Our conversation, which had degenerated into a cross-cultural comparison of methods for cooking udders among the English, Romans, Mexicans, and Yemenite Jews (who on top of everything else need to make them kosher), ceased as soon as we began to share the true Valencian paella. The rice lining the bottom of the pan was browned and crusty; the meat was tender and deeply flavored. Everything was imbued with the smoke of vines and fruitwood and the aroma of rosemary, and the Phaseoli lunati were, well, incomparable.

Max Lake, an Australian doctor turned wine maker, broke out a case of his best Australian red, and when no more than half of it had been drunk, one of the British writers among us revealed that, at the age of sixteen on a vacation in the south of Spain, she had been courted by El Cordobes, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived.

This is the end of a brief (four pages) essay, “Rosemary and Moon Beans,” anthologized in Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything. It is extra-special great because of the leap between the two paragraphs–they’re very good on their own (Steingarten, like my other favorite food writer, Ruth Reichl, is both lyrical and witty), but juxtaposed, they mimic and convey the mysticism of good food, especially good foreign food, crafted in foreign ways, which seems to make real the possibility of living very differently. In the interstice created by the food, the conversation, like the writing style, changes: it becomes quieter, more intimate. Because this is the end of the essay, the strangeness and possibility linger the way an aroma might in the air, or a taste in the mouth.