Fill In The Blank

These days, it seems nearly impossible to avoid reading about other people’s money in major print media outlets.  And I’m just not above it.  I admit it.  On Saturday morning I don’t bother with either the newsprint sections of the weekend WSJ or The Financial Times (I read the New York Times on line, so I can savor that wealth digest during the week).  I go straight for the magazine sections.  Of the two financial pubs, I give more points to The Financial Times, which in its ballsy way, calls its wealth rag “How To Spend It.”  Plus, it has this nasty, dishy column written in the style of an Ab Fab episode about the dilemmas presumably real wealthy people find themselves in due to their own shortsightedness and greed. I find it irresistible. 

So, Gretel, you say, “What Has This To Do With Food?”  I’m getting there.  Last week, the Aesthete section (which is one of those Q&As all the newsy magazines now have with famous or just rich or rich and famous or just notorious people that are thin disguises for product placements) featured the Earl of March.  You can Google it, but here is the link, because I love you and want you to be an FT reader, too. 

You will notice first the Earl of March is handsome and he is very good at looking right at the camera, which either means he’s terribly self-assured or terribly shy and the photographer had to tell him dirty jokes to get him to sit on that couch and have his picture taken. He doesn’t smile.  Presumably because he’s English and they have that teeth thing going.  And here I’m going on a William Gibson tangent to say that the Earl of March looks exactly like my mental image of Hubertus Bigend (and that you have to look up on your own because on some things you just have to do your own homework). 

You will notice second (or at least eventually or if you are me) that the interviewer asks that most impertinent question “In my fridge you’ll always find [fill in the blank].”  His answer appears flippant, but if you parse it, as we will momentarily, well, “curioser and curioser” as my favorite English author would say.

The Earl fills in the blank with “...a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and Grenada chocolate from Rococo in London...”  So there’s the product placement, right off the bat.  Veuve is in his fridge and on his lips as the brand is very likely (although it is hard to tell exactly for sure from the website) sponsors of The Festival of Speed, held at the Goodwood racetrack, which is the Earl’s event and on his property. 

The chocolate, however, gets an endorsement from the Earl, “- it’s absolutely the best, proper dark chocolate.”  Not only that, it’s ethically proper as it is fair trade chocolate made from product from a cocoa farm in Grenada. You remember Grenada -- 1783 the Treaty of Paris, 1983 the U.S. invasion of...2004 Hurricane Ivan...2007 host of the Cricket World Cup and nutmeg capital of the world (at least, prior to 2004). So much to look up!  Even better, the company is owned by a chocolate-obsessed woman.  With three fabulous locations in London (Chelsea, Belgravia, Marylebone (none of which, I suspect are pronounced the way they are spelled) I doubt she’ll bring her chocolates to these shores, but isn’t that what the Internet is for? They ship hampers!  I’ve always wanted a hamper that wasn’t for laundry.

The Earl continues, unbidden, and here’s where it starts to get deep (although I think it was intended to be Ab-Fab-by, as answered by his wife or publicist). “I don’t know about staples. I’m not looking for eggs when I go to the fridge, I’m looking for champagne and chocolate.”  And it’s there that I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks for the last two weeks. 

Of course the Earl doesn’t know about staples.  Although, his father is an accountant, so you’d think he wasn’t raised with a silver spoon filling up all of his mouth.  But never mind that.  The Earl knows what he’s not looking for -- eggs.  You have to cook them.  They might have salmonella.  They are a bother.  Clearly, someone else does his cooking.  The Earl is always looking for immediate gratification within his clean, stainless steel refrigerators.  “Mouth pleasures” as they say on 30 Rock.  Chocolate. And something to get drunk on.

I realized I have no damn idea what I’m looking for when I open the fridge.  Then I thought, if I did have an idea of what I was looking for in the fridge, for starters, and then extrapolated that to the bigger picture of my life, say, my living room or my office, maybe I’d be more successful, more like the Earl, but with way better teeth.  So I keep trying to fill in the blank.  What would it always please me to find in my fridge?  What would make me cut past all the clutter and reach for joy?  I keep asking, asking.  There’s no answer, yet.  Do you have one?