A Lost Creamy Garlic Dressing, Found

Or, how to stop worrying and love your brain.

I RECENTLY READ a fascinating article in the New Yorker about the different ways humans think, written by a man who claims he often has no thoughts in his head until he actually says or does something. That he has neither images nor thoughts most of the time. A kind of spotless mind.

I wish I were like that, especially after reading the article (which I began to wish I’d never seen—but only because it made me overly brain-conscious).

My brain (like yours, probably) does not fall neatly into either broad category: picture-and-pattern thinkers or word thinkers. The conclusion of the piece seems to be that there’s really no way to know how we think—we’re that mysterious to ourselves.

As much as I love a good mystery, now I can’t stop thinking about the thought patterns of my brain, which, the article seems to imply, may be better suited to an animal behaviorist or an engineer than to a writer. And which I was once quite content to have naturally devoted to salad and constant worries about the fate of the planet.

Am I living the wrong life for my brain?

And another question: Is there a difference between thinking and memory, the latter of which for me is full of precise images and sounds and often seems as vivid as life itself. Almost like a waking dream.

The piece ventures into our dreams, and one part really blew my mind: “Dreams are unreal, and might not lend themselves to being described during waking life. In describing them, we give them a fixity they may not have.”

I mean, doesn’t that describe our waking lives, as well? Is ANYTHING real?

And never mind daydreams, those wandering reveries we allow our exhausted or frightened minds, as a respite or a portal to long-ago memories.

I honestly got myself into a bit of a frazzle thinking about this piece of journalism, but it also led me to today’s recipe, which replaces a chicken salad that I was extremely excited about and can now scarcely recall. (We’ll make that soon; I have my notes).

While I was worrying about that Dangerous Radioactive Capsule Smaller Than a Penny that fell off the back of a truck in Australia and authorities were scouring the desert to locate (they found it), my miraculous mind protected itself by opening the daydream door, and we wandered together back through a lifetime of side/house salads in restaurants—of all things.

Radioactive capsule just lying around on the ground, la-di-da, near Newman, Australia. (Western Australian Dept. of Fire & Emergency Services/ REUTERS)

Side/house salads are never very good and often a bit depressing. That’s what I was thinking until the extremely precise visual of a delicious house salad I had many many times in my early twenties came to me. I was living in a tiny town that had a tiny restaurant that somehow had an excellent Culinary Institute of America- trained chef (who also introduced me to the splendid idea of stuffing goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes into a chicken breast). I’ve thought about that salad a lot in the intervening decades without knowing why.

It was nothing more than soft leaf lettuces, two slices of tomato, thin onion rings, and a thatch of wispy sprouts. A bit bleh, right? Just like half the house salads in the universe. But then my mind did one of its weird tricks and in addition to a perfect visual of this salad being placed before me on a rustic wooden table in a tin-ceilinged dining room so long ago, the flavors of the creamy dressing finally came rushing back to me, too: a bit too garlicky, in the best possible way, simultaneously sharp and mellow, with an alluringly funky undercurrent (anchovies!). It was always all about the dressing!