Steal the Menu

by Raymond Sokolov

  “Through” could not be sounded out if you relied purely on the basic sounds of its letters, but concluding that o-u-g-h always sounded like “oo” did not help you pronounce the words spelled t-o-u-g-h or b-o-u-g-h. One rule wasn’t enough, but three rules pretty much showed you the way to cope in this maze of muddling signs.

  I saw this in a flash. I figured out, in an extremely exciting couple of days when I was barely six, that the apparently irrational business of spelling was not the chaos it seemed to everyone else struggling with it in my class. They were looking for a system to explain the deep mystery of Dick and Jane. I understood intuitively that there were many “systems” at work on those idyllically illustrated pages.

  The more pages I read, the more little orthographic patterns emerged. So I read a lot, not consciously to bone up on spelling. I read because I could, and, because it was easy for me, I loved it. Mrs. Smart noticed and told other teachers. I had become what they thought of as a natural speller. This weird talent would not have been remarked upon if other children hadn’t needed classroom practice to improve their spelling. But I quickly emerged in those drills as some kind of prodigy.

  Show me the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” and I could spell it right away, even though I had no notion of what it meant and couldn’t possibly have understood a dictionary definition without an hour of explanation of the history of the relations between church and state in nineteenth-century England. I doubt I had any firm idea of any of the parts of that phrase: century, nineteenth century, England, state, church. I was only a six-year-old, but I could spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” and a lot of other sesquipedalian jawbreakers, for the amusement and wonder of teachers and older children.

  One day, I got taken into an eighth-grade homeroom to give a demonstration of my powers. The teacher was large and raven-maned, notorious in our school for, shall we say, threatening exuberance. Her students were giant thirteen-year-olds who looked to me like somebody’s parents. They called out words and I spelled them.

  So at six I tasted fame, and liked it. Word of my skill got around. My classmates joined the rest of the school in regarding me as a little resident genius. Neither they nor I would learn the phrase “idiot savant” until years later. So from then on, in my little world at the Hampton School in affluent northwest Detroit, I was the smartest kid.

  There was some truth to my reputation for intelligence. I had unconsciously analyzed the English language’s multifarious orthography, without having any sense of how all those vestiges of Latin, French and German—languages with more orderly but dissimilar spelling systems—had left their mark on the way our words looked. So I was intelligent when judged by real criteria, but in first grade I was rewarded for being able to perform a stunt. That was just the beginning.

  In fifth grade, ever more adept at spelling ever more difficult words, I moved up from being a local prodigy to the higher and far more confusing status of national celebrity.

  Every spring, all students in the five counties of the Detroit area who were enrolled in grades five through eight competed in a spelling bee sponsored by the Detroit News. First there was a competition for each grade, then for the entire school, then for a group of schools in the same district. District winners competed for the Detroit title. And the Detroit winner went to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee.

  I was ten. I won my grade. I won my school bee and the district bee, and then the city bee. As I moved up the ladder, I got progressively more attention in the News, which paid for the whole circus as a promotional effort to attract readers.

  After I was city champion, I came to know the Boys and Girls page editor of the News, a lively, smart, single, behatted, old-fashioned newshen named Virginia Schnell. Her most important assignment every year was the spelling bee, a sweet sinecure involving a week in Washington on the News’s tab, but the downside was spinning out usable copy about that year’s city champion speller again and again, which meant spending many days with the moppet and his parents. But with me, Schnell hit the jackpot: I was quotable and often got her on the front page of the News. It got me fatally interested in journalism.

  In Washington, I did better still for her. In 1952, at ten, I was the youngest contestant in the history of the bee. So I was mentioned in all the stories written by dozens of reporters for papers from coast to coast, and they were careful to say that I was representing the Detroit News. That was the protocol, since the reporters all understood that the real point of the exercise was to sell newspapers. They therefore attached each speller’s newspaper sponsor to his name like some Homeric epithet: Minnie Mintz (Akron Beacon Journal), Billy Batson (New York World-Telegram and Sun).

  Not only was I the youngest, I was also up to the competition. I finished twenty-second, and would have gone further if the pronouncer (the man who spoke each word we had to spell) hadn’t mispronounced the word I missed. He looked at “assonance,” a word he confessed he didn’t know, and then said “A-sonance.” He was quickly corrected but I, never having seen the word either, thought he’d unwittingly given me a clue. If it had two s’s, then any fool would have pronounced its first syllable to rhyme with “lass.” But the pronouncer’s first impulse had been to give it a long a, something normally possible only if there were only a single s following the a. Or so I reasoned before I went down misspelling “assonance” a-s-o-n-a-n-c-e.

  This was not the end of it. In 1953, I returned to Washington as the Detroit champion and finished second, once again a casualty of official mispronunciation. That year the word was “spermaceti,” pronounced by the very same official pronouncer as if it were a pasta: “spermacetti,” like “spaghetti.” I cried briefly before taking cover in the basement of the Commerce Department building, where the bee took place, among aquariums filled with salamanders slumbering in green-tinged tanks. My tears got on national television. I appeared on the front page of the New York Times, a distinction I never achieved while working there.

  Since I was much better copy than the fourteen-year-old from Arizona who came in first, the Bee’s administrator offered to send my mother and me to New York to be on The Ed Sullivan Show with the winner. We said no thank you, reminding him that the New York junket was supposed to be a special treat for the winning speller.

  I was also told the name of the proofreader’s manual from which the bee selected the words that contestants had to spell. This was, for someone at my level as a kid speller, a dead giveaway. If I returned the following year, as the man who leaked the word list source to me hoped, all the other children would be spelling words they’d never heard or seen, words such as “vigesimal,” which I had guessed correctly that week had an s like “infinitesimal,” instead of a c like “decimal.” But with that secret list in hand, I’d have no more need for guessing. I could easily memorize every possible word they’d use in the next bee. It wouldn’t matter if the pronouncer mangled every one. Only a slip of the tongue by me could keep me from the title.

  But that would have been wrong. We went back to Detroit without going on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I never entered another spelling bee. I had retired.

  But my reputation lived on. There I was in 1954 with two other thirteen-year-olds on a Woodward Avenue bus, making a racket. A dour biddy got up and came over to me. “Everyone knows who you are,” she said. “So behave. What one Jew does reflects on all other Jews.”

  I switched to private school and escaped the community that knew my saga best. So my life as a teenager was fairly normal, but my academic résumé was stellar, and I believed in it.

  If you graduate first in your class in high school and continue on to get a summa in classics at Harvard (picking up the undergraduate thesis prize and a junior year Phi Beta Kappa key along the way), you can be pardoned for thinking your brain is in good working order and ought to be the tool you use to make your way in the world.

  That was my working theory of me. But as I reached adulthood and had to decide more precisely what t
o do with that tool, I began to doubt that my future lay in the classroom teaching Greek and Latin. I looked around myself, at the other graduate students and, with panic, at my teachers. My strings did not vibrate sympathetically with theirs. I loved Greek literature, and I had given it my best, for seven years. Now I needed a way out, and Newsweek came to the rescue.

  Thank God for those movie reviews in the Harvard Crimson, which legitimized me in the eyes of the Newsweek recruiter. Without them, I would now be a disappointed retired professor of Greek at some provincial university. Instead, I landed a job in big-time journalism, where destiny put me in the way of Alex Keneas, who deftly put me in the way of Charlotte Curtis, who mistook me as the answer to her urgent need to hire a food man.

  Three

  Food News

  “What will you be doing here?” asked the nice young woman in personnel whom I went to see after my welcoming lunch with Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis.

  “I’ll be handling food,” I replied.

  “Well, I’ll put you down as an N2.”

  I shrugged. As an elite news staffer, I had been put on the so-called publisher’s payroll, which brought with it special, if largely ceremonial, privileges at the bank down the block, and saved me the indignity of dealing with the weekly paychecks that were the lot of less illustrious news slaves. I was to be paid each month.

  When I finally received my first paycheck, it was suspiciously tiny, much less than the salary I’d been offered. I inquired. The nice lady in personnel had taken me at my word. When she’d seen that I was young and I’d said I was to be handling food, she’d made me an N2, an assistant salad handler in the cafeteria. We sorted it out.

  In fact, I had inherited a little empire several floors above the Times newsroom. The phrase “splendid isolation” might have been coined to describe the food department. While the newsroom was making history by printing the Pentagon Papers, a leaked official study of the Vietnam War and its failures, I luxuriated in my peaceable kingdom. The most splendid of all its appurtenances was the test kitchen, whose professional-style Garland range, immaculate expanse of butcher block counters and forest of heavy-gauge copper pots came with an English test cook and a Polish maid to clean up after her.

  The test cook, Jean Hewitt, was handsome, a diplomate in home economics from London, and quietly furious that I’d gotten the job she thought, with some real justice, she deserved more than I did. My staff also included a secretary, Velma Cannon, a very refined black lady of late middle years devoted to the white southern gentleman who’d previously occupied my desk. Last, but crucial to our ability to respond to the flood of mail that rolled in every day, was the stenographer, Anita Rizzi.

  When the phone rang in that office my first day, I reached for the receiver at my elbow, but Anita beat me to it. Part of her job was to be the first responder. And if she was already on the line, Velma picked up the next call. If Velma and Anita were both busy with calls and still another rang, Jean took that one. I was last in this inverted pecking order, answering the phone at my desk only if the other three were already handling our ever-inquisitive readers. No one ever explained this to me. But I soon figured it out and fell in line. And like the others, when I answered a call, I said, “Food news.”

  I thought it was funny. Downstairs, where the real reporters were, they covered the news. We “covered” fast-breaking recipes and the policy decisions of chefs.

  My irony was misplaced. Even though a great deal of what the Times food editor wrote about was not newsworthy, a crucial part of it, as Claiborne had defined the job, really was food news. My respect for him grew as I read through his old articles in the office files. He had discarded the old food-page model of recipes handed out by food-product companies and restaurant “reviews” redacted from press releases or based on meals eaten on the cuff. Instead, Claiborne had hunted down fresh developments in the food world (a concept he was instrumental in inventing): new chefs and newly arrived ethnic cuisines; and, when the opportunity arose, he did actually cover the news in his field. For example, when Albert Stockli resigned as executive chef at Restaurant Associates in 1965 to open his own restaurant in Connecticut, Craig wrote about it, and the article was an early example of the sanctification of a celebrity chef in the major news media.

  It was easy to miss the journalistic core of Claiborne’s work, because he was so careful and clever about folding it into the epicurean format he’d invented for himself. In a given week, he would contribute a food feature, most often about an interesting home cook, to the Thursday women’s page, euphemistically rebranded as “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings”—or in Times-speak, the four-F page—and, later on, as Family/Style.

  On Friday, he would review restaurants, places he’d visited several times with three or four guests. These reviews were the reverse of impressionistic, filled with expert calls about ingredients and flavors, lapses in authenticity. To make things easier for the reader, he graded each place with from one to four stars. Very few restaurants got the maximum four stars, and the list barely changed from year to year, which was an accurate reflection of the placidity of the tiny world of elite food in New York from 1957 to 1971.

  Also on Friday, there were brief recipes. And on Sunday, Craig would collaborate with the in-house photo studio on an illustrated recipe for the back pages of the New York Times Magazine.

  This was a job description that fitted Craig to a T but nearly flattened me.

  Toward the end of my tenure, I sat on a committee to discuss the future of Family/Style. Soon after, the section was parceled out into separate daily sections, with many journalists working on them. This redesign, which I favored, because it broadened food coverage and presented it more coherently, divided the food editor’s superjob into slots for a principal restaurant critic, for other critics covering budget restaurants, for food reporters and a recipe writer.

  I continued to perform all those functions while the redesign went forward. I did it all without training or contacts in the food community, and, worst of all, I had to operate in a depressed economy that hammered the luxury restaurants that were my basic “story.”

  A critic in any field needs lively new work to judge. If publishers stopped publishing books, book critics would have to stop writing reviews. This, of course, will never happen, even if and when all books are electronic. But in the New York restaurant world of the early 1970s, new restaurants of consequence rarely opened. Instead, several famous eateries were closing their doors. In my first few months at the Times, the city’s most famous restaurant, Le Pavillon, served its last meal. So did the regal Café Chauveron, with its glittering array of copper pots, where I’d interviewed W. H. Auden for Newsweek in 1968, the winter following his sixtieth birthday. The Colony, an evolved speakeasy with fancy French food for a high-society clientele—pressed ducks and the like—also went out of business.

  In journalistic terms, I didn’t have much of a story, but that wasn’t obvious to me or anyone else reading my pieces during my first few weeks at the Times, because I was able to make news all on my own.

  Really, I didn’t want to cause a commotion. I didn’t suspect I was going to. Coming from Newsweek, which no one I knew ever read, and whose several million readers almost never raised a peep over anything I wrote, I did not dream that a short article about a Chinese restaurant in suburban New Jersey could spread frenzy throughout the tristate area and beyond.

  But it did.

  In my defense, I will stipulate that Craig and Charlotte made me do it. At the purée mongole lunch on my first day at the paper, far more important than Craig’s grandstanding about the cafeteria chef’s heavy hand with bay leaf was his offhand announcement that he would be leaving the city for his East Hampton dacha without supplying copy for that week’s Thursday food feature. It was Monday. There was no time to get to know my staff or plan my debut article with my editor.

  Craig wished me well, with a smile I can be excused for thinking faintly malicious, a
nd Charlotte sent me off to personnel to become a salad handler and then to walk through an obligatory tour of the Times building for new hires.

  What should have been an unchallenging bit of institutional tourism—a swing through the newsroom, a look at the acre of linotype machines that filled an entire floor of 229 West Forty-third Street and the presses in the basement—turned into a distracted, panicked perambulation during which I occasionally interrupted the tour leader’s spiel to transact real business on the fly with the photo department or the Family/Style copy desk. Eventually, I found my way to the food news department, introduced myself to my very curious staff, and gave Jean Hewitt the recipe she would have to test under exigent circumstances, which included shopping for hoisin sauce in Chinatown.

  For my first article as food editor, I chose the tryout piece I’d written about a Chinese restaurant tucked into a filling station on Route 1 in New Jersey, five miles north of Princeton. A Kitchen was a thirty-two-seat dining room attached to Sam’s BP Gas Station. There was no Sam in sight, but instead Alex and Anna Shen filled you up with regular for thirty-one cents a gallon and also served “celestial banquets” to clued-in Rutgers and Princeton faculty members.

  One of them, the sinologist John Schrecker, had stumbled on the place with his wife, Ellen, and discovered that the Shens served much more than the hamburgers, chop suey and chow mein on their regular menu. They were ambitious and authentic practitioners of “the same northern and Sichuanese dishes that have been appearing in New York City restaurants over the last few years,” I wrote.

  John and Ellen had for some time been introducing me to this exciting food as it emerged, elusively and without fanfare, in Chinese restaurants ostensibly devoted to the Cantonese dishes that had, until the late 1960s, been the only form of Chinese cooking available in America. But with the reform of racially restrictive immigration laws, non-Cantonese Chinese had begun trickling into the country, bringing the foods of their native regions with them. This new wave of Chinese immigrants often arrived on student visas from Taiwan, more educated and self-confident than the Cantonese laborers who had preceded them to work on the railways in the nineteenth century. Craig Claiborne had already noticed what was happening.