1981: Down East and Not Looking West

Pines, Rocks and Atlantic, Monhegan Island, watercolor, Lucey Bowen, 1981

   
     For "Old China Hands," like Henry McNulty, "the pull of that country was like a gigantic magnet."  Upon the re-opening of diplomatic relations with China, he had to get back.  In the June 1981, Gourmet his  "Going Home to China"  tells us that McNulty was born in Suzhou in 1913. His father ran a missionary school.  McNulty recalled fleeing school Nanjing ahead Chaing Kaishek's troops in 1927.  Graduating from Princeton University in 1936, McNulty had a career as a war correspondent, journalist and publicist for French Champagne.  His was a voyage of rediscovery.  He shared his special perspective.  He provided the reader with a bridge between the end of Dynastic Imperial China and the end of Mao's China. In 1981, much of China was still closed to foreigners.  He calls his a nostalgia trip, I found it full of insight.  He had grown up speaking a local dialect; Mandarin was now being taught as the standard.  The word for a rickshaw pulled by a running human had disappeared with the introduction of humans on cycles pulling the same cargo.  For the benefit of travelers wanting to retrace his journey,  McNulty included information about restaurants and hotels in Nanjing, Suzhow and Shanghai. 

      As Deng Xioping proposed economic reform in China, he could look to Singapore for inspiration.  Singapore was home to a majority population of overseas Chinese.  The former British colony had leaped out of the starvation times of the 1940s and 1950s and by the early 1970s had established itself as a manufacturing center for American companies like Texas Instruments.  Trotta's article made a useful guide for Americans traveling there on business or pleasure. She makes it clear that visits to the old colonial haunts, like Raffles hotel are of historic interest.  Yet this is no playground for "Old Colonials,"  it is the vibrancy and ambition of the mix of Chinese, Malay, Indian and European that makes the place unique. Her essay, combining ancient and modern history, sociology, anthropology, anecdote and food is Gourmet at its best.  

     Meanwhile, Asian immigrants were flocking to California and livening up the scene. Carolyn Bates described Tien Fu, a restaurant for authoritative Szechuan dishes.  She remarks that now in San Francisco, Chinese restaurants are to be found in neighborhoods far from Chinatown, like Noriega Street at Nineteenth Avenue, in the Sunset district.  Once again, the piece explains certain basics, such as the cold dishes that are the Chinese equivalent of appetizers.  In August, Ms. Bates reviewed Fuku-Sushi, which was located in San Francisco's Japantown.  The intracacies of sushi are explained. In December she reviewed The Peacock, an Indian restaurant at 2800 VanNess.  The owner, Pupla Goswami, accurately predicted that Indian cooking was going to be the next craze. The same might have been said of Vietnamese food at the Golden Turtle in Richmond, restaurant which had opened in 1977.
     I confess.  My 1981 vacation was pure Gourmet, specifically the June issue's feature "Coastal Maine." the June issue of Gourmet.  From Worcester, Massachusetts, I drove up the Maine coast.  The Laura B ferried me to Monhegan Island, all pinewoods, rocks and splashing Atlantic. The Wyeths, Andrew and Jamie painted it over many years.  I spent a week and I painted, hardly speaking a word to anyone, and eating the very plain food you'd expect at an old hotel on an island in Maine.  When I returned to the mainland, I ate.  I ate fabulously at Aubergine, in Camden, and at Le Domaine in Hancock.  It was good living.


Tien Fu
The Peacock, at 2800 VanNess is now a real estate agency.

Fuku Sushi
Golden Turtle
Henry McNulty died in 2001.

Geri Trotta, Barnard graduate, world traveller, writer and editor, died in 2005 at age 90.

The chef owner of Aubergine, David Grant, still lives in Camden, and hasn't lost his cooking and eating chops.

The family who founded Le Domaine it sold it almost a decade ago, it is still providing fine French food to summer people from June thru October.

1980, Meals and Restaurant Critics of Yesteryear

   

Characters for Meat and Pig (Still Negotiating how to do Chinese brush painting for calligraphy in ArtRage.)

     In her essay "Pork," the intrepid Nina Simonds shared with us memories of her student days in Taipei, Taiwan. At that time, before Nixon and Kissinger made their overtures to the mainland, only Taiwan offered independent visitors the opportunity to experience the everyday life of the Chinese people.  A vignette of her neighborhood butcher at work introduced the importance of pork in Chinese culture, religion, language, cuisine.  She traced the consumption of pig from 2000 B.C. through the Han, T'ang and Sung dynasties.  Her recipes: everything from pork coins served with Mandarin Pancakes and Scallion brushes to two kinds of spareribs.
     Jay Jacobs visited Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan, then located at 1059 Third Avenue.  The original Uncle Tai, Wan Dah Tai, born in 1919, had come from China to New York in 1967 and introduced New Yorkers to Hunan style food. He won the respect of such food luminaries as the New York Times' Craig Claiborne.  In 1979, he departed for Texas, but left the restaurant in the capable hands and peppery instincts of his Chef Teng, a native of Szechuan, whose food Jacobs, and his two sons, loved.  The restaurant was owned by one David Keh, about whom we will hear more in later years.
     My travels in 1980 took me from New England to the New South.  My old Washington, DC, housemate,  Jill, had moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  She conducted the archaeological portion of environmental impact research for the Tennessee Valley Authority's mining activities, and investigated the region for local produce and bar-b-cue.  Although she was well acquainted with some of the small, part-time smokers north of Knoxville, we checked out Buddy's Bar-b-cue, and I got my first taste of pork,  Tennessee, or rather Alabama, style.
     Somewhere on that peregrination I picked up a paperback copy of Trevanian's Shibumi.  The New York Times labeled it "the most agreeable nonsense in commercial fiction this spring" when first published in 1979.  I fell in love with the book and its hero, Nicholas Hel, and thus, Japan.  The author, Rodney William Whittaker, organized the book along the lines of the Japanese game of go. Whittaker, a film scholar,  had served in Korea.  Nicholas Hel is the illegitimate son of a Russian Countess and a Prussian Count, born in Shanghai between the World Wars.  He and his mother are adopted by the Japanese officer in charge of the occupation of Shanghai.  Hel grows up stateless, but speaking Russian, Chinese, German, French, Japanese and eventually, English.  He's sent to Japan to study go, and becomes culturally Japanese, and eventually a highly paid assassin. He's a Count of Monte Cristo in a very seventies adventure.  Ultimately, he pitted against the American oil interests who dominate the C.I.A.  In a decade which would see a 70% increase in Asian immigration, Nicholas Hel was just the sort of agreeable nonsense to educate me on the Japanese concepts of shibumi (effortless control), sabi and wabi.
     I no longer thought I had something to teach the Oriental, I wanted to be the Oriental.  Is it only stateless bastards and anthropologists who believe that culture can be learned, and isn't racial or inherited?  However, much as I loved Nicholas Hel, I could never master effortless control, especially when it came to food.  Hel and his mistress Hana were well-satisfied with restraint in everything, especially food, choosing small portions of vegetables and brown rice.  My emotions were shown as soon as felt.  I was an enthusiastic cook and an enthusiastic eater.  For me, one taste of something was not enough.

     
     Uncle Tai spread the joys of Hunan style Chinese food to Houston and Dallas, and then in 1987 to Boca Raton, Florida and in 1993 to Atlanta.  He was fortunate to have four sons, each of whom is now responsible for some aspect of Uncle Tai's empire.  Alas, in 2012, a running-shoe store occupies the original restaurant. 
     Jay Jacobs, who also wrote about New York City in Gourmet under the pseudonym Hudson Bridges, died in 2008.
     Rodney Willam Whittaker's literary executor permitted Don Winslow to write another Nicholas Hel story, Satori, which takes him to Mao's China and Vietnam.

1979, Firsts

After Photograph accompanying Nina Simonds' essay.

     Things are best hidden in plain site.  I page through my copy of Gourmet dated July, 1979, and find I've circled and underlined recipes for Tomato Pesto Tarte and  Mixed Vegetable Coleslaw. The pesto is a keeper, but I never made that recipe for coleslaw ever again.
     I completely ignored Nina Simonds' dumplings treatise, which is both heartwarming, full of history and stomach pleasing.  In 1979, Simonds was a twenty-something, from a tiny New England town, who had gotten herself to Taipei some years earlier to study Mandarin, Chinese cooking, and Chinese culture.  Her piece combined Chinese history with a raft of recipes for dumplings.  It's interesting to note that her readers were meant to find won ton wrappers at Oriental markets and large super-markets. Why did I not notice them? 

     I wasn't paying attention.  I probably didn't read the reviews for Los Angeles restaurants, or notice the ones by Caroline Bates, featuring Los Angeles' Hamayoshi and Hamasushi.  In 1979, Gourmet authors were explaining the basics of sushi to their audience. Just as I had missed out on the advent of Beni Hana in New York, I remained a sushi virgin.
     If anything, I drew even closet to my New England roots.  High technology had taken over the dark satanic mills of New England's smaller cities and there I found work.  Strange it was for an art history major to be teaching people how to make computers.  But it paid the rent on my apartment in an 18th Century farmhouse, still owned by the same family whose ancestors built it.
     My apartment was a narrow bedroom with a kitchen-dining room-living room across the stairs.  A half-refrigerator, two burners and a narrow sink limited my options.  The cafeteria at work and a pizzeria that made great meatball subs had to suffice.

    Happily for the Yelp generation, Hamasushi is still going strong at 347 East 2nd Street in Los Angeles.
     Simonds is now in her early sixties.  She has authored 10 cookbooks, and has a video blog, Spices of Life.  

Bar Agricole, SF

     

     Given I'm passionate about food and art, couldn't resist a visual review of a new-to-me resto.  We'd visited once before with le chef de agricole, my sister, the farming consultant.  Of course the maitre de bent her ear for a good half hour.  The spousal unit loved the drinks menu and treatments, which have won a James Beard award for their sources and originality, I think.

     

     So being on my own for the weekend, I took myself to brunch.  The best part is the #47 bus picks up and drops off within a half block of home and Bar Agricole.  I sat in the garden/patio. Planters of herbs take up half, cement tables for two and groups the other half.  

     Advance student of menus that I am, I knew exactly what I wanted: beef brisket hash with a poached egg, which you see above. Chicory on top for color and flavor.  And a Rebelde (Rhum, mint, lime), for controversial me. Actually two, and a double espresso. Then back on the bus. Poorer in pocket, two paintings richer on iPad, via ArtRage.  All passions accounted for!

Nothin's Cookin' This Christmas

     I'm too busy with stockings.  I have to do stockings or it's not Christmas.  This year there were so many things to go into the stockings that auxiliary stockings had to be purchased.  Soap, hand lotion, small toys, candy, crackers, chocolate coins, flavored chocolate apples, scented tags for car mirrors, emery boards, oddly shaped pens, a rolling pin, 6 shot glasses, spices, flavored salts, ouzo flavored candies, pez dispensers in the shapes of characters from the Lord of the Rings, miniature spice boxes for travelers in middle-America, note pads shaped like cup-cakes, post-it notes with colorful designs; all have been sorted out to the appropriate recipient. Six stockings for my six closest relatives.
     Why? The one empty stocking is mine.  And that is why I do stockings, religiously at Christmas.  It is in the futile hope that my mother will fill mine, as she did a half-century ago.  I actually do not remember what was in them, except tangerines. Yet, they remain my secret of the season.  Jamming into a small space the excitement, the surprise, the love she showed by creating them.  Somehow my frantic collecting and sorting of items doesn't quite match up to what I felt as a babe.
     So I wonder, should I continue this post-nightmare-Scrooge-like dispensing of trifles in hosiery?  If it is for myself that I do it, is it really loving or generous?  Once upon a time, my mother went on strike and didn't cook a turkey for Christmas.  I can remember the absence of wafting turkey grease as if it were yesterday.  Perhaps one year I will give up my stocking compulsion and gauge the reaction of the non-recipients.  Or maybe I won't.

Alice Richardson, Redux

     Oh the sociology of the kitchen!  Writing about popularity of The Joy of Cooking, Ann Mendelson observes "The Depression did not initiate the departure of the hired cook from American households...but it speeded up the process for middle class families." Both The Joy of Cooking and Just A Minute can be read as persuasive essays aimed at convincing middle class women that cooking was neither an impossible nor a menial task.
    The two cookbooks converged in 1961, when Alice was asked to edit the latest edition of what was by then the work of both Irma S. Rombauer and her daughter Marion Rombauer Becker.  According to Mendelson, Alice was remembered by the Rombauer-Beckers as "Having had several martinis before lunch and gone to sleep afterward," and they didn't find her of much help. As my copy of Joy is a later edition, there is no clue there.
     I do know that I was taken with her apartment in New York. In the narrow entrance hallway, she'd had someone paint a trompe d'oeil scene.  She was an editor at Look Magazine and wrote a book about hair and make-up which ought to be useful for anyone making movies about Manhattan in the 1960s. She placed my sister and I in a feature about permanents for children in Look that also involved Liza Minelli. On the tip of Long Island, near Montauk, she and her husband built a beach colony of modern design and furnishings, and there they retired.
     One more thing about the biscuits: Alice and my grandmother favored using a mix of bacon grease and butter instead o Crisco!
   
   

The Subject Was Biscuits

     What began as reflections on my mother's cooking has turned to ferreting out the identity of cook book author, copywriter, editor and family friend, Alice Wilson Richardson.  The subject was biscuits.  In my experience, the taste for biscuits at every meal runs deepest in the South.  My Texas-born-South-Carolina -bred grandmother's approval of Alice's friend chicken and Alice's tendency to include biscuits in her menus hinted at shared roots.
     Internet sleuthing turned up the next clue, in a New York Times obituary. It was a connection I'd never made. Turns out that Harriet Sappington, a movie actress and one of my grandmother's dearest New York pals, was Alice Wilson Richardson's sister.  Factoids like that are key to successful Ancestry.com research, and sure enough, I found Alice and her family. She was born in Florida and grew up in Baltimore!  (To put the icing on the cake in a surreal fashion, her baby book, with locks of hair and baby pictures intact,  turned up for sale on Alibris. )
     This explains her comment "The more proficient you become, the more you will be able to measure to taste in the Southern Mammy tradition." My grandmother was so reliant on "The Help" that she could barely boil water.  Alice, moving to a northern city,  pioneered working women's cooking as entertainment.
     I'm still puzzled about the biscuits.  She doesn't offer a recipe for them. "Make biscuits from prepared mix, following instructions of box." Biscuit recipes are simple, consisting of flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, shortening and milk or water.  So why a mix?   Necessity! Turns out, according to The Williamsburg Cookbook, from that venerable Virginia city, that homemade biscuit mixes were born before boxed biscuit mix. Mrs. Booth's Biscuit Mix produces 4 1/2 cups of mix, which you keep in the refrigerator. To make 6 biscuits, you measure out a cup of the mix and add enough milk or water to moisten. (Mrs. Booth's mix uses 3 cups self rising flour: 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder: 1 Tablespoon sugar: 1 cup shortening combined with pastry blender.)
     The biscuit mysteries solved, I'll next turn to Alice's most famous undertaking, and how she brought me my 15 minutes of fame at an early age.