The First.....

''I saw the young man over there with eggs Benedict, with hollandaise sauce. And I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce in hubcaps. Because there's no plates like chrome for the hollandaise.''  

~ Mitt Romney

The first time I had hollandaise was a bit unfair to the wonderful world of sauces. I'm not saying this because I dislike a sauce (or condiment, for the laymen), quite the opposite in fact. It's just that the first time I ever experienced such a thing, it came prepared over stuffed lobster. Stuffed lobster is a damned hard thing to beat if you're a city boy from Charlotte, NC. I realize that up here in good ol' Maine, lobster is sold in some form or another everywhere from fine retail markets to roadside shacks, but it's not like that where I come from. And even if was? Well, hell...make it stuffed, please. You stuff a lobster by taking all of the meat out if, mixing said meat with various items, then placing it back in the shell over several cooked shrimp and then baking that mixture for a bit. Not the most illustrious of explanations, granted, but you'll live. After all is said and done, you pour a light drizzle of hollandaise over it and that's pretty much the culinary that of it. 

I've had hollandaise on a lot of things since then. In fact, I'm somewhat over the whole thing these days. What with Eggs Benedict, sauted asparagus, any kind of fish that you can think of...it's pretty commonplace for the world I live in. 

But this assignment got me thinking about it a bit. Was the hollandaise really all that good? Truth be told, I don't really remember. It could have been the fact that it was on the lobster that did it. At the time, I was nowhere near as versed in cuisine as i am now. Nor was I aware of how drastically my tastes would change with time an training. I wasn't exactly eating such things on a regular basis back then, so it may well have just been the ravings of an unrefined palate. 

Regardless of what may or may not have been, I don't think that I could have had a better experience with the stuff. The hype of my memory in no way replaces the fact that it's become something like mustard to me over the past ten years, but I chose to write this simply because the memory of it stood out among "first-time" memories that I have. 

It was the first, but not the best? Nah, it was the best, even if I wasn't the one making it.