05.06.06

The Impostor

Posted in Brooklyn, Dave's Faves, Meats, Seafood, Williamsburg at 5:11 am by Administrator

If you take cabs, I’m sure this has happened to you at least a couple of times.  Your cabbie gets you where you are going, but the conversation is still going somewhere.  So you idle at the curb, maybe talking a little faster, maybe even passing the money up front, but you don’t make a move for the door handle.

That has happened to me a few times as the customer, and many times, from the other point of view, as the cabbie.  The other day, in South Williamsburg, I idled in front of a brownstone on Wythe Street for a good fifteen minutes while my fare poured her heart out.  She had been living a lie.

I had first spotted her not too far away in North Williamsburg staggering out of a bar on Union Street and Richardson.  I didn’t expect much from her.  She looked like every other girl in Williamsburg right down to the mullet, the Duran Duran tee shirt she had obviously not bought before Simon got fat, the torn leg warmers, the oversized pink plastic belt, and the can of PBR in her hand.  She was a classic hipster chick.

(The Williamsburg Bridge from the hipster side)

But she clearly had to get something off her chest.  She danced around it for a while, and I wasn’t in the mood to fish for it.  So after the bit of back and forth during which she repeatedly hinted at some secret dominating her life, we fell silent.  I assumed it was the same old story I’d heard a million times from girls like that:  she’d gotten hooked on oxycontin and couldn’t kick so it was ruining the one good relationship she’d ever been in OR she had slept with her gay friend’s boyfriend who actually isn’t gay and neither of them know how to tell the real gay one.  I hear stuff like that all the time, so I wasn’t worried when she clammed up.  But I could tell she was bursting at the seams.

“I’M A REPUBLICAN!!!” she blurted out.  “I’m from Utah.  I’m from Utah, and we’re all Republicans.  ALL OF US.  I mean . . . I love being Republican.  I love George W. Bush.”  She was talking very fast now.  “I hate Ralf Nader, I hate the Democrats . . . I even hate other Republicans who don’t stand behind Bush.  I’m a Republican. . . a Republican.”  We were at a light, and I had been looking at her in my rearview.  As I turned my gaze back to the street in front of me, I noticed in the mirror that my mouth had been hanging open.  The light had been green for some time.

Usually, I’ve got something to tell people.  Something to at least start to put things in perspective.  Maybe even something to make people feel a little better.  But I was speechless.  I actually considered that she might be on some crazy drug, and I could be in physical danger. 

She kept talking as we crossed into the south side of Williamsburg.  I managed to ask, “Do your friends know?”  This only served to agitate her to the point where I could barely understand her.  And, no, her friends did not know.

She’d voted for Bush twice.  She’d actually worked for the Bush campaign in 2000 and, like Alex P. Keaton, worshipped Richard Nixon.  Her hobby was collecting Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich memorabilia.  She was against abortion, against gay marriage, against immigration, against Arabs in general.  Yet she was living in possibly the most liberal neighborhood on the planet. 

As we sat in front of her building with the meter running, she began acting more and more like she was on the couch in her therapist’s office.  She was on the verge of tears now.  All I could say was, “Well . . . there’s always something,” quoting my hero Tepper from Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out.  It seemed to work though.  She calmed down and worked her problems down to their core:  “Why should I be afraid of becoming an outcast just because I support our president?  Why should I live in fear of letting all these liberal freaks around here ‘find me out’ for the Republican I am?”

She seemed empowered.  Her facial expression relaxed, and she grabbed her purse to pay me.  Even though the meter had been on, I still could have made way more money out there picking up and dropping off fares in the time I sat in front of her house.  I expected a nice tip.  I hadn’t considered that, as a Republican, she did not identify with the working man one bit.  She gave the change plus a dollar.

Now I was the one who felt deflated.  I asked her, “Is there any place in Williamsburg you go to get away from the other hipsters, I mean the real ones.”  I didn’t care that I might have sounded offensive.

“Marlow and Sons is only a couple blocks away.  I love their oysters.”  She said it reminded her of her drunk mother’s summer house on Puget Sound.  If I wasn’t going to get a monetary tip out of her, at least I got a tip on the food in the neighborhood.

I returned to Marlow and Sons today with a couple of my hipster friends.  We had a feast.  The oysters, some from Puget Sound, some from Blue Point Long Island, were delightfully briny.  The west coasters were huge.  (I visited the Hudson River Project and read that oysters from what is now New York Harbor used to grow to be gigantic, and the people of the Manhattan tribe would filet them and roast them like steak.  So I should say these oysters were huge by today’s standards.  They definitely required more chewing than the oysters I’m used to.)

(Left: the Puget Sound monsters, Right: the local Blue Point)

We also devoured a handsome plate of assorted meats (soppressata, coppa, saucisson, chorizo, and prosciutto), assorted cheeses (pleasant ridge reserve, majic mountain, taylor farms gouda, sprout creek, and the stinkiest hooligan I’ve ever smelled), and pate with cornichons.  It all went together so well. 

I was in heaven.  Basic foods served without garnish or overpreparation.  That’s good eating.  And, tonight at least, aside from my friends, there wasn’t a hipster in sight.

Marlow and Sons, Broadway and Berry St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Read an article I wrote about a floating oyster bar off Cape Cod’s elbow in the “Published Food Writing” section of the Famous Fat Dave’s Five Borough Eating Tour website.   

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04.28.06

Hand Piping

Posted in Brooklyn, Cannoli, Dave's Faves, Italian, On The Open Road, Sweets at 4:17 am by Administrator

Picture it:  Sicily, 1650.  The people of Palermo are celebrating Martedi Grasso, the Catholic celebration of Fat Tuesday.  The streets are jammed with revelers indulging in sweets to enliven the merriment of the Carnevale.  Cannoli are being exchanged like beads at the modern day New Orleans Mardi Gras.  One Sicilian man, whose name is lost to history, is moved to poetry:

That is pride.  The Sicilians, a proud people, take particular pride in their cannoli.
 

A few centuries later, in suburban Maryland, my new high school sweetheart is the daughter of a Sicilian immigrant.  She is also a vegan.  Her father, Tony, is overjoyed that his daughter’s new boyfriend would gladly eat anything and everything.  He takes to cooking me spaghetti with clam sauce and rice balls filled with peas and ground beef while his daughter subsists on baked beans and tofutti cuties.  Before long, Tony makes his ritualistic trip up I-95 to Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop in Baltimore’s Little Italy.  Upon his return I find Tony in the kitchen with a glowing expression on his face, a whopping spoonful of sweet ricotta in one hand, and a delicate fried wafer in the other.  It is time for my cannoli education.
 

(The Albemarle Street location as seen on vaccaropastry.com)     

Tony inserts the ricotta into the waiting shell before my eyes, sprinkles it with powdered sugar, and triumphantly serves me dessert at eleven in the morning.  Before I swallow my first bite, I know I have found the first true love of my young life.  The look of almost giddy anticipation on Tony’s face prompts me to speak with my mouth still full.  “So good,” I moan, flakes of shell flying from my lips.  A big slap on the back, a few more bites, and I am the son Tony never had.
Still, Tony feels a responsibility to teach me the true Sicilian way.  He carefully explains to me exactly why my first cannolo tasted so good.  The ricotta must always be stored in a cool, dry place.  The shells must be made with Marsala wine.  And the two must never, ever meet until just before the cannoli are to be enjoyed, lest the shells lose their crunch and the ricotta grows warm and runny. 

 

My love of cannoli flourished, so Tony began making extra trips to Baltimore to be sure he was stocked up for my frequent visits.  Much like the “cutter” in Breaking Away, I began thinking I was Italian, although every member of my family is of Eatern European Jewish descent.  Tony soon dubbed me “The Cannoli Kid,” and I took to the moniker with a Sicilian’s pride. 

Years passed and, while my relationship with Tony’s daughter did not withstand the test of time, my love affair with the cannoli was beginning to blossom.  Mostlly as a result of my mounting indentity crisis, I found myself studying in Florence, Italy during my junior year of college.  Once I arrived, I didn’t waste any time reaching my adopted motherland.

I skipped orientation week and took the overnight train to the toe of the boot.  My new apartment in Florence had seemed alien and unwelcoming, but when I got off the ferry in the port town of Messina, I felt like I had come home.  The people expressed that familiar sort of warmth I’d come to love back in Maryland.  The distinctly Mediterranean weather agreed with my constitution, and the food was the best I’d ever eaten.  Like Tony had done for me years earlier, I considered it my responsibility to introduce my classmates back in Florence to the glories of real Sicilian cannoli.

I made sure to eat cannoli with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the way I do with lobster when I am in Maine, or pickles on the Lower East Side.  I followed my belly to the tiny hilltop town of Corleone.  Yes, The Godfather was filmed there, and a cinematic pilgrimage was part of the reason for my visit.  But more importantly, Corleone is located in the heart of Sicily’s sheep country.  The people of Corleone, therefore, make superior ricotta for their connoli. 

After wandering around the town for a few hours fielding an array of confused looks from the Corleonese, I met Eustachio in a piazza.  We exchanged niceties in my broken Italian, and I asked something to the effect of, “Where could I find a tasty cannolo around here?”  His eyes lit up.

(The piazza in which I met my destiny) 

Eustachio whisked me across a couple cobblestoned blocks of Corleone, announcing to friends he passed the excitement that was about to ensue.  By the time we reached the cool, dry basement of a poorly stocked grocery store that his uncle owned, I was surrounded by a least half a dozen eager Sicilian men.  Eustachio did the honors of building my cannolo before my eyes, just as Tony taught me years earlier.  I felt the anticipation in the air as I took my first bite.  It was even better than the first time back in Tony’s kitchen.  My knees actually went weak, and I shouted, “Que buono!”  A joyous cheer went up all around me, and I was showered with brotherly shoulder smacks and bear hugs.  I felt as though I had just gotten married.

Eustachio arranged for his uncle to supply me twenty shells and a gallon jar full of ricotta at an unnecessarily discounted price.  He imposed the strict condition that I do everything possible to keep the ricotta cool during the sixteen hour journey back to Florence.  He even drove me to the train station in Palermo with the air conditioning on full blast.  The rest was up to me. 

Back in Messina, I had to wait two hours for the train to be dismantled and loaded onto a ferry to the mainland.  Under the blazing Mediterranean sun, I sprinted to a nearby focacceria.  My Italian was not good enough to explain my situation, even though I had picked up the thick Sicilian accent nature had intended for me.  The proprietor refused to even look at the contents of my wrinkled paper bag, and he seemed to think I was some American drug fiend who needed a place to hide his stash.

I started to grow desperate, pacing the floor, gesticulating wildly with my hands, and repeating “mingia,” the word for fuck in the Sicilian dialect.  These were things the proud Sicilian standing before me could comprehend, so he finally inspected my mysterious bag.  I understood him say something about “cannoli” and “why didn’t you say so” as he hurriedly shoved my jar in his soda case.  The ricotta was saved, and when I returned to Florence, I bestowed the precious cannoli upon my classmates.  I felt like Tony must have when he gave me the sacred gift.

Since I moved to New York, I’ve scoured the five boroughs for cannoli that rivaled the ones I first had back in Maryland or the ones I found everywhere in Sicily.  But even institutions like Veniero’s Pastry Shop on 11th Street and Fortunato Brothers in Williamsburg refused to hand-pipe their ricotta.  Sicilians had immigrated to New York City in large numbers more than a century ago.  But no matter where I looked or who I consulted for advice, I could not find a cannolo that would satisfy Tony, Eustachio, or me.  Had New York’s Sicilian population lost its sense of pride in the crown jewel of their ancestral cuisine?

Last week, I picked up an old man with warm, smiling eyes in my cab.  I took him from Grand Central Station out to Cypress Avenue on the border between Brooklyn and Queens.  As we passed a modest storefront at Stanhope Street, he spoke to me unsolicited in a familiar accent.  “This place here has great cannoli.”

Within minutes of dropping him off in Ridgewood, I was seated on the sidewalk beneath the “Euro Cafe” awning.  I ordered two cannoli from a woman with that same familiar accent.  I watched her at the counter, squeezing cool ricotta into a fresh shell that smelled of Marsala wine.  Before swallowing the first bite, my taste-buds transported me back to Tony’s kitchen, then to Corleone, and finally to Martedi Grasso.

Euro Cafe, Cypress Ave btwn Stanhope and Himrod, Brooklyn

Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour 

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