Get 'Em While They're Hot

There is a corner bakery-cum-pastry shop on the three-block walk from the Raspail Metro stop to Columbia’s campus at Reid Hall. It’s painted magenta on the outside, and there’s a neon sign in the shape of a baguette jutting out from above its door. A dog and a cat live inside and wander as they please beneath the displays of tarts and macaroons. It’s a charming place, yet my affection for it is tempered by resentment—were it not for this adorable little bakery, I would not be the addict that I am today.

I was walking back to the Metro one night, craving something sweet but not too rich, when something in the bakery’s window made me stop: two wicker baskets filled with meringues. Each meringue was about the size and shape of a jellyfish, sans tentacles. Some were pure white, others were covered with almonds, and others bordered on the pastel shade of green that is the international indicator of pistachio. I went in, ordered an almond one, and ate it as I walked toward the Metro. Despite its size, it was lighter than the two Euro coin I had used to buy it, with great cavities of air within its creamy exterior. It shattered unpredictably with each bite, covering my face and chest with what looked like talcum powder. Its flavor was unadulterated sweetness, its texture melting daintiness.

The next day, out of pure journalistic curiosity, of course, I bought a pistachio meringue, and ate it, too, on the street—it was every bit as satisfying as I’d come to expect.

The next morning I walked by a different patisserie and saw meringues in its window—these looked rougher-hewn than the ones I had eaten before. Before I knew what I was doing, I had bought one and discovered that, beyond the crunchy exterior, its center was gooey and marshmallowy. By the time I popped the last bite in my mouth, my shirt covered—rather fittingly—with white powder, I was hooked.

Meringues are nutritional null signs, literally almost nothing more than sugar. A typical recipe calls for one-quarter cup of the sweet stuff for each egg white. The two ingredients are whipped with a pinch of salt until fluffy and stiff, dolloped onto a baking sheet, baked at a low temperature, and cooled in the oven before being arranged temptingly in bakery windows.

What quickly becomes obvious to a meringue junkie is that the quality of a meringue varies dramatically depending on the time of day at which it is bought. A meringue plucked from the counters in the late morning or early afternoon has an easy crunch and a soft, glistening interior. That same meringue eaten just a few hours later has a tough, styrofoam-like shell, and what was once cotton candy-like and light now has the texture of bubblegum. A meringue demands to be eaten within hours of emerging from the oven—the concept of a day-old meringue is laughable. The short lifespan of the meringue is a quality that it shares with many French foods, and tragically few American ones.

Refrigerators, preservatives, and technologically-advanced packaging were invented before most of us were born. We Americans expect our foods to last for days or weeks or months—advertisers have convinced us that a short shelf-life is a drawback rather than a sign of quality and authenticity. Lately, the modest backlash against spinach that has been trucked through several time zones and strawberries that have been flown from one hemisphere to the other has led to a push for locally grown foods. Local produce is better for the environment, and for you, activists say—oh, and it tastes better, too.

While the superiority of fresh, local produce is fairly incontrovertible, I fear that by equating freshness with nutrition and eco-friendliness, local food activists have turned freshness into a matter of obligation rather than pleasure. But they have missed the larger point: freshness is desirable from a hedonistic standpoint even when health and the environment are irrelevant to the food in question.

What anyone who has ever bitten into the shiny crust of a still-warm bagel, or stood in line for half an hour to spend two dollars on a freshly-frosted cupcake knows is this: the proportionate relationship between freshness and flavor isn’t limited to just fruits and vegetables. All kinds of food—whether healthful or bereft of nutrients, plucked from a vine or baked in an oven, packed with potassium or chockablock with sugar—taste better when fresh.

Part of what makes food precious is its ephemerality—it won’t (and shouldn’t) be around forever. American food producers seem to have seen this transience as a hurdle to be overcome rather than as a reminder of food’s essence. The industrial food system wants us to think that a meringue that is fresh in the morning but goes stale by mid-afternoon isn’t worth our time or money. But once you’ve eaten something without preservatives, something that will lose its flavor and texture in a matter of hours, you’ll probably discover what I already know: freshness can be addictive.