Today, I am inspired by our correspondence between me and dear Doug. He is one of my blogger friend.
https://phainopepla95.com/ (Doug’s blog)
and you can find and read our correspondence below the post in my other blog
Just a tomate and feta cheese,…where carried us into our own memories…
From now on, in this blog, I want to share “Delectamentum Memorias”… or Delicious (food) Memories…
If you join me, if you make a post in your own blog about your delicious food memories, please just let me know I can share in here too…
Thank you,
delectamentum memorias 
Once when I was visiting France, I stopped by Le Pigeon Blanc, a restauirant in Forbach, for lunch. The menu look interesting and I decided to try the mysterious côtelette d’agneau (lamb chop), which actually was three or four lamb chops (I don’t recall exactly 50 years later!). They’d been perfectly prepared in butter with garlic. I never thought I’d like lamb chops since I’d never had them prepared so expertly before, but these delectable lamb chops were so good I ended up gnawing on the bones, tempted to order more though the meal was typically French: as much as you need and just enough, no excess, just good dining! I’ve never had lamb that delicious again!
Out of curiousity, I Googled the restaurant’s name (it’s in a hotel), and it is still there:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=le+pigeon+blanc+restaurant%2c+forbach%2c+alsace%2c+france&qpvt=le+pigeon+blanc+restaurant%2c+forbach%2c+alsace%2c+france&form=IGRE&first=1&scenario=ImageBasicHover
My motion picture team used to stay in Gasthäuser in villages in Germany because they were inexpensive and they were off the main road. Why live in a foreign country, too, if not to experience the culture in depth. We always looked for Gasthaus with a butcher shop associated with it because the meals in the associated restaurants were exceptional.
In one village near München, the Gasthaus restaurant had Kalbssteak mit Kräuterbutter, veal steak with herbed butter, which was served with an herbed rice. The five of us all ordered this meal. we ate, commenting to each other how exceptional the meal was.
The local beer, which we consumed in reasonably copious amounts, was perfect with the meal and when we finished, one of the team said, “I think I could eat another one of those!”
“Won’t the locals think we are a bit piggish?” another one said – we had to wear our US Army uniforms for that particular motion picture job, so were more conspicuously American than when we wore civilian clothes on a job. (We were US Army motion picture photographers.)
“Probably,” said another, “but I’m ordering another one anyway” So the five of us ordered a second helping of that delicious meal! Apparently, all five of us had the same impression of the meal, and we all were veterans of eating in German establishments, where we knew something exceptional when we ate it!
Did we draw attention to ourselves with the Germans in the restaurant? Yes, but the waitress (probably the chef’s wife since these village businesses tended to be family affairs) was so pleased with our enthusiastic response to the meal she had the chef come out to thank us and to bask in the glory of being an exceptional chef.
A side note: I was the only white guy on the motion picture team, which was all black guys otherwise. We had strategy for getting lodging since some places the Germans were prejudiced against blacks. We would order a large meal at the Gasthaus restaurant, eat it quietly (or at least not making a scene!), spending what would be a large amount of money on food and drinks, then ask for rooms. Once they realized we were good guys, and would be decent guests, we never failed to get rooms!
My friends visiting from France hadn’t ever been to the Deutsche Weinstrasse, a series of Reisling wine producing villages along the Rhine River. I suggested we take a train from Kaiserslautern, where I was stationed, to one of the villages, Deidesheim. We could stop by the Weinstuben, sample wines, buy some of the local wines, and return all in a day, and, besides, the train was a local, a quaint antique (I’m sure) steam locomotive-pulled, slow trip through some beautiful forest scenery.
We purchased our roundtrip tickets, enjoyed the Weinstuben, selected wines to enjoy later in Kaiserslautern and Paris, and found we’d had a wait for the return train. One of my friends had purchased a German equivalent of sugar cookies in a bakery, and we decided we should have wine and cookies to pass the time!
While this isn’t a meal story, I assure you a solid Deidesheimer Reisling mit Prädikat of whichever vintage it was that we had that year (1972) was as delicious an accompaniment to a simple cookie as one could have! We hid behind a kiosk in case eating cookies in public was illegal in Deidesheim! LOL! (Well, maybe it was the wine we were concerned might cause a problem….) Perhaps everything tasted so good because it was three friends, stupid and young drinking an agreeable Reisling from the bottle that we passed around. We were all young enough to remember mothers scolding us for sharing our drink that way!
I still like wine and cookies, as awful as it sounds. If a wine is worth drinking, I say, it should be able to handle abuse.
OOPS! I reread the instruction. These weren’t posted in my kitty boy blog, but they represent three instances where something I ate was memorable. I spared you the story about the best liver and onions ever served in a small cafe in Hunawihr, France, where my friend from Paris and I visited his girlfriend, who was working in the vintage. I mean, who orders liver and onion in France!? But I did, and it was perfect. If there is a poorly prepared meal in France, I never found it!
I check here every once in a while. I cannot wait until tomatoes grow and ripen again. I love the taste and smell of them right off the vines.