 |
| Mace and Nutmeg |
An egregious example of this romance: Los Angeles' The Rangoon Racquet Club, reviewed amongst the 1989 issues of Gourmet. Its colorful proprietor, the Brussels-born Dutch Jew, Emanuel Zwaaf, recreated a legendary British watering hole he'd experienced in Burma near the end of World War II. He called it "the last remaining outpost of the British Empire in the United States." Beginning in 1964, he served fantasy curries, lumpia, poppadums, clams bourguignonne, mussels provencale and pot-au-feu. Fusion cuisine, indeed!
Travel features about "Simla,"the hill station in India; "Singapore" in the 30s and "Mauritius" share this nostalgia for colonial days. Simla, where the British Raj retreated to govern durring the uncomfortable heat of the approaching monsoon season, seemed permeated with another nostalgia, that of the British for home. Noel Barber worked on a newspaper in Singapore and observed that in 1938, 45,000 American cargo ships loaded 40% of Malaysia's rubber production and 54% of its tin into their holds. Naomi Barry's essay on Mauritius touches on the American involvement in the spice trade, especially the above pictured nutmeg, which began just a decade after our Revolutionary War. Both authors laud the product of successive conquests: a blend of cultures and cuisines.
Curiously, there was little reflection that the competition between the Dutch, French and English trading companies in southeast Asia had its parallel on athe American Island of Manhattan. In the review of Angkor Wat, possibly the first Cambodian restaurant in California, no mention is made of disastrous conflicts which had driven the proprietor into exile in 1975.
Manhattan retains its leadership in trade and restaurants. The February, 1989 review of Nusantara, notes that it is an outpost of the Indonesian company responsible for Oasis Restaurant in Djakarta. (Oasis will appear in a subsequent issue of Gourmet in a travel article about Djarkarta.) The specialty of both is rijstaffel, an over-the-top presentation of the Indonesian staple, rice, with sauces and condiments invented by Dutch colonists in Java to impress each other. In my European travels, I tried this dish in Amsterdam in the early seventies.
(I note also that it was in 1989 that Professor of Food Studies, Krishnendu Ray, emigrated from Orissa. He is the author of some of my bibles on these topics: The Migrant's Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (2004) and Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia. (2012).)
In November 1989 my son was three-and-a-half years old, and my daughter a year-and-a-half. We decided that I was not happy working full time, and missing out on mothering. Children tucked into their car seats, I took them on the round of living history museums as my parents had done some three decades earlier. I included two ones new to me: Plymouth Plantation and Mystic Seaport. I wanted them to understand the colonial agricultural and seafaring struggles of past generations.
After I'd resigned, I cooked an amazing farewell dinner for all the brilliant women I'd worked with at my high technology company. My cooking, with the exception of the Bolognese, is not something that was transmitted to me from some line of maternal cooks. It comes from a desire to feed people well. I can read, therefore I cook. I am not afraid to serve a new-to-me recipe to company. I served the ladies Beef Wellington and Reine de Saba.
We established our own version of the Christmas breakfast tradition, with a Open house the saturday before Christmas. The menu reflected something of each of us and something of both. Working in high technology in the Boston area meant that we had numerous friends from India and Pakistan, so samosas were on offer. The recipe came from Julie Sadfi, but of course our friends helped us with on the spot advice. On our visits to New Orleans we'd purchased the Times-Picayune New Orleans Cookbook, which gave us grits and grillades. With Jill and one of Dick's sisters living in Tennessee, we found out where to order a country ham and served it with biscuits.
Consider the fate of those restaurants featured in 1989 Gourmet:
New York:
China Grill at 60 West 55th Street is still China Grill.
Nusantara 219 East 44th Street is now Ben and Jack's Steakhouse.
Darbar at 44 West 56th Street is now Uncle Jack's Steakhouse.
J Sung Dynasty at 511 Lexington Avenue is S Dynasty.
David K's at 1115 3rd Avenue is a Walgreen's Drugstore.
20 Mott Street is a building under construction.
San Francisco
Angkor Wat at 4217 Geary is now Hanuri Korean Barbeque.
Yujeans at 843 San Pablo Avenue, Albany is now White Lotus Thai Cuisine.
Los Angeles
Restaurant Shiro at 1505 Mission Street, South Pasadena is still Restaurant Shiro.
Rangoon Racquet Club at 9474 Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills is a Bank of America building.
No comments:
Post a Comment