main: July 2011 Archives
An extremely pleasant and perfectly bright acquaintance surprised me by stating with his usual attractive confidence that food is a frivolity and cooking not part of our cultural life. His spouse, whose every meal gives the lie to such silliness, just smiled.
So I asked them if they knew that George Lang, best known as reinventor of New York's Café des Artistes, had just died. His life, I said with my own brand of confidence, may be worth a look, because he personified and made public the need to feed as well as be fed. How can hospitality not be inherent to the world's manifold cultures, a mythic boon everywhere?
Lang's 1998 autobiography, slightly puffy and larded with "stars," does have a frivolous title: Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen.Yet it tells a brave and even beautiful story of how a soul came into its own.
Here's my Philadelphia Inquirer column about the book and Lang's life.
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"I learned about cooking and flavor as a child." Maybe I'm worried that it's too easy, or dislike the part of me that's a permanent boy, but I've become increasingly shy of drawing from the same family well to recount my early fascination with food. Recently, though, I came upon a recipe for creamed scallions by the late chef Edna Lewis (here's my 2006 Philadelphia Inquirer appreciation) taken from her kindly and expert "memory" cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor. The line at the top of this post is that book's opener, and this is how she introduces the onion dish:
Growing up, we would sow onion seed in the garden and then thin a lot of them out before their bulbs got too big. We chopped them up, sautéed them in bacon fat, poured in heavy cream, and ate them for breakfast. This recipe is not quite as rich as that, but uses scallions in a way that tastes just delicious. In my opinion, they are an underused vegetable and taste almost as good today as they did years ago.Breakfast. Scallions, bacon grease and cream for breakfast. Even though her Freetown, Virginia family, settled there by her slave grandparents, was a larger collection of relatives than my nuclear Brooklyn four, what the hell. If Miss Lewis could look back without reservation, so may I.
Many of her recipes run from-the-dirt ingredients through butter-and-cream initiations, claiming their own particular France. There's a wonderful one for "long-cooked green beans" in which the chef politely dismisses "undercooked" vegetables and instructs us to find thick-skinned Kentucky Wonders to simmer (with pork) for more than an hour. So here's her scallions, an easy lesson in how to find luxury in basics.
Heavy cream gains the antique ivory you see by reducing and morphing into sauce. (Whisk carefully till the very end.) Taste? In the movie Heat, actress Pat Ast refers to pimpled hunk Joe Dallesandro as "a little piece of semiheaven."
Wonder why I made that connection....
Forbidden Lundy's
No, I won't drag yet another Lundy's story out of my Mouseketeer cap, the one with the ears that my California toymaker-uncle Irving who lived in Sherman Oaks next door to Liberace sent to me -- and one to brother Leslie -- with our names sewn in pink script so we could be the first on our block to wear them to school, the same school that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Julian Schnabel went to, a few blocks from where Arthur Miller brought bride-to-be Marilyn to meet the parents. No, I promise I won't talk about the fine, floury steam of napkin-wrapped beaten biscuits, the army of black waiters, the way Dad convinced his observant mom that when it came to lobster, God made a kosher exception for the Weinsteins, and the oh so sad attempt late in the Lundy's game to revive the clam bar by calling it the Teresa Brewer Room, the same place where I first saw my father, Harry, eat steamers.
I actually have few ordinary memories of my dad. He was a car dealer and closet bookie who felt it necessary to be away a lot. Yet special things stand out, as in all family memories: how proud he was that he could take his many brothers and sisters for wet jaunts on his shiny Chris-Craft, which he docked in Sheepshead Bay, right near Lundy's. (Suddenly it was gone.) How good he was at making messy tuna salads and at grilling steaks, and how very much this short, redheaded, sun-freckled man enjoyed his food.
I've written before that eating out was our special connection, but I see something now that's new. When I think of him 50, 55 years ago at F.W.I.L. Lundy Bros.on Emmons Avenue, plucking and sucking his clams and piling up the shells in a keen, mechanical manner, not sighing over how good they are or pausing to say so, then sipping the still-warm broth, intent on its finality, I realize that in this and this alone we have become the same person.
An uncomplicated dish of littlenecks and pasta led me to this realization, a recipe fashioned by the genius turned generic Emeril Lagasse, whom I once met (anonymously) as, flush-faced, he swept through his just opened New Orleans cri de coeur, Emeril's. What a changed man, as are we all.
Local Long Island littlenecks are 50 for $17, and for some reason -- in spite of its reputation to the contrary, food does not automatically make one self-aware -- I had stayed away from buying and cooking them. Yes, I know they pop open on a grill, spilling their insides as you try to gather them up. So I Googled and found something so basic from Emeril's Food Network show (a network that would never take off, I had written long ago) that I wasn't afraid to try.
Scrubbed them and soaked 'em in salted water with cornstarch, which is thought to "bleach" the meat as well as purge the poor things of waste and sand. Then all you do is cook some pasta and in another big pot cook some garlic and pepper flakes in olive oil, add white wine and the clams, cover, shake, and wait till they open. Add pasta, parsley, stir, serve.
I used the chef's proportions, except added more clams, and ate with a gusto and delight that comes too rarely. I am a little older than my father was when he died. No matter. He would have loved these clams, the first dish I have ever cooked that is just for him, and for his son.
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Do you have a recipe that you'd like to cook, or like to have cooked, for your mom or dad? If so, share it in the comments section, and I'll post them here and on Facebook so we can compare.
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