It’s a real conundrum, and I don’t think it has to do with the general size of the American appetite compared with the British one. Jess tested this minestrone right before the holiday season, when eyes are normally much bigger than tummies. Waiting for certain festive foods to arrive — in my world, matzo balls, latkes, roasted turkey and stuffing — lifts them to ridiculous heights of desirability. It also just makes me hungry.
In this post-holiday period, on the other hand, there’s a general satiation. Eyes have definitely become smaller as tummies have filled up. For me, something long-cooked and roasted, splashed with gravy and garnished with brussels sprouts, has taken on a Voldemort-ish quality: It’s all too present but shall not be named. The fascination has suddenly turned into an aversion. Hence this minestrone, which is wholesome, meat-free and totally unthreatening and generally feels right for now, particularly in small portions.
Still, a sense of hunger (or satiation) can be unbelievably tantalizing, as anyone cooking and tasting food for a living will tell you. I spend most of my days having forkfuls that never amount to a meal. This professional grazing messes with my senses. “Am I hungry?” is something I often ask myself and don’t have a good answer to, having thoroughly muddled the gatekeepers in my brain whose job it is to signal fullness after eating. Or, “Is this delicious?” another question you would think shouldn’t be up for debate. But it is! In my test kitchen, we always need to deduct marks from the first dish of the day, tasted around 11 a.m. when appetites are ferocious, and bolster the points of the unfortunate 4 p.m. contender.
Appetites are so individual, too, fluctuating according to mood, personality type and other facts of our lives that have nothing to do with how hungry we actually are. As with so much else, it all goes back to childhood. My ultimate appetite-killer as a young boy was — and still is — the skin formed on the warm milk my father would serve me before dinner. If I was too late to reach my milk before the dreaded skin had formed, I would find it impossible to eat anything. Simply the sight of it put me off my dinner entirely.
I share this aversion with the British food writer Nigel Slater, who captures its effect precisely: “Skin. Even the word sends shivers down my spine. This is the stuff you peel off your chest when you have a sunburn; it’s the little flap left hanging when you cut yourself that catches on everything; it’s the transparent sheath left behind by an emerging snake. Skin is the word I link automatically with grazed shins or something mummified. So what is it doing floating on my cocoa?”
