When you prepare dinner, you understand.
At a sure level, all of us eat one thing memorable that we attempt, desperately, to duplicate. We spend hours making an attempt to nail that one taste. We tweak and edit and modify and therapeutic massage, simply to get the right shade and consistency and normal vibe. And it’s a uncommon event that we succeed.
However ought to we succeed? Ought to the Holsteiner Schnitzel I made final month actually be precisely just like the well-known Luchow’s model that I used to share with my father within the Nineteen Seventies a couple of years earlier than the place closed? I’m not asking can it’s—with an identical substances and methodology (and talent), after all it could possibly. However ought to it? How about my grandmother’s Hungarian goulash, or my Aunt Lena’s knishes, or cabbage strudel from the long-defunct Mrs. Herbst Bakery, or your southern grandmother’s fried rooster?
That is the foggy grey line—a culinary DMZ—throughout which sits the murky bathroom that includes style reminiscence, emotional accuracy, cognitive means, and want; cross over into the mists, and you would disappear altogether, like James Earl Jones in an Iowa cornfield. He desires to know, to really feel, and to expertise a previous so badly that he’s prepared to fall, biblically, to want, and vanish utterly. Utilized to the world of meals and reminiscence, if we achieve duplicating one thing from way back whose style lodged itself deep within the recesses of our temporal cortex, does it by some means dilute the that means—or the precise high quality—of the unique expertise? And if we don’t succeed, does it tarnish the dish as we bear in mind it?
Once we lengthy for the style of a specific factor, is it the factor itself that we would like, or the context wherein we ate it?
Just a few years in the past, my pal
Katherine Could and I had been in Maine, main a workshop collectively. We had been speaking about consolation and discomfort, and one of many questions I requested and wished folks to consider was: once we lengthy for the style of a specific factor, is it the factor itself that we would like, or the context wherein we ate it? Is it about the one that first fed us the factor, or the place the place we first ate the factor? Can we love succotash as a result of recent corn comes just for a fleeting second in the midst of summer time, after which it’s gone? Or pastina as a result of it’s what our grandmothers fed us once we had been ailing?
One Sunday afternoon within the spring, a few years in the past, my pal Adriana referred to as up and requested if I wished to hitch her for lunch at a now-defunct trattoria in Greenwich Village. Perched on a nook of Carmine Avenue and Bleecker the place Trattoria Spaghetto stood for a few years (and is now 232 Bleecker), it was tiny and the type of place that served nondescript wine out of scratched water glasses. Raised in New York Metropolis, I’d by no means been there, though I’d walked previous it a thousand occasions since childhood. On that afternoon, we sat down, and for the primary time in my life, I ordered soup for lunch. (We’ve got a factor in my household about soup not being sufficient to represent a correct meal, which is ridiculous.)
A bowl of inexperienced minestrone confirmed up, and I nonetheless don’t know what compelled me to order it. It was served with some plain semolina bread from Zito’s. It was like we stepped out of Nancy Meyers film. The soup was scrumptious, the dialog was good, after which we went dwelling—me to my small Manhattan studio condominium, and he or she, to her place in Carroll Gardens.
A pleasant bowl of soup on a Sunday afternoon. Large deal.
However for a very long time, I lusted for it to the purpose of near-obsession. It was a ubiquitous Italian spring soup: vivid inexperienced and wildly aromatic, with a mix of greens that included escarole, spinach, kale, and perhaps some Swiss chard; there was some ditalini concerned, together with a couple of quartered new potatoes, string beans, and cannellini. There was garlic, and doubtless leek. The broth was vegetable inventory, and a hefty grating of Parmigiana Reggiano sat fraying on its floor, together with a drizzle of olive oil so fruity that you would scent it from throughout the room.
I searched in all places however by no means discovered a recipe for it; I seemed in Endurance Grey’s Honey from a Weed, in Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking, in Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy, in Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, in Elizabeth David’s Italian Meals. I requested my chef buddies and so they principally scratched their heads after I described it. Some stated it was a basic, however not with potatoes; some stated the kitchen most likely simply had leftover potatoes kicking round; some stated it was solely ever accurately made with escarole (simply escarole), and others stated that prosciutto would by no means be used, not at the same time as a condiment. It by no means occurred to me to simply attempt to make it the way in which my mind remembered it.
I used to be too on the fence to try the dish and too wistful to attempt to recreate one other time in my life that, with lots of its folks, is gone.
I used to be afraid that the unique Proustian expertise would by some means be sullied if I duplicated it completely, and worse nonetheless if I screwed it up: I wished the greens to be thick and vivid and recent the way in which they had been within the restaurant, and the garlicky vegetable broth to be fats and spherical. However I additionally wished it to be a Sunday afternoon within the Nineteen Nineties after I was in my early 30s, after I had no mortgage and no automotive, and I may simply name up my late Dad and meet him and my stepmother for pizza at Di Fara’s in Brooklyn. I wished it to be each the soup and the scenario about which I swooned to Susan for over a decade, however withheld as a result of I used to be too on the fence to try the dish and too wistful to attempt to recreate one other time in my life that, with lots of its folks, is gone.
So why now?
Perhaps it’s a mix of age and longing and being settled. Perhaps it’s the data that that restaurant is lengthy gone, and so there’s no potential likelihood of my getting again there and saying to myself, properly, mine stinks by comparability. Or perhaps I’m lastly okay with the concept of placing my very own spin on one thing so iconic, even when it winds up being very completely different.
I by no means have made my Aunt Lena’s knishes, and although I’ve the recipe card for it, I doubtless by no means will. Knishes are simply too fraught, and Lena was a troublesome cookie. However conjuring up a easy, elemental meal that was excellent and idiosyncratic and served to me on an strange chilly Sunday afternoon within the spring—that’s a threat I can take, if just for love.
This put up was initially revealed on Elissa Altman’s weblog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal concerning the intersection of meals, spirit, and the households that drive you loopy. Learn extra on her Substack, or sustain together with her archives right here.
Photographs courtesy of the writer.
