Readers have been writing to ask when I would get around to the sanguine curd, and I have been putting it off, and I owe you an admission as to why. It is not that the dish is obscure. It is that I did not, until recently, have the stomach for the joke the timing was going to make of me. A food critic sits down in the spring of our discontent to review, in all seriousness, a curd the color of a fresh wound. Someone was always going to write in. But the letters kept coming, and Freeman’s kept setting it out, and a critic who reviews only the comfortable dishes is not a critic but a guest. So I went out to the Bestiary.

What it is, for those who have only read about it

You have met the sanguine curd already, whether you know it or not, because it haunts the historical pages of this region like a birthmark. The stage production down at the playhouse was praised in these very pages for its period accuracy, and the detail our reviewer singled out, fondly, was a character eating sanguine curd at Freeman’s, exactly as people did in the weeks after the Silence. It is that kind of food. It belongs to a time. It is a set curd, firm enough to hold an edge on the spoon, a deep and frankly alarming garnet that goes nearly black at the center of the mold, and the tradition at Freeman’s Windward Bestiary is to give it away, a coin-free portion to anyone patient enough to stand in the line during the spring fundraiser. I stood in the line. It moves slowly and the company is good and Grandma Windward’s griffin chicks sneeze on you while you wait, which is either a charge or a feature depending on your feeling about griffin chicks.

How it tastes

Here is where I must be honest against my own preference, because I went out there prepared to be clever about it and the curd declined to let me. It is superb. The texture is the first surprise, a clean cool set that breaks like good custard and then turns silken the instant it warms, so that a spoonful you expected to chew instead simply leaves. The flavor is the second and larger surprise. There is an iron note to it, unmistakable, a low metallic hum under the sweetness that I will not insult you by pretending is not the entire point of the thing, and it is balanced against something bright and almost floral that keeps the whole from turning grim in the mouth. It should be macabre. It is, instead, oddly consoling, in the way that only very old food is consoling, food that people have been making and eating through worse springs than this one. I had a second portion. I went back a second day and had a third. I am aware of how that sounds.

The Verdict

Verdict: as good as it is ill-timed. Eat it, and notice yourself enjoying it.

And that noticing is the whole of my review, in the end, because I cannot in conscience file a clean rave for the sanguine curd and pretend the season around it is not the season it is. We are a region that has lately taken to speaking in lowered voices about pale neighbors and cold mornings and people who came home from an evening out short of something they could not name. And here we all are, lined up cheerfully at Freeman’s for a free helping of the reddest thing on the island, spooning up a dish whose great and ancient trick is that it tastes faintly of blood, and going back for more. I do not say this to spoil your appetite. I say it because I have learned this spring not to eat anything in Wexamour without asking what it is really about, and the sanguine curd, it turns out, is about exactly what it looks like, and we love it anyway. Perhaps that is nothing. Perhaps a region simply likes a red curd in a green season. But I have been doing this a long time, and when a place suddenly cannot get enough of the one flavor everyone claims to find unsettling, I stop calling it a coincidence and start calling it an appetite.

Eat the curd. It is wonderful. Only do me the courtesy, as you swallow, of knowing what you are hungry for.

Topaz Toepads reviews the food and tables of Wexamour for the Vaelthir section. He accepts no free meals, on principle, and three portions of a free curd, on grounds he declines to defend. Letters and dinner invitations may be sent by owl.