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...]
My Particular Beef
It glistened while it spattered. A dangerous smell had already filled the second-floor apartment. What in the world was I to do? The Weinsteins had moved from an elm-lined, tulip-strewn street in Midwood, Brooklyn -- two-family houses built in the 1920s -- to a "development" in Howard Beach, Queens, the year before I would have graduated from eighth grade in Public School 238. I was confused about being uprooted, which sounds like a common U.S. story, of army brats and kids of World War II parents looking for postwar jobs. I'm not claiming I … [Read more...]
Your Last Supper?
Each time I get a post from the site Memorie di Angelina (Easy. Authentic. Italian.) I assume it includes a recipe I want to cook. Author Frank Fariello's nonna Angelina left Campania in the 1920s and settled in The Bronx on Arthur Avenue. Through her Sunday dinners, Angelina took the boy on an eating and cooking path that his later years working in Rome and around the home country made inevitable. Yet Fariello's kitchen voice whispers in welcome modesty, which is a paradoxical result of direct engagement and … [Read more...]
Iceberg, Melting
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Hungry beyond myself, I come to a cartoon field of wet, glossy globes. Leaping into mud, I get on my knees and lean over, biting and choking to swallow one down. The way nightmares work, I see the lettuces, run, bend and chew -- again and again. Then I wake up, blinking and faint. Iceberg. Caesar. Mesclun. Hedda. These make my two-syllable lettuce poem, and they're welcome, though my next thought is about the recently denigrated M.F.K. Fisher for her youthful lettuce memories. She wrote what she remembered and … [Read more...]
Do You Recall Matthew Shepard?
I wrote this in October, 2008, for the online "Obit Magazine," which called itself " 'The New Yorker' of Death." It's been two decades since his murder. None of us can control how we’re remembered, though we may try to live in ways that minimize the dancing on our graves. Yet a special place should be made for those who are memorialized not for how they lived, but how they died. Those singular victims of war, accident, or crime may become famous, even important. But their daily voices, their quirks and smiles, their plain ambitions and … [Read more...]