Russ & Daughters

by Mark Russ Federman

  Figuring out what to do with the dark part of the salmon, closest to the skin, was more difficult. Old-timers know that this is a rich, tasty layer of fish fat and would object if it was trimmed away. “What are you doing?” they would shout at me. “You’re losing the best part of the fish. Cut down to the skin.” We rarely hear that anymore. Now it’s a shriek if there is a speck of dark in an otherwise salmon-colored slice. No use in trying to convince customers that this part of the fish is delicious. So we came up with Smoked Salmon Tartare—a delectable solution. (See recipe on this page.) The fact that we use smoked salmon and not raw salmon should be chalked up to culinary poetic license.

  We also devised a creative solution to the problem of what to do with bagels left over at the end of the day. Day-old bagels are not sold at our store. Offering a “baker’s dozen” sold some; “half price for the last hour” sold a few more. But we still had a considerable amount of leftovers. When the neighborhood streets were populated by Bowery bums and prostitutes, I handed them out to the locals, but I had to abandon that when the crowd got large and unruly and some demanded cream cheese and lox on their free bagels. Then we hit upon Bagel Pudding, which is very much like a bread pudding and has become very popular on the newly hip Lower East Side. (See recipe on this page.)

  Perhaps my greatest assault on a classic food tradition was the creation of a new gefilte fish preparation. While there have always been variations on the gefilte fish theme, most traditional recipes include whitefish, pike, and mullet. Some prefer their gefilte fish sweet, others savory. Some like fish shaped into ovals; others want loaves. But in either case, gefilte fish sales were trending down. Our new salmon, whitefish, and dill creation has more in common with French quenelles than with traditional gefilte fish, and it can be served hot or cold as an appetizer at the fanciest dinner party. It brought our sales back up, and so gefilte fish survives for another generation.

  It’s important to give credit where it’s due: The creation of these new products was my idea, but the development of the recipes has been the work of my wife, Maria, who is not a Russ by birth and, God bless her, is not afraid of breaking with tradition.

  Maria, my partner in life and in work, and me at our daughter Niki’s wedding in 2007

  Whitefish and Baked Salmon Salad

  MAKES 8 SERVINGS

  1½ pounds smoked whitefish, skinned and boned (about one 2-pound whitefish)

  ½ pound kippered (hot smoked) salmon

  ¾ cup mayonnaise

  ½ small white onion, finely minced

  ¼ teaspoon white pepper

  With your fingers, flake the whitefish and salmon, making sure to remove any skin and bones. Transfer the fish to a food processor and pulse until it is well combined yet still slightly chunky, about 5 or 6 one-second pulses. Transfer the fish to a large bowl and gently fold in the mayonnaise, onion, and white pepper with a spatula.

  Smoked Salmon Tartare

  MAKES 24 SERVINGS

  2½ pounds smoked salmon (preferably a mild variety, such as Gaspé Atlantic or Western Nova)

  1 medium red onion, finely diced

  ½ cup finely chopped scallions (white and light green parts only)

  2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

  1½ teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

  1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley

  Cut the smoked salmon into a ¼-inch dice. Combine the salmon, red onion, scallions, vinegar, olive oil, and parsley in a large bowl and mix gently until just blended. Serve with endive leaves, crackers, or bagel chips.

  7

  The Holidays

  All Year Round

  Back when I was a trial lawyer working at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, my parents were certainly proud of the fact that I was the first professional in the family. But when the Jewish holidays arrived in September or October, it didn’t matter how many degrees or how many pending cases I had, they expected me to leave my clients for a few days and help them out behind the counter. In fact, I occasionally had to ask a judge for a delay in a trial. If the judge was Jewish, he understood. And often the judge would ask me to put in his holiday order when I got to the store.

  Home for the Holidays

  Once I took over at Russ & Daughters, I would call my kids each autumn as the Jewish holidays approached to ask them to help me out. When they got cell phones with the ability to screen and avoid calls, it often took several attempts to reach them, because they knew why I was calling. But I was not about to be deterred. We are the Russ family. When you’re needed, you come home for the holidays.

  One year, Noah protested that his professors at Mount Sinai School of Medicine wouldn’t accept any excuses for missing classes. “Dad, I can’t tell my prof that I have to miss a week of neurosurgery classes to slice salmon.”

  “Vi nempt men parnosa?” I replied, using Grandpa Russ’s family mantra. “From where do we make our living? How do we survive?” I also reminded him—in English—that I, meaning the store, had been paying for his education. Noah showed up on time and ready for work. As it turned out, some of his professors were not only understanding about his absence from school but also asked him to fill their holiday orders. One of his classmates even volunteered to help out in the store in exchange for smoked fish to take home to his family for the holidays. I assigned Noah and his friend to packing orders. They were the fastest and most accurate order-packing team we ever had. Finally, his expensive education was paying off.

  Then there was the time that I called Niki while she was studying abroad and said I needed her in the store.

  “Dad, don’t you remember?” she said. “I’m in France. I can’t make it for the holidays this year.”

  “Really? What are you doing there?” I was teasing; of course I knew very well that our herring sales were paying for her tuition at L’Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. And, come to think of it, the store had paid for her French lessons as well. I told Niki that geography wasn’t a problem. I’d pay for the round-trip ticket, and she could study on the plane to New York and on the plane going back to Paris. She came home and brought along a French-Vietnamese friend who was curious about American culture. Her friend didn’t speak much English, and our customers rarely speak French or Vietnamese, so I assigned her to packing bagels. All went well until a customer asked her for “assorted” bagels. We had taught her only about “mixed” bagels. But we worked it out. And a week later Niki and her friend—who must have picked up some interesting ideas about American culture from working at Russ & Daughters for ten hours a day—were back on the plane to Paris.

  This is how it is in a family business. The small family-owned-and-operated store is not unlike the small family farm. You gather everyone for the harvest season and they all pitch in. And you never know if the harvest will be bountiful or if an act of nature or of inhumanity will ruin all of your hard work.

  The New Year and September 11, 2001

  I am cursing as I walk down First Avenue from Fourteenth Street. I’m on my way back to the store with Raul, the kitchen man, each of us pushing a hand truck containing ten boxes filled with assorted smoked fish. Everyone’s used to my cursing in the store (but not when there are customers around, of course), so Raul isn’t taking it personally; he isn’t even paying attention. It’s September 13, 2001, two days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, and all vehicular traffic has been banned south of Fourteenth Street, which has been cordoned off. To get products to the store for the upcoming Jewish holidays, we have to walk fourteen blocks north to Fourteenth Street, meet the delivery trucks coming from the smokehouses, and then schlep the boxes fourteen blocks back to Houston Street.

  The period from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur is Russ & Daughters’ busiest time of the year, and Rosh Hashanah is just days away. But with traffic banned in the neighborhood and mass transit service spotty at best, how will our customers get to the store? And will shoppers want to come down to Lower Manhattan after the ba
n is lifted? It’s clear to me that this event will have a devastating economic impact on New York City, and especially on Lower Manhattan. And there is no way to know how long it will last.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, Herman and I were working behind the counter and Niki was in the upstairs office when I got a call from Maria. It was about 9:15. Maria had heard on the radio and then seen on TV that something terrible had happened at the World Trade Center. Apparently a plane had crashed into the North Tower, and the building was on fire. Maria suggested that we go up to the roof of our building, where we would have a clear and unobstructed view of the World Trade Center, less than a mile away. Then Maria called again, telling us that a second plane had crashed into the South Tower and that it might be a terrorist attack. Niki, Herman, and I went up to the roof. The skies were the kind of bright, clear blue that you see in New York only a couple of times a year. We stood there, speechless, watching the two towers burning. It wasn’t long before they collapsed. Herman, who tends to have an apocalyptic view of things, was convinced that this was the end of the world. Given what we had just witnessed, I thought it was possible that he was right this time.

  We went back downstairs, and I went over to the corner of East Houston and Allen. Walking past me, going north, were hundreds of people, some covered with soot and ash, all looking bewildered. Some asked if they could use our bathroom or our phone. (Our bathroom was working, but not the phones.) Some just needed to talk. No one had much information about what had just happened or what was going to happen. There was a communal state of shock.

  Once we determined that no one who worked in the store had loved ones in or near the World Trade Center that day, I sent home employees who would have difficulty traveling or who needed to gather their families. I closed the store at 3:00 p.m., and Niki and I rode our bicycles to the World Trade Center site. We knew without discussing it that this was a historic, unprecedented event. Traveling by bike was easy. All vehicular traffic had been halted except for ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars, all with sirens screaming at the same time. No one paid any attention to two people on bikes. We got as far as about three blocks from what has since become known as Ground Zero. Many of the streets in this part of Manhattan are narrow and lined with tall buildings, making them feel almost like caverns. Those caverns were now acting as funnels for white smoke and gray ash. Every few minutes a firefighter emerged from the smoke cloud, alone and exhausted, where we stood with our bikes. When it became clear that there was nothing we could do to help, Niki bicycled back home to her apartment over the store, and I bicycled over the Brooklyn Bridge to our home in Brooklyn, accompanied by hundreds of bewildered-looking people who were walking across the bridge to get home as well. None of us could yet fathom the depth of this tragedy.

  Many of the neighborhood businesses closed down for the duration, but on September 12 I made the decision to keep Russ & Daughters open every day, for full ten-hour days. We represented something enduring and reliable in a changing neighborhood during changing times. A sense of stability and normalcy was needed for our employees, our customers, and me, now that our world had been turned upside down. And nothing was going to stop the Jewish holidays from arriving a week later.

  Rosh Hashanah that year fell on September 18. I expected very little business in the days leading up to the holiday. Traffic into Manhattan was restricted, and subway service was only gradually coming back. But some people—not many—did come. Some used the subways and some walked, schlepping home shopping bags filled with smoked fish. Business was way off, as it was for everyone in the neighborhood.

  Ten days after Rosh Hashanah comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Jews observe a twenty-five-hour fast from sundown to sundown, which is traditionally followed by a celebratory “break-fast” meal that is shared with family and friends. Providing food for this meal makes this period the busiest time of the year for Russ & Daughters. But that year, I expected the worst. As Yom Kippur drew closer, traveling around Manhattan became a bit easier. Some customers canceled their long-standing orders, but others increased the size of theirs because they were inviting more people to their break-fast. Some told me that they had lost family members or friends to this tragedy and didn’t feel like celebrating anything, but they felt that they wanted to, they needed to, maintain the tradition of the Yom Kippur break-fast with food from Russ & Daughters. That made me feel a bit better, but not much.

  Breakfast? No, It’s Break-Fast

  Older customers who came from Eastern Europe told me that the traditional Yom Kippur break-fast used to be nothing more than a piece of schmaltz herring and a shot of schnapps. The herring quickly put some salt into the fasting body, and the schnapps was for … everything else. Pulling a herring or two or three from the barrel—the cost was three for a quarter in the early 1920s—and wrapping it in a Yiddish newspaper didn’t take very long. There were no pre-orders, no lines, no waiting.

  Yom Kippur is a day of repentance and fasting as atonement for the previous year’s accumulated sins. During this twenty-five-hour period, any work—including cooking—is forbidden. So over the years, and with the increasing affluence of American Jews, the break-fast food of choice expanded from herring to other food that didn’t require cooking or even reheating once the services were over: smoked and cured fish; bagels and bialys with a schmear of cream cheese; and rugelach and babka for dessert.

  What this means for Russ & Daughters is that hordes of Jews descend on our store during the week leading up to Yom Kippur. Five thousand years of poverty, privation, and pogroms have programmed into our DNA a primal fear that any fast at any time could become permanent. Matters are further complicated by the fact that our fish, although smoked, pickled, and cured, is still perishable, with a shelf life of one week to ten days. Add to this the fact that some of our products are not plentiful and may indeed run out before the onset of the holidays. The result: hundreds of pre-fasting Jews who think they may never eat again shopping at the last minute and waiting in line for products that may run out before it’s their turn to be waited on. The chaos that this creates is probably not hard to visualize.

  When I ran the store, I did everything during the pre-holiday rush. I sliced, diced, and filleted fish and kept the counter clean—always a knife in my hand, always a rag in my pocket. I answered the phones and the customers’ questions, kept the countermen energized, and maintained crowd control as best I could.

  It was not unusual in the midst of all the craziness to get a phone call from an elderly woman who was hard-of-hearing. The conversation usually went something like this:

  “Are you the boss?”

  “Yes, I’m Mr. Russ.”

  “I want a quarter pound of lox, you should slice it thin, and two bagels, they should be well baked but not burnt. I’m sending my son to pick it up in half an hour. Make sure it’s ready.”

  “I’m sorry. We’re too busy. It’s the holidays. I’m afraid I can’t take your order over the phone.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t take your order.”

  “I don’t have a daughter. I said I’m sending my son.”

  “No, I said I can’t take your order.”

  “That’s right, a quarter.”

  I see this is no use. It takes longer to communicate than to simply fill the order.

  “Okay, okay. It’s the holidays, so why don’t you buy a half a pound?”

  For some reason, she hears this clearly. “A half a pound? What am I making? A wedding?”

  Even though I’m now retired, I’m still called into service by Niki and Josh for the pre-holiday rush. But now I stand on the customers’ side of the counter, wearing civilian clothes, not the deli whites—the long white starched coat with the Russ & Daughters fish logo over the breast pocket. And now I get to smile as I walk through the shop, helping to control the chaos.

  It wasn’t always such a pleasure. For my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandpa
rents it was a lebn (a living), and not an easy one: Jewish merchants selling Jewish food to Jewish customers in a Jewish ghetto, with plenty of competition from other appetizing stores and a clientele barely out of poverty themselves. How much things have changed. These days, during the Jewish holiday season the shop is packed to capacity, with many people waiting outside to get in and customers who have made it into the store waiting their turn to step up to the counter and select the smoked fish, herring, salads, and other items they will have sliced, diced, filleted, and packaged to take home for their own breakfast. There are five employees handing out the pre-placed orders, ten working the fish counter, three on the candy side, two in the basement shipping area, six in the kitchen, and one (me) attempting some sort of crowd control.

  On the days leading up to Yom Kippur, the wait for service ranges from two to three hours. Often a customer will approach me and ask how long I think the wait will be. She holds number 27 and the above-the-counter monitor shows that customer number 15 is currently being waited on. “About two hours,” I reply. She can’t understand. “How can it take two hours to wait on twelve customers?” I explain that she has number C27 and they are now taking care of number B15. There are more than one hundred numbers in between.

  On one particular day–before–Yom Kippur a few years ago, the customers outside the store aren’t unhappy at all; in fact, the mood is festive even though they’re about to begin a twenty-five-hour fast and a period of deep introspection and atonement. The weather is nice, an atypically sunny and mild day in the beginning of October. This time of year it’s often cold and rainy, and the customers outside are as unhappy about waiting in the rain as they are about their impending deprivation. But now, in addition to the nice weather, they are also being entertained. Niki hired a klezmer band to play for two hours outside the store. When I first heard about this, I was shocked. This had never been done before! It was not part of the traditional pre–Yom Kippur scene at Russ & Daughters, and it could be regarded only as insensitive to the gravity of the occasion. But, as usual, I am proved wrong. The customers are happy to be diverted by the klezmer music, which is culturally in sync with the foods they are about to buy: here are both the food and the music of their Jewish souls. They are even buying the band’s CDs.