HUNGRY GERALD

HG is very fond of fried fish. Fish and chips is a meal. For a snack (or a very light lunch) a fish sandwich is just right. Like many great edibles, a fish sandwich must be simple; and the key to elevating that simplicity is that every element of a fish sandwich must be correct. The buttered bun must be soft with a crisp, toasted surface. There must be high grade tartar sauce and a sprinkle of Tabasco. The fish should be cod or haddock, fried to a greaseless crisp. During HG’s summer sojourn on Prince Edward Island, HG often lunches on a fish sandwich at Rick’s Fish and Chips on St. Peters Bay. An exemplary nosh. Fish sandwiches do not abound in landlocked Santa Fe where HG lives for much of the year. HG’s craving sometimes forces HG into Burger King for a sad fried fish sandwich — for shame, for shame. Today, HG/BSK stopped at Blount Clam Shack in Riverside, R.I., for a quick lunch. Ordered a specialty: “The Fish Reuben.” This is a generous piece of fried cod topped with Swiss cheese, cole slaw and tartar sauce served on a buttered, grilled bun. This is the gold standard of fried fish sandwiches. Sea heaven on a bun. The Shack also offers a “Fish BLT.” In this version the fried cod is topped with lettuce, tomato, smoked bacon and mayo. Must try.

Gifted Daughter Lesley, husband/Profesore Massimo R., their two daughters (Arianna and Sofia) plus Civilized Dog, Pip, live on Naragansett Terrace, a lovely street in Riverside, R.I. (little town minutes from Providence). The street fronts on Naragansett Bay so the water views and sunsets are exhilarating. Homes are well kept with colorful gardens. Many are old homes (once occupied by tugboat captains, pilots and other seafarers) that have been updated without too many jarring modernist details. It is a quiet, neighborly street, a throwback to an America of the distant past. There are some very pleasant amenities. One is Crescent Park, a short walk away. The Park is home to the Crescent Park Carousel. It was built in 1895 by ID. Looff, a famous carousel designer at the turn of the century. It was built as part of a real estate promotion (Naragansett Terrace was being developed as a second home community for urban residents of Providence and other Rhode Island cities). The Carousel is the largest and most elaborate of Looff’s works with 62 beautiful hand carved horses and four elaborate chariots. It fell into disrepair but was saved in the 1970’s by local residents and in 1987 was designated a National Historic Landmark. The Park is also home of a Blount Clam Shack. Blount is a big Rhode Island and Massachusetts company (largest producer of clam chowder in New England and the largest producer of lobster bisque in the United States). In recent years Blount has opened a few clam shack restaurants in Rhode Island featuring traditional clam shack dishes like clam chowder, fried clams, lobster rolls, etc. HG/BSK lunched at the Crescent Park location today and it was splendid. HG/BSK had “Clambake Chowder”: clams, potatoes, chourico and corn in a clear, briny broth. “Chowda” as it should be. Then some clam belly rolls with excellent cole slaw and tartar sauce. Cape Cod potato chips. Perfect New England cuisine. HG walked it off by strolling with Toby, The Wonder Dog, and Pip, Lady Dog of Grace and Intelligence. Though small in size, Toby has a very stentorian bark (like those advanced little audio speakers). Toby utilized his loud bark whenever he spotted a neighborhood dog. Pip kept silent. Understanding, but still disdainful, of Toby’s bad manners.

It is not simple (or cheap) to ship a dog by air from Santa Fe to Boston. Toby, The Wonder Dog, is too big to qualify for passenger travel. Has to go via cargo in a specified (expensive)) crate. Lengthy intricate paperwork required. Compliance with complicated TSA regulations. HG/BSK arrived at Santa Fe Airport at 5:45 AM for 8 AM flight to Denver (plane change for Boston). The Santa Fe Airport is a small 1930’s architectural gem (looks like it was built by CCC/WPA craftspersons). Personnel are chosen for a high degree of incompetence. Though BSK made meticulous arrangements for Toby (and BSK is always relentlessly thorough) United Airlines was in a state of regulatory confusion. Toby finally was placed in a crate some 15 minutes before flight time (almost two hours of computer nuttiness). Toby (and HG/BSK) made it to Boston safe and sound. Surprisingly, The Wonder Dog, seemed unruffled by his first experience flying the friendly miles. Met by Gifted Daughter Lesley R. who managed to negotiate the insane traffic between Boston and Providence. Roads are still a nightmare after the expenditure of billions on The Big Dig, the decade long construction project that was designed to unclog Boston’s arteries. Much joy at the end of a long day. Toby frolicked happily at Lesley’s Riverside R.I., home with Pip, the charming and welcoming family dog. With the sun setting over the waterfront landscape, Lesley provided a lush meal of Rhody sea specialties: smoked bluefish pate, snail salad, steamed little neck clams in a olive oil-wine-garlic-parsley sauce; fish cakes made of fresh cod (remoulade sauce); radish and fennel salad. Vodka before dinner and white wine with the food. Red wine with Robbiola cheese and a unique Italian honey and wine marinated whole walnut. Extraordinary. Meal was a pot of gold after a long day of travel.

BSK lightens culinary labor (and intelligently economizes) by cooking dishes that are equally good for two consecutive dinners. BSK also has the knack for recycling roasts and sautés for savory Asian salads (these are salads that can happily rest in the refrigerator for a few days). BSK’s stews, of course, gain in flavor by being reheated. A favorite is rich and unctuous chicken curry (Recipe from Vikram Vij’s cookbook, Vij’s At Home). BSK always cooks enough for two hearty dinners. HG makes a raita of Greek yogurt, sour cream, olive oil, garlic, cucumbers, radishes, baby turnips, sumac and smoked paprika. Condiments (peanuts, chipotle peppers, lime pickles, Major Grey’s chutney, etc.) are varied at each dinner to prevent monotony. BSK’s Texas beef chili (the traditional “bowl of red”); New Mexico pork green chili; French-influenced beef stew (cooked in plenty of red wine); Chinese Mo Pu ground pork and tofu, are splendid for consecutive dinners. When BSK roasts a marinated spatchcocked chicken (backbone cut out and the chicken flattened), the left over chicken is mixed with a variety of greens, onions, scallions, radishes, turnips and room temperature cooked Chinese rice “sticks” or rice noodles. The salad is dressed with soy sauce, Canola oil and Vietnamese fish sauce. Sprinkled with red pepper flakes. This salads makes an excellent dinner and a pleasant lunch. Marinated Asian flank steak (cooked rare and sliced on the bias) gets a similar treatment. Confirmed foodies, HG/BSK manage to dine very well at home without long, burdensome meal preparations. That’s because BSK always merges creativity with economy.

Gorgeous Granddaughter Sofia here, reporting live from Shanghai, China (in case you confused it with some other Shanghai). I’m here for a couple of weeks visiting a friend who was an exchange student at my high school this year. True to HG tradition she will be known here as EFM: Excellent Friend Marine.

Shanghai is an amazing modern city with many things to recommend it, the most important being (from an HG family point of view, anyway) the food. On one of my first days here, EFM, worried that I wasn’t getting enough to eat (from being invited to dinner at BSK and HG’s house she knows that my family does not take kindly to small quantities of food), took me to brunch at a restaurant near her family’s apartment named Paradise Dynasty. She ordered me a basket of soup dumplings (Xiao Long Bao). These soup dumplings were no ordinary soup dumplings however. They came eight to a basket, each a different flavor: original, garlic, luffa, foie gras, Szechuan, cheesy, crab roe and black truffle. The waitress was insistent on the correct order of how to eat them: clockwise around the basket. EFM was insistent on teaching me the correct way to eat them: biting the side to let the steam out and suck the soup out instead of biting off the top. Every single flavor was delicious, and I spent the rest of the day (which we spent at a wild animal park outside the city where I rode an elephant!) exclaiming on how amazing they were. My love for these multi-flavored dumplings gave EFM something new to worry about. Now she was concerned that my taste for soup dumplings was being corrupted by Paradise Dynasty’s modern, avant garde specimens. The next day, we took a trip to a restaurant (EFM scoffed when I asked her if it had an English name) in Yuan Garden which EFM claims everyone knows makes the best soup dumplings in Shanghai. Outside, people lined the benches, clutching take-out containers filled to the brim with dumplings. To get to the dining room, you have to go up several flights of stairs. When you’re seated, you are not given a menu; rather, there is a small card on the table that only has a few options. EFM ordered for the table: two baskets of soup dumplings (one crab and one pork), and the Mother Dumpling: a steamed crab bun, served in a special wooden container with so much soup in it you have to drink it with a straw. I, GGS, had found pure heaven and it came in the form of soup dumplings. The only downside to the experience was that my elder buddy HG couldn’t be there to experience it with me.

HG, like his beloved late sister, Beulah Naomi Katz, is fond of sweet Vidalia onions. In New Mexico, HG has discovered Texas Sweets, an onion as sweet as Vidalias. They’ve got an advantage: A longer pantry life. Sliced raw sweet onions enhance many dishes. Essential with a hamburger. Delightful with Tandoori chicken. Good canned sardines, sliced onions, Kalamata olives and artisan bread make a pleasant lunch. The best use of sliced onions: In a sandwich of rare roast beef, Jewish rye bread well lathered with chicken fat, coarse salt. (A delicatessen in Harlem, when it was a Jewish neighborhood, made a specialty of this sandwich. Long lines awaited the robust treat). HG likes finely chopped onion in tuna salad. Even better is canned Italian (or Spanish) tuna mixed with cannellini beans, chopped onion, parsley, Sicilian olive oil, squeeze of lemon and plenty of ground black pepper. The late Italian food guru, Marcella Hazan, proposed a dish of slowly cooked, slightly caramelized onions over pasta. Sounds good but have never tried it. One of HG’s favorite, appetite enhancing aromas is that of frying onion. Good times are sure to follow. HG has a happy memory of the after school treat prepared by HG’s Mom. Thick slice of Stuhmer’s Pumpernickel Bread. Chicken fat (rendered weekly by Mom). Sliced onion. Coarse salt. Properly fueled, HG would be off to star in Bronx street games like punchball and “association” football.

Flank steak used to be cheap. (Alas, no more). Chinese chefs used it in many stir fries and Italians pounded it tender before rolling it around savory stuffing to make Rollatini. (Sometimes Italian cooks used thin slices of eggplant rather than meat). HG/BSK learned the secret for making excellent flank steak from the very eccentric Andre R.. He was a frequent visitor when HG/BSK had a Fire Island beach home. Andre got older. His girl friends got younger. Andre and his young lady, upon arrival, would strip off their clothes and run naked into the sea. HG/BSK’s little children and their friends were always bemused and delighted by this display of free spirit, l960’s behavior. Andre would marinate a flank steak for a day in a mixture of soy sauce, honey and sliced garlic. Barbecued quite rare. Sliced thinly across the grain. The meat was tender with a blackened semi-sweet Asian crust. Made a great meal accompanied by summer sweet corn on the cob. BSK cooked a flank steak a la Andre a few days ago. (BSK pan broiled the meat in a very hot cast iron pan). Good eating with BSK’s salad (peeled roasted peppers, chopped sweet onions, Kumatoes, arugula) with Maytag blue cheese dressing. Dinner the next night was the left over flank steak, sliced thinly, served over a Vietnamese-influenced salad of rice noodles, spring onions, Persian cucumbers, frisee, carrots and cherry tomatoes. It was dressed with a combination of sesame oil, soy sauce, grated ginger and garlic, Red Boat fish sauce. Sensational. HG had left over salad for lunch the next day. Economical BSK hd provided a tasty group of meals from one modestly priced Trader Joe’s flank steak.

Grilling a cut up Bell’s Chicken in my Brooklyn backyard I was drawn into reverie about another of My Most Important Food Memories: Around ten years ago I was way up in the hills of St. Ann parish in Jamaica searching for old records. At a little bar I met a older Indian-Jamaican who told me to come up to his house as he said he had records. We drove together up the winding hills to his home. He pointed me to a crawl space under his house and said the records were there. Now I have a general aversion to low spaces and the insects that teem in those dark regions, and in the tropical environment of Jamaica those insects proliferate even more and going under that house was like being thrown into the Insect House at Turtleback Zoo — Enormous roaches, spiders large enough to speak, crazy millipedes with pincers; in any case I persevered and dragged out 4 trunks of moldering 45s. In between the Patti Page vinyl, the horrific mold spores (which later gave me a rash lasting 4 weeks), the records so destroyed by insect and rat urine, I managed to find five records that I wanted. Negotiation time. It went badly. The old man demanded $200 each for songs barely worth $5 and when I wouldn’t agree…He just got mad. Yelled at me for wasting his time. I apologized and apologized and finally went to a little street side shed and got two cold beers for us to assuage any hurt feelings. Well…in the quiet moments as we sipped our beer and smoked a slow cigarette, the old man asked if I was hungry. And yes…I was starving. Jamaicans tend to eat a big breakfast and last on that all day, but I am not a breakfast man, so driving in that country I often found myself starving. The old man announced that ever since his wife died he refused to cook inside. “Everything taste better on the fire!” He then popped up and his formerly elderly frame belied a new energy and he simply bounded up a breadfruit tree and cut two fine specimens down. He gathered together some dried twigs and logs and quickly had a blaze going. He went inside and grabbed a rudimentary grate, some salt cod, margarine and a ratchet knife. He cut the fish and breadfruit into rough chunks and dropped them on the flames. The smell was heavenly — pimento wood, roasting flesh and the open, clean air of St. Ann’s. After a bit he removed the grate and heaped margarine onto the charred salt cod and breadfruit. I gathered up bit of both and devoured it — smokey, little bit gritty, salty, fishy, buttery, rough yet totally comforting and unbelievably perfect for the moment. We were silent — me and the old man — breathing the air, chewing, savoring the flavors and licking our black ash fingers. He broke the silence: “Dem nah eat this food in Kingston. This a pure Countryman thing,” He cackled, “Dem curry or fry everything in Kingston!!” He held up a particularly burnt piece of breadfruit dripping with margarine: “This a the real Jamaica!” and popped it in his mouth. And me? I had to agree.

Many people don’t like brussels sprouts (Or “fairy cabbages” as BSK’s grandmother called them). HG loves them in many ways. Roasted with garlic or bacon or chestnuts. Pan fried with garlic and shallots. Shaved into flakes and cooked in a good sofrito to be served over pasta. Last night, BSK gave the sprouts an Asian treatment and they were splendid. BSK sautéed them (Blackened slightly around the edges) with oil, garlic, ginger and some Japanese Mirin. Caramelized them with a slight dusting of sugar. They were a spectacular side dish for Tonkatsu, fried, breaded, thin slices of pork. Thrifty BSK saw Pork Scallopini on sale at Whole Foods and snapped up a batch. These were doused with beaten egg and rolled in Panko. BSK used very little oil in the pork fry (Usual recipes call for two inches of oil in a pan heated to over 300 degrees.) Less oil. Less heat. And, the Tonkatsu was crisp, greaseless and juicy. HG completed the dish with a bowl of soba mixed with sesame oil. BSK and Gorgeous Granddaughter Sofia dotted their Tonkatsu with fruity Japanese Bulldog Sauce while HG opted for Chinese Sweet Chile sauce. All the diverse elements of the meal blended together quite happily.

New Yorkers are vociferous in lauding the town’s pastrami sandwiches. The sad truth is that the art of pastrami has been faltering in New York for years and it is now possible that the best of all pastrami is found at Langer’s, a traditional Jewish delicatessen in a shabby Los Angeles neighborhood. Runner up to Langer’s is Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen in Montreal, famed headquarters of Montreal Smoked Meat. Californians sneer at all hamburgers except those served at the California-Arizona-Texas fast food chain, IN-N-OUT. Angelenos become orgasmatic in describing the chain’s Animal Style cheeseburger. An HG pal said that when he lands at the LA airport after a trip east or abroad, his first stop (before unpacking) is at IN-N-OUT. “Must get my IN-N-OUT fix.” Yes, the chain makes a very good burger but BSK’s New Mexico Green Chile Cheeseburger tops it. BSK uses 80% lean-20% chuck. Dusts a big cast iron pan with sea salt. Turns the heat up high. Sears the burger on both sides. Tops the patties with abundant slices of Kraft Cracker Barrel Sharp Cheddar. Lowers the heat and cooks until the cheese melts and the interior is a juicy pink. Meanwhile, BSK is warming a saucepan of 505 Bottled Green Chile Sauce. The number 505 is the Santa Fe area code and this sauce is an authentic local product. Great flavor. Plenty of heat. No chemicals or artificial enhancers. BSK pours the sauce over the cheeseburger. Flanks it with home fried potatoes, gently caramelized onions, cole slaw. (HG likes a few smokey chipotle peppers on the side). No mushy hamburger buns. Just cold bottles of Anchor Steam Beer. Another BSK kitchen triumph.