Monday, August 19, 2002
Honey Cake
Honey cake is Jewish gingerbread says Myra Binstock, a listener. An apt comparison. Both are spicy. Both are symbolic. The honey cake by dint of its sweetness is eaten to herald a new, sweet year. Gingerbread is shaped and baked into edible symbols. But I think the Jewish New Year’s honey cake is more like Christmas fruit cake, at least metaphorically. Jibbing its lack of popularity, the old joke about fruit cake is that there is only one in the world and it gets passed around each year. Honey cake is like that. Hardly anyone really likes it either, but you’ve gotten have one for the holidays. [more]
Thursday, August 15, 2002
Pastrami Skirt Steak
Steve Harkavy and Sam Barbieri brought barbecue to the WOR studios last week, so Joan and I, starving broadcasters that we are, could have something to “taste” for our Weekend show. [more]
Tuesday, August 6, 2002
Summer Soda Rush
So now I’ve tried Coke and Pepsi with lemon, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi with lemon, and Coke with Vanilla. I’m going back to plain seltzer.
Still, I can’t help myself. I am always tempted by a new soda, and some old ones. The other day, I tried an orange soda with fresh ginger that I bought in a new store in Park Slope. Bierkraft has the largest array of beers I have ever seen chilled in one place. The refrigerator runs the full, long length of the store – maybe 80 feet. Okay, I exaggerate. The first few refrigerators are devoted to soft drinks and only slightly hard other drinks – like cider. There is also a fine cheese department, and specialty groceries. But the soda and beer is what makes this store unique.
[more]
Thursday, August 1, 2002
Grilled Sweatbreads
About 25 years ago, at the Feast of San Gennaro, there was a man who grilled sweetbreads over a charcoal fire. For a few years, his time at the fair overlapped with my time of living downtown, and I remember clearly his leathery face and knarled hands. He was the stereotype of the weather-beaten southern Italian working man. For a few nights a year, for a very few years, I could walk to his set-up on Mulberry St., buy his plump, smoky sweetbreads and take them home to eat, instead of having to eat them standing up among the hordes in Little Italy. [more]
