Eating Read online

  Mrs. Chao’s Chinese-style sashimi makes a good starter for an egg-foo-yung lunch. If you have the basic ingredients on hand and a good fish market nearby, you can whip it up in minutes, but you will have to let the dish stand for ten minutes or so while the fish marinates.

  CHINESE-STYLE SASHIMI

  You will need a very sharp thin-bladed knife with which to cut a pound of very fresh wild salmon, tuna, or wild striped-bass fillet, or a mixture of all three, into very thin, very neat oblong slices, as in Japanese sashimi. Then mix a tablespoon or so of dry sherry with another of soy sauce, a few grains (no more) of sea salt, a little fresh-ground pepper, a green onion trimmed and chopped very fine, and a teaspoon of sesame oil. Let the fish steep in this marinade in the refrigerator for ten minutes or so, and serve with a few sprigs of fresh cilantro.

  Recently, my old friend Eddie Schoenfeld cooked for me and a few friends at his home in Brooklyn. I have known Eddie since the seventies, when I was startled one day at lunch with a Random House colleague at Uncle Tai’s, then the hottest upscale Chinese restaurant in New York, to find what appeared to be a bearded Chasid in a black suit, but without the usual hat, and with a nonregulation black bow tie, handing out menus. Eddie was not a Chasid. He had begun his odd career by arranging banquets for his friends at authentic Chinatown restaurants, and soon this became a business. One of these restaurants had made a great success by introducing spicy Szechuan cuisine to the United States, and its owner, David Keh, decided to try his luck uptown with Uncle Tai in the kitchen. He took Eddie with him. Eddie brought his clients along. The place was a huge success. And so we met.

  Our friendship took root and blossomed. I suggested to Eddie that he and Uncle Tai write a cookbook. Uncle Tai’s so-called Hunanese recipes had caught on with uptown diners, and some would become classics, ubiquitous today on Chinese menus. To illustrate this success, Eddie multiplied for me the number of Chinese restaurants in the United States by the presumed proportion that include General Tso on their menus and calculates that Americans now spend over a billion dollars a year on these sweet, gooey, high-margin chicken thighs. Later, Eddie explained that these were not necessarily Uncle Tai’s recipes, nor were they Hunanese. Hunan is an impoverished province, and its cooking is undistinguished. But the name was easier to pronounce than “Szechuan,” and so Uncle Tai’s enterprising backer, David Keh, launched Hunan haute cuisine for the uptown trade. Moreover, some of the recipes were actually created by Mr. Peng, a reclusive genius from Taipei. Uncle Tai, a master chef with an unpredictable temper, adapted many of his dishes for Americans. When we signed the contract for the Uncle Tai cookbook, neither Eddie nor I knew this complex provenance. Nor did we know that Uncle Tai’s third son would be furious with Eddie for revealing his father’s recipes, which the son considered family property. On a busy evening at Uncle Tai’s, as Eddie was serving a banquet to a table of twelve, the number-three son, a waiter and a judo expert, flew at Eddie, who landed unconscious for a few minutes on the carpet. Eddie, a cool professional, eventually got up, arranged his tie, walked out of the restaurant, and never returned. Uncle Tai’s cookbook, which would probably have become a perennial best-seller, was never published, but became the basis for Eddie’s collection of thousands of Chinese recipes. Uncle Tai eventually left New York and reopened in Dallas.

  At dinner in Brooklyn, Eddie recalled these events in his cheerful, dispassionate way but concluded with a sigh: that night, he said, “we had a line out the door.” Eddie has since created several fine Chinese restaurants in New York, most recently the Chinatown Brasserie on Lafayette Street, one of the two or three top Chinese places in town at the moment. The dinner he served that night was effortless and sublime. The main dish was a simple steamed salmon fillet about a half-inch thick, served in bite-size pieces beneath a sauce that requires careful measurements until you’ve made it a few times. Once you understand how the complex flavors blend—the fermented black beans are dominant, but faintly, like an echo; the oyster sauce provides body and salty sweetness; the sherry adds a delicate nip—you will have no trouble reproducing Eddie’s dish, which, including prep, shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, assuming you have the ingredients and equipment at hand. Salmon and fermented black beans are of course a well-known combination, but this subtle treatment gives the traditional preparation a nice bounce. Serve it with mildly flavored fried rice, or precooked Hong Kong noodles, mixed with enough sesame oil and soy sauce to add a mild flavor.

  SALMON WITH FERMENTED BEANS

  You will need a twelve-inch bamboo steamer with a tight-fitting lid, a fourteen-inch wok, and a ten-inch heat-proof platter, lightly oiled so that the fish won’t stick. For the sauce, you will need a small bowl in which to mix a half-teaspoon each of minced garlic, minced fresh ginger, and sugar; a teaspoon each of regular (Kikkoman, e.g.) soy sauce and dark soy sauce, blended with mushrooms, which you will find in Chinese food shops;two teaspoons of oyster sauce, available in many supermarkets;a tablespoon each of finely chopped fermented black beans (sold in Chinese food stores) and dry sherry;and a dash of fresh-ground white pepper. A quarter-teaspoon of MSG is optional and unnecessary. To the mixture add a teaspoon of potato starch if you can find it in a local health-food store—or arrowroot, or as a last resort cornstarch—dissolved in two tablespoons of water. Then put three inches of water in the wok, fit the steamer to it—make sure that the bottom edge of the steamer sits in the water, or it will scorch—and bring the water to a boil. Center two half-inch fillets on the oiled plate, pour the sauce over them, and sprinkle a half-cup or so of green onions over that. Put the plate in the steamer, and cover it tightly with the bamboo top. Do not use a metal top or the condensed steam will fall back onto the fish and ruin it. After three or four minutes, the fish should be barely cooked through at its thickest part. Break the fish up with a chop-stick, mix the fish bits with the sauce, and serve at once. This is a wonderful dish for four; quick, easy, inexpensive, and delightful.

  FRIED RICE

  For fried rice, boil two cups of rice with two and a half cups of water: I use basmati, but any unflavored standard long-grain rice will do. Boil until the water disappears, then cover and set over a very low flame to steam for ten minutes or so, until all the water is absorbed and the rice is just beyond al dente. If you overcook it, don’t despair. Turn it into gruel by adding a little water and cooking it further, adding soy sauce, chopped meat or fish, etc., and serve it as congee. Otherwise, let the rice cool and dry for an hour or two or overnight. Then, in a wok, heat a quarter-cup of vegetable oil, and when the oil is very hot but not smoking, add the rice and shove it around with a Chinese shovel-like scoop if you have one, or whatever else serves the purpose. After a minute or two, when the rice is well coated with oil, add soy sauce sparingly to taste. Then break an egg into the rice and mix it about until the rice is well warmed. Now you can add whatever suits you—bits of meat, chicken, fish, shrimp, vegetables, bean sprouts, leftovers—but not too much.

  NINE

  PUBLISHING BOOKS WITH KNIFE AND FORK

  In the 1950s, when I lived on the top floor of an old town house in Greenwich Village, I could still encounter on walks through my neighborhood relics of the old bohemia: the wood-frame house on Bedford Street where Edna Millay once lived; Patchen Place, the rickety mews where e. e. cummings rented a house and where Djuna Barnes still lived; the run-down tenement across town, on St. Mark’s Place, where Lev Bronstein, who changed his name to Leon Trotsky, once kept a printing press, and where Wystan Auden and Chester Kallman now lived, amid piles of books and manuscripts, and where you had to check before you sat down that Chester, a good if messy cook, hadn’t parked a pot of oxtail stew on your chair. On Hudson Street, Dylan Thomas was drinking himself to death at the White Horse, two blocks north of the modest house where Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Once or twice in the Fourth Street subway station, when I still worked at Doubleday and Co., I saw William Faulkner—slight, with grayish hair, dresse
d in chinos—clutching a manuscript folder on his way uptown to see his editor, Albert Erskine, at Random House. It did not occur to me—as I walked along these century-old streets under leafy sycamores with Barbara and her Harvard friends John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch, who would become the so-called New York School of Poets—that we were at the end of an expiring bohemia, which was even then becoming gentrified. That trickle would soon become a flood of restored town houses, smart restaurants, and expensive shops, all but obliterating the picturesque remnants of the 1920s culture.

  From my flat on Tenth Street, I liked to walk a mile or so downtown to the old Washington Market, which was razed by 1973 to make way for the World Trade Center. There are still a few old-style public markets in New York’s ethnic neighborhoods, where merchants hire stalls to display their meat, poultry, produce, and grocery items, and from May to October the green markets throughout the city are a blessing, but the Washington Market, beneath a vast skylit roof bounded by Fulton, Vesey, and Washington Streets, barely a mile north of the tip of Manhattan, was special, for it had been established before the Revolution on land donated by Trinity Church and still conveyed a sense of those times. Here you could feel immersed in New York’s living past as you wandered from booth to booth, tended by merchants with plump red faces in long white coats and straw boaters beside shambles offering racks of feathered game, fine poultry, sides of beef, whole lambs and piglets, while other stalls featured crates of eggs, tubs of yellow butter, neatly piled eggplants and cabbages and oysters on ice, one of which poisoned me so that I could not look at another for a decade.

  I remember, as in a dream, a long-lost restaurant on Cedar Street, a few blocks north of the market, which must have supplied the game birds featured on its menu, including the cold Scotch grouse that I ordered at a solitary lunch some fifty years ago. The bird was boned and stuffed with foie gras and accompanied by a sprightly juniper-infused game sauce, with a side of pommes soufflées on a linen napkin in a battered silver dish. But a few years later, when I happened to be downtown, the restaurant had vanished, leaving not a trace. Even now when I find myself on lower Broadway I think of it and wonder if that unforgettable restaurant, with its sawdust floors and worn wooden tabletops, may have been only a dream.

  For underpaid young editors in those days, there were a dozen or so inexpensive French restaurants in Manhattan with blurred menus in light-blue ink run off on a ditto machine, offering céléri rémoulade, moules marinière, pêté maison, maquerau au vin blanc, escargots, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, boeuf bourguignon, entrecôte aux pommes soufflées or frites, and so on, of which the Fleur de Lis on the Upper West Side was typical. Here two could spend a long evening, with a carafe of wine, for under ten dollars. For grand occasions there was Chambord, on Third Avenue, with its trolley of hors d’oeuvres, its soufflés, and its chocolate truffles to take as you left. Here you could spend forty dollars for dinner for two with a decent claret. When Chambord disappeared to make way for what would become the Random House Building, Roger Chauveron, the owner, opened a place around the corner in his own name, which lasted a few years, until it, too, was displaced, by the new Citicorp Building. One by one, Manhattan’s other high-style so-called Continental restaurants followed Chauveron into oblivion, including the very chic Colony. It was there one night that I witnessed an old woman in blue sneakers, who had been canvassing the other diners for Richard Nixon earlier in the evening, pass out and apparently die at her table. Whereupon four waiters swiftly appeared, each lifting a leg of her chair tilted slightly back so that she would not slide off, and carried her out of sight on this improvised palanquin, while the surviving patrons, having glanced at this memento mori, returned to their pheasants and quenelles de brochet. Eventually, even the great Le Pavillon, and finally its offspring, La Côte Basque, gave up, as a wave of culinary fads, led by la nouvelle cuisine, supplanted these monuments to Escoffier and Monsieur Point.

  The business of book publishing is done mainly in restaurants, at lunch and occasionally at dinner. Staff meetings are held, calls are made, and paperwork is shuffled in the office. Lunch and dinner reservations are made there, but the real work is performed with knife and fork. It was, for example, over lunch in 1925 at “21,” then an elegant speakeasy on East Fifty-second Street in New York, and still a high-testosterone hangout for burnished Wall Street ninjas, male and female, that Bennett Cerf, a young vice president at the firm of Liveright and Company, offered to buy from the brilliant but wildly improvident Horace Liveright the Modern Library, which provided the stability on which the company and its staff depended. Bennett had bought his vice presidency with an investment of twenty-five thousand dollars in the chaotic firm, and now, having learned the business, wanted his own company. Liveright was desperate to repay money he had borrowed from his father-in-law, whose daughter he wanted to divorce. The deal was made over lunch, and Random House was launched, with Bennett and his friend Donald Klopfer as partners and the Modern Library as its cash cow.

  PINOCCHIO AT “21”

  One evening in the 1980s at “21,” a fellow Random House editor and I were awaiting Roy Cohn, a regular at that place, who was dying of AIDS and wanted to publish his memoirs while he still had time. Like so many others, I had dreaded and despised Cohn for his cruel red-baiting as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel. Later, when I got to know him, I found myself surprisingly at ease with him. Roy, I discovered, was born without a conscience, a Shakespearean birth defect that he shared with Edmund and Iago, for whose frailty S. T. Coleridge invented the exquisite term “motiveless malignity.” Roy believed in nothing and had no concept of truth. His condition may explain but hardly excuses his atrocious behavior, or redeems the harm he did to his country and the countless people he had gratuitously hurt as McCarthy’s chief counsel. I was fascinated by him as a moral grotesque like Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, the fictional twin of Karl Rove. After a lifetime in the book business, I tend to see people as fictional characters, as Humpty Dumpty, Dr. Casaubon, Emma Bovary, Captain Ahab: a professional deformation. For me, Roy exemplified star-quality wickedness. It was Norman Mailer, Roy’s Provincetown neighbor, who introduced me to him. I believe that Norman saw in Roy possibilities like those he had seen in Gary Gilmore, the heartless killer who with a slight moral adjustment might have been the promising young man next door rather than the murderer of The Executioner’s Song. Norman did not pursue this opportunity with Roy, a neighbor and friend.

  That Roy might write a valuable memoir was inconceivable. But with strong editorial help, perhaps something could be salvaged from the helter-skelter manuscript pages he had shown me. To reject out of hand his wish to write a book would have been irresponsible. Roy knew Joseph McCarthy and his sinister retinue as no one else did. Moreover, in person Roy was nothing like the dough-faced consigliere with the hooded eyes whispering into McCarthy’s ear at the Committee’s televised hearings. To my surprise, I had come to like him and hoped that with the help of an editor, Cohn might re-create his complex character as the narrator of his own life: a very long shot, but worth a try, and he was paying for dinner.

  As we discussed the manuscript, Roy told me that he had been raised as a New Deal liberal Democrat by his father, a politically connected New York judge. In 1944, he campaigned for FDR on West Seventy-second Street, the beating heart of New York’s liberal Upper West Side. He retained his Democratic Party affiliation throughout his life. His conversion to anti-Communism, he told me, came when, as a twenty-four-year-old assistant U.S. attorney, he joined the prosecution of the atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and was won over by the fervent young FBI agents assigned to the trial. A few days later, when I asked Roy how seriously he took the threat of Communist subversion, he said off handedly, as an actor might dismiss his screen self as just a job, “Communism never worried me. It was Joe’s thing.” To me Roy never displayed strong political feelings of any kind. But the story of his conversion to anti-Communism by the young agents to whom he was attr
acted seems plausible. Thus he became a hero of the Republican right and used these connections to shape his career. Had the opportunity arisen, he could as easily have become a Stalinist.