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01/02/2006 Archived Entry: "Happy New Year, Sad News, Shepherd's Pie"

Happy New Year! Although I always think Healthy New Year or Peaceful New Year are even better greetings these days.

My year started sadly with the news that, on Dec. 30, my old friend Rona Jaffe died in London, where she had gone to celebrate the New Year with her English friends. Rona told me and a few select other friends that she had pancreatic and liver cancer last summer, while we were staying with her in the Hamptons. (You can read about that weekend on my website. And there’s another diary item about staying with Rona for the weekend six years ago.) She was very optimistic and upbeat, even at the end, although lately she has certainly been worse for wear from, we thought, the chemo therapy.

We had dinner just a few weeks ago at Sammy’s Roumanian, the last of the Yiddish Roumanian steakhouses. I was checking out Sammy’s after not having eaten there in several years (part of my research for my book in progress, “Arthur Schwartz’s New York Jewish Food”) and Rona, who was always eating healthy, and exercising (she was going to her Pilates class as recently as two weeks ago) was concerned there would be nothing there for her to eat. Little did we know that there would be nothing for any of us to eat – happily that is. She ate a tiny bit of chopped liver, a few bites of skirt steak, and some broccoli. The food was so bad – I mean really disgracefully bad – that none of us ate with gusto. I attributed her lack of appetite to her degree of tiredness. (In restaurants, she ate like a truck driver, although when home she did “diet” things like eat spaghetti sprayed with Pam during the high-carb, low-fat era, and nothing but a tiny piece of skinless boneless chicken and salad in the high-protein, no-carb era. She was a slave to diet fads.) The day we went to Sammy’s, she had earlier given a lecture on Jewish women in the arts, been on a panel of Jewish women writers, and been charming to strangers at a luncheon. Her stamina was astounding, not only for someone who was sick, but for anyone.

Rona went out in a blaze of glory. Although she wrote 15 best selling novels, she is best known for “The Best of Everything,” her first novel, published in 1958, when she was 27, which was made the next year into the movie by the same name, starring Joan Crawford, Suzy Parker, and Hope Lange playing the character that was more or less Rona herself. The book is considered the first of what is now called “Chick Lit,” and this year Rona was being called “The Mother of Chick-Lit” and was honored numerous times. The movie was released on DVD last summer with commentary by a film historian and Rona herself. The commentary by the film historian is not nearly as amusing, interesting or insightful as Rona’s. You should rent it or buy it. Watch the movie without the commentary running, then watch it with Rona’s voice.

My favorite Rona Jaffe novel is “Family Secrets,” a family saga based on her own family. Her grandfather was Moses Ginsberg, who was the Donald Trump of his day. In the 1920s, Ginsberg built, in Brooklyn and Queens, housing for immigrants on the Lower East Side who were moving up the socio-economic ladder. He was one of the builders who gave Brooklyn more housing starts than any other municipality in the mid 1920s. He also built hotels. Rona always liked to say that her mother named the Carlyle, because she was an English major in college, and her uneducated aunt named the Beverly, who just liked the name.

After having lost his fortune, Moses Ginsberg reinvented himself as a ship builder and regained the fortune in World War II. He was the first Jew to live in very “restricted” Greenwich, Connecticut, where Rona spent weekends and summers on the family compound. She was born in Brooklyn, in the apartment building next to Union Temple on Eastern Parkway, but she grew up on the Upper East Side, where she lived until the end. The whole Ginsberg story is in “Family Secrets,” a real page turner, as are all her other novels. More than merely amusing soap-operatic tales of women’s lives, I always felt Rona’s books were what the academics call “novels of manners.” She captured with telling detail the popular culture of the times in which her novels were taking place, and which she lived through.

The New York Times obituary, written in great haste by Mitchell Owens, doesn’t do her justice, but I suppose no obituary can do anyone justice, including this one. Rona could be impossibly self-centered, as most artists are, but she was also delightful company – funny and sweet and sensitive to the feelings of those she loved. I was privileged to be one of them. Always the greatest of observers, when I was the restaurant critic of the New York Daily News, I could always count on Rona to recall details of dinner that I could not remember, or hadn’t even noticed. She was my frequent dinner companion and, in my reviews, I would call her “Nicole,” the Upper East Side princess, so I could quote her always funny, cogent comments.

On a joyous note, I spent the first night of Chanukah (Christmas day) with my immediate family and New Year’s Eve with my nearest and dearest friends, Bob Harned, Erica Marcus, Rozanne Gold, and Michael Whiteman, quietly at home with a good bowl of spaghetti alla carbonara, great cheese, good-enough wine, and a birthday cake for Rozanne for dessert. I haven’t been home for the holidays in several years because I usually have a culinary vacation group at Tenuta Seliano in Italy. For New Year’s Eve, Cecilia (La Baronessa) stages a big party. It was nice to be home and quiet for a change.

Yesterday, I made what we Americans call Shepherd’s Pie, but the British call Cottage Pie. The difference is that Shepherd’s Pie should technically be made with lamb. Cottage Pie is made with beef. Recently, after some dental work kept both Bob Harned and me from eating chewy food, we went to our local pub – Park Slope Ale House, on Sixth Avenue and Fifth Street – for their wonderful Shepherd’s (really Cottage) Pie. I decided I just had to try my hand at it. Here’s the recipe I devised.

Cottage Pie
Serves 4

For easier cleanup, choose a deep sauté pan or shallow flame-proof casserole that can go into a hot oven. This way you can prepare the meat base in it, top it with mashed potatoes, and pop it in the oven. I used a 10-inch copper sauté pan, which is more than attractive enough to put on the table. Otherwise, you will have to transfer the meat mixture to a casserole, or four individual serving casseroles, to bake the “pie.” At the Park Slope Ale House, they bake Shepherd’s Pie in individual heat-proof bowls.

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 medium onion, cut into ¼-inch mince
1 medium carrot, cut into ¼-inch mince
1½ pounds ground chuck
2 tablespoons flour
1 to 1¼ cups beef broth (can be canned or from a bouillon cube)
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons ketchup
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 cup frozen peas
½ pound mushrooms, thinly sliced, sautéed in 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (optional)
2 pounds potatoes, peeled, boiled, and mashed (I use 2 or 3 tablespoons of butter, and
about ½ cup cream or milk)
½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or shredded Cheddar cheese

In a 10-inch skillet or sauté pan, over medium heat, warm the oil and sauté the onion and carrot together until the onion is tender and golden, about 8 minutes.

Add the chopped beef and break it up with the side or a wooden spoon, continuing to break it up as it cooks and loses its raw color.

As soon as the raw color is gone, sprinkle on the flour and mix well, cooking another 2 minutes while still stirring and breaking up the meat.

Add the beef broth, the Worcestershire, and the ketchup. Bring to a simmer, still breaking up the meat. Let simmer for 2 or 3 minutes.

Add the frozen peas, mix well, then let simmer another 3 or 4 minutes, until the peas are defrosted and barely cooked. Stir in the optional sautéed mushrooms.

With the back of your wooden spoon, or a spatula, even out the mixture in the pan. Or, transfer it to a casserole that will accommodate it and about ¾ inch of potatoes. Or, divide the mixture between 4 individual casserole dishes. Spoon on the mashed potatoes and smooth the top, making sure the potatoes cover the meat well. Sprinkle with grated cheese.

Bake in a preheated 425-degree oven for about 20 minutes, until you can see the meat mixture bubbling around the edge of the pan, and the top has lightly browned.

P.S. – My offer of autographed bookplates still stands. If you send me a receipt (from a bookstore or from any internet bookseller, such as Amazon) for any of my cookbooks, I will send you back a beautiful bookplate-sized sheet of handmade Amalfi paper with my insignia and personalized autograph. Mail receipts to Arthur Schwartz & Associates, 25 Plaza Street West, Suite 2C, Brooklyn, NY 11217. And thanks again to all of you who have already done this.