Читать книгу Back where I came from - A. J. Liebling - Страница 11

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All over the country pig snouts are a favorite regional dish with people who can afford nothing better. With the snouts a Bowery epicure can get soup, potatoes, two kinds of vegetables, stewed prunes, pudding, all the slightly shopworn bread he can eat and a bowl of coffee, for fifteen cents. That is a diner de gala, but the quality probably would not please you. The standard Bowery meal consists of four terrifying crullers and coffee, all for a nickel. Coffee is usually served in a porridge bowl.

Still, there are viands at which the Bowery palate revolts. I remember that toward the end of President Hoover’s blessed reign, Mrs. Gifford Pinchot suggested a five-and-a-half cent meal to sustain the depressed. It included cabbage rolls stuffed with salmon and rice, apple and orange salad, sticks of corn bread, breadsticks of whole wheat flour and spinach. I discussed this menu with a man named Minder who runs a Bowery restaurant. He said, “It sounds lousy. I couldn’t sell no crap like that.” Minder was a thinker. He wore a purple turtleneck sweater and khaki pants while he presided over his own place in the joint quality of maitre d’hotel and bouncer. He said that he thought a good many of the men on the Bowery had been driven from their homes by wives who prepared food like cabbage rolls stuffed with salmon and rice. Reluctant to go home to dinner, these men had taken to hanging around saloons, drinking on empty stomachs. Eventually they had hit the skids and been forced to abscond from the genteel communities where their wives still lingered, commiserated by their neighbors and continuing to copy recipes out of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

The typical Bowery eating house is a long high-ceilinged room with a plate-glass storewindow in front for all its light by day. There are long wooden tables varnished with gravy, which has been massaged into the grain of the wood in the course of years. Salt and pepper are in open dishes and the customers reach in with their hands. The average check is ten cents, and payment entitles the customer to sit up all night and keep out of the cold.

The Bowery restaurateur has his own problems.

“Sometimes my customers come in with one of those nickel shots under their belt,” Mr. Minder says. “They order some soup. The hot soup does not go good with the alky. When the hot soup gets in their stomach they drop right off the chair. Then we got to telephone for the ambulance. The telephone call adds to the overhead.”

It would be difficult to say which is the oldest school of cooking back where I came from—the Armenian or the Chinese. Both began when French cooking was a matter of a naked Gaul tearing a raw rabbit. I know an Armenian named Krikor Sousikian, who is “cooker and treasurer” of a small restaurant called the Bosporus, and who was once the chef of Derdat Babayan, Abdul Hamid’s jeweler, in Constantinople. I know Babayan’s son, Levon, who lives in Paris and vouches for old Krikor. I once knew a New Yorker named Sam Johnson who claimed to be an illegitimate son of Abdul Hamid’s, but I never believed him and it has nothing to do with cooking anyway. I just mention it to show what quaint characters we have back here.

The cook of a great jeweler occupied a peculiarly responsible position under Abdul Hamid because the Chief Eunuch bought the jewels for the harem. The only way to the Chief Eunuch’s affection was through his stomach. Krikor cooked Derdat Babayan into a monopoly of the wedding present market, which was important because the Sultan took a new wife every year. At each wedding there were great gifts, not only to the bride, but to the guests and to the members of the harem who ranked her. Krikor’s cooking had no personal importance to the Sultan, who ate nothing at all except eggs boiled in the shell and soup out of cans because he was afraid of being poisoned. Krikor says this. He learned his cooking from a man named Avedis Azdikian, who was the Escoffier of the Near East. I once asked Krikor Sousikian how many dishes were in Azdikian’s repertoire.

“Ai! From Patlijan, eggplant, he could make three million dishes. Patlijan karniyark. Patlijan moussaka. Patlijan dousme. Patlijan chaup kehab. Patlijan azyze—in the style beloved of the Sultan Aziz. Patlijan”—

“That’s plenty!”

Sousikian paused meekly. “In all there are three million.”

Krikor cooked his first state dinner at the age of twenty. It was the birthday of one of the jeweler’s family.

“What did you serve?”

“Chirim, fish,” he said. “Chirim in cream soup.” So it seems a bisque of shrimps was the first course. But the shrimps of the Sea of Marmora are to the shrimps of Fulton Street as the dome of St. Sophia is to the Little Church Around the Corner, he explained. Everything tastes better in Constantinople.

“Then,” he said, “was patlijan moussaka—eggplant stuffed with meat and tomatoes. Then bouillabaisse our style, fish stew from wonderful fish of Constantinople. Then kouzou guvej—lamb in casserole with leeks and peppers. Then mushrooms in pastry. Then”—

“What sort of wines?”

“Wait, wait, there is more eating to tell. Then, Russian salad. Then lokma—like fritters in honey. Then varti anoush, rose leaf jelly; then hanoum dour dahel, so sweet—dessert we call ‘the lady’s lips’—and kaymak, heavy cream, on everything, and honey—ai! That was a dinner!”

“And the wines?”

“Champanya,” said Mr. Sousikian, shortly, as if to ask “and what should the Sultan’s jeweler drink but champanya?”

“And after dinner,” he recalled, “Derdat Babayan called upstairs and congratulated me and gave me gold.”

“Where is he now?”

“He is dead.”

“And what did he die from?”

“From over-eating.”

The greatest Chinese cook I ever met was named Henry Hong—at least the Chinese I knew told me he was the greatest cook, for I never ate any of his handiwork.

“North China cook not much,” said Henry Hong. “Shanghai cook different, not much. Nobody China people beat Canton, Hankow. Nobody Canton, Hankow, beat me.

“When we see Eulopean eat steak,” he said, “we think there go one half-civilize. He know he hungry; no know make utensil for cook, burn meat on piece fire.”

I thought him an arrogant fellow, like most experts on regional cooking.