Spectator Life

Hannah Moore’s June Spectator piece on sandwiches made me hungry. Then it made me think. Ms Moore makes a sound distinction between modern Britain’s plastic-boxed, triangular ‘sandwich’ and the custom-made, piled-high, endlessly imitated, seldom-matched product of a good New York or Chicago delicatessen. Why, one wonders, do the Brits put up with it? Landing in countless foreign ports over the years, for business or pleasure, I’ve always wondered, pretty much before wondering about anything else, ‘What’s the food like?’ Almost always, I’ve liked what it was like. In the age of real borders and undiluted ethnicities, food was a powerful expression of locality.

Wise men say only fools rush in. But in this particular instance, I really couldn’t help falling in love on the spot. Like a zillion others, the story starts on a night out. When my party, dripping with rain, arrived at the restaurant, our table wasn’t ready, and they ushered us to wait at the bar The bar was a happening kind of place. Instead of looking up at shelves of bottles and bartenders mixing drinks, it looked down onto the kitchen area, which was built around a giant wood fire over which five or six cooks labored frenetically. The flames blazed openly, fed from the picturesque log stack that lined the back wall of the dining area.

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early in 2020 — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a dire wheat harvest causing bread-price rises — I became a bread-maker. I dug around on the internet for a good recipe for sourdough, and found one padded out with the usual bloggery and waffle. Absent the philosophy and the pious musings, it gives a clear, sensible route to bread self-sufficiency. Sourdough doesn’t need bought-in yeast, only a ‘starter’ of flour and water. This is often called a ‘mother’, and attracts wild yeasts as it develops; after five days in the jar it is a gently bubbling ferment of living yeasts, and you keep it going by adding flour and water to it day by day.

You can get goat in parts of New England. Consumers of Portuguese origin create a market unparalleled elsewhere in the US. In Boston, as I recall, Savenor’s used to sell camel and kangaroo. Few meats are too un-American for New York City. Ottomanelli, purveyors to whatever is left of the Four Hundred, still has venison of the quality they sold to the Upper East Side in the Gilded Age. Los Paisanos in Brooklyn stocks alligator, turtle and caribou. But the great days of the 1950s, when a club in New York served porcupine, caribou, muskrat and armadillo, are fled. With the closing of the American mind has come the narrowing of American appetites. Americans’ self-image is of enterprise, pioneering, innovation, adventure and the call of the wild.

Willard Nickerson was about as Cape Cod as you could get. Chatham locals even gave him the nickname ‘The Codfather’. Willard was a 12th-generation member of the Nickerson family, his ancestors having arrived on the Mayflower. He was also a Chatham lobsterman/fisherman and on July 4, 1976, Willard led the annual parade down Chatham’s Main Street in my father’s 1952 Woody car. My father was rightly proud to chauffeur one of the town’s most revered residents. Willard was not just a local treasure because of his profession, he also played the trombone during Chatham’s summer band concerts. If you happened to be a year-round resident, Willard would come and find leaks in your roof during a blustery nor’easter.

Joy’s Toasted Parmesan Canapés: mix four tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese with half a cup of grated Swiss (or any other mild cheese that will melt), add mayonnaise enough to make a spread, season with salt and oregano or basil, spread on bite-sized rounds or squares of thin-sliced white bread, top with a slice of green olive (optional), broil until bubbly, serve immediately. Caveat, sophisticates: the ‘Parmesan’ likely as not was that pale yellow powder dispensed from the green Kraft cylinder, the Swiss was from Wisconsin, the mayonnaise was aka Miracle Whip Salad Dressing, the spices dried ones from the McCormick jar and the bread courtesy of Pepperidge Farm (if you were lucky). Not a whiff of anything cordon bleu or ‘artisanal’ here, the latter a term not yet dreamt-up c.

The most exciting arrival in years on the DC dining scene is coinciding with the end of the pandemic. Not since the launch of the DC Michelin guide has the buzz been as strong. Nestled adjacent to the Old Ebbitt Grill, it’s sure to be a welcome addition to the Power Lunch scene among the Jos A. Bank-clad downtown crowd. Yes, the Cheesecake Factory has opened their new location just a few blocks from the White House. Truth be told, DC being a city full of cynical people who think they live in a West Wing episode and that the height of dining is Cafe Milano, it’s not actually clear to me that DC deserves a Cheesecake Factory. But it brings a level of class, sophistication and culture to the nation’s capital that we haven’t had since Billy Carter.

How does the saying go? Is it ‘fool me once, shame on me. Fool me four times, I’ll shame you on social media’? It’s a lesson someone like Graydon Carter, the legendary former Vanity Fair editor who now runs an ambiguously successful digital magazine called Air Mail, should know by now. Yet Carter has managed to infuriate his fellow bon-viveur, Keith McNally, the restauranteur and Instagram enthusiast. Carter has, McNally claims, booked and not shown-up at one of his New York restaurants not once, not twice, but four times. To rub salt into an empty place setting, Carter didn’t call ahead in his latest no-show, at Morandi in the West Village, for a reservation for 12 people.

‘Life,’ Carl Sandburg says, ‘is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.’ Carl, being a poet, was the sensitive type. You’d better believe that when Chuck Norris peels an onion, the only crying comes from the onion. But Chuck’s iron-jawed impassivity isn’t a trait I personally seek to emulate (though one is naturally curious about the type; did you know that when Chuck goes to a feminist rally, he leaves with a freshly ironed shirt and a sandwich?) I freely admit that both life and onions have occasionally brought me to tears. Especially onions. Julia Child thought it hard to imagine a civilization without them, but as a seven-year-old I vigorously disagreed.

About five years ago, just after my 50th birthday, I noticed that I was extremely fat. Not ‘overweight’, not ‘heavy’, not ‘big-boned’, not possessed of a ‘good sense of humor’; fat is what it was. It was down to a long-undiagnosed medical condition and the attendant medication. It was also down to enjoying food a lot. What to do about it? Like a lot of men, I like a solution. I fundamentally believe that if you have a problem, you just need to find the right expert, who will lift the hood, run a few tests, give you a schedule to follow and it’ll be right as rain. ‘Go to the Mayr,’ a friend said. ‘They’ll put you right.’ And so it was. The Mayr Clinic is a celebrated health farm on the shores of the Wörthersee, a lake in eastern Austria.

My jar of vegan flaczki has been eyeing me for the last four months. It sits in my fridge, large, round and imposing, filled with a lumpy gray mixture. Flaczki is tripe soup, a traditional Polish concoction of broth, herbs, spices, vegetables and guts. Poles adore the stuff. It is warming and hearty. An unimpressed friend once described it as ‘elastic-band stew’. My vegan flaczki contains mushrooms instead of tripe. I bought it for a lark. My Polish friends thought it funny that a modern, progressive twist was being put on a firmly traditional dish. I am a vegetarian, but every time I think about eating my vegan flaczki, I think again. Traditional Polish food is warm, rich and meaty. Roulada, for example, is a meat roll stuffed with, among other things, more meat.

I don’t remember my grandmother, Anna Olson Nelson (Nelsie to her grandchildren), ever measuring out anything for her divine Swedish bread. The recipes must have been kept under the thick, blonde braid that she piled expertly on top of her head. What I do recall, as if it were yesterday, is helping Nelsie bake fläta and limpa every other Sunday in her small kitchen. The heavenly smells of cardamom and fennel wafted throughout her apartment while she tried to improve my Swedish. My mother, Mimi, often spoke Swedish to me and my sister, Chris, when we were babies and my father was with the Office of War Information as a correspondent in China, Burma and India during World War Two. Nelsie was our ‘Swedish nanny’.

How better to lift a torch against late-winter gloom than by conjuring an evening from a time when our country was still a confident going concern, when its culture and ideas bestrode the free world? What with our plague-driven mania for virtual living, it’s hard to get anyone to come to dinner these days. And since she died in 1969, our virtual guest of honor won’t be coming either. But from an era full of entertainment giants, we pick one, the star of stars: Miss Judy Garland. If only in our minds, we invite Judy to cocktails and dinner and then, just maybe if we get lucky, to linger late into the evening around the piano and sing a few of the old songs. This is not a formal affair, just two couples on a Friday evening after work.

What will Easter 2021 be like? Nothing like 2020, if I have my way. This year, I dream, Easter will be preceded by a Holy Week as solemn as if COVID had never been. Purple-veiled statues will stand solemnly about the church overlooking the Holy Thursday foot washing, a jug of water the only cleansing agent in sight, while a large choir sings the Ubi caritas. The Mass will be jammed with people, as it is every normal year, lovely, unknown people who spontaneously show up, unregistered and untraceable, squeezing in wherever there’s space. Afterwards an altar boy swinging a golden censer will lead the procession through volutes of blue smoke to an altar of repose, swathed in white silk.

Growing up in a mixed American household of Indian, Italian and Puerto Rican descent, I never questioned the varying menu each night for dinner. Until I was a teenager, I hadn’t realized my family’s weekly meals were different from those of my friends — until they began begging me to eat at my house on weekends after I told them what was being cooked. For me, dietary normalcy meant chicken curry on Mondays, arroz con habichuelas on Wednesdays and lasagna on Fridays. My Puerto Rican and Italian American mother Loretta had married my father Roop, an Indian immigrant, in 1981. I always admired my mother for her fearlessness in crossing cultural lines during an era when interracial marriage was less common than it is today.

The decline and fall of the New York Times, like that of the Roman Empire, did not happen overnight. Believe it or not, by 1970 the rot had already set in at the Times and rank error was being peddled as fact to a trusting public. I have proof. In August of that year, the paper ran a review of a Canadian theatrical production just arrived in New York called ‘Love and Maple Syrup’ (a reference to a Gordon Lightfoot song). The show was panned — so far, so par for the course — but the review ended on a shockingly error-riddled and un-factchecked note: ‘Love, incidentally, is great, but have you actually tasted maple syrup? Ugh! Only a nation with built-in insecurities and a dire need for blood sugar could have chosen it as its national drink.

One takes the chance, in writing about al fresco dining during winter, of getting pigeonholed as that guy who always goes on about how cold it is in Chicago. But if I’m to write about food and drink at this time of year, there’s no attractive alternative, unless you want to hear about my puttering in the kitchen making spaghetti, and how exciting is that? With indoor restaurant dining forbidden due to the pandemic, the remaining choice is the outdoors — the ideal setting, in this challenging time, for the intrepid individual to demonstrate boldness without being a complete idiot about it, always a fine line. The question is, how?

Raclette is the ultimate comfort food. From the French word racler, to scrape, this simple, hearty dish is all Swiss. There isn’t a village in Switzerland, in the Alps, the Jura or the Engadine, where you can’t have raclette. There are even restaurants, called carnotzets, just for raclette, although they usually serve fondue, as well. Many Swiss homes have their own raclette-designated space, often in the basement, sometimes doubling as bomb shelter, featuring fireplace and wooden table, with cozy banquettes. It’s where the Swiss go when they want to soak up carbs for comfort. In the film Heidi, you’ll watch the orphan’s uncle serving her raclette in the rustic chalet during a cold winter’s eve.

Moving back from New York City to Central Pennsylvania has been like the Five Stages of Grief, if only the last stage were eating hot soup with a hard-boiled egg in it on a 90 ̊F day in August, which is what I’ve been doing. In other words, I’m becoming a native again. Moving back to a place as particular as my hometown of York, Pennsylvania appealed after rootless years in a coastal city. From our rich colonial history to our high concentration of snack manufacturers and the pack of wild turkeys that patrols the bike path along the old railroad, York may not be an elite metropolis, but it’s no anonymous suburban wasteland, either. We owe some of that specificity to the Pennsylvania Dutch.

It’s hard to keep up with the French. First they invent a perfectly good culinary term, hors d’oeuvre, which as everyone knows refers to the bite-sized appetizers served at cocktail hour. We Anglos, in keeping with our ancestral custom, duly pirate the word and put it to work in kitchens on three continents. But barely have we wrestled the silent h into submission and gotten the vowels in oeuvre sorted out (is that ue or eu?), when the French — who had permitted their attention to wander for a brief space — deign to take note of our efforts, lifting a single languid eyebrow: ‘What? Hors d’oeuvres? Oh, you mean amuse-bouches?’ Stop the presses, everyone; cancel the cookbooks; send the menus back to the printshop. It’s an amuse bouche now...

Is your January still dry? Many of us begin a new year with the best of intentions and make resolutions in the hope of improving ourselves. Giving up alcohol for a month is a popular one — goodness knows why — but 'Veganuary', when you take up veganism until February 1, is an equally trendy option. Veganism is ‘cruelty free’ and is good for both you and the planet. What’s not to love? Support for the diet has gone mainstream with the US seeing a 600 percent increase in people identifying as vegan over the past three years. But just how ethical is it? We're always told that high consumption of meat and dairy is fueling global warming.

I often feel conflicted around this time of year: can Christmas food be justified in January? I’m quite strict on when the Christmas feasting begins: I’m not interested in beginning the festivities until everyone has finished work (even when that working takes place at home), so that usually means halfway through Christmas Eve. But, the end is less defined, and often has a long tail, especially this year. Culinarily (or greedily), I have no problem with it: I love Christmas food. I’m quite happy to stretch Christmas out for as long as I can: leftover sandwiches never lose their appeal, stuffed with all manner of cold cuts and root veg, bathed in medieval-tasting bread sauce, and occasionally boasting a pig in blanket.