Potato, scallion, mushroom, sweet onion and Parmesan frittata, parsley on top

Eggs, and recipes for eggs, are paradoxical. That shouldn’t seem so at first. An egg will do a certain thing when placed near, or mixed with, another thing, and do that thing at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. Which is what all ingredients do.

But actually, as lucky four-year-olds know, eggs are full of surprises. Eggs are also full of doubt. Their clichéd purity of form is challenged by the slippery dualism of yolk versus white, which is why there’s something sad, even destructive, when you take a fork or whisk to beat your egg: an implicit zen balance is smashed that can never be remade. You have moved ahead and left innocence behind. You salt your scrambled lunch with existential tears.

Now that the writer has gotten that out of his system, the cook removes half a dozen organic, free-range conundrums from the fridge and places them in a bowl to throw off the shock of the cold.

As I do so, and the weather warms as well, I think of Summer Cooking, Elizabeth David’s modest 1955 masterwork that I’ve written about before. Its chapter “Eggs” offers about 25 recipes, many of which have taught me the way heat and half-minutes work their wiles on these liquid laboratories. Cream and egg in tandem sop up herb aroma. Bottom warmth clearly differs from that which surrounds. And when a hidden yolk reaches the instant when it yearns to be a grown-up solid and can feel its limpness just begin to muscle up? Stop! Oeufs mollets.

She hates frittatas. In her elaborate, thumb-nose gift to postwar Britain, Italian Food, David writes that the country’s cooks “are particularly stubborn with regard to the cooking of omelettes, insist on frying them in oil, and use far too much of the filling, whether it is ham, cheese, onion, tomatoes, or spinach, in proportion to the number of eggs, and in consequence produce a leathery egg pudding rather than an omelette.”

Poor baby. And, in this rare case, wrong. She wasn’t willing or able to jump from her quivering French envelope to something else. I can hear my friend and neighbor Camilla laughing her Milanese head off.

Camilla Makes Frittatas

Camilla across the street is a character, and by that I mean a figure in any novel you’d want to read or story you’d want to tell — and yes, something of a character in the other sense, too. She’s terrifically talented and famous at her job, a film and video editor, for which she’s been chosen as an Emmy finalist. But she appears here for one reason: the lukewarm, leftover frittata that sits on her kitchen counter.

“Have some!”

Her voice does not allow refusal; this is hospitality as demand. It’s not a motherly offer, or motherly food: too sensuous and even sexy for that. Yes, Camilla cooks a sexy frittata, almost delicate in texture and flavor yet substantial, the very antidote to leather. Hers is studded with herb and the crispest vegetable she could buy or pluck from her backyard plot, ready for a dotted trail of oil and fling of salt.

Once, she pulled a pan (the Danish Scanpan) out of a drawer that she said works faultlessly on the stovetop; she doesn’t finish her frittata under a broiler. Camilla, as it happens, belongs to a local swimming group that is predominantly social and includes our village’s renowned Isabella. I mention this because the dozen women — the group is ladies only — had been invited last year to Camilla’s place after their dip for a frittata lesson, performed in the manner, most likely, that her mother and two sisters in Piedmont also cook the dish.

For many reasons, I wish I had been there. Yet today, in a hurry, she told me a few of her tricks. The first is to invert the proportion of egg to vegetable: “They all have too much egg, and that’s what makes them tough.” So she uses 4, not 6, eggs in her 10-inch pan, and more of the other stuff.

“Also, I fry dry,” she added, making sure her spinach or leeks or onion have no extra moisture, which she said prevents the egg from browning properly at the end. I admitted that I sort of disagreed, but that may be because I finish mine in the oven.

She instead cooks frittata properly on the stove only by turning it over in the tradizionale plate-over-pan, flip, and slide-back-in manner. Then she asked if I knew her particular “clock method” to keep the bottom from burning. I did not, so she groaned and graciously explained how she rotates her pan on the burner, 12 to 3, 3 to 6, 6 to 9, for even cooking.

Of course, I listened carefully — it’s hard not to listen to Camilla — because her result is so appealing, and my own frittata is the development stage, slowly solidifying. Still, after more than a dozen attempts, it’s good enough to serve, so I’ll share my frittata logic.

And Camilla has promised, promised! that as soon as she returns from Italy, she’ll give me her favorite frittata recipe: onion, apple, sage. When she does, patient reader, you shall have it.

The Author Tries

The first frittata I ever ate was in La Jolla, California, when I was a graduate student in my early 20s. I have a cinematic memory of a new place on fancy Girard Avenue (new in 1970 or ’71), that turned them out fast, a sort of frittataria, but it also could have been the older C & M (Cresci and Mercurio) Deli, which specialized in artichoke frittatas (click and go to page A14 of the hoary La Jolla Light) and made hot sandwiches out of them. As you can see, the C & M recipe mixes parboiled, diced baby chokes, bread crumbs, garlic, onion, basil, parsley with the eggs, hand-forms the stiff stuff into patties and fries them in vegetable, not olive, oil. Does any reader remember either place, or both?

Wow, were they good. The egg in those napkin demanders served as a classic binder, but one with different textures at the same time.

So this is my frittata thinking, which I admit isn’t unusual. The goal is to make a round form that holds together as it moves from pan to plate. Inside and out should be solid, not runny, but also tender. It should slice like a pie, but almost fall to a moist crumble in the process. It can be a shaped patty if you like, and you can fry it as C & M did. The result will be oily and crunchy, but that’s not where my frittata’s going.

I rarely use nonstick anything, but in this case a 10-inch nonstick frying pan does the trick (mine is Calphalon). A few hours before you want to eat, take 6 eggs ( I hear Camilla groan) out of the refrigerator and let them sit. Then, the creative question is, what shall this disk taste like?

Sometimes I go to the farm stand or even our garden and get the just-picked thing: asparagus, yellow squash, spring onions. I have also been known to scrounge in the crisper: that half red pepper, a few orphan scallions, lonesome celery, dirty spinach. I almost always use finely chopped garlic and some potato, which can be any kind. Leftover pasta is welcome, too. This is home, not restaurant, food.

Here’s where I may annoy you by failing to give precise instructions, because I must admit that sometimes I prefer butter to olive oil, sometimes mix the two — and occasionally use nothing at all. I enjoy the pugnacious flavors of oil and butter together, to be sure, and we can start by wilting or sautéing (roasting is OK, but that seems like a waste of time) the chopped ingredients you ultimately choose. That goes for the dice of raw potato, too.

Then, as things are melding and smelling fine, I add a touch of broth.

Camilla, wherever she happens to be, rolls her big brown eyes.

Wet

A braise will plump the pieces, pull the potato out of rawness — and cause another, unexpected, result.

Some frittata recipes have you dump the sautéed ingredients from the hot pan into a waiting bowl of cool whipped eggs, along with whatever chopped fresh herbs you like, some black or red pepper, perhaps salt, then stir and put the mess back into the same pan, wiped and refreshed with a touch more oil on a gentler heat.

But you may also pour eggs, herbs, seasonings directly on top of what you’ve cooked, lower the heat, stir once or twice and relax.

What does that extra moisture from the chicken or vegetable broth, or water, accomplish? In many but not all of my tries, it seems to have softened the egg, so when I removed the half-cooked mass from its moderate flame or coil to finish under a broiler, it actually had risen, though feebly, like a senior-citizen soufflé. By the way, when the pan is under the heat, you should watch carefully until the top barely begins to darken, then remove — advice to be repeated below.

I must discuss cheese. Many things that call themselves frittatas, including a quite appealing impostor by elBulli chef Ferran Adrià that replaces Spanish-style, thinly sliced potatoes with egg-soaked potato chips, exclude Parmesan or Pecorino Romano. But either or both (or ricotta) can be a happy addition. However, I don’t like what melty cheeses do to frittata texture.

Grate a small chunk and mix half in early with the liquid egg, and assort the rest over the unset top before it goes under the broiler. Exclude the cheese if you have a midday yearning for one, maybe two, pure flavors.

Frittata 1.0

Do you want a recipe? I always do, so understanding that it’s an imaginative outline, you may start with this. I am vague on vegetable quantities because each can vary, but their cooked volume should at least match the eggs’ (about 1 1/2 cups).

• 6 eggs, not icy cold
  
• a few tbsp. olive oil
• a few small boiling potatoes, diced raw with skin on
• 1 small onion (red is pretty), diced
• a few or more cloves of garlic, chopped fine
• one vegetable, the freshest, the one you love, or whatever you have around, chopped bite-size
• one or two fresh herbs, ripped or coarsely chopped
• 1 cup or more grated Parmesan and/or Pecorino Romano

You’ve read the steps already, so I’ll try to be succinct.

Heat the pan to medium and add enough oil to thinly cover the surface when you swirl. Wait till the oil is hot.

Sauté the potatoes first, and the onions too until they reach the usual translucence, then the garlic, making sure it doesn’t brown and bitter up. Add your signature vegetable and stir until you know the neighbors are “talking.”

Add a splash of chicken or vegetable broth, or water, stir, and let the liquid simmer down, cooking the potato. It’ll take a few minutes.

Add black pepper or red-pepper flakes at any point, but be cautious; you can add more as you eat.

Beat those eggs in a bowl with half the cheese. Beat, don’t be omelette effete. You may now take the hot contents of the pan and scrape it into the bowl of tortured egg and stir. Add a drop of oil to the empty pan and let it heat.

Plop the mass back into the pan, turning the temp down a notch. Shake gently to settle the food if necessary. Do not stir.

Or you may do as I do and pour the cheesed eggs into the half-full pan off the heat and stir it up just once to mix ingredients, wait a minute, then reduce heat to low-medium, return the pan, and watch. If the cooking seems too fast, remove pan from the burner again until things calm down.

After 3 to 5 minutes, you will spy a solid yellow bottom showing itself through the jiggly raw top. You are allowed to get a spatula and check that the aforesaid bottom is beginning to brown.

If so, it’s time to sprinkle the rest of the cheese on the top and put the pan under the broiler: not too close, and the oven door should be open slightly. The term “broasted” has been used for ’50s roadside chicken, but that’s what we’re doing to these eggs. Watch the top like a hawk, and when it begins to show its first tan pocks, grab a potholder — easy to forget that! — to pull your meal out.

A Spanish Coda

When you feel comfortable about this play with eggs, you may enjoy a decidedly unmolecular gastronomical variation. But please make sure the chips — this sounds odd — are just out of the bag.

Ferran Adrià’s Tortilla Española or Potato Chip Frittata
(via Saveur, with my amendments)

• 6 eggs
• Up to 2 cups thick potato chips, I use Kettle Brand
• Approx. 2 oz. Serrano ham or prosciutto, even thin Italian salami, cut bite-size. The frittata is tasty without meat, too.
• ¼ cup canned piquillo peppers or pimentos, finely chopped, or frying or even bell pepper, chopped and sautéed till softened with olive oil in the pan you’ll use
• 1 tbsp. olive oil, enough to barely cover the pan
• small handful (2 tbsp.) thyme, oregano, or marjoram leaves, whatever’s fresh, chopped not too fine and just before they go in
• salt, black pepper to taste
• water

Turn on broiler.

Potato chips soaking in egg

Beat eggs with a dollop of water. Hand-crush potato chips (this is fun) and add to eggs, stir, and let soak to soften for at least 5 minutes.

Add soft pepper, herb, optional ham or salami, black pepper and maybe scant salt to the eggs and chips, then stir.

Pour the egg lava into an oil-slicked pan at medium heat and follow the frittata steps above. Remember: don’t stir.

If underdone as you cut into it at the table, just put your package back in the oven.

Frittatas taste nothing like American breakfast, our ordinary blank and eggs. Beyond my dual pleasure in cooking and eating, I should mention the frittata moment that makes me happiest: when I found that I could slide the sizzler from pan to serving plate with no trouble whatsoever. That gesture is garnish enough.

Postcard sticking its tongue out at a rival, the telegram. Sent to Miss Freda Fayman, Hall, West Virginia, June 30, 1913 (all postcards collection of Jeff Weinstein)

Can tweets, texts and email save the post office? Seems a foolish question, same as asking if Facebook or HuffPo could rescue newspapers. Congress has again been going postal about the semi-Thatcherized U.S. Postal Service, on the one hand not wanting to spend a sou to keep it going, on the other not willing to offend business lobbies and scotch that expensive Saturday delivery. Yet there was a time when a similar absurd idea really did work: More than a century ago, the tweetlike penny postcard, enemy to the ostensibly profitable two-cent letter, brought struggling postal services worldwide into the black.

Boomer readers who moan about today’s kids’ texting addiction probably remember their own, equally tiresome grandparents telling them about two, even three, visits from the mailman every day. There were other ways to communicate, of course — oldsters may recall the vaudeville joke “telegraph, telephone, tell a woman” — but letters, they wrote letters, they wrote stacks and stacks of letters. Cursive script was actually taught at school, and anyone who owned a shirt or shirtwaist, or worked for those who did, knew how to remove blots of India ink from starched white lawn.

Typing ribbons were messy, too. But at the turn of the last century, a typewriter could be both the worker and the machine, as the punning “working-woman threat to the home” card at far left shows. And in case you think kiddie texting is stupid in a particularly 21st-century way, here’s what’s hand-written on the back of the other card:

“Has Rose written to you lately she is coming back and forth again, so we are having nice times together again, and I am very glad she is for she is very nice to go out with. this time for not answering my letter, but I think you might think of me once in a while. Don’t you?

Lurena”

Can’t tell if the card’s target is male or female, but I bet young Lurena and her beribboned friends called the Sears, Roebuck catalog their “dream book” and exchanged fat, leatherette albums filled with the postcards they hoarded.

In either case, they wouldn’t have been the only ones actively asking images to create desires — even a desire for more images, which is one way to understand the worldwide craze for picture postcards that started just after 1900 and peaked a few years before the outbreak of the First World War.

A craze? Well, in 1905, over seven billion postcards — yes, a B — were mailed internationally, with almost one billion just in the U.S. Also, deltiologists estimate that about half the cards produced in that period, which they have dubbed the postcard’s Golden Age, were bought not to be mailed but to be pasted in Lurena albums. So those billions are doubled.

A planet awash in Niagaras, littered with Main Streets, overrun by risque ankles and Peeping Toms. Picture postcards provided the greatest profusion of pictures the world had ever seen.

Oh, what is a deltiologist, you ask? Invented in 1945, the high-rent word, derived from the Greek deltios (a small writing pad or letter), means “postcard collector.”

This writer is one of them. He has worn a T-shirt printed with the words RESTAURANTS and GAY TOPICS to postcard bourses and fairs so that sellers would know just which category of sucker he was.

Now, deltiological history is rather complicated and truly interesting only to deltiologists, as our spouses and friends will confirm. In short, advertising and message cards paralleled the rise of postal services from the 1860s on; the struggle between private postals and government-issued blank cards was resolved, more or less, in the 1890s. Austria printed the first color card in 1889, and souvenir and view cards were produced and sent in greater and greater numbers until the economic collapse of 1893 forced many printers to close (my husband just left the room).

Reverse

An early (1883) U.S. Postal Card, advertising or business only, one cent

The U.S. government tried to regulate private cards, which cost a penny to mail, but finally gave up. In 1899, the first card made of photo paper, the so-called Real Photo Post Card, was sent, and Eastman Kodak saw nothing but opportunity. Think of that first 1900 Brownie as a smartphone, the photo postcard it snapped as a jpeg, the postal system that delivered it as the Internet. A family photo explosion! Staid studio photographers fought to stay alive.

By 1905, real-photo cards were homemade and soulful; German-made chromolithograph view cards of everything from everywhere were lusciously colored; hastily shot and mailed news cards showed industrial strikes and first views of the San Francisco quake; theme and novelty cards were gooey, saucy or slightly insane. Few could resist this thoroughly modern eye candy, and a craze was born, a creative effusion of visual and personal interaction.

Sent from Baltimore, Oct. 20, 1910. H.L.W. to Miss Clara Smith, Cazenovia, N.Y.

No postmark, but undivided back, so pre-1907. Addressed to Mr. and Mrs. S.A. Hendricks, Hermon, Ill.

May 23, 1910 from “your Ant Rose,” Columbus, Oh., to Mrs. Blanche Meyers, Stoutsville, Oh.: “Dear Nease, I will send you a postale of the strike!”

Sept. 18, 1909, New York, N.Y. to “Miss L.M. Bodine, 37 West 128 St, City.”

July 19, 1907. “Your Coz, Ora” sent this to Chas. W. Baker, Lancaster, Pa.

Those frivolous postcard pennies kept postal services everywhere afloat, and history abounds in lessons. Can the USPS find a way to cash in on “digital postcarding” now?

By Milton Rogovin. Copyright and reprinted with the permission of the Rogovin Collection LLC and the Board of Regents at the University of Arizona.

“Out There” has been on indefinite holiday, but during this cheerful pre-election period of lies, greed, and cynicism, Obit Magazine has taken the opportunity to repost an essay and video slideshow (with an odd voice, mine) about a man whose life was an antidote to all these awful things: the late photographer Milton Rogovin.

So I’m using this opportunity to say hello, “Out There” friends, and cheer you up with an appreciation of a life lived right — rather, left.

I haven’t read each and every

Frankenthaler was proud of her conservative stance, as this 1989 piece by her in the New York Times opinion section makes clear. A sample: “I feel there was a time when I experienced loftier minds, relatively unloaded with politics, fashion, and chic.

For those on Facebook, you may wish to read a fine post by historian and critic Mira Schor about the topic, with a fascinating thread of comments. Schor links to NEA-topic columns by Village Voice art reporter Robert Atkins (which, for transparency sake, I must admit I edited).

Take a look. They will give you the tenor of that art-world time.

Neither my brother nor I can recall sitting down to eat meatloaf when we were Brooklyn kids.  But we must have, because we share a childhood “meatloaf ghost.”

“It had something red and burnt on top,” he told me on the phone. “But I can’t remember anything else about it.”

That must have been tomato sauce or, more likely, ketchup — probably Heinz in our conventional household. We have no idea how the ghost’s corpse tasted.

I wouldn’t blame Mom’s particular meatloaf for that. No matter how good the food she gave us every single night was, our kitchen-table meals tended toward forgettable. Dad was rarely home for them, which may have been both the cause and the effect of our sullen suppers.

One of my fine Facebook friends in the deep Midwest likes to promote her circle’s meatloaf contests, which is why I decided never to post a photo of actual meatloaf ready on a plate. How many years of eating pleasure must you bank to imagine that something so mud-ugly could make anyone happy?

But camera-ready or not, the end of 2011 is my meatloaf moment.

The ever-twee village of Bellport, New York, on Long Island’s glistening South Shore, has a block-long commercial center of shops. Anchoring these is a small supermarket called Wallen’s.

A Wallen Market (which everyone calls Wallen's) beef promotion, c.1960. From "Bellport Village and Brookhaven Hamlet" by Victor Principe, photo courtesy Robert Wallen

It had been the Roulston Grocery Store, which moved across main street in the ’30s to its present site, taking over the Comet Theater — where in 1917 Irving Berlin sang “Yip-Yip-Yaphank” (or “Yip! Yip! Yaphank!” according to a 1918 review in the New York Times, which must be right, no matter what the sheet music says). If you look hard, you can see remnants of the old vaudeville dressing rooms in Wallen’s storage area.

As long as I’ve been shopping there, Wallen’s has offered a freshly ground “meat loaf mix”: one-third each of beef, veal, pork, sometimes in three discrete lumps, lately blended together. Wallen’s cordial butchers have never failed me, and my gratitude rises especially high for their boned legs of lamb, having learned the hard way (from Beck, Bertholle and Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking) how wrist-aching and messy it is to bone the thing myself. Did the sweat of pride season my first, garlic-larded result? Sure it did; always does.

Decades later, just as I have fashioned a meatloaf worth writing about, Wallen’s announces it must close.

Yes, some disasters are local. This December, as before, you pull open the door to a sepia, quasi-utopian zone. You slow down; your iPhone dissolves. Norman Rockwell fantasies are seductive and usually emotionally false, but when corn-flake nostalgia takes neighborly, shopping-bag form a few blocks away, it’s hard to resist taking part. The Jean Arthur-Jimmy Stewart you in this scenario could really be you. Why in heaven not?

Wallen’s price for Hellman’s mayo is higher than that at the “local” Stop & Shop, but it almost equals out in the cost of gas that buys the corporate bargain. And after the farmstands close at Thanksgiving, Wallen’s still finds apples, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower grown within pickup distance to put in its cool produce bins.

After Wallen's closes, will I have to grind it myself?

My praise won’t save the store, not now or a year from now. Yet every writer knows that we treasure most what we know we’ll lose, so we pretend to try.

With a cossetting smile, the butcher tells me that even though they’ll be gone, all will be well, thanking me for my concern. I’m relieved for him, but how could all be well or tolerable if I can’t get my meatloaf mix?

I have spent years making fun of meatloaf, which technically is a way to stretch meat — a primitive Hamburger Helper. Those who claim that day-old-meatloaf sandwiches are better than the steaming aromatic preliminary have been easy to knock down, in a “so you love leftovers?” way.

They are right, of course, but the hot stuff must be worth getting cold in the first place.

The problem with meatloaf is its total surrender: each ingredient just gives up. Keeping the animal muscle moist with milky breadcrumbs and canned tomato isn’t enough; the parts should gain and strengthen through their baking, not wave the gray-meat flag the moment they spy an oven.

Yet a meatloaf’s blending of identities, not ideal for creativity but the essence of democratic cooking, should result in a satisfying culinary negotiation. I have never cooked or eaten great meatloaf, because that’s not a possibility, but I’d like to offer one you could bed down with.

I am aware that home cooks across the country will draw swords at my claim, but martial meatloafing is not the point. The sweetest thing about meatloaf is that there’s no best one. It’s a meat mirror, reflecting the face of the one cooking it, and the one eating. All I may do is show myself in the following flexible recipe, developed over many winter tries:

• 1 1/2 lbs. ground beef-pork-veal mix, or all ground chuck
• 1 raw egg
• 1/2 cup of fresh or dried breadcrumbs (or panko) with or without crusts, makes no great difference
• 1/2 medium onion
• 1 small carrot (more makes it too sweet)
• 1 rib of celery
• 4 or 5 peeled cloves of garlic or to taste (I like garlic)
• 3 or 4 pitted prunes
• good salt
• some kind of pepper: black, red flakes, powdered cayenne, even a lively chile, seeds removed
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
• optional: 1 or 2 crushed anchovies or a shake of Worcestershire sauce. Cider or wine vinegar. Some folks like nutmeg or allspice (I don’t).

The goal is to make two medium-size loaves you shape by hand, moist enough so they won’t dry out, but not so loose they sink and flatten in the pan before they hit the heat.

Set oven at 350 degrees. Lightly oil an ovenproof pan — I use 8″ x 12″ Pyrex — or two pie plates.

Place the chopped meat in the largest bowl you have, handling the sticky mass as if it were fluffy. Make a well in the middle and crack your egg in. If you squint, the yolk will look like a glazed orange garnet set in a brooch of deep carnelian. That shining jewel, I realize, is my only foregone meatloaf memory, one that waits for red-tipped fingers to break it.

Loosely chop the vegetables, prunes, and possible anchovy into chunks, and either Cuisinart them quickly to retain some texture or continue to mince by hand.

Oh, before you do that, soak the breadcrumbs in milk. A recipe for meatballs in the Sarcoptes or “Meat Mincer” chapter of ancient Rome’s Apicius cookbook adds red wine instead to its filler, which you may do too. One ripped slice of any bread in that same machine above takes a few seconds to crumb.

Add the vegetable mixture and sodden crumbs to the bowl, with modest amounts of salt and whichever pepper. I season by eye. You don’t want to mask or strip the flavor that sits in the meat; you hope to provide accompaniment.

We were given hands in order to stick them into Cthulhu treats such as the one in front of you, so pretend you’re mud-wrestling or caught in quicksand and squish everything around until a single, though particulate, tone is reached. Don’t squeeze and press the air out; play staccato piano in the bowl. Do not even think to answer the phone or door until you are done.

Add more milk or a dash of vinegar if too dry; more dry crumbs if too wet.

No need to rinse your hands. Grab half the stuff and place in half the pan, patting and poking it into a rounded, oblong loaf a few inches high, sides away from the edge so an almost-crust may form. Do the same in the other half. Manipulate the pair so they at least appear to be the same size (they never are), which also allows them to cook at about the same rate.

Present the unattractive duo to your eating partner as if they were a king’s ransom, put ‘em in the oven and bake for a little more than half an hour (depends upon how cold the meat is when you start) to an internal temperature of 155 degrees — that’s all. A siren fragrance will fill your kitchen, one that invites you to the food, but paradoxically always surpasses it.

Remove the pan and test the loaves if you need to. Everyone else’s meatloaf is overdone: not ours.

Tomorrow you may burn the remainder crisp and sign your snack with ketchup, enjoying it hot or cold, for breakfast or dinner, on bread or off, anyway you like. Meatloaf is meatloaf, and your own loaf life is now completely up to you.

Update: When I wrote “loosely chop the vegetables,” I meant the prunes to be included. One charming reader couldn’t read my mind, so I made their place in the mix crystal-clear.

Do you wonder, as I do, what every faded stain once tasted like?

Oh, the captions for the Obit slideshow seem to have slipped away, so just in case you’re curious, here they are:

1) Menu from the Hotel Oxford Restaurant, Coffee Shop, Piccadilly Circus Cocktail Lounge, San Francisco
2) Portion of Oxford Hotel menu
3) WWII cover of a New York Central railway menu. The “V” stands for Victory, not Veal.
4) Dinner menu from “Bermudian” steamer, May 12, 1910
5) Another San Francisco menu, this one printed as a balsa-wood postcard that Grison’s Steak & Chop House would mail for free, c.1940
6) Menu cover for Mon Lay Won, the “Chinese Delmonico,” c.1915. Mon Lay Won was considered a “destination” Chinatown restaurant for both Chinese and non-Chinese customers.
7) Portion of Mon Lay Won’s bill of fare. Yellow Fish Brain is a hefty $1.50.
8) “Two of a Kind” photo pasted on back of “Bermudian” cruise menu

Best not to read old menus on an empty stomach.

You need not ask me to explain the piles of old restaurant menus and food ephemera loaded into boxes and bags in my closet, because each item is more than glad to tell its story. The 1920s candy wrapper with crumbs of ancient chocolate hiding in the creases or stained S.S. Lurline dinner card (to and from Hawaii) are straining to brag about their former flavors and who last sampled them. Vintage object are patient in the long run, but they ultimately demand total attention.

When I brought that candy wrapper home from the flea, it forced me to wet my finger, press it down, and lift a very few of the tiny brown specks to my mouth. Thrilling! The ghost of chocolate past. In the same way,  I was compelled to read my hundreds of menus and labels and play a version of the “catalog game,” picking one thing from each I’d most like to have.

The blackberry fried pie, crossed out in the unused glassine wrapper above, is no doubt better than the apple. I’ll take it.

What would I order from Hackney’s on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, the “world’s largest seafood restaurant”? A proud vacationer took this menu home on Monday, June 23, 1947, a few months before I was born — the date’s scrawled on the cover.  Would it be the Lobster Thermidore with French Fries — double French on the classy Jersey shore — and biscuits , plus coffee or tea, $2.50? Don’t get too excited, Jeff, that’s the equivalent of $25.50 now. Or the Soft Shell Platter, much cheaper, but probably fresher, at $1.75.

The fantasy is that everything was fresher in the past, in the world you never saw. Tastes, and pleasures, were embryonic and unsullied. Laughs were sweeter, too. Each item on every old menu is the apple before Eve.

Next week, Obit Magazine  will post a piece of mine called “What Dead People Ate.” (I’ll alert you.) The hook is the 40,000-strong menu collection of the New York Public Library and how the staff is crowdsourcing in order to create a menu-item database. But I’d like to share with Out There readers a menu of my own and story I didn’t include.

Mon Lay Won, the “Chinese Delmonico,” was a turn-of-the-last-century destination restaurant for Chinese and non-Chinese New Yorkers at 24 Pell Street. The site now holds the not-bad Vegetarian Dim Sum House.

Here’s a photo of the place c. 1910, cropped from one on the fascinating website Shorpy:

Mon Lay Won, the Chinese Delmonico, 24 Pell St., New York (1910)

Chinese food had already entered non-Chinese U.S. culture, the “exotic” dishes garnished with Tong Wars spice and the usual racist pigtail-caricature. On Dec. 12, 1897, the New York Times ran an almost too perfect example of how Mon Lay Won could serve as a journalistic stage for such charming cultural control: a piece about a Chinese wedding party, described as if the attendees had dropped from Mars. “Between the click, click of the chop sticks, a babel of sounds, gutteral and nasal, could be heard….”

Most times, of course, you must look past the Gray (not Yellow) Lady to get at any multifaceted story. The latest China Heritage Quarterly published by the Australian National University has a rich and unexpected article by Scott D. Seligman about how Chinese merchant New Yorkers in 1903 helped Jews to raise money for pogrom victims in Russia. Here, Mon Lay Won plays a somewhat different role; it may help to know that the Mr. Singleton mentioned below happens to be Chinese:

After the benefit, which raised $280 for the Kishinev Jews, Singleton threw a banquet for some prominent New Yorkers at the Chinese Delmonico Restaurant. No ordinary chop suey joint, Delmonico’s–Mon Lay Won (Wan Li Yun) in Chinese–was a handsomely decorated, somewhat upscale establishment at 24 Pell Street that catered to Chinese and non-Chinese diners alike and was known throughout the city. It had Chinese-style coffered ceilings adorned with lanterns, wooden arches richly carved with dragon motifs and Chinese paintings on its walls. Round tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl decorations filled the hall, and guests sat around them on wooden stools.

Mon Lay Won (1905). From collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

Among the dinner guests that night was the famous Yiddish theatre actress Bertha Kalisch, who was appearing nearby. She and the other Jews present were apparently unfazed by the fact that Mon Lay Won, which featured pork and shrimp dishes prominently on its menu, was the antithesis of a kosher establishment. Exactly what was served that night is not recorded, but at a similar dinner Singleton had hosted there a few months before – also attended by several prominent Jews–pork and shellfish were notably absent from the table. That night, roast squab, chicken stuffed with reindeer ham, bamboo shoots and mushrooms and several varieties of fruit were served, although there was a course of shark’s fin soup. It appears that the Chinese hosts were trying, within their limited understanding of Jewish dietary laws, to make their Jewish guests as comfortable as they could, and that the Jews–at least some of whom surely were observant–were doing their best to meet the Chinese halfway.

Maybe now my Mon Lay Won menu will be quiet, and I can pass over its mongrel chop sueys and choose instead the Yellow Fish Brain for $1.50, Chinese Green Sprouts for 25 cents, and Green Plum preserves for my dessert.

A portion of the Mon Lay Won bill of fare

The other day I typed in my Manhattan tenement address and whirled the Google eye to one of our two street-front windows. Let’s see how close I can go … there’s the air conditioner, the tree branch blocking a shape …

I gasped.

You can see what I saw in the image above. Is that me looking out, being caught by some Universal Intelligence and now being observed by another me?

It sure does look like my suit-and-tie Gravatar at the top-right of this page. But if that is indeed my face, or any face, why is it so pale? Isn’t that the way a ghost, my own ghost, a Google ghost, would appear?

It’s a normal, unthreatening block I live on, as the less magnified Google shot below makes clear. The street’s not obviously haunted, although decades ago, standing at that same window, I saw a man I knew from the neighborhood plunge a knife into another man on the sidewalk directly across from me. The guy I recognized may have been defending himself, I couldn’t tell, and I don’t know what happened to the victim. The one with the weapon was led away by police.

Now I see that once handsome man-with-the-knife behind the counter of his own Polish luncheonette, fat and gray, dishing out kielbasa.

Soon after we moved in to our tiny place, my spouse wrote a sad short story called “The Previous Tenant,” about the traces such a young, possibly gay, probably disturbed presence left behind. John had found some wrenching journal scraps, some scrawls on the wall. Where did the poor fellow disappear to?

For that matter, I discovered a small stash of creased, black-and-white snapshots buried in the drawer beneath the apartment’s only closet. Each one showed a drab older lady in a Ukrainian-style babushka, no expression on her face. The photos could have been taken in the 1920s, the ’30s, it was hard to know. No expression, no telling details, a record of life that’s no record at all.

Do you know the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”? It too looks out a window, after husband Gabriel hears wife Gretta, for the first time, recall and weep over “delicate” Michael, her long-lost love:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

After Halloween, we know, comes the snow. Even with Google off and curtains drawn, we’ll never want for ghosts at the window.

Each of us is poised to be haunted by our very own.

"Protest Stencil Toolkit" samples in a gallery

Late last week I received this email:

Attn Jeff Weinstein, Blogger
Out There
In light of the current Wall Street protests, the PROTEST STENCIL TOOLKIT could
really come in handy. A clever book of die-cut stencils, each page reflects a
concern (financial, environmental, political…) while including examples from
the great protest movements of the 20th century. An interesting resource for
designers and artists, this book is also a serious look at the powerful graphics
of protest.
J-pegs and books are available upon request. Thanks for sharing this timely
book with your followers.
Debra Matsumoto
US Press & Marketing
Laurence King Publishing

Gosh, I had so much trouble fitting “Get Anita Bryant Off Our Breakfast Tables” on one sheet of oaktag, so maybe this would help. Odd that I couldn’t find a link to the book, so I Googled it. Protest Stencil Toolkit was done in the U.K. by one Patrick Thomas, also invisible in the email, and published in May.

What a smart firm, to have anticipated such a trenchant mass-consumer market. Here’s the beyond-apt catalog copy:

The enabling tome by Patrick Thomas

With this book anyone can create protest graphics. The 46 die-cut stencils, plus a bespoke typeface, can be combined to create both slogans and powerful visual messages, and are robust enough to be re-used any number of times. There are classic symbols from the great protest movements of the twentieth century, as well as new images reflecting contemporary concerns – such as the environment and the economy. These are the building blocks of visual statement, and this book is the essential toolkit for the graphics of protest.

I especially like “robust enough to be re-used any number of times” — like, for the rest of our lives.  I myself am looking for a way to incorporate that sweet cow, above.

Reader quiz: Can we think of any other backlist gems to piggyback on current events? Das Kapital doesn’t count.

Overhead shot of Occupy Times Square, Oct. 15, 2011

Ray's Pizza, 27 Prince Street, New York -- but not for long

If you read the New York Times, you may know that Ray’s Pizza is about to bite the dust. I’m going to direct you to a piece I wrote for Obit Magazine on that very subject in just a minute, and all the pertinent links are there. But first, I need to say some things to those few who hadn’t heard the tremendous news and are now beginning your slow swoons of nostalgic regret.

Ray’s isn’t that good. It never was. It’s just OK.

Ray’s, the first one on Prince Street and not the many famous original first authentic namesakes around town, isn’t all that old, either. Yours truly was in eighth grade when it opened, and I’m still a boy at heart; JFK would be elected one year after. Paris is peppered with bistros and restaurants two, three times its age, a few of them with opening-day napkins still being used.

None of that makes any difference, because if you love Ray’s or, more likely, love the idea of Ray’s, you will feel its loss terribly. Imaginary madeleines are just as powerful as real ones, because both lead to memories of pizzas past. Don’t be confused when, as you return for a last supper at Ray’s or any of your shuttering favorites, it doesn’t seem “the same.” Every bite we take is different from all our previous ones — even of the same thing. Can’t help that, it’s the way we’re built.

Here’s that link, but do come back.

Me, I have no “best” pizza in my repertoire. I can tap only novel ones with bacon marmalade, chain-store ones I carefully burned to a tasty crisp, flaccid ones that dropped their glop onto my single pair of good pants.

Then there was the one brought to us by Mercury, the fleet-footed waiter. He ran to the kitchen to pick up the tray, ran back toward the open archway, grabbed some salt from an open bowl– I hope it was salt — and flung it on top. Never stopping, he placed his gift gently on our outdoor table, smiling a young man’s wooing smile.

It was almost midnight. Ana, John and I sat at the edge of a small, ancient piazza, its dead fountain and dirty columns lit by Fellini floods that turned the holes of darkness around us into black velvet. The crust of my first Rome pizza cracked under my hand, but I scooped the loose tomato and hot, white cheese before they could fall and lifted everything into my mouth.

Earth.

Grass.

Sun.

Our friend Ana, artist Ana Mendieta, knew how we would respond, and for a moment at least she didn’t say a word — just threw back her head and laughed a generous, raucous laugh that echoed and bounced around the piazza’s cold stone.