Where everybody knows your name, sort of

It’s always nice to be treated like “someone special,” and one of the easiest ways to do that is to become a regular customer, or simply a “regular,” at an eating establishment.

Notice that I did not use the word restaurant. This is not because restaurant is not an appropriate word to use in this context; rather, because the word is too limiting. Eating establishments can range from the French Laundry in California to the coffee cart on the corner that provides you with breakfast five days a week. It’s wherever you hang or hat, or tie on the feedbag. The point is, it’s a place where you and your dining preferences are a known quantity.

Now, I have never been to the French Laundry, or even to Per Se, which is a few blocks from my Manhattan home but is symbolically worlds away from where I live. But during various times in my corporate working life I have been a regular at several coffee carts around the city and it is a mostly pleasing experience.

There’s something comforting in having someone, even a complete stranger, know exactly what you crave first thing in the morning and before you can even say “good morning,” your coffee (milk and two sugars, please) and breakfast (buttered roll) are ready and handed to you in a brown paper sack, with a wad of napkins stuffed on the top to soak up the coffee that creeps through the tiny hole in the center of the plastic lid. You usually know nothing about this person, and they know nothing about you aside from your breakfast preferences. It’s a strange sort of symbiotic relationship that needs little work and creates mutual satisfaction with every mundane transaction.

And yet, there’s also something a bit unsettling about a complete stranger thinking he knows you so well that he can fill your order as he sees you approach the cart. How does he know that you are more in the mood for tea this morning, or maybe for a bagel or doughnut? How dare he presume to know exactly what you want every single weekday morning? What about those days when you have breakfast meetings and bypass the cart altogether? Does he have the right to feel insulted and short-changed, or does he take it in his stride and turn to the next regular’s order?

On the other hand, there was the Bagel Bakery in Burlington, Vermont, where I went for breakfast nearly every weekend for at least a few of my college years. The place was always packed (being the only place in town to get fresh bagels at the time) and yet I always seemed to get the same counterperson. Every single weekend we had the same exchange.

Me: “A sesame bagel with Muenster cheese, please.”
Counterperson: “Mustard or mayo with that?”
Me: “No thank you, just cheese.”

Gosh, wouldn’t you think that she would remember my order after the first few months?

But I digress.

Over the years there have been a few places in Manhattan that I frequented enough to feel that I was seen as a “regular.” One of the first was the Diamond Dairy Restaurant, a shabby sliver of a place high above one of the large jewelry exchanges on West 47th Street, the Diamond District of New York City. For many years I would bring friends there for lunch to share the experience of eating in a place that time seemed to have forgotten, while gazing down at millions of dollars worth of diamonds, gold, and other precious metals and stones. And for many years my server was Marie, a sitcom-ready wisecracking waitress who liked to guess what I was going to have for lunch (it was almost always a toss-up between cheese blintzes and stuffed peppers). I felt a real sense of loss when Marie no longer worked there, felt it again when the cooks changed and the food seemed different, and felt it a final time when I read last year that the place had finally gone out of business.

When my kids were in elementary school in Hell’s Kitchen, we had breakfast every Thursday morning at the original Amy’s Bread on Ninth Avenue and 46th Street. Yvonne always greeted us with a big smile, chatted up the girls, and expressed surprise when I changed my usual order from chocolate sourdough twist to cherry scone and back again. She gave us day-old (and still delicious) cookies, gave the girls tiny birthday cakes, and even told us that she was having a baby before she told her boss. Talk about trust!

These days I tend not to be too “regular” anywhere due to a combination of factors—less eating at restaurants, having coffee at home in the mornings instead of from a cart, and working in kitchens, which eliminates the need to purchase meals during the day. But there is one place where I feel known: the burger joint at the Parker Meridian Hotel on 57th Street. My younger daughter and I often have lunch at this (not-so-) hidden gem in the lobby of the hotel, and we are always greeted by the folks behind the counter. Although there is only counter service, our lunch is often brought to our table when it’s ready. They know that we like our fries hot out of the fryer, and they are happy to oblige. When Sofy was gluten free for a few years, they grabbed a paper plate (for her bunless burger) as we approached the counter. They even know me by name, even if it’s the wrong name: at the burger joint I am somehow known as Cheryl, and I am too polite, and too much time has gone by, for me to correct the accommodating staff.

Well, no place is perfect, even when you’re a regular.

Cakegirl and Chocolate: A Love Story

It’s so chic to love chocolate. There are stores and festivals and magazines and countless websites devoted to the fruit of the cacao tree. People love to talk about their preferred chocolate in terms of percentages—“Oh, I only eat seventy-two Asante single origin. Anything else is too sweet. And don’t get me started on milk chocolate!” They think it makes them sounds more knowledgeable, so sophisticated, so gourmet.

I say, who gives a rat's ass? Just shut up and eat it...it’s all good.

Growing up, I thought there must be something strange about how much I loved chocolate. (Remember, this was in the sixties and seventies, before Scharffen Berger was a household name or even invented yet.) I mean, I really loved it. The chocolate pudding that my mother would prepare (from a box, and delicious) on cold mornings and serve hot, calling it chocolate soup; the waffles, ice cream and hot fudge that we would have for dinner on an occasional Sunday; the Hershey’s Golden Almond Bars that my father would bring home from work—all of this fueled my passion and yet somehow made me feel a bit ashamed, as though my love for chocolate was, well, abnormal somehow. The fact that the rest of my family seemed to share this passion (though as is often the case with dark family secrets we never talked about it) did little to comfort me and make me feel that it was normal.

What did make me feel better eventually was the newsletter that my father received in the eighties called Chocolate News. Printed on cocoa-brown paper and scented with chocolate, this newsletter was chock-filled with all things chocolate--recipes, taste tests, new product information, interviews, and photos. "At last!" I thought happily. "There are others out there like me!" (Remember, this was in the days before the Internet made it a snap to find like-minded folks.) Chocolate News was followed by Chocolatier magazine, and it wasn't too long before a whole chocolate culture sprang up, thanks to people like Jacques Torres (aka Mr. Chocolate), Alice Medrich (aka The First Lady of Chocolate), and Messrs. Scarffenberger and Steinberg of the aforementioned Scharffen Berger fame. Adoring chocolate had become mainstream and I could no longer think of myself as unusual and offbeat, at least as far as chocolate was concerned.

So I could write reams about how wonderful chocolate is and how much it has changed my life. But I won't. I will, however, share some of my favorite chocolate indulgences with you, so that you will see that far from being a chocolate snob, I am wide-reaching in my appreciation.

A few of my favorite chocolate things:

See's Chocolates. My absolutely all-time favorite box chocolates. Not tea-infused, chile-spiked, lemon-verbena-filled bonbons, but good old-fashioned nut- and caramel-filled milk and dark chocolates. They are only sold in shops in the Western U.S. or on line, but I'm happy to order them over the Internet, especially since you can assemble your own box of favorite chocolates. No more poking the bottom of the chocolates to make sure you didn't get the jelly-filled one!

Green and Black Milk Chocolate with Toffee. Really good milk chocolate with bits of burnt-sugar goodness. A few squares of this after dinner is pretty much all I need to make my day complete.

Thick European-style hot chocolate. I first had this at the world-famous Angelina Cafe in Paris and was instantly hooked. It's like drinking hot chocolate pudding (just like the chocolate soup my mom used to make--comfort food at its best). Nowadays I get my fix at City Bakery, where a tiny "shot" is usually all I need, or at Jacque Torres, where you can get the Wicked Hot Chocolate, which packs some spicy heat. Nothing is better or more satisfying on a cold winter day, though I could be convinced to drink it any time of the year.

Hershey's Chocolate Bar. Yes, I know it's so declasse to love Hershey's but I do, as do many Americans--it's what we grew up on. Everyone else in the world turns their noses up, but sometimes a Hershey bar really satisfies a craving--it's cheap, dependable, and available literally everywhere you go in this country.

And finally, my two favorite ways to indulge:

A really good, moist, old-fashioned chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. So much harder to find than it would seem. There are millions of variations out there and people are always telling me where to find "the best." I suppose most pastry chefs think their chocolate cake is THE BEST, and I am no exception. I always feel somehow complete when I have a big old devil's food cake sitting under the cake dome in my kitchen. Best accompaniment: a glass of ice-cold milk and a napkin to wipe the frosting off your upper lip.

Hot fudge. Chocolate at its simplest and most sublime. Again, most people think they know where to find the best, or they have the best recipe...but once again I win this, hands down. And finally I will include a recipe in this blog, which only seems appropriate. This is from baking and chocolate maven Maida Heatter. Needless to say, it's fantastic on ice cream but I have been known to simply eat it straight from the jar.

The World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce (from Maida Heatter' Book of Great Chocolate Desserts)

1/2 cup heavy cream
3 Tbsp sweet butter, cut into small pieces
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
pinch of salt
1/2 cup strained or sifted Dutch-process cocoa powder (don't substitute - it must be Dutch process for the right color and flavor. And don't skip the straining or sifting--if the cocoa is lumpy your sauce will be lumpy.)

Place the cream and butter in a heavy 1-quart saucepan over moderate heat. Stir until the butter is melted and the cream just comes to a low boil. Add both sugars and stir for a few minutes until they are dissolved. (The surest test is to taste; cook and taste until you do not feel any undissolved granules in your mouth.)

Reduce the heat. Add the salt and cocoa and stir briskly with a small wire whisk until smooth. (If the sauce is not smooth - if there are any small lumps of undissolved cocoa- press against them, and stir well, with a rubber spatula.) Remove from the heat.

Serve immediately or pour into a straight-sided glass jar to cover and store in the refrigerator. To reheat slowly, spoon the sauce into the top of a double boiler over hot water, or in a heavy saucepan over the lowest heat. I usually just place the glass jar in the microwave and heat at 15-second intervals, stirring in between, until hot.

Pour on ice cream or eat with a spoon. Sigh.

So many cookbooks (and magazines), so little time...

In our dining room there are two bookcases, and those bookcases are filled with cookbooks. There are probably several hundred cookbooks there, not to mention a few dozen more that are scattered around the apartment. Another bookshelf in the living room is lined with a few years’ worth of food magazines. And in my miniscule Manhattan kitchen there’s only room for two binders and a manila folder, all filled with recipes for appetizers, desserts, and everything in between.

Okay, so I’m a little obsessed. Maybe more than a little, as my husband frequently points out. But it’s a healthy obsession, not to mention a delicious and useful one as well.

People often gasp in surprise and even delight when they see my cookbook collection. I don’t think I fully appreciated how, um, unusual my collection is until I visited other people’s homes and noticed that most of them just had a shelf or two of cookbooks in or near the kitchen. Where are the rest of them? I would wonder, then I would realize that not everyone feels the needs to have multiple volumes on food and cooking lining their walls.

And not everyone spent years working in the book publishing industry, where one of the few perks was getting free books from most of the other major publishing houses. It was as simple as calling that house and asking whoever picked up the phone, “Say, can you send me a copy of The New Basics?” and offering to send your new friend whatever book they wanted from your own office. Over the course of almost eighteen years I amassed the majority of my collection. I got everything from the latest edition of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook to much more specific titles on doughnuts, soba noodles, and homemade ice cream. The time between requesting a cookbook and its arrival in a padded envelope seemed endless, especially if it was a title I had known about for a long time and was particularly eager to receive.

At the same time I started ordering cooking magazines and usually held subscriptions to several at the same time. At different times I was receiving Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Fine Cooking, Everyday Food, Chocolatier, Cooking Light, Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country. Obsessed, indeed.

Somewhere along the way, other people began to notice my collections and felt the impulse to enable me. So for years I’ve received cookbooks from family and friends. One friend found a treasure trove of promotional booklets among her recently deceased mother’s belongings and sent them to me—“Learn to Bake (with Swan’s Down)—You’ll Love It!” and “Every Night is Campbell’s Soup Night” among them. Another out-of-town friend brings a Midwestern community cookbook every time he visits. I warn him that some day I’m going to serve him a dinner from those books and it will include Boiled Raisin Cake (from the Immanuel Lutheran Recipe Book, 1940) and Slumgullion on a Bun (from the Women’s Society of Christian Service, 1969).

Eventually, when I began to share living space with three other people who also needed space for their possessions, I realized that things might be getting out of hand. Plus I was getting tired of the hairy eyeball my husband would give me whenever a new cookbook appeared on the dining room table.
So yes, I actually got rid of some of my beloved cookbooks. My husband sold a few on Amazon, and many others were donated to the impromptu library/giveaway bookshelf in the laundry room of our apartment building. I cut down on my magazine subscriptions when I acknowledged that I simply didn’t have time to read, let alone cook from, more than a couple of magazines a month. Now I receive only three (and I’ll let you guess which three I decided upon) and of course I can get recipes for nearly everything on the Internet...though it’s not quite the same as thumbing through a book or magazine.

The two most frequently asked questions I get about my cookbooks are:

Have you cooked from every one of these books?

My husband always cracks up when he hears this, because he likes to claim that I’ve cooked from a very small percentage of them. I beg to differ, though the truth is that there are certainly many cookbooks on the shelves that have never been used for cooking (White Trash Cooking and Practically Macrobiotic immediately come to mind). One of my goals for the next few years is to try and cook at least one recipe from each of my books (this will also be excellent fodder for the blog).

But that misses one of the major points of owning cookbooks. Other collectors nod vigorously in agreement when I explain that only part of the pleasure comes from cooking from the books—much of the pleasure also comes from simply reading them. I know plenty of people like myself who can get into bed with a cookbook and read it as if it were a novel. You always learn something from the book, and it always inspires you to cook—even if it’s not a recipe from the book you’re actually reading.

And:

What’s your favorite cookbook?

Well, that would be like asking me which child is my favorite. (Note to daughters: you know what the answer would be.) As with many other things in life, it all depends on the mood and the timing. Am I preparing a dinner party for six? Do I need a great chocolate cake recipe? Am I decorating cookies for an event and need some inspiration? Or do I just feel like leafing through an old favorite, which is akin to slipping into a comfy sweater? There is no right answer. Or, as my daughter Sofy says when asked what her favorite color is, I don’t have a favorite because that would be unfair to all the others.

So yes, I admit that I have an obsession but again, it’s an obsession that serves a purpose. You need a good, tried-and-true recipe for profiteroles/poached salmon/banana bread/beet salad with goat cheese/chicken cacciatore? Come on over—I’m sure I can help.

In the beginning...

IN THE BEGINNING...

My love affair with food started early—at ten days old, to be exact. That was when my mother (who claims that she was, at age 21, “too young and stupid” to know any better) fed me solid (baby) food. So I guess I caught on early, and the affair has been the love of a lifetime.

I don’t think I was ever a fussy eater, though there were a few foods that I refused to eat at different times in my life. The only thing that I absolutely refused to eat as a child was cooked carrots—probably because my mom, like 1960’s mothers everywhere, served canned carrots, and I still wouldn’t want to eat those today, though I would eat carrots prepared virtually any other way. I also went through a period when I didn’t join my family in Sunday-night Chinese food feasts, probably because the gluey texture and bland flavor of Long Island-style Cantonese did nothing for my taste buds. My taste for Chinese didn’t really blossom until the first Szechuan restaurant opened in our area, and then I was hooked.

How many kids would order a plate of sauteed chicken livers and onions at a restaurant? I did. How many kids ask for a Winnie-the-Pooh-shaped cake pan for Hanukkah? I did. There may have been other kids who eagerly anticipated their fathers’ arrival at the end of the work day when the fathers came with boxes of Hershey’s Golden Almond Bars. Like many other suburban Jewish kids, I looked forward to Sunday morning breakfasts of bagels, lox, and cream cheese, though the real treat was the chocolates my parents purchased at the appetizing store--especially the chocolate-covered marshmallows with a layer of caramel on the bottom.

My interest in baking also started early, with the aforementioned cake pan (and yes, I did make cakes with that pan). Naturally I had an Easy-Bake oven, though eventually I graduated to using the tiny cake pans to make cakes in a “real” (toaster) oven. I also spent hours poring over my mother’s copy of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, which was loaded with color photographs of cookies of every kind. I would study the photos and the recipes and imagine how very wonderful it would be to make each and every recipe.

But I think I really caught the baking bug when I went on a class trip to the Wonder Bread factory. I was about nine years old at the time, and I can still remember the incredible aroma of a factory full of baking bread. We were given paper hats to wear in the factory and at the end of the tour we were each rewarded with a single Hostess cupcake. To top it all off, my teacher then distributed recipes for bread, which I was desperate to make at home.

Fast forward many years, to my young adulthood in New York City. I did what all college graduates living in New York did—I got a job in an office, first in a music management firm, then in the publicity department of a publishing house, a career I pursued for nearly eighteen years. All the while I baked—for family and friends, for co-workers, and once in a great while, for someone who would actually pay me to bake something for them. I collected cookbooks by the dozen and subscribed to food magazines. I even obtained, through a book search company, a nearly-new copy of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, and reveled in the idea that I could bake every cookie in that book if I desired, now that I was a grown-up with my own kitchen. I took a wedding-cake weekend workshop and made my brother’s wedding cake, to much applause.

I got married and had two daughters, and I loved baking elaborate cakes for their birthday parties—think Sponge Bob, Scooby-Doo and the Powerpuff Girls. It was never a bother to bake cupcakes for their classroom parties or bake sales—I looked for excuses to bake. And while I was sitting at my desk talking to authors and producers and editors, I kep thinking, “How can I go from this to baking for a living?”

My transition, when it happened, is the stuff of fairy tales to the ears of those who have always wanted to switch careers. My co-worker Dawn was a fellow baker, and she and I would have long discussions about our craft. She left publishing and worked for a woman named Marie who had a baking business in her apartment, mostly making elaborately decorated cookies for various clients. Dawn and I would occasionally get together for lunch, I would hear about how much she loved her baking job and her boss, and I would think, “If only I could get a job like that!”

Eventually I did get a job like that—with Dawn, at Marie’s apartment. They were looking for help for the holiday season and I was looking for a new food-related career. And from that moment on, as they say, I have never looked back.

It’s been a wonderful six years since I made the leap from publishing to pastry. I have worked for bakeries, caterers, and a school (more on these later) and have also taught cooking and baking, both in classrooms and privately. I have baked wedding cakes, birthday cakes, and decorated cookies for nearly every holiday and occasion you can think of. And even though baking is now my “job,” I still love it as much as ever. For me, a good time means pulling out the butter and eggs and sugar and chocolate and trying a new recipe, or visiting an old favorite, at my home for family and friends. Baking makes people happy—the people who eat the results are always happy, but so are the people who do the baking.

So why start this blog now? These days it seems to be the next, required step in one’s career, particularly in freelance-type work where it makes sense to have a way to connect to others with similar interests. I hope to make contact with lots of other people who love to bake, cook, eat, and talk about baking, cooking and eating. I’d like to share my thoughts about food with a wider audience and I look forward to hearing back from those of you who are moved to respond to my writings.

So, welcome to my blog...happy cooking/baking/eating...while I dream up the topic for my next entry!

Sherri aka Cakegirl