Soaking Many of us in 2020 understand that we must retreat from strangers, sometimes even from our very closest, and do for ourselves. The threat of death by a new plague makes any comparison unusual, although comparing different threats of death in past decades and centuries puts some of the present danger in existential limbo. Small comfort. But I've been told that context is important. When I hear "context is important," I usually screw my face into a please, no. So I did some lookback and realized I had rarely written about … [Read more...]
Breakfast With Bill
For the life of me, I can't recall where or when I found the pot, but I'm certain a cosseting dealer at some hodgepodge stand in Manhattan or L.A. must have told me it was an object effort to get U.S. support for England as it was attacked by Germany. Five inches tall and made in Staffordshire, like thousands of others, it was daubed with childish flowers by women in city factories. The teapot, as teapots go, is hideous, but I counted out my money and carried it home. I'm listening to Morrissey as I write. His voice is in Manchester, an … [Read more...]
Juice, Tomato
Of course, I had to grow, pluck my own and juice them. I even bit one on the vine like an animal -- I am an animal -- and sucked and chewed, thinking of another writer who acted on the same impulse before I was born, though with a different lure. Perhaps MFK Fisher transmitted that to me, a gastronomic Tesla. As I get older, and maybe as others do, I tend toward something I will call "jeweling" my past, surrounding habitual memories with Wordsworth halos. This happens more often now, under pressure to consider the present a permanent past. … [Read more...]
Kosher Becomes Croissant
How Jewish is he? Queen, bar mitzvahed in Queens. If I say big deal, certain readers will spit. It was a giant, sweaty deal way back, but evaporated fast. My sceptic father knew that. Still, if you hate Jews, you hate me, truer than true now that I'm 72. So Moishe's Kosher Bake Shop, the around-the-corner bakery that opened in '72, said goodbye late last year with a vague paper sign, the way they all do. How many tears am I supposed to ... yes, the word is shed. Never liked its grim unsweptness, couldn't finish the prune or poppy seed … [Read more...]
No Picture This Time, at the New Year
No picture this time because food was so bad. The kitchen, which prepared the takeaway in front of me, tried hard and worked like crazy, getting it hot and out. I was excited, in my narrow, private way, because it was New Year's Day, and I was solo. Waiters in Italy strew salt on platters as if they were trying to melt ice on streets. Invisible sugar fairies did the same on my chopped pork ribs, green beans in garlic sauce, wet-mop sesame noodles. Only the egg roll, a silly schoolboy crush, rose to its hot, greasy promise. Not a … [Read more...]
Not Celery
"Did you see my cardoons?” Mike pointed to a pile of leafless, longer celery. I have eaten cardoons, I remember, at an optimistic Sicilian-only restaurant in Manhattan, long- and quickly gone, and in one other place, forgotten. Never saw them in a market before, and the produce guy, who pretends to know me, was proud. I looked, touched, and didn't buy, a cooking coward. Then I drove back. The plant seemed bruised and tired, with browning ends, but I read what I had to do: it's a thistle, an artichoke cousin, so I sheared the … [Read more...]
Stalker
Do all uncooked foods talk back? Snap crackle crunch; that's how cerealized infants learn words for eating. Yet the sound of celery is curbed by wilt. And then comes heat, and silence. Steady, serious warming hushes carrots, apples, globes. In chicken noodle soup, celery logs sog after a simmer unless added optimistically toward the end. Who are the wasters who'd have us "flavor" our soup and discard the sodden stalks that Edward G. Robinson would give his life for in Soylent Green? The same goes for stew, too. I’m a voyeur now, the boy … [Read more...]
Cold, Dead White
Forget the red, erase it. Before bloodied by berries, its surface was white. But unlike that of cottage cheese, coconut flesh, or the armor around my eyeballs, this white is negative, an abrogation. When finally chilled, my dish frightened me, at the same time I saw that the recipe worked and cookie should have been pleased. Here's where Lady Macbeth usually appears, her "posset" mention: The doors are open, and the surfeited groomsDo mock their charge with snores.I have drugg'd their possetsThat death and nature do contend about … [Read more...]
The Good Knife
One of the few short stories I've written, a lifetime ago, begins with a declaration that I stole cookbooks. Yes, I did lift some classics as well as a set of what I thought were "good" kitchen knives from a foofy store in San Diego. I learned later that the knives were French, not big-deal German, and in spite of their ridiculous price, considered just OK. When I took the biggest in my hand and pushed it through something, it cut just as well as the $1.99 drug-store serrated knife I already had and still use almost 50 years later, a … [Read more...]
Yeast Never Dies
Yeast isn't a food or an ingredient, except in tiny ways. It plays on food, like a conductor, or a cook. So when you realize that yeast floats in the air and lives forever, or almost forever, you may have more respect for its governance, its fungal baton. A random search engine found an article that had the word "Holbrook" in it, Holbrook being not an actor but a hamlet -- yes -- on Long Island, New York, where my beloved Costco sits, 20 minutes by car from the St. James Brewery. Low-ceiling industrial malls don't magnetize shoppers, … [Read more...]