“Just don’t talk. Do what he says,” a man huddled in a blue parka warned.
“He’s downright rude,” said a blond woman in a blue coat. “Even abusive. But you can’t deny it, his soup is the best.”
1989
UNDER THE HOOD
MARK SINGER
The other afternoon, at a parking lot on the Lower West Side, we put a 1988 Ford Taurus station wagon at Chris Maynard’s disposal. Maynard removed two flat foil-wrapped packages from a canvas shoulder bag and then lifted the hood of the Ford. “Veal scaloppine,” he said, “with Genoa salami, aged provolone cheese, and Spanish onion.” He laid the packages on top of the car’s fuel-injector housing, wedged each one into place with a cone-shaped wad of foil, slammed the hood shut, and said, “Now we’ll just let that cook awhile.”
He headed into traffic, up West Street, in the general direction of the Bronx and Tony’s Delicatessen, birthplace of the corned-beef doughnut. Maynard has an open mind and is prone to serendipitous detours. Maybe he would get to Tony’s and maybe he wouldn’t; in either case, he was unlikely to stay hungry. On the front seat lay a set of bound galley proofs of Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine, a soon-to-be-published collaboration between Maynard and Bill Scheller, who would have been along on the trip to the Bronx had he not been in the midst of a three-month detour to Spain.
Maynard and Scheller began to explore car-engine cooking five years ago, when they warmed up some smoked brisket on a drive from Montreal to Boston. After that, each time one of them got behind the wheel he did so with a broader sense of purpose and adventure than most of his fellow-motorists. Quickly, the two men branched into stuffed eggplant, poached fillet of sole, and baked apples. Last year, when they steered a Lincoln Town Car through the One Lap of America rally, a marathon eight-day drive around the republic, they got a concentrated chance to refine their techniques. Taking advantage of the Lincoln’s spacious, eleven-by-thirteen-inch fuel-injector-housing surface and its piping-hot valve covers, they conducted successful experiments with ham steaks, pork tenderloins, and stuffed chicken breasts. They attracted a little publicity, and soon a cookbook became an inevitability.
Explicating a creation called Enzo’s Veal (“in honor of the late Enzo Ferrari”), Maynard and Scheller write, “Start this in Manhattan and lunch will be ready in New Haven. Turn once, in Stamford.” Despite such detailed instructions, they are aware that no two makes of engine behave identically. Chicken thighs that take three hours and forty-five minutes to cook under the hood of a Chrysler New Yorker may need about fifty minutes to become nicely browned inside an Olds Cutlass. Manifold Destiny preaches “the time-trusted method of temperature verification known as ‘burn your finger.’” Repeatedly, the authors warn of the hazards of, say, sticking one’s hands in the fan or doing something with a hot dog that would inhibit the free movement of the accelerator linkage. Maynard and Scheller dare to be poetic in naming dishes: Lead Foot Stuffed Cabbage, Pat’s Provolone Porsche Potatoes, Thruway Thighs. Their chapter on Southern cooking offers a recipe for Blackened Roadfish. Manifold Destiny is dedicated to Molly and Pluggy, Scheller’s half-Doberman/half-Labrador and Maynard’s two-year-old Airedale, respectively. “Pluggy is my role model,” Maynard said. “She’s always ready for a good time.”
Once, to accommodate a television crew, Maynard tried to cook an omelette in a Thunderbird, but the effort was subverted by a shoddy wrapping job and by “the Third World status of streets in New York City.” This experience came to mind as he drove up the entrance ramp to the West Side Highway. “We may have seen that veal for the last time,” he said as we rattled over the brick pavement. “Actually, the only thing I ever lost was a chicken breast—in Virginia. I was driving an ’81 Toyota, usually a pretty good cooker. I put the breast on a little north of D.C., and somewhere near Richmond I pulled over to check and it was gone. Fortunately, I happened to be cooking a pork loin, too, so I ate that instead.”
After one rubbernecking delay—a three-car pileup in the southbound lanes—we made our way up the Henry Hudson Parkway, then over to the Mosholu Parkway, and within twenty minutes we had arrived at Tony’s Delicatessen, on Bainbridge Avenue. Beyond the generally endearing fact that Tony’s is an Italian-owned place that serves Jewish food as well as Italian to a mainly Irish clientele, Maynard goes there specifically for the corned-beef doughnuts: deep-fried agglomerations of nothing your doctor would recommend—“oily enough to require an EPA variance on the Arctic tundra,” according to Maynard and Scheller. It came as a disappointment to learn that there were none on the premises. Maynard was able to forestall starvation, however, because Manny Bonet, the chef at Tony’s, is also the innovator of a triangular deep-fried concoction called the potato turnover.
Maynard ordered one of those and a cup of coffee. As he ate, we asked how he had discovered Tony’s.
“I park my car a couple of blocks from here,” he said. “Ironically, you can’t cook in my car. It’s a Volkswagen Rabbit, a diesel, with no good surface to attach anything to. The only thing that ever really worked was that first batch of smoked meat from Montreal. Driving from Philly to New York, I once tried to do some chicken breasts, but when I got to where I was going the chicken breasts were still sushi.”
A cop car slowly cruised by, reminding Maynard that he had parked the Ford Taurus near a bus stop, in a less than strictly legal manner. He went outside, raised the hood, and said, “Mmm, smell that cooking!” Subtle hints of salami and onion hit our nostrils, followed by fresh Bx34 bus exhaust. “That’s what I love about car-engine cooking,” Maynard said. “Nothing beats stopping at a toll booth on the Garden State Parkway, checking under the hood, and having the smell of garlic and pork juice waft back at me.”
Maynard’s VW Rabbit was parked in a lot a block away, and he offered to show it to us. When we got there, however, he realized that he didn’t have a key to get into the lot. That forced us to marvel at the Rabbit—missing right rear window, roof that had been walked on by a heavy person, graffiti on the hood—from a distance. A few doors down was Eddie’s Delicatessen.
“They sell Irish bangers,” said Maynard. “Want to check them out?”
Sure we did. They were in a freezer case—Irish Regular Pork Bangers and Irish White Breakfast Pudding. Each one looked as if it might fit neatly along the exhaust manifold of a Chevrolet Celebrity.
“How would I cook this sort of thing?” Maynard said, closing the freezer door. “I’d cook it in a frying pan on my stove. To be honest.”
1989
PROTEIN SOURCE
MARK SINGER
Members of the New York Entomological Society paid forty-five dollars to attend the group’s hundredth-anniversary dinner the other night at the Explorers Club. Among the items on the menu were cricket-and-vegetable tempura, mealworm balls in zesty tomato sauce, roasted Australian kurrajong grubs, and roast beef with gravy. Members of certain affiliated entomological organizations were asked to pay fifty-five dollars. Miscellaneous guests, including representatives of the media, had to cough up sixty-five dollars. Crews from all the major local television stations materialized, along with reporters from the BBC, CNN, TV Asahi (Japan), Christian Science Monitor Radio, Nickelodeon, Reuters, the Associated Press, Scientific American, the Times, the Post, Newsday, U.S. News & World Report, Food Arts, and a lot of other places.
Marialisa Calta, of Eating Well, had traveled all the way from northern Vermont. Her editor expected her to come back with a story, of course, but Marialisa Calta is more than a rote transcriber of such facts as that a hundred-gram portion of giant silk moth caterpillars provides 112.2 percent of the recommended daily adult allowance of riboflavin, 120 percent of the copper, and 197.2 percent of the iron. Marialisa Calta is a thoughtful human being. “I’m trying to free my mind from the cultural bias against eating bugs,” she said. “Also, I’m Italian, and we supposedly eat anything.”
A waiter in black tie and a wing collar passed by wit
h a tray of hors d’oeuvres—mealworm ghanouj on fontina bruschetta. The mealworms, which had been simmered in red wine with salt and pepper, tasted fine. The ghanouj seemed a little gummy. Marialisa Calta suggested that we chase it with a live honeypot ant. On a nearby table was a petrilike dish of ants that looked familiar except that they had been feeding on peach nectar and the abdomen of each was a large, swollen, translucent sac. “Pick out a logy one,” Marialisa said. “They’re easier to catch.” We picked out a logy one. It tasted sweet. Though there was a limit of one per person, we might have sampled another, but a cameraman from Channel 4 jostled us and made us spill our ginger ale.
We saw a man who we instinctively felt was Norman Cooper, the president of the National Pest Control Association—an intuition based mainly on the name tag he was wearing. Mr. Cooper’s wife had obtained tickets to the latest August Wilson play, Two Trains Running, for that evening, he said, but he preferred to eat insects. Mr. Cooper is the president of ESCO, a.k.a. Exterminating Services Company—the largest pest-control firm in the metropolitan area. “We’re concerned with insects as pests,” he said, in a vaguely defensive tone. “My regard for the press in the past has not been the highest. I have seen them take scientific fact and distort it in order to make a sweeps-week rating higher. We’ve seen how they’ll take a nonthreatening situation and blow it into a scare story. Of course, that’s a generalization, but it’s largely true.”
Another waiter interrupted us, this time with a tray of fried mealworms and wax-worm fritters with plum sauce, and, when we looked up, some lower life forms had thrust a long lens and a microphone into Mr. Cooper’s face.
We had a brief conversation with Robert Boyle, a writer and naturalist, who does a lot of trout fishing and fly-tying and has been eating insects for fifteen years—“not as much as I’d like but enough to repel friends.” An open-minded friend of Mr. Boyle’s who used to analyze bins of flour for the Army, testing them for their mealworm content, once recommended that he raise termites, “but not too close to the house.” “Termites are something like 20 percent protein,” Mr. Boyle said. “That’s their wet weight. Dry, they might be closer to 50 percent.”
Toni Schwed was also present. She is working on an anthology of “fiction, poetry, aphorisms, and cartoons—everything that’s not nonfiction—about bugs,” and has just published a book titled Noah and Me, about a psychotherapist for animals.
On the buffet line, we caught up with Mr. Cooper again, and he introduced us to some of his fellow pest-control professionals: Ivor Specterman, the general manager of ESCO; Bob Stien, of Acme Exterminating, in Manhattan; and Gil Bloom, of Standard Exterminating, in Queens.
Gil Bloom had some wisdom to convey about the press. “Like pest control, they serve a necessary function in society,” he said. “They’re not always loved, but they serve a purpose. We do our best to treat them as nontarget organisms. As exterminators, we tend to target only four-legged, six-legged, and, on occasion, eight-legged organisms. We don’t normally go after two-legged creatures, although, if you were really interested, I could set you up with someone.”
During dinner, we shared a table with Mr. Cooper and Dr. Muhammad Shadab, an entomologist on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, where he specializes in making anatomically exact pointillist drawings of the reproductive organs of spiders. One of the centerpieces was a green-mesh-covered glass fishbowl containing a bed of aquamarine gravel and a large tarantula-colored tarantula. Dr. Shadab studied it for about two seconds before pronouncing it female.
From the buffet table we had picked up a couple of two-inch-long Thai water bugs—a species that, according to Lou Sorkin, the treasurer of the New York Entomological Society, has “the flavor of lettuce, seaweed, or Gorgonzola cheese, depending where you bite into it.” Instead of eating them, we decided to keep them as souvenirs.
We asked Mr. Cooper whether the Thai water bug was the same insect that people encounter in dark, dank, scary New York City basements and refer to interchangeably as the water bug and the American cockroach—as opposed to the smaller, ubiquitous species of cockroach that is found in New York City kitchens and is known as the German cockroach (except in Germany, where it is known as the French cockroach, and in France, where it is known as the English cockroach).
“Yes,” Mr. Cooper said, and he explained that the Thai water bug was a close relative of the North American scary-basement water bug.
Immediately, Dr. Shadab contradicted him. “No,” Dr. Shadab said. “The American cockroach is not a true bug. In common language they are all bugs, but a true bug has different wings and mouthparts. A true bug—like the bedbug—has a piercing mouth so that it can suck the juices out of plants and sometimes animals. Now, that’s a true bug. A roach is a roach.”
A Thai water bug sat untouched on Mr. Cooper’s plate.
“Do people ever eat roaches?” he was asked.
“No,” Dr. Shadab said.
“Well, perhaps,” Mr. Cooper said. “But not knowingly.”
1992
A SANDWICH
NORA EPHRON
The hot pastrami sandwich served at Langer’s Delicatessen in downtown Los Angeles is the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world. This is not just my opinion, although most people who know about Langer’s will simply say it’s the finest hot pastrami sandwich in Los Angeles because they don’t dare to claim that something like a hot pastrami sandwich could possibly be the best version of itself in a city where until recently you couldn’t get anything resembling a New York bagel, and the only reason you can get one now is that New York bagels have deteriorated.
Langer’s is a medium-sized place—it seats 135 people—and it is decorated, although “decorated” is probably not the word that applies, in tufted brown vinyl. The view out the windows is of the intersection of Seventh and Alvarado and the bright-red-and-yellow signage of a Hispanic neighborhood—bodegas, check-cashing storefronts, and pawnshops. Just down the block is a spot notorious for being the place to go in L.A. if you need a fake ID. The Rampart division’s main police station, the headquarters of the city’s second-most-recent police scandal, is a mile away. Even in 1947, when Langer’s opened, the neighborhood was not an obvious place for an old-style Jewish delicatessen, but in the early 1990s things got worse. Gangs moved in. The crime rate rose. The Langers—the founder, Al, now eighty-nine, and his son Norm, fifty-seven—were forced to cut the number of employees, close the restaurant nights and Sundays, and put coin-operated locks on the restroom doors. The opening of the Los Angeles subway system—one of its stops is half a block from the restaurant—has helped business slightly, as has the option of having your sandwich brought out to your car. But Langer’s always seems to be just barely hanging on. If it were in New York, it would be a shrine, with lines around the block and tour buses standing double-parked outside. Pilgrims would come—as they do, for example, to Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City and Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas—and they would report on their conversion. But in Los Angeles a surprising number of people don’t even know about Langer’s, and many of those who do wouldn’t be caught dead at the corner of Seventh and Alvarado, even though it’s not a particularly dangerous intersection during daytime hours.
Pastrami, I should point out for the uninitiated, is made from a cut of beef that is brined like corned beef, coated with pepper and an assortment of spices, and then smoked. It is characterized by two things. The first is that it is not something anyone’s mother whips up and serves at home; it’s strictly restaurant fare, and it’s served exclusively as a sandwich, usually on Russian rye bread with mustard. The second crucial thing about pastrami is that it is almost never good. In fact, it usually tastes like a bunch of smoked rubber bands.
The Langers buy their pastrami from a supplier in Burbank. “When we get it, it’s edible,” Norm Langer says, “but it’s like eating a racquetball. It’s hard as a rock. What do we do with it? What makes us such wizards? The average delicatessen will take this piec
e of meat and put it into a steamer for thirty to forty-five minutes and warm it. But you’ve still got a hard piece of rubber. You haven’t broken down the tissues. You haven’t made it tender. We take that same piece of pastrami, put it into our steamer, and steam it for almost three hours. It will shrink 25 to 30 percent, but it’s now tender—so tender it can’t be sliced thin in a machine because it will fall apart. It has to be hand-sliced.”
So: tender and hand-sliced. That’s half the secret of the Langer’s sandwich. The other secret is the bread. The bread is hot. Years ago, in the 1930s, Al Langer owned a delicatessen in Palm Springs, and, because there were no Jewish bakers in the vicinity, he was forced to bus in the rye bread. “I was serving day-old bread,” Al Langer says, “so I put it into the oven to make it fresher. Hot crispy bread. Juicy soft pastrami. How can you lose?”
Today, Langer’s buys its rye bread from a bakery called Fred’s, on South Robertson, which bakes it on bricks until it’s ten minutes from being done. Langer’s bakes the loaf the rest of the way, before slicing it hot for sandwiches. The rye bread, faintly sour, perfumed with caraway seeds, lightly dusted with cornmeal, is as good as any rye bread on the planet, and Langer’s puts about seven ounces of pastrami on it, the proper proportion of meat to bread. The resulting sandwich, slathered with Gulden’s mustard, is an exquisite combination of textures and tastes. It’s soft but crispy, tender but chewy, peppery but sour, smoky but tangy. It’s a symphony orchestra, different instruments brought together to play one perfect chord. It costs eight-fifty and is, in short, a work of art.
2002
SEA URCHIN
CHANG-RAE LEE
July 1980. I’m about to turn fifteen and our family is in Seoul, the first time since we left, twelve years earlier. I don’t know if it’s different. My parents can’t really say. They just repeat the equivalent of “How in the world?” whenever we venture into another part of the city, or meet one of their old friends. “Look at that—how in the world?” “This hot spell, yes, yes—how in the world?” My younger sister is very quiet in the astounding heat. We all are. It’s the first time I notice how I stink. You can’t help smelling like everything else. And in the heat everything smells of ferment and rot and rankness. In my grandfather’s old neighborhood, where the two-and three-room houses stand barely head-high, the smell is staggering. “What’s that?” I ask. My cousin says, “Shit.”
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