Steal the Menu (2 page)
Authors: Raymond Sokolov
No one could have imagined such a spot in the placid, static, mediocre dining world of 1971. Today, we take for granted a lineup of star chefs transmuting remarkable ingredients of the highest quality into novel dishes tangentially based on the dusty classics still in faded vogue when I covered New York restaurants for the
Times
. The closest America had to a TV top chef then was Julia Child performing
coq au vin
for an audience of home cooks eager to learn to make French dishes correctly. Julia’s breezy, offhand manner enticed a generation away from the stultifying distortions of the home economists who ruled at most food magazines and newspaper food pages. She was also an authentic counterforce to “continental” menus pushing fancy food with no roots anywhere except possibly American hotel kitchens, flaming steak Diane and butter-oozing veal
francese
.
Forty years later, after the ancien régime in French cuisines gave way to the nouvelle cuisine of Michel Guérard, the Troisgros brothers and Paul Bocuse, and then passed its baton to a global network of master chefs, Daniel Boulud, a classically trained French pro, presides with star quality over a small empire of inventive restaurants that bear his name. The meal I ate in 2010 at his informal Bar Boulud was a model of a modern meal, of a cosmopolitan way of eating that has spread from Paris all across America, and to Lima and Manila as well.
That lunch at Bar Boulud was typical of the radical sophistication of our bustling creative food scene, with its nonclassic ingredients (arugula), lighthearted plating (
boudin noir
—blood
sausage—sculpted into three squat cones), the non-French waitstaff of both sexes, wine from what General de Gaulle might have called “all azimuths.”
†
And yet each of these radical departures can be traced to changes in French restaurant kitchens that radiated around the world and have now been absorbed by “native” cooks from Iceland to Patagonia.
You could even say that Boulud has returned to his roots in a way that would have been impossible in the naive New York of 1971. When I did a feature with a New York–based French
charcutier
for the
New York Times
forty years ago, the man had been forced to abandon his trade, because New York couldn’t support even one artisanal sausage maker. He showed me how to make a batch of blood pudding (with veal blood, because pork blood couldn’t be sold legally in New York), an everyday favorite in France that was then unobtainable in New York. So the boudin casually reinvented at Bar Boulud in 2010 was not only a sign of postmodern creativity but also an example of the spread of authentic culinary practices from the French center to formerly unsophisticated peripheries like New York.
My personal intersection with this historical arc has not been casual. I was in the middle of various revolutions in food, recording them as a journalist, participating in them as a cook and eater. I had a front seat for all the action: the
nouvellisation
of French and then other cuisines; the role of television, starting with Julia Child on PBS and exploding into the era of the “top” chef; the emergence of the foodie, educated by cheap jet travel and ever-more-reliable cookbooks; the globalization of food ideas (fusion) and ingredients; the rise of politically correct notions of proper nutrition and ecologically sensitive food production and transport.
My life in food encompassed all of these developments, with a
privileged three years of residence abroad, and very extensive gastronomic travel from 2006 to 2010, while I was writing a biweekly restaurant column for the
Wall Street Journal
.
So, in this memoir, I’ll be filtering the unprecedentedly fast-moving history of food since World War II through my direct encounters with it. However, I cannot and would not want to claim to have been a primary actor in the making of these events and trends. I was there, and I ate what was put in front of me.
*
Indeed, to be frank, it was in the back of my mind to publish my own sequel to
The New York Times Cookbook
, with recipes I would bring to the paper. Or, as I soon learned, maybe I wouldn’t have to spend years accumulating enough material for a book of my own. After I was able to look at the food-department ledgers that contained paste-ups of
Times
recipes going back decades before Claiborne had arrived, I saw how he had produced his book so soon after he became food editor.
Once he had his contract, Claiborne had apparently flipped through those ledgers, much of whose contents had been produced by his predecessors, and hastily checked the ones he liked with a thick No. 1 pencil before handing the ledgers over to a typist. This process would explain why the cookbook he produced has multiple versions of the same recipes—brandied tutti-frutti I and brandied tutti-frutti II, cold tomato soups I and II, mousses au chocolat I and II. Craig seemed to have forgotten he’d already put a check mark beside the first versions by the time he put checks by the second ones in ledgers from later years, but the editorial process at Harper & Row inevitably put them side by side and no one bothered to choose between them before the draft went to press.
†
De Gaulle promoted France’s nuclear capability as a striking force (
force de frappe
) that could defend French sovereignty anywhere (
tous azimuts
).
First Bites
I was born on the eve of war and Holocaust on August 1, 1941, at Harper Hospital in Detroit. By family legend, I began eating immediately and with prophetic zest. The exact content of that first meal is unrecorded, but I am sure it didn’t come directly from Mom. She, like other advanced women of her time, believed that science offered a nutritionally superior and more hygienic way to feed her baby than she could herself.
Powdered “formula,” dissolved in water and delivered in sterilized bottles with rubber nipples, replaced the mammalian teat in millions of American households of that era. Of course, many mothers today still choose to trade the intimate mess and exposure of nursing for the technoid ritual of preparing and delivering formula to their infants: mixing, washing and sterilizing bottles, flicking the heated “milk” on their wrists to check that it isn’t too hot, remembering not to tilt the bottle too high for fear of drowning the child as he feeds, hunting for a new formula when Beloved Nipper refuses the one you started him out with.
I was not that balky kid. I never refused a bottle. Far from it. Not long after we returned home to our bastard Tudor house in the
comfy Russell Woods neighborhood, I was sucking down three bottles at a feeding. At a year old, I weighed thirty pounds, and Geneva, the jovial black nanny, couldn’t force my galoshes over my chubby ankles.
Did this gorging cause the allergies that afflicted me as a toddler? Childhood asthma, sensitivity to eggs, sulfa drugs, feathers, dust—they all vanished once I began eating solid food in saner amounts. By the time I turned four, my weight had become normal for my age and height, but who can say if, fourteen years later, some molecular ghost of those bottled banquets lurking in my blood didn’t touch off the nearly fatal reaction I suffered from a wasp sting at an outdoor mixer at Brandeis University in the late summer of 1959. A wasp at Brandeis.
Tempting as it is to blame Mother for that (and so much else), the lusty appetite was all mine, a spontaneous urge as normal to me as a cry or a burp. She merely enabled it. Looking back on my writing career, I can’t help thinking that I was born hungry and unusually interested in what I put in my mouth. Nonetheless, my family life stood behind that natural inclination.
When my paternal grandfather, Barney Sokolov, arrived in Philadelphia around 1910 from Kremenchug, a dreary industrial hub on the banks of the Dnieper in what is now Ukraine, he enrolled in an engineering program at Temple University, hoping to leave behind the life he’d known as a farmhand and the training he’d had as a bookbinder in Europe. But marriage and fatherhood came quickly. My father was born in 1912. Then news of a better life in the American West led Barney away from a technical career in Philadelphia and back to the land.
Already in 1911, another immigrant Jew, Benjamin Lipschitz, who called himself Ben Brown, had begun leading some 130 other Yiddish-speaking, socialist immigrants to the state of Utah, where they formed a Zionist agricultural commune on Homestead Act
land outside the barren town of Gunnison. The Clarion Colony never overcame the triple jinx of poor soil, insufficient water and undercapitalization.
*
But in our family, it was remembered as a heroic adventure. Baby carriages were threatened by coyotes. Even hardy shtetl products like my grandmother were unprepared for the comfortless life, despite the cordial welcome and advice they got from Mormon neighbors.
I was also unprepared for the bleakness of Gunnison, when I managed to piggyback it onto a working trip for
Travel + Leisure
magazine. I drove through town on a great-circle tour of the mountain time zone in the 1970s, that paradisiacal era when you could get off a flight at some midpoint and continue on later, for the same fare as an uninterrupted transcontinental nonstop. As a freelance writer, I maximized my work possibilities and my private travel interests by cannibalizing a
Travel + Leisure
ticket to California, issued to me as part of an assignment for an article on fish restaurants around the country, into two segments with a stopover in Salt Lake City. I paid local rates for a Hertz car, which I then drove south through Gunnison to Death Valley, continuing on to Mount Whitney, Reno, Pyramid Lake (Nevada) and back to Salt Lake for the flight to San Francisco. Along the way, I climbed Mount Whitney and baked a cake at the summit for a
Natural History
column on high-altitude baking (the batter boiled in my camper’s oven but did subside into an edible cake, which I, too nauseated from
soroche
, fed to an astonished hiker, who later nominated me, unsuccessfully, for a Guinness title as world’s highest baker) and did research for my biography of A. J. Liebling,
Wayward Reporter
, at Pyramid Lake, where Liebling had reported on the evils of aerial hunting of wild mustangs. I also spent a lurid, sleepless night at an isolated motel on a lonely stretch of Interstate
80 east of Winnemucca, kept awake by the angry shouts and then the ecstatic squeals of the couple in the next room.
My stop in Gunnison, Utah, had not been much pleasanter. The small town’s principal landmark was a prison. As I ate a toasted cheese sandwich at a lunch counter, next to a tobacco-chewing fellow in snakeskin boots, I tried to imagine my grandfather struggling to make a go of it there.
Little had changed from the bleakness the first arrivals had seen in 1911, as Goldberg noted:
As Ben Brown steered the wagon westward out of town, the colonists strained to see their land.… Although lacking in farm experience, Barney Silverman became concerned. The land sloped steeply, resembling the sides of a “large saucer.” The “raw earth,” as Isaac Friedlander described it, was bare of trees and covered with sagebrush, shadscale, and tall, thin grasses. Large patches of ground were devoid of any vegetation.… The site of the base camp was a particularly dubious place to begin cultivation. Yet, this determination was out of the Jews’ control. The stage of canal construction had dictated the initial area of farming in the southern part of the colony on some of the worst land in the tract. Silverman also noticed that no well had been dug for water.
After five wretched winters, Clarion went under. Ben Brown stayed in Utah and prospered in the wholesale egg distribution business, the capitalist opposite of everything he and the Clarion Colony had once stood for. My hapless family, now including my uncle Eugene Victor Debs Sokolov, born in Utah in 1913, the year after the socialist E. V. Debs ran for president for the fourth time, decamped to that Kremenchug in Michigan, Detroit, where we had a wealthy second cousin.
Her welcome was a hollow one. She died soon of diabetes, leaving Grandpa Barney to improvise a living on the margins of the Detroit food economy. By the time I got to know him, in the early 1950s, he was operating an old-fashioned fish market—smoked whitefish, herring in barrels—on Michigan Avenue not far from the city’s skid row. At one point, he had banged together coops in his backyard, raised chickens and sold them to neighbors during a butchers’ strike. Even after he had his own shop, he kept his hand in as an agriculturalist with a little home vegetable garden that brought him his only worldly fame. In 1950, the gardening page of the
Detroit News
extolled the pumpkin he’d coaxed to grow up a post. When my sister and I were taken to Grandpa’s house on our weekly Sunday visit, I ran eagerly out to the garden to see this wondrous climbing cucurbit. It was very small and wrinkled.
The fish market was equally uninspiring. And it came to a tragicomic end. Grandma Mary inherited the building and, guided by my father, rented it out, first as a doctor’s office, then as a bookstore. Or so everybody thought. Yes, the tenants did sell books, but naughty ones, and there were girls upstairs. Police eventually raided the place, and Grandma Mary, a sheltered homebody, barely Anglophone, was cited for running a cathouse.