My decades-long food colleague and friend Daniel Young, who lives in London and does many things, including posting on substack about past and present hungers, asked me if I knew of an old egg store on East 7th Street between Second and First avenues in the East Village, Manhattan, the same block where another Daniel and I live in a tenement built in 1893. The egg store is in a 1984 film by Paul Mazursky, Moscow on the Hudson, London Daniel emailed. Russian-circus saxophonist Robin Williams, who defected while his troupe negotiated a final, … [Read more...]
Born to Pasta
I've been absent and errant, for many reasons, but global tumult has sifted through everything I am. The other day, I admitted to a friend who masters a special bookshop -- which, if forever ambered, could be an Ashurbanipal or Alexandria for our rickety future -- that my daily reliance on cooking as thinking, hand-ballet, and even small achievement was waning, and I wanted to end my relationship. He stopped, struck. As we spoke, he had been sorting books and ephemera in his store's exploded back room. I already knew that New York City … [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 white, … [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...]
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...]
Fireflies Are Out …
They bring me back to my stoop days, decades ago, when I smudged their bellies on my forehead as makeup, also called war paint. Will they make the same impression decades from now, on those I love beyond measure, in flooded or scorched backyards I'll never see? You can tell the temperature by the firefly rate of thorax blinking, which can be hypnotic, like the gleam of this cucumber seed in fluorescent kitchen light. Those seeds, covered in slime, scoot like baby roaches onto counter or floor when you run a spoon down the center of your … [Read more...]
Finding My Chowder — Part 2
Corn season on the East Coast is ending, sweetness flying off cobs to hole up for the winter and be retrieved -- if we are lucky -- for our next warm time. Still, there's an autumn corn-ucopia to be had. The few farm stands that remain open are stocking swollen cauliflowers and glossy leeks, hard parsnips, more and still more carrots. But the late corn in their coolers, tassels limp, allow us a final chowder. Brooklyn kids from the '50s rarely saw corn on a cob. Canned corn, even dairy-free "creamed style," was considered lazy roughage, so … [Read more...]
Finding My Chowder — Part 1
I don't know where she was born, and I don't know her real last name. When I say this to friends or even to party strangers, they quite rightly raise eyebrows. My late mother lived to almost 90. What kind of adult son would have been so profoundly uncurious? As of now, I've found no record of her before her marriage to my dad -- no marriage certificate, either. Her maiden name is "Browne" on the photostat of my birth certificate, but she told me later that that was not the case and offered another one -- also, as it happens, … [Read more...]
Learning To Cook: Frittata
Eggs, and recipes for eggs, are paradoxical. That shouldn't seem so at first. An egg will do a certain thing when placed near, or mixed with, another thing, and do that thing at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. Which is what all ingredients do. But actually, as lucky four-year-olds know, eggs are full of surprises. Eggs are also full of doubt. Their clichéd purity of form is challenged by the slippery dualism of yolk versus white, which is why there's something sad, even destructive, when you take a fork or whisk … [Read more...]