The Catskill Chronicle

By Jude Waterston

I work in a 100+ year old Italian food shop, specializing in homemade pasta. My boss’s mother, who owned the store with her husband for a healthy chunk of those years, before handing the keys over to  her son, still sits in the kitchen some 20 feet behind the tiny store’s interior. There, she makes an unusual and complex lasagna; rolls meatballs; bakes miniature zucchini cakes; prepares a labor-intensive mixed vegetable antipasti called caponata; and cooks a handful of pasta dishes that we sell in take-out containers from a refrigerator case up front. Additionally, she supervises three kitchen workers who refer to her respectfully as Senora and to whom she has entrusted a bevy of the recipes she has developed over the years that, at 80, she no longer has the stamina to tackle.

I don’t work in the kitchen, but I am often in close proximity and am apt to overhear Senora’s patter as she slices leeks or chops pancetta into little cubes. She knows of my passion for food and cooking, and many times, if I am within earshot, she turns in my direction and regales me with stories about learning to cook; special meals she prepared for her late husband; dishes she ate as a child growing up in abject poverty during the war; and her current likes and dislikes regarding restaurants she frequents in her neighborhood, that is also my neighborhood.

The other day, as I moved a long, curved, two-handled knife through a thick wheel of creamy white ricotta salata cheese, I overheard her tell her kitchen assistant, who prepares the dozen or so sauces we offer the public, that when she was first married she kept a little notebook in which she wrote down every meal she cooked for her beloved Genovese husband, Gino. I was intrigued by this concept. Daily, she had taken the time to jot down the food she painstakingly learned to cook that reminded him of home and the new dishes she invented or adapted from the Italian cookery magazines she subscribed to or brought back from trips to her own hometown of Asalo, outside of Venice.

While listening to her, I thought of all the meals I’ve prepared for others over the years. First off, as a young girl and into my teens, it was for my family, then for close friends for whom I cared deeply, and new ones I wanted to draw into my world, and perhaps impress with my comfort and creativity in the kitchen. Then came long and short-term boyfriends and prospective beaus, and most important, my sister, Janet, who is my soul-mate and the person I have cooked for the longest, and with the most gusto and careful attention.

Janet and I have shared a comfy little house in the Catskills for over fifteen years. For seven of those years, I wrote a weekly column for an innovative upstate newspaper with a wide following, the Towne Crier. My pieces included recipes I developed, along with anecdotes about my love of everything having a connection to food and cooking. Many were personal and all were meaningful to me. Here are some of my memories of the food I’ve made for others, gleaned from a handful of those stories.

 

Uzi’s Schnitzel

My new Israeli husband, who I met and fell in love with when he was visiting New York for a few months’ vacation, assumed I was Italian when, for our first dinner together, I presented him with jumbo pasta shells filled with ricotta cheese and spinach in a homemade marinara sauce topped with shredded mozzarella and a sprinkling of grated parmesan. “What is this?” he asked. “Stuffed shells,” I replied. Having been brought up not far from the sea, the only shells he’d known were the ones embedded in the sand by the water’s edge.

He adored them, and from then on accompanied me to the local supermarket like an eager tot. Once, as I moved my cart about, I noticed him picking through the poultry section. He emerged with a plastic-wrapped package of boneless chicken breasts. “To make schnitzel,” he explained when I looked at the pale and boring fleshy breasts and made an unenthusiastic face.

Schnitzel, I later learned, can be found in every restaurant, household, and frozen food section of grocery stores in Israel. Originated in Central Europe and meaning cutlet in German, it was made with veal, but in the 1950’s, Israel did not have enough grassland to pasture cows, so the Jewish settlers adapted their native dishes to use turkey and chicken meat since those animals were less difficult to raise. “It’s easy,” Uzi insisted. “You pound them thin, dip them in a beaten egg and cover them with,  uh, uh, you know…” I looked at him blankly, while I waited for him to come up with the word. “Bread dust!” he finally shouted, triumphantly.

Suddenly, I felt a pang of guilt. He was far away from his family, friends, language, and the foods he loved. I am a dark-meat and bone eater, and though I pictured a flabby, dull and dry cutlet on our plates, I took them home and determined to make them exciting. After pounding the cutlets to about a quarter inch thickness, I seasoned the bread crumbs (formerly referred to as bread dust) with lots of herbs and spices and coated the chicken well. As they sat in the fridge, giving the crumbs time to adhere properly, I set about filling little ramekins with a variety of dipping sauces.

For added flavor, I sautéed the schnitzel in a combination of olive oil and butter and made sure not to overcook them, which would have resulted in tough, dry cutlets. I piled the thin, crisped schnitzel onto a platter and surrounded them with the sauces, which consisted of mango chutney, honey mustard, Chinese hoisin sauce, ketchup spiked with a splash of hot sauce, and a lemony mayonnaise. My take on this Eastern European standard became one of Uzi’s favorite meals, and he requested them often, though he never could recall the word for breadcrumbs. “Make me some bread dust chicken tonight, Juju,” he would urge. And I would.

Cooking for the Zoo

I entered college as an art student in the fall of 1975, but eventually majored in drugs and alcohol. Our dorm, housing hopeful musicians and fine artists, was known as The Zoo. I worked out quite a schedule for my first semester. In two days I covered my required art classes, a couple of English credits, and a philosophy course. The rest of the week I was free to enjoy being a 19-year-old writing profoundly depressing poetry; listening to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Stevie Wonder ad nauseum; and cooking for my dorm-mates.

We were forbidden to have any cooking implements in our dorm rooms, though we were allowed a small refrigerator. My roommate, Lynnann, and I had lugged to the State University of New Paltz two double burner hot plates, large and a small toaster ovens, and a variety of pots and pans. Dipping into the allowance our parents sent for books and art supplies, I didn’t stint on ingredients and could, on any given night, be found cooking broiled shrimp, baked chicken, or one of my specialties, salmon croquettes scented with lemon zest. On the occasions when we heard that an inspection was about to take place, we would cover the contraband with a couple of batiked Indian bedspreads and shove it in the bottom of one of our closets and under the beds.

Once I decided to make my own potato chips. I flavored them by rubbing each paper thin potato slice with Indian spices like curry powder, cumin, ginger, and turmeric. It took me two painstaking hours to slice and season them. As I set about deep frying the chips, the exotic scent of curry brought eager faces to our door. My friends kept grabbing fistfuls from the paper-toweled-lined bowl in which I was dumping them. When I had finished this lengthy production, there were about six potato chips left for  my own consumption. Not a great reward after so much hard work, but I really didn’t mind. The truth was that I  loved cooking for my friends.

One evening a week we all gathered in the communal television room on our floor to watch a “Twilight Zone” marathon. Most people arrived in their pajamas or bathrobes. I was often called upon to bake cookies or some other treat for the event. Our huge toaster oven came in handy at these times. One night my friend Rich presented me with a somewhat unorthodox filling for brownies. “Skip the nuts,” he counseled. Less than an hour later I entered the TV room with a platter of dense, pungent-smelling brownies. To my memory, as the evening progressed and the secret ingredient was fully digested, each episode of the Twilight Zone became more hysterically funny than the next. Oh, those crazy days of youth!

Bullying Billy

When I first met my friend Billy, he was not much of a cook. Strike that. That makes it sound as if he was somewhat of a cook, which he was not. Though hefty in size, he wasn’t much of an eater, either, as f ar as I was concerned. He liked to eat; he just wasn’t eating good food. From what I could gather, a lot of pizza, soda, chicken nuggets, and fries were being consumed. I bullied and nagged him about his eating habits. I was confrontational and, most likely, annoying. I would make him tell me what he’d eaten in the days prior to our meeting. He would just shake his head sheepishly, pat his protruding stomach, and shrug his broad shoulders.

One weekend when my sister, Janet, was unable to come up to the house we share in the Catskills, Billy accompanied me there. Over breakfast at a local diner I asked him, “Did your parents ever take you out for any ethnic food?” “Only for Chinese, and we always ordered the same thing,” he said. “Spare ribs?” I guessed. “Yeah, and don’t forget the egg rolls, pork fried rice, and egg foo young,” he said. “No chicken and broccoli?” I asked. “Too healthy,” he replied.

Back at the house, over the next couple of days, I discovered that Billy was actually an adventurous eater eager to try any new food I put before him. Around noon of our arrival day, I walked into our ample kitchen to begin working on our first meal together. Billy sauntered in and stood a foot or two from me. “You can relax in the living room or play your guitar if you want,” I suggested. He didn’t move. “You don’t have to stand here with me,” I told him. “I want to. I’d really like to learn how to cook,” he confided. So we began to work side by side, and as we did, we would record the recipes with very specific details so that Billy would be able to reproduce them in the future. He was a divorced father of two young girls with limited palettes. In particular, he looked forward to cooking with his daughters and introducing them to a variety of foods.

One of the first things we prepared together was fresh salsa made with ripe tomatoes, red onion, pickled jalapeno, lime juice, and lots of cilantro. For breakfast the next morning, we made decadent baked eggs in heavy cream and butter with parmesan cheese and chives. Before dinner we had a couple of scotches and an hors d’oeuvre of stuffed mushrooms filled with bread crumbs, garlic, and two cheeses, drizzled with a touch of sherry.

Earlier, I had asked Billy if he’d mind if I prepared dinner on my own. I wanted to make him something special. I promised to give him the recipe afterwards if he wanted it, but mostly I just felt like knocking his socks off and showing him how much his friendship meant to me. The stuffed flank steak, cooked to perfection, was beautiful to behold and delicious, too. There were side dishes and a salad, none of which either of us remember. It was that steak (and some good red wine) that bonded us even further. I knew I had a friend for life. And he knew the same.

For Janet

 

When I look through the hundreds of pieces I wrote for the Towne Crier, the majority of them involve my sister, Janet. She has never been a cook and I can’t remember when I was not. I have been presenting her with “three squares” a day, as they say in prison, every weekend (and some weekdays) for a long, long time. But the meals I prepare for her are never institutional, mundane or thrown together. Wild mushroom frittata; soft scrambled eggs with parmesan and oven-roasted potatoes; tropical fruit salad with toasted coconut and fresh mint; Moroccan chicken tajine with apricots, figs, and chickpeas; endive and pink grapefruit salad with toasted walnuts; four cheese pasta with pancetta; grilled, marinated pork loin; spicy Thai mussels; broiled swordfish kebobs with charred cherry tomatoes; flank steak with warm flour tortillas; panna cotta with raspberry coulis, to name a very few. Friends who visit and stay for a meal ask her, incredulously, “Is this how you eat every day?” She smiles. Indeed, it is.

Broiled Swordfish Kebobs with Charred Cherry Tomatoes

Serves 2

1 pound of swordfish, cut into 1” x 1” cubes

12 – 15 cherry or grape tomatoes

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Marinade:

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

Juice of 1 ½ lemons (3 tablespoons)

1 garlic clove, sliced

2 – 3 tablespoons fresh Italian parsley, chopped

1 teaspoon dried oregano or mixed Italian herbs

½ teaspoon Dijon mustard

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Whisk together all of the marinade ingredients in a small bowl, cover, and set aside for an hour or two. When ready to prepare fish, preheat broiler. Remove garlic slices from marinade and discard. Put swordfish cubes in bowl with marinade and toss to coat completely. Thread the fish and tomatoes, alternating them, onto skewers. Reserve marinade. Place skewers on a baking sheet and salt and pepper lightly. Broil the kebobs, turning them a couple of times, until the fish is cooked through, about 5 – 6 minutes. Place the kebobs on a platter and pour the reserved marinade evenly over them. Serve with rice pilaf.