of taste.

I had strep throat in April 2007. It lasted for at least two weeks, maybe three, and I was in misery. Food was mush in my mouth, paper recycling left in the rain, tender concrete.

Since before I was born, my mother made donuts on Easter. An old recipe, a small metal donut cutter, a wok full of oil, a spider to fish them out, powdered sugar to finish. They're best fresh and still good the next day; they're always eaten by Tuesday.

I don't eat many donuts in everyday life. When I lived in New Orleans, I only went to the iconic Cafe du Monde for the first time two weeks before moving to New York. A friend, visiting, wanted to try their famous beignets. And so we did on a typically humid August afternoon. The pastry was good — simple like my mother's Easter donuts, smaller and lighter, but heaped with powdered sugar such that every surface within the indoor-outdoor cafe space was sticky, such that when I took a bite, beams of the stuff arced in every direction, and my black corduroys were dotted white.

We ate our donuts, drank our cafe au lait, and left. Another flash of rain washed any sugar off my clothes and person. We took shelter further down Decatur Street under a shallow awning and, eventually, soaked anyway, just ran a block away to the not-quite nearest bar. Drank.

That Easter in 2007, I was confined to the guest room, where we kept our one TV, watching DVDs (they were from Netflix, but nobody called it "watching Netflix" until the DVDs dried up) while my parents and their friends drank mimosas on the porch, while their friends' children, my sister, and her friends, ran around on the egg hunt.

I was still too sick to mingle and, by then, probably wallowing in the misery, but the strep was beginning to fade. My mother cooked me a steak — I can't recall the cut, and all that mattered was that it was steak, not ground beef — sliced it into slivers and brought it to me in the guest room.

I know now that what I tasted in that steak was the presence of some pagan god — earthly, solar, marine, all at once. Every holy element conspired on this plate. I hadn't so much as sensed salt in weeks, and now these little strips of salted beef electrified my young body; I could swear the strep fell further back into some bacterial hell with every bite of flesh, and there were so many. Little, salted slivers — table salt, not kosher — and each one a new blow until I spiritually shed my sickbed and cast off sweaty sheets.

I don't recall having donuts that Easter — not suitable for a sick boy, surely — but I’ve never had such a vital bite of steak.