And I didn’t start it.
POP QUIZ: Do you know when and how the DeathbedFood blog began? Hint: it wasn’t in 2011 and it wasn’t my idea.
In the summer of 2011, I had a butterscotch creme brûlée at LA’s The Six Restaurant, blurted out “OMG! This is deathbed food!” and tweeted about the dessert right away using a #deathbedfood hashtag:
The restaurant responded:
As I went bananas about the brûlée the next day at lunch it hit me. Maybe “deathbed food” was a deal. After all, The Six said they loved the hashtag and that it was always an interesting question to ponder. And so the blog began. Faster than I could whip whipped cream, I had the domain, Twitter account and Facebook page set up. I was a blogger.
A week later, I shared the news my parents. After crickets and blank stares they simultaneously both asked, “What’s a food blog?”
I explained I’d be writing about food on the internet and added that it is called “DeathbedFood”. My dad instantly replied, “Oh yeah, I remember saying that.”
He then recounted a dinner he had with my mother 40 years ago when corduroy Jordache jeans were the rage and I was in middle school. They were at a neighborhood restaurant in Larkspur called the Blue Rock Inn which is a piece of Marin County’s history (around since the late 19th century and now home to the Left Bank Restaurant).
My Dad had ordered the Halibut Rosemary and told my Mom the dish was so good that it could be his deathbed meal! He later bantered the term around as we had other breathtaking meals when he would declare, “No, THIS is what I want to have on my deathbed!” From adolescence on, the word “death” flew across our dinner table almost as often as “How was school today?”
Looking back it seems odd for a parent to talk about any kind of death subject regularly at the dinner table around an impressionable young child – let alone my chemical engineer-educated, successful automotive-engine-oil-additive-professional, very logical father. But because it was used as an adjective to describe luscious foods, I simply internalized and morphed the term into “deathbed food” later in life.
There’s another reason the death reference didn’t traumatize me. Even though I was young, I realized that my dad was sardonic and had a bone dry sense of humor. There’s a reason why he wears a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” hat.
So I’ll end with saying “Thank You, Dad” for creating the seeds of the DeathbedFood blog way back in 1976!