Commentary

Pear lover's delight

My Friend P is a lover of pear.

FOR ME, WELL, I like pear. And when you come across a pear lover however, you get to understand the difference between a pear lover and a pear liker.

Pear lovers behave like cats. Cats and pears are like Seaga and Tivoli, a Manley and the PNP, you get the drift - cats are seriously into pear. They love it and eat it to their hearts delight and without apology.

And what does the human lover of pear do? Well, they eat pear with everything. And when I say everything I mean everything - pear with bulla, pear with hard-dough bread, pear with your dinner ­ rice and peas and chicken, pear with patty, I can live with all of those. But this combination is what defines the authentic pear lover ­ people who eat pear with soup.

Seriously, how can you eat pear with soup? When I say eat pear with soup, I don't mean they have a spoonful of soup followed by a bite of the pear. Oh no! They peel the pear and dip it in the soup. They make the pear swim in the soup and eat the pear like how you would eat dumplings in soup! Strange people.

But understand, those are the true pear lovers. Give them a pear that is green and they wrap it up with paper to hasten the ripening process and they check the progress every day. Yes, human cats I call them.

Special F, too, falls into the pear lover category. Eating pear with soup. My Lord, when pear season comes along I tell Special F that I wish I was a pear given the passion that he lavishes on the fruit.

But while we are on the topic of food and how you eat it, my Friend G insists that corn is to be boiled along with food. 'Whatever' I said. But he continues: "When you eating corn you need to be able to suck it and feel the gumption," he said. I daresay he does sound like he is talking about something else apart from corn.

I quite hate the idea of things like noodles, pieces of food and corn pork juices trickling off my boiled corn. No sirreee. My corn must be pure and untouched by other foreign flavours. And then we got to the quantity of corn that you eat. This of course, might be a 'country' thing but big and serious, when you are putting on a pot of corn, anything below 12 corns is indeed a waste of time. Most of the time you really don't get down into the genuine taste of corn until cob number four or five.

And you need of course, to do justice to the corn cob ­- if you really love corn.

Okay, I love corn no apologies here, and not the soft imported sweet corn like what they sell at KFC. Nope. Home grown corn is where the flavour is.

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myfriendp@hotmail.com