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The Taste Of The Past;
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A Brooklyn Nostalgia
by Abraham Rothberg
Old men are prone to nostalgia and
anecdotage--and why not? If the past was never the golden age many
touted it to be--I listen with amused disdain to tales of how wonderful
the 1930s and 1950s were by people who never lived through those times—some
things were indeed better then. Food, for
example. As I have grown older, I am struck
with yearning for the foods of my youth,
some "family" foods, prepared by my mother and her two sisters, others
from companies and restaurants now gone, or making their products
differently.
When I was growing up, we lived a brief nickel's
ride on the New Utrecht Avenue trolley from Coney Island, where I regaled
myself with the delights of Nathan's hotdogs and French fries, the equals
of which I haven't been able to find since I moved away from New
York City some twenty years ago. I, un-American in my distaste for
virtually all French-fried potatoes, including even my mother's, loved
Nathan's, which were made in a quite different way, the secret of which,
we were told, was as closely guarded as
the formula for Coca-Cola.
How can I describe the boyhood pleasures of
chewing Black Jack chewing gum, which, when we had a penny, we preferred
to chewing street tar, which we believed would make our teeth whiter. Or
the marvels of Horton's French vanilla melorols, on the rare occasions
during the Depression we had a dime to buy them, a truly tangy
vanilla-bean taste and a prewar butterfat content that was an invitation
to clog your coronary arteries. Or, even better, the home-made ice-cream
of a spotless little German ice-cream parlor near the Hewes Street
synagogue, where I sang in the choir. Between services, I would sneak
away to watch transfixed as the owner, with a large wooden spoon,
ladled gobs of rosy strawberry, dark chocolate and green pistachio
ice-cream into sundaes, sodas, floats, malted and frappes, and who,
doubtless out of pity for my forlorn, impoverished longing, would give me
twice the amount I ordered and could pay for, and then, "as a favor to
him," ask me to "sample" his new flavors--peach, or cherry, or
pineapple--and tell him how they tasted. Or the small stores on
Thirteenth Avenue where they sold fresh charlotte russe with a layer of
raspberry jam between the aery sponge cake and the thick swirl of genuine
whipped cream.
During the Depression,
potatoes were a staple, cheap and plentiful. Never did they taste better
to me, wonderful Long Island potatoes which grew where now sprawl acres of
suburban houses and concrete malls. Frequently, we boys, always hungry,
took a potato or two from home to roast over fires we built in backyards.
We called those potatoes "mickeys," a term I didn't connect with the Irish
or the potato famine until I was at college.
Men out of work sold roasted chestnuts and sweet
potatoes from small metal carts that were charcoal-fire ovens on wheels.
They wrapped the potatoes or chestnuts in a cone of the day's newspaper so
you could handle the hot potato or nuts as, right there on the street, you
ate them. Most of the time, most of us didn't have the nickels and dimes
such things cost, so we had to make do with the "mickeys."
Commercial products in the Brooklyn of that time
also satisfied the palate, Stuhmer's dark pumpernickel or Wisotsky's
crisp-crusted rye bread to be eaten with fresh, sweet-smelling tub butter
and white and black radishes whose sharp flavor brought tears to my eyes.
Old-fashioned farmer cheese, wrapped in cheese cloth in the ice box,
before my mother brought it out to spread on our bread. Ebinger's
splendid double-chocolate layer cake as a treat to be eaten with a glass
of unhomogenized milk which came with a thick head of cream. Lofts'
parlays, chocolate, nuts and nougat. And the coffee beans in the grocery
brought from the sack to the grinder, and then freshly ground before your
eyes, which filled the store with a coffee aroma. On special occasions,
we were allowed a cup of this dark nectar, though well-diluted with milk.
The local delicatessen,
Skilowitz's, whose savory pastrami, garlicky salami, rolled beef, and
brisket were all dispensed on seeded rye bread with special mustard. The
local "appetizing" store, Miller's, which sold all sorts of
herring--pickled, chopped, smoked, in schmalz, sour cream and wine
sauce--and other pickled and smoked fish--salty lox sliced thin and orange
long before I ever heard of saumon fumée; chunks of salmon
in brine with slices of onion, which we called pickled lox; whitefish and
butterfish whose soft flesh was a smoky delight to the palate; but I
haven't seen a single butterfish in more than twenty years. Fished out,
they tell me, gone, vanished, no more. And the sauerkraut, sour and
half-sour pickles and pickled green tomatoes we called gherkins but
pronounced jerkins, dipped tingling cold from great wooden
barrels of brine and spices.
Best of all were the foods
my mother and her sisters prepared. All three of them were brought up on
Middle-European cooking and baking, and very proud of their culinary
skills. My mother's cheese and potato blintzes, potato pancakes and salmon
croquettes are the best I have ever eaten. She made a
Mitteleuropaische delicacy, babulyiniklach, a heavenly
combination of potatoes, onions, chicken fat and eggyolks I never found
elsewhere, not even in Vienna or Prague, and superb kugels with
crisp crusts and hearts of thick broad noodles spiced with cinnamon and
white raisins. She baked a remarkable rice kugel, with a crispy
crust and both black and white raisins, I never found elsewhere either.
She prepared mushroom and barley soups from dried mushrooms--the Czech
dried mushrooms she thought the best—thick
with carrots, celery, parsnip and bits of meat which warmed us many a cold
winter night.
The youngest, most Americanized of her sisters,
my mother experimented more with her recipes. It was she who baked the
first—and best--carrot cake I ate, and a
pineapple-meringue pie she might have "invented," which I can still
remember more than three and a half decades since her death. My Aunt
Yetta's apple pies and shtrudel, full of lemon peel and
orange peel bits, melted in the mouth, as did her sweet and sour lima
beans and a baked potato log we called bubeh or potatonik,
a slice or two of which was a meal in itself. My Aunt Fanny made chicken
soup that could be eaten with a fork so thick was it with chunks of
chicken, vegetables and farfel or egg barley. She baked tiny,
fluffy circles of flaky dough with powdered sugar she called cheese
bagels, which were nonpareil. And she whipped up superb dark-chocolate
pudding with heavy sweet cream and maraschino cherries that all her nieces
and nephews loved.
A little while ago, in the
local newspaper, a small item reported that the "original Nathan's" was
opening a branch at a nearby discount department store. The second day it
was open, I drove there, made my way to a half-concealed alcove where I
found the sort of counter one usually finds in fast-food restaurants these
days, but above it, in blazing neon, was that old familiar sign:
Nathan's. It was lunch hour, but no more than a handful of diners
were there, and only one person stood at the counter. As I stepped up to
give my order, I remembered the crows that mobbed Nathan's Coney Island
counters, eight and nine deep, jostling and yelling their orders, the
hilarity and peevishness, the eating and spilling, the aromas of other
Nathan specialties—their chow-mein
sandwich, for instance—vying with the fresh ocean smell of the wild
Atlantic only two streets away.
Forgetting my present-day strictures about
nitrites, salt and saturated fats, I eagerly ordered two hot dogs and
French fries. Hypnotized, I stood watching the frankfurters sizzle on the
grill, the rolls toasting brown, the French fries spitting oil from the
deep-fat fryer, breathing in the scents as though they were perfumes.
Bliss!
When I got my order, I was shocked back into
reality by the price, well over $5. O where are the prices of
yester-year! I sat in one of the small booths with its vinyl-covered
benches and formica-covered table, savoring every mouthful. Delicious!
Yet it wasn't at all like standing on Stillwell Avenue in the crowd of
Nathan's devotees, gulping down a frank and a batch of French fries,
dripping mustard and ketchup, listening to the oohs and ahhs of
appreciation, making a few myself. Still, the franks and fries did
taste like old times, almost like the "original Nathan's," almost but not
quite. Something was missing--but what?
When I got home, I told my wife about the
whole escapade, and she roared with laughter. Irked, I repeated, "Well,
something was missing." And she, who remembered Nathan's as well as
I did, went right on laughing, and in her good-natured way, said, "Sure,
something is missing, you fool, your youth! It's not the taste of the
frankfurters and fries that's different, Abe, it's your mouth."
Copyright © 2005,
Abraham Rothberg
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