HUNGRY GERALD

Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Velveeta Cheese. My-T-Fine Chocolate Pudding. Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix. Have not had any of these supermarket basics in scores and scores of years. While certainly not gourmet treats, they were important elements of HG’s schoolboy cuisine. Little HG’s elementary school, P.S. 86, was just three blocks from home so HG would go home and enjoy a Mom-prepared lunch every day. A bowl of tomato soup (HG’s Mom used milk rather than water in preparing this excellent potage). A Velveeta-lettuce-tomato-sliced onion sandwich on whole wheat or Pechter’s pumpernickel bread with a goodly dollop of Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise. And, sometimes, a chocolate pudding for dessert. For some obscure reason, Friday lunch was Aunt Jemima’s pancakes with butter and honey. This cuisine enabled smart little HG to get a consistent string of A’s on the HG report card. The Principal of P.S. 86 would bellow at his students during the weekly assembly: “Concentration. Self Control. Obedience. Watchwords for future success.” In later years, HG proved deficient in two of these watchwords but excelled in “Concentration” when applied to food and wine.

As HG luxuriates in front of a crackling fire at his New Mexico home watching news reports of three foot snow drifts battering the East Coast, HG notices a funny sensation. A nostalgic hunger for the soups HG’s Mom fed the family. They warmed HG and family in the winter and cooled them in the summer. Winter-time soups were either kapustah or potato soup. Kapustah, as HG recollects it, was a cabbage, onion, tomato, garlic melange in a beef broth enlivened with chunks of boiled beef. This was topped with a big ladle full of sour cream plus some fiery, freshly grated horseradish. With a few slices of Stuhmer’s (or Pechter’s) pumpernickel (with the savory spread of chicken fat and coarse salt) this was a solid, filling, cold weather dinner. The potato soup was simple. Just boiled potatoes and onions in a rich beef stock. A lunch dish. Warm weather soups were beet borscht and schav, both served cold. Mom’s borscht was incomparable. She used something she called “sour salt” to balance the sugary earthiness of the beets, giving the soup a distinctive sweet-tart taste. It received the usual topping of sour cream plus a healthy shower of chopped scallions and radishes. It was accompanied by a hot, buttered boiled potato. Schav was a sorrel soup, mouth puckeringly sour. Unlike the English Sorrel soup, the sorrel in Schav is not pureed but left in its leafy state. This soup was served icy cold (sometimes ice cubes were added to the bowl). Sour cream, naturally, and the obligatory boiled potato. During those non-air conditioned years of yesteryear, schav was a lifesaver on a blazing New York summer day.

When I was growing up in The Bronx of the 1930’s a major controversy divided the Jewish population. It made the battles between Democratic Party loyalists-Socialists-Communists-Trotskyites seem very minor league. (No, children there was no such thing as a Jewish Republican. A Jewish quasi-Republican like Joe Lieberman would have been as rare a sight as a yamelkeh-wearing unicorn). What divided the Chosen People was the choice of pumpernickel bread. Some (stupid,gross) people chose the Stuhmer brand. Some (intelligent, elegant) people swore by Pechter. (these were not packaged breads like the dreaded Silvercup but delivered daily to grocers and bakery shops from lower East Side and Brooklyn ovens). Pechter, of course, was my family choice. The loaf sustained us. French baguettes? Feh! Bring back my Pechter (and my youth while you’re at it).