The Bread and the Knife

by Dawn Drzal

  Fortified with a pot of French press coffee, I watched the lake assume its daytime persona in the sun’s glare off the water. The waiter reappeared with a silver tray, lifting its domed cover to reveal four puffy, golden poori. Blistered and glistening with oil, they looked like inflated blowfish pulled straight from the water. Next to them sat a bowl of marigold-colored potato curry, flecked with bright green cilantro leaves and studded with black mustard seeds. Two tiny dishes completed the tableau, one containing a mixture of freshly chopped green chiles, onion, and cilantro, the other a potent-looking paste of red chiles. I picked up and promptly dropped a scalding poori. While I waited for it to cool, I tasted the potatoes. “Mouth-watering” has been drained of significance by overuse, but in that moment I experienced its literal meaning. The bhaji, essentially a dry potato curry, was so delicious that my heart began pounding with anxiety at the thought that soon it would be gone. First it was tangy verging on sour, like sorrel soup, then spicy, then salty. Next came the bite of mustard seeds, the astringency of ginger, the reassuring warmth of garlic, the sweetness of caramelized onions, and an alluringly musky spice I couldn’t place but now believe was hing, or asafetida. The poori was now cool enough to touch, and I ripped off the edge. A breath of warm air rushed out, and it deflated in my hand like a living thing. The combination of the poori and the bhaji was indescribable. I tried to make it last as long as I could by experimenting with various combinations of the condiments on the table, but inevitably everything disappeared except some of the fiery pepper paste. When the waiter removed the empty tray, I was too satisfied to feel sorry.

  is for

  Jordan Almonds

  It’s been twenty-five years, and I still haven’t recovered from the inexplicable disappearance of Jordan almonds from movie theater concession stands. Ridiculous, I know, but some foods and activities are like Siamese twins, bound together so intimately that separating them does irreparable harm to both. Going to the movies just isn’t the same without Jordan almonds. And it doesn’t work to smuggle them in from outside; I’ve tried it. They taste different when not warmed by the lamps of the concession stand.

  Like most children, I spent my formative years at the movies consuming tubs of buttered popcorn, Raisinets, Good & Plenty, and Whoppers. I didn’t discover Jordan almonds until I was fifteen, at the same moment I discovered “cinema.” Both seemed equally adult to me. Serious film—which for me included everything from Woody Allen to Lina Wertmüller—gave me the key to making sense of the adult world and, although the people on the screen were actors, I saw them as visible proof that the complex, exciting people I fantasized about truly existed.

  Most of all, these films provided a psychic escape from Trevose, Pennsylvania, a suburb so lacking in identity that it is classified a “census-designated place” rather than a town. Trevose could easily have been the subject of Gertrude Stein’s famous pronouncement, “there’s no there there.” If for some peculiar reason you were to go on TripAdvisor searching for a dining recommendation, you would find, in order of preference, an Italian restaurant, Cracker Barrel, and—almost too perfect to be true—the Suburban Diner Restaurant on West Street Road. The problem with the Trevoses of the world is not that most people don’t seem to mind living in them. It is that they mind that you mind.

  The nearest place to find some relief before I left for college (and forever) was Philadelphia, which in the seventies was a vast agglomeration of neighborhoods with a tiny nucleus at its center, fittingly called “Center City.” In that miniature urban oasis, there was an even smaller section, called South Street—perhaps seven blocks long by three wide—that had a bit of the edgy pioneer energy that teenagers find so intoxicating. Every weekend I took the commuter train from Suburban Station to gawk surreptitiously at the embryonic punk fashion scene (although I was often too cowed to actually walk into the stores) and wander through the art museums. But what really drew me to Philadelphia weekend after weekend were two movie theaters: the Theatre of Living Arts, known as TLA, and the Ritz.

  Mecca for me was TLA, a gritty cinema on South and 3rd Streets that showed a truly impressive roster of repertory, foreign, and cult films. I can still feel my hand smoothing out the folds of the enormous quarterly schedule on my bedroom’s hot pink shag rug. I would kneel until my back ached and my knees were numb, poring over the titles and thumbnail descriptions, planning my Saturday expeditions like Peary to the North Pole. In the days before videos, DVDs, and streaming, the only way to see the “canon” was to go the movies, and during my high school years—guided by books of film criticism by John Simon and Pauline Kael—I saw an eclectic array of films by directors like Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Cassavetes, Herzog, Ken Russell, and Volker Schlöndorff, mixed with lighter fare by Busby Berkeley, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder. Less often, I went to the Ritz in tony Society Hill to keep up with current “art” and foreign films.

  My Saturday afternoons at the movies were sacred, and everything about them was ritualized. I had to arrive early not only because Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall, refused to go into the four-and-a-half-hour screening of The Sorrow and the Pity because he missed the first few seconds of the credits but also because I needed to buy Jordan almonds from the concession stand. At TLA, I always tried to sit in the fourth row center, or as close to it as I could get, so that I could put my feet up on the seat in front of me (there were no ushers to prevent you) and no head would block my view. The black upholstered seats were stained and torn, some entirely broken, some crazily tilted, so you had to move along the row until, like Goldilocks, you found one that was just right. I still remember the excitingly unwholesome smell of that dilapidated theater, left over from the notorious midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show just hours before. Nearly everyone went alone on Saturday afternoon; the point was not socializing but seeing the films. I’m sure that my enduring preference for going to the movies by myself stems from those early days.

  I don’t remember exactly when I first tasted Jordan almonds, but their somewhat elusive appeal seemed perfect for the often disturbing and ambiguous films I had started seeing. Unlike the simple sweetness of Raisinets or Whoppers, the confectionary equivalent of what was shown in suburban multiplexes, the Jordan almonds of that time had a soapy quality, a touch of perfume. Like everything else that adults seemed to prefer—gin or broccoli rabe or black coffee—they were an acquired taste, and I was determined to acquire it.

  Stringent and inviolable rules governed the consumption of Jordan almonds. Rule number one: if I was seeing one movie, I bought one box; a double feature, two boxes. Rule number two: no matter how hungry I was, I could not begin eating them until the credits began to roll. Rule number three: it was necessary to suck on the shell in such a way as to ensure a uniform thinness all around, flipping the almond as necessary. The sugar coating never became rough and grainy during the process as it sometimes does with the Jordan almonds of today, which can abrade your tongue like sandpaper. After losing their initial slick coating, they retained their satiny texture as the shell became thinner, until the barest hint of the woody almond beneath could be detected. At that moment, while a hint of resistance remained, it was time to crunch down, creating an explosion of slightly bitter almond and a rush of sugar.

  Watching a movie with subtitles while engaging with a box of Jordan almonds is a wholly immersive experience, requiring complete concentration to focus simultaneously on the story, the camerawork, the spoken language, the subtitles (especially in the case of Romance languages, where you can try to figure out the translation), and the tricky business of getting the shell to just the right thinness before biting down. Sometimes at key plot points I would lose track and end up with a naked, mealy almond in my mouth or, conversely, during a crisis, find myself mindlessly crunching through a handful of candies, leaving myself short during the remainder of the movie. During stretches of excruciating boredom, I would conduct blind taste tests to see if there was a diff
erence in flavor between the various colors. For example, while suffering through The Tree of Wooden Clogs—an Ermanno Olmi film so excruciatingly slow that the seasons seem to change on the screen in real time—I discovered there was a subtle hint of extra vanilla in the white ones.

  Jordan almonds disappeared from movie theaters sometime in the mid-1980s—first spottily, then completely. For me they are frozen in a certain era of movie-going, when I was open to everything and when I sought and found in the darkened theater not mere escape, but transport.

  is for

  Kielbasa

  The universe of food when I was growing up was divided into three Dantean realms: heaven, purgatory, and hell. Heaven corresponded to my grandmother’s kitchen, where the vegetables were fresh and prepared in surprising but always delicious ways. Purgatory was the dinner table at home, where my mother served boiled frozen lima beans, frozen broccoli florets, and frozen serrated carrot coins, which she supplemented with the occasional head of iceberg lettuce. And hell was my father’s house, the land of the can. This culinary cosmology makes sense to me now: my grandmother was an Italian cook, my mother a product of American supermarket culture, and my father a peculiar Polish American bachelor hybrid. But at the time I merely dreaded having to eat there during my weekly Saturday visitation.

  My father subsisted on a diet of instant Sanka, menthol cigarettes, and buttermilk (for his ulcers). For lunch, he served either canned potato soup or sardines on Saltines. It is easy to imagine the horror these meals inspired in a child. On Saturday nights he made pot roast, blasted so long in the pressure cooker that it fell apart into matchsticks that stuck to your teeth. This was invariably accompanied by watery canned “French” green beans and the only edible dish, mashed potatoes with buttermilk. Only rarely did I stay over; he liked to watch the Creature Features after I went to bed, and the sound of the opening scream traveled up the stairs to my room and terrified me. When I did, though, he would boil a thick, U-shaped kielbasa for Sunday breakfast, steaming up the small kitchen with a delicious, garlicky fog. After draining the sausage, he would fry the slices with some scrambled eggs, which tasted doubly good because I was so hungry from the day before.

  Perhaps for this reason, I remain inordinately fond of kielbasa, which he pronounced “kel-bassy.” Its charms are best displayed in white borscht—the best soup in the world, in my humble opinion. I first discovered it at a now defunct Polish coffee shop in the East Village called Angelica’s, not to be confused with the well-known vegan restaurant of that name. Angelica’s was famous for its soups, of which it served a rotating variety every day. It was late on a frigid Saturday afternoon when I slid onto a stool at the lunch counter, chilled to the bone because the March sun that morning had tricked me into dressing prematurely for spring. I’m not sure why I ordered the white borscht; probably I expected it to have something in common with its red cousin. It’s just as well I didn’t know that the white variety is based on sauerkraut and contains no beets at all, or I might have chosen something else. A steaming bowl appeared before me almost instantly, brimming with a nearly opaque white broth flecked with herbs. Slices of kielbasa could be spied floating just beneath the surface. The sharp tanginess of the first spoonful was a wonderful shock, tempered by the soup’s creamy texture and punctuated by discs of chewy, smoky meat. There was a primal reassurance in the warmth that spread through my limbs. Hands down, it was the best soup I had ever eaten.

  I remained so enamored of white borscht that, ten years after that first bowlful, I impulsively decided to take a winter vacation to Cracow for the sole purpose of eating it at the source twice a day for a week. As soon as I had checked into my hotel, I wandered over to a nearby restaurant to begin my white borscht fest. It was not on the menu. Screwing up my courage to ask the waiter, I received a look of polite incomprehension. I assumed this was a fluke until the experience was repeated in every restaurant during the next three or four days. Increasingly disappointed and puzzled, I concluded that white borscht must be one of those home-cooked dishes that aren’t deemed worthy of serious restaurants and sought out some real holes-in-the-wall. Still no luck.

  Meanwhile, it snowed. Not Manhattan snow, festive and clean, muffling sharp edges and hiding dirt and then disappearing. Cracow snow fell silent and inexorable from a windless sky, continuing ceaselessly day into night into day until it threatened to erase the world. My trip was turning into a terrible mistake. Then one day, when the flakes had turned to freezing rain and the streets to slush that seeped into my boots, I stopped in a subterranean tourist restaurant next to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I was ushered past a long bar to a heavy wooden table in the back room. Flipping through the laminated pages of the menu, badly translated into four languages, I saw it! To be polite, I also ordered a drink and an appetizer, but I could hardly contain my excitement and relief. My visit had been redeemed, my judgment vindicated.

  The drink and appetizer arrived promptly, but the soup did not. I waited. The couple on my left finished their meal, had coffee, and left. A large family in the corner ordered lunch and were served. I motioned for the waiter and asked where my soup was. He gave me a blank stare and disappeared into the kitchen. The family started in on dessert. I began to feel paranoid as well as hungry. Was it my imagination or were the waiters furtively whispering to each other about me? Was I being singled out for ill treatment because I was a woman eating alone? Finally, feeling desperate, I scraped my chair back loudly and stood up to leave without paying. Instead of being outraged, my waiter appeared from nowhere and hurried over with the bill, minus the soup, as if he had been wondering when I would finally catch on. As I reached the door, a young waiter rushed up and said softly in excellent English that white borscht was an Easter soup, not available in the winter. “Why didn’t my waiter just tell me?” I asked. He gave what I was starting to recognize as an Eastern European shrug. Later, I realized I should have known that the restaurant used the same tourist menu year-round, with all the seasonal specialties listed whether they were available or not.

  I never did find white borscht on that trip. The closest I came was a supermarket packet of powdered zurek (a close relative), which turned into lumpy papier-mâché paste when I tried to make it with hot water from the hotel room tap. I did take away two lessons, though: never travel without doing your research, and never, ever visit Auschwitz alone in February.

  What follows, miraculously, is a recipe I found for that Polish coffee shop white borscht.

  Christine’s White Borscht

  (from Arthur Schwartz’s Soup Suppers)

  4 cups water

  2 pounds sauerkraut (not canned), not drained

  2 or 3 chicken legs

  3 small bay leaves

  4 medium celery ribs

  2 medium carrots

  2 large leeks, white part only

  2 teaspoons whole allspice

  2 quarts water

  Coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper

  2 teaspoons dried marjoram

  4 teaspoons cornstarch

  1 cup heavy cream

  ½ to ¾ pound kielbasa, sliced, at room temperature

  For the garnish:

  6 medium boiled potatoes

  3 hard-cooked eggs, cut into halves

  1. In a 2- to 3-quart saucepan, bring the 4 cups water to a boil. Add the sauerkraut and simmer, partially covered, for about 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid while it is still hot and reserve. There should be about 5 cups. (The sauerkraut can be discarded; its flavor is much diminished.)

  3. While preparing the sauerkraut stock, make the chicken broth: In a 3- to 5-quart saucepan, combine the chicken, bay leaves, celery, carrots, leeks, allspice, and 2 quarts of fresh cold water. Bring to a brisk simmer over high heat, reduce heat, partially cover, and let simmer steadily for 1½ hours.

  4. Strain the chicken broth and reserve. There should be about 4 cups; if not, add a little water.

  5. In a 4- to 6-quart pot, combine
the 4 cups chicken broth with 4 cups of the sauerkraut stock. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover and bring to a boil. Add the marjoram.

  6. In a small cup or bowl, mix the cornstarch with the remaining cup of sauerkraut stock. Whisk into the briskly boiling soup and cook for 1 minute, stirring slowly. This will not perceptibly thicken the soup, but it will bind it.

  7. Turn off the heat and stir in the heavy cream.

  8. To serve, place several rounds of kielbasa, a boiled potato, and half an egg into each wide, deep bowl. Ladle on the hot soup.

  Serves: 6

  Advance preparation: Can be kept refrigerated for up to a week (don’t worry if it separates); it freezes perfectly. Reheat to a simmer before serving.

  is for

  Lobster Roll

  Everything has its price, as my divorce attorney was fond of telling me, so I was willing to endure the protracted financial blockade necessary to extricate myself from my second marriage. It felt like being starved out of the ghetto at Lodz. Although deep in debt, I badly needed a break from the citywide cabin fever that seizes Manhattan in August, when the only people left on the streets skulk like wallflowers who haven’t been asked to dance. I had chosen a guesthouse in Kennebunk, Maine, based on glowing online reviews, but my spirits plunged as I turned off a leafy lane into the asphalt parking lot of a squat beige brick building, unmistakably a former Catholic school. Any hope that I had mistaken the address was immediately quashed by a maroon sign on the facade proclaiming FRANCISCAN GUEST HOUSE in towering block capitals. Bearing witness to its past as a dorm in a Lithuanian boys’ boarding school, my room was decorated in a style that can only be called Mid-Century Misery. Paneled in a sickly yellowish brown, its ceiling bloomed with water stains, and its worn brown indoor–outdoor carpeting was suspiciously damp to the touch. Furnishings consisted of a rickety wooden desk and a bed covered with a scratchy polyester coverlet. Throwing open the windows and switching on the juddering ancient air-conditioner did nothing to dispel the almost unbreathable miasma of mildew that seemed to ooze from the walls and the floor. I descended to the front desk, where I was informed that a recent leak was responsible and that all other rooms were occupied.