Steal the Menu (3 page)

She, too, built a life around food, chopping carp for gefilte fish, preserving Kirby pickles with copious amounts of garlic and dill in Mason jars. We would carry home bushel baskets of them every fall, and kept them in the rec room, slightly embarrassed in our half-assimilated way, by this mark of
jener Welt
, the old country no one ever mentioned.

Although my father’s first language had been Yiddish, which he relearned in after-school classes, the world of his grandparents meant little more to Daddy than it did to me. He did, however, join a Jewish congregation (very reformed) just before I was born, and volunteered for the Public Health Service after Pearl Harbor (the
army turned him down because of a transient heart condition) to take a stand as a Jew against Hitler. And who would argue that for a young doctor to interrupt his career in order to teach other military doctors how to treat venereal disease with the revolutionary new wonder drug penicillin was not a selfless and effective contribution to the war effort? He and my miserable mother spent three nomadic years in a catch-as-catch-can life around army bases, fearful they’d be snubbed in allegedly anti-Semitic officers’ clubs, and actually were snubbed by locals in South Carolina and Texas who had had their fill of strangers on their way to war theaters in Europe and the Pacific.

In our family mythology, these were hard times, a descent into lumpenproletarian scarcity. Mother never stopped wincing over the unpasteurized Grade D milk she had seen on supermarket shelves in El Paso, home to Fort Bliss, or retelling the horror story of the Chicano boy who tried to get me to go shoot rabbits. I was three by then, and I had heard the noise of revelry by night on V-E Day in Columbia, South Carolina, not long after my neurasthenic mother had blithely chopped off the head of a chicken she’d been raising in the yard. As I watched it run around spattering blood on the bare dirt, I had no way of appreciating the spectacle as a reenactment of Grandpa Barney’s poultry caper in Detroit twenty years before.

What did I think about that chicken, my first exposure to meat production? I wish I could say that this barnyard violence troubled my soul ever after and fattened the wallets of therapists. Not so; nor have I shrunk from offing rabbits and geese when the necessity presented itself.

Mother did not continue her career as a home butcher after we left Columbia. But she did bring back one exotic culinary habit from the war. Chili.

The same Mexicans who terrified her with their low-class
Thumper bagging and unpasteurized milk also fed themselves with delicious Mexican food that she and Daddy learned to love.

How did my timorous parents, who were tenderfoots par excellence, unable even to find the Chinese laundry at Fort Bliss, end up adopting a lip-stinging Rio Grande chili as their signature family dish? No, they did not attend the annual Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cookoff in a Texas ghost town. Instead, my parents learned about Mexican food because of gonorrhea. The leading nightclub operator in Juárez, the lively town across the border, via the bridge over the Rio Grande, heard that a doctor at Fort Bliss had a miracle drug that could cure his case of the clap. He called for an appointment, and Daddy explained that the drug was in short supply and he couldn’t treat him. Even U.S. civilians couldn’t normally get it, only military personnel and their “contacts.” So unless this Mexican had had sex with a WAC, or perhaps a GI, and could prove it, Daddy wasn’t authorized to treat him.

Horacio Gutiérrez, as I will call him, had not become the leading figure in the raffish nightlife scene of wartime Juárez by accepting refusals from low-level bureaucrats, even if they were captains in the U.S. Public Health Service. He made another phone call, this time to someone at Fort Bliss who outranked my dad, and ordered him to treat Señor Gutiérrez.

He did so quite happily and cured him. From then on, all three of us Sokolovs were
personae gratissimae
at Señor Gutiérrez’s club. All of Juárez was officially off-limits to U.S. servicemen, but my father’s rank was high enough to get him past the MPs at the border checkpoint. So we went often, and ate and drank on the house, developing a taste for the free food on offer in unrationed Mexico. I wore my tailor-made captain’s uniform and acquired a little serape and a tiny guitar, so that I could sit in with the Mexican “magicians” when they played “Cielito Lindo” and “Amapola.” It was
also the beginning of my career as a student of ethnic food and as a restaurant-world insider.

My father would have shuddered at the thought that he was preparing me for a life as a gourmet. He had no respect for friends of his who cooked as a hobby or made a big fuss about fancy food. Without exactly calling a gastronomically avid friend of his a homosexual, he made it clear to me that the meal he’d just eaten at the man’s house gave him doubts about the state of his host’s masculinity. Certainly, the fellow was wasting his time on an unserious obsession.

But then my father, a hilarious comic when the mood came upon him, felt compelled to dismiss large areas of life as “unserious,” or “making no difference in the world.” His standards for seriousness were high and self-undermining. Although he was a first-rate and successful internist, he let me know from my earliest youth that he hated the practice of medicine, considered it drudgery. The intellectual quality of routine patient care was tediously low. And he retired at the first opportunity, at fifty-eight, after twin retinal detachments brought him financial independence through disability insurance. Certainly, he never gave me a word of encouragement to follow in his footsteps as a doctor. But then he never gave me a word of advice about anything important.

When I announced that I was going to major in classics at Harvard, he opined that classicists didn’t make anything happen. But that was as far as he went, never offering any real opposition to the plan or even mentioning the subject thereafter.

Similarly, when I came home senior year with the news that I was intending to marry a non-Jewish woman, his reaction was one of indifference. Mother insisted that I make a special trip to see our rabbi for the first time in eight years, to tell him I was intending to marry a Christian. Dr. Richard C. Hertz of Temple Beth El tried to talk me out of the marriage. I would regret standing apart
from mainstream Jewish life, he said. His trump card was that he wouldn’t officiate at the ceremony.

I had the presence of mind to point out that no one had asked him.

My father never returned to that subject, either. It would have been hypocritical for him if he had, since his background and personal convictions were irreligious, despite his nominal membership at Beth El. We did not observe the Sabbath or keep a kosher home. Neither did either set of my grandparents, although Barney and Mary Sokolov had retained a bemused nostalgia for the Orthodox practices of their European childhoods. When I was five or six, we went to their house for the only Passover seder ever celebrated in a home by our family in Detroit.

It was conducted with complete fidelity to tradition. Adult men reclined at the table on pillows and washed their hands when the Haggadah commanded them to. An older cousin asked the four questions in Hebrew, English and Yiddish.

But on all other days except that one, Jewish dietary rules were ignored, even if traditional Jewish dishes from the shtetl found a place on the table. From this liberated platform, my father and his classy if unstable bride vaulted onward to consuming
treyf
, unambiguously nonkosher food like ham, with a suspiciously oedipal zest.

Lobster, as rebarbatively
treyf
as a ham, was the emblem of their marriage. They honeymooned in Maine, tootling up the coast from lobster pound to lobster pound in a new roadster that was their wedding gift from Grandpa Joe Saltzman. Back in Detroit, one of their favorite restaurants became Joe Muer’s, the giant seafood place on Gratiot, where lobster was always an option. But Daddy was in true lobster heaven when he took me and my sister to the Maine shore in the summer of 1959. We ate our way through one lobster pound after another, starting the meal with steamed
clams and then ripping apart chicken lobsters at bare picnic tables outdoors, within a sniff of the Atlantic.

Daddy never tired of telling me how he loved this “animal” dining experience. That it might be not only a transgression against the civilized dining standards Mother maintained at home but also a thumb in the eye of kashruth did not seem to occur to him. He affected indifference to Judaism, but not toward his identity as a Jew.

On one of those rare occasions when he took me on an outing that didn’t end up at a sports arena, we ate at a dingy deli called Lieberman’s Blue Room. The light was actually bluish, from overhead fluorescent bulbs. And the dish I ordered also had a bluish tinge. The budding food critic foreshadowed his later forays into exotic comestibles by ordering
lungen
, a dispiriting bowl of spongy, stewed lungs.

I couldn’t eat them. I don’t think I could do it easily today, but there is no risk of a test, since lungs cannot be sold legally in the United States: abattoirs no longer inspect them for human consumption.

Lieberman’s, despite its dismal decor, was a vibrant part of the old Dexter-Davison Jewish neighborhood, with its Ashkenazic immigrant flavor. When that increasingly affluent community fled an encroaching black population and resettled a few miles to the northwest, the Yiddishkeit of Dexter-Davison did not survive the move. The delis that did make it to Livernois and Seven Mile Road were sleeker and kosher in “style” only. Darby’s and Boesky’s (the family that produced the Wall Street felon Ivan, who mysteriously changed the pronunciation of his surname from the Bo-es-kee we all grew up with as customers to Bow-skee; he went to jail and the Boesky restaurants are gone) laundered the sometimes funky menu of places like Lieberman’s. No more
lungen
, or
eiter
(udder) either.

Our family ate most of its out-of-the-home meals at a group of forgettable genteel places with refined and distorted versions of ethnic food, none of it decisively phonier than what you would have found back then in most second-rank American cities, but phonier and with a shakier claim on local tradition than famous places in New York, Chicago, San Francisco or New Orleans at the time.

When I was fifteen, I was happy to be fed overcooked pasta at Mario’s, or greasy French-fried frog’s legs at Fox & Hounds, the pseudo-British roadhouse in goyish suburban Bloomfield Hills. Years later these forays provided me with a baseline of well-meant culinary fraud against which to see how the real thing in France or Italy stood out as sharply different from the culinary dishes we ate on those Sunday nights out in the Motor City of the ’50s.

Detroit was a backwater, but it did have two unique places to eat, one raffishly elegant and nationally acclaimed. The other was an eccentric burger joint disguised as a railroad train. I never ate at either one of them until I was in high school, and never with my family.

At the high end was the London Chop House, an eclectic downtown watering hole run by Les and Cleo Gruber, pals of James Beard’s (he named their glittery ‘21’ Club clone one of the ten best restaurants in the nation in 1961) and authors of an excellent guide to the restaurants of the world. The Chop House attracted Detroit’s big shots, car guys and real estate honchos, exactly the crowd my glitz-shy parents shunned. They would, however, consent to eat across the street at the Grubers’ less brash Caucus Club. Neither of the Gruber kitchens were temples of gastronomy. They didn’t offer much more than top raw materials—beef, lobsters, lake fish—plainly prepared and sold for top dollar. You’d get your name monogrammed on the matches at the table, but the food chef Pancho Vélez cooked for both places was full of shortcuts and off-the-shelf
flavorants. According to the food-history blogger Jan Whitaker, Pancho did not hesitate to jazz up carrots with maple-flavored syrup or to stir onion powder into mashed potatoes.

At the other end of the culinary scale, a retired adman named Bill Brooks served unremarkable hamburgers on a dreary stretch of Woodward Avenue somewhere between the city limits and Birmingham to the north. But Brooks was a true snob, unlike Les Gruber, who would serve anybody who’d pay his freight. You couldn’t eat at Bill’s unless he approved of you.

First of all, you had to be plugged in enough to know that the locomotive-shaped building with no sign on it was a restaurant. Then you had to understand that the chef-owner, a gray-haired recessive, had a microphone concealed near the locked, bell-less front door. Initiates would stand there calling out their names and pleading to be admitted. If he agreed and felt like working that night, Bill would buzz you in to a dark and ill-kempt vestibule that led to a small semicircular counter. The proprietor would emerge from his little hidden kitchen, make a stab at a congenial greeting and take your order.

Before long, an electric train rolled out of an opening in the kitchen wall on the track that ran along the counter. Your burgers sat on little flat cars. Bill stopped the train several times so that the flat car with the appropriate burger came to rest right in front of the person who’d ordered it.

I knew that this food, and the rest of what we were getting in local restaurants, was mediocre stuff. I had, after all, been to Chicago many times—twice with my family and on several other occasions while changing trains on my way to Camp Kawaga, near Minocqua, Wisconsin. So I knew what you got in a really big city at legendary addresses (Barney’s, the stockyard steak house, and the slightly more sophisticated Fritzel’s, a showbiz magnet in the Loop famous for “continental” dishes like chicken Vesuvio and
steak Diane), and at the nationally known Polynesian “gourmet” chain Don the Beachcomber. We even passed through New York City once on our way back from that Maine idyll. But my first glimpses of high-end food, more or less authentically prepared, were at home.

Mother was an excellent and ambitious cook. Her repertoire was built on the German Jewish kitchen of her prosperous childhood in Detroit. Anyone who has looked at
The Settlement Cook Book
knows what we ate. The author, Lizzie Black Kander (1858–1940), gave cooking classes in a settlement house in Milwaukee to young immigrant Jewish women from eastern Europe. Her goal was to help these greenhorns cope with America. So in her lessons she combined German and Jewish specialties such as Bundt cakes and matzoh balls with more “American” recipes like blueberry gingerbread and salmon loaf. There was also a section called “Household Rules,” a compendium of useful tips, such as how to maintain an icebox (a real one, with blocks of real ice; we had one like that ourselves at some point during World War II, stocked by an actual iceman, who cameth with large scary tongs).