If you cook, you know.
At a certain point, we all eat something memorable that we try, desperately, to duplicate. We spend hours trying to nail that one flavor. We tweak and edit and adjust and massage, just to get the correct color and consistency and general vibe. And it’s a rare occasion that we succeed.
But should we succeed? Should the Holsteiner Schnitzel I made last month really be exactly like the famous Luchow’s version that I used to share with my father in the 1970s a few years before the place closed? I’m not asking can it be—with identical ingredients and method (and skill), of course it can. But should it? How about my grandmother’s Hungarian goulash, or my Aunt Lena’s knishes, or cabbage strudel from the long-defunct Mrs. Herbst Bakery, or your southern grandmother’s fried chicken?
This is the foggy gray line—a culinary DMZ—across which sits the murky bog that comprises taste memory, emotional accuracy, cognitive ability, and desire; cross over into the mists, and you could disappear altogether, like James Earl Jones in an Iowa cornfield. He wants to know, to feel, and to experience a past so badly that he’s willing to fall, biblically, to desire, and vanish completely. Applied to the world of food and memory, if we succeed in duplicating something from long ago whose taste lodged itself deep in the recesses of our temporal cortex, does it somehow dilute the meaning—or the actual quality—of the original experience? And if we don’t succeed, does it tarnish the dish as we remember it?
When we long for the taste of a particular thing, is it the thing itself that we want, or the context in which we ate it?
A few years ago, my friend
Katherine May and I were in Maine, leading a workshop together. We were talking about comfort and discomfort, and one of the questions I asked and wanted people to think about was: when we long for the taste of a particular thing, is it the thing itself that we want, or the context in which we ate it? Is it about the person who first fed us the thing, or the place where we first ate the thing? Do we love succotash because fresh corn comes only for a fleeting moment in the middle of summer, and then it’s gone? Or pastina because it’s what our grandmothers fed us when we were ill?
One Sunday afternoon in the spring, many years ago, my friend Adriana called up and asked if I wanted to join her for lunch at a now-defunct trattoria in Greenwich Village. Perched on a corner of Carmine Street and Bleecker where Trattoria Spaghetto stood for many years (and is now 232 Bleecker), it was tiny and the sort of place that served nondescript wine out of scratched water glasses. Raised in New York City, I’d never been there, although I’d walked past it a thousand times since childhood. On that afternoon, we sat down, and for the first time in my life, I ordered soup for lunch. (We have a thing in my family about soup not being enough to constitute a proper meal, which is ridiculous.)
A bowl of green minestrone showed up, and I still have no idea what compelled me to order it. It was served with some plain semolina bread from Zito’s. It was like we stepped out of Nancy Meyers movie. The soup was delicious, the conversation was good, and then we went home—me to my small Manhattan studio apartment, and she, to her place in Carroll Gardens.
A nice bowl of soup on a Sunday afternoon. Big deal.
But for a long time, I lusted for it to the point of near-obsession. It was a ubiquitous Italian spring soup: bright green and wildly fragrant, with a combination of vegetables that included escarole, spinach, kale, and maybe some Swiss chard; there was some ditalini involved, along with a few quartered new potatoes, string beans, and cannellini. There was garlic, and probably leek. The broth was vegetable stock, and a hefty grating of Parmigiana Reggiano sat fraying on its surface, along with a drizzle of olive oil so fruity that you could smell it from across the room.
I searched everywhere but never found a recipe for it; I looked in Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed, in Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking, in Deborah Madison’s Vegetable Literacy, in Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, in Elizabeth David’s Italian Food. I asked my chef friends and they mostly scratched their heads when I described it. Some said it was a classic, but not with potatoes; some said the kitchen probably just had leftover potatoes kicking around; some said it was only ever correctly made with escarole (just escarole), and others said that prosciutto would never be used, not even as a condiment. It never occurred to me to just try and make it the way my brain remembered it.
I was too on the fence to attempt the dish and too wistful to try and recreate another time in my life that, with many of its people, is gone.
I was afraid that the original Proustian experience would somehow be sullied if I duplicated it perfectly, and worse still if I screwed it up: I wanted the greens to be thick and bright and fresh the way they were in the restaurant, and the garlicky vegetable broth to be fat and round. But I also wanted it to be a Sunday afternoon in the 1990s when I was in my early 30s, when I had no mortgage and no car, and I could just call up my late Dad and meet him and my stepmother for pizza at Di Fara’s in Brooklyn. I wanted it to be both the soup and the situation about which I swooned to Susan for over a decade, but withheld because I was too on the fence to attempt the dish and too wistful to try and recreate another time in my life that, with many of its people, is gone.
So why now?
Maybe it’s a combination of age and longing and being settled. Maybe it’s the knowledge that that restaurant is long gone, and so there’s no possible chance of my getting back there and saying to myself, well, mine stinks by comparison. Or maybe I’m finally okay with the idea of putting my own spin on something so iconic, even if it winds up being very different.
I never have made my Aunt Lena’s knishes, and even though I have the recipe card for it, I likely never will. Knishes are just too fraught, and Lena was a tough cookie. But conjuring up a simple, elemental meal that was perfect and idiosyncratic and served to me on an ordinary cold Sunday afternoon in the spring—that’s a risk I can take, if only for love.
This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack, or keep up with her archives here.
Images courtesy of the author.