Food and Drink

There are some characters who infuse literature and life with disproportionate zest. The nature of their vocations is less relevant than the fervency they bring to the job, which is what makes them stand up off the page and sail through time. Lucius Beebe, who kept a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, favored bowler hats and evening dress and wrote a column for the old New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s and then for Gourmet until his death in 1966, sits high up on my list of zestful characters who go the distance: militantly old-fashioned, never out-of-date. The association with the estimable, sadly deceased Gourmet justifies talking about Beebe under the food heading as much as any other, even though he did not always write about food as such.

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called “CarnivoreMD” (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: “If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male... or alpha female.” Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer consigned to memories of the postwar school cafeteria, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word “offal” implies wastage — from the Middle Dutch for offcuts — but it can also be a delicacy. Foie gras is only the most obvious example. For the most part, though, the West has become squeamish about what was once called “variety meat.” But a new wave of offal-lovers is reviving an interest in organs.

They were neighbors and friends. Harold Loeb, an economist, writer and heir to the Guggenheim and Loeb fortunes, and his wife Vera lived down the Saugatuck River from us on Snake Drive, at the end of Buttonball Lane. Harold was better known as having been betrayed by Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1930s — Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises was modeled after him. Harold got even in The Way It Was, published in 1959. He asked my father to sketch him for the book’s back cover. Among other things they had in common a gift for gardening. My father, known for his charcoal sketches of celebrated locals of Weston, Connecticut, planted a large, Walden-inspired plot surrounded by a white picket fence, where weeds were allowed as long as they didn’t interfere with the crops.

"Gelati, sorbetti e granite,” it said on the cover. We were in a little bookshop off the Piazza Duomo in Verona. Days of consuming Italian gelato in the hot afternoons had worked so wonderfully upon our imaginations that here we were purchasing a recipe book in a language we didn’t even understand, trying to capture a little of the magical glitter of the Italian summer before it slipped through our fingers. I still have the book — and I still don’t understand enough Italian to follow a recipe. But the pictures convey some of the original magic. Gelato al limone peers creamily out of a yellow bowl, garnished with bristling strips of lemon peel. Gelato allo Champagne is pink and melting, snuggled up to a strawberry. Sorbetto d’arancia is spooned into a hollowed-out orange.

You might expect Zabar’s, the world-famous “appetizing” store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, to have become a shadow of its former self. This seems to be the case for most of New York’s other independent specialty shops. Fairway, Balducci’s, H&H Bagels, Dean & Deluca: the food purveyors of my youth have gone kaput. They were bought, leveraged, expanded, overextended and oversold. They expired past their sell-by dates. But somehow Zabar’s survived. For the Upper West Sider, Zabar’s is our Yale College and our Harvard. Like many I make my way down to 80th Street and Broadway most weekends for continuing education. I head to the appetizing counter and take a number.