I realize now, of course, that I gave up too easily. Sure, I stopped by to try the pumpernickel anytime I heard of a promising new bagel bakery—even if it was uptown, a part of the city I don’t venture to unnecessarily. But I didn’t make a systematic search. How was I to know that bagels can be instrumental in keeping families intact? This time, I was going to be thorough. I had read in Molly O’Neill’s New York Cook Book about a place in Queens where bagels were made in the old-fashioned way. I figured that there must be similar places in Brooklyn neighborhoods with a large population of Orthodox Jews—Williamsburg, maybe, or Borough Park. I was prepared to go to the outer boroughs. But I thought it made sense to start back on Houston Street.
The area where Abigail and Sarah and I used to make our Sunday rounds has seen some changes over the years. The old tenement streets used to seem grim. Now they sport patches of raffish chic. On Orchard Street, around the corner from our Sunday-morning purveyors, stores that have traditionally offered bargains on fabrics and women’s clothing and leather goods are punctuated by the sort of clothing store that has a rack of design magazines and a coffee bar and such a spare display of garments that you might think you’re in the studio apartment of someone who has bizarre taste in cocktail dresses and no closet to keep them in. These days, the Lower East Side is a late-night destination—both Orchard and Ludlow have bars too hip to require a sign—and a cool place to live. After spending years listening to customers tell him that he ought to move Russ & Daughters uptown, Mark Federman, the son of one of the daughters, is renovating the apartments above the store and expressing gratitude that his grandfather held on to the building.
Ben’s Dairy has closed, and Moishe’s Bakery has moved to a tiny place around the corner. But Russ & Daughters has been carefully preserved to look pretty much the way it did when the founder himself still had his arms deep in the herring barrel. I figured Mark might have some information I could use, and he was bound to be sympathetic to the project: his daughter, Niki, recently graduated from college and moved to San Francisco. “Do you think Niki might come back, too, if we found the bagels?” I asked, as Mark and I edged ourselves into the tiny office he shares with his wife, Maria.
“I don’t think she’d come back for bagels,” he said. “Maybe for an apartment upstairs.”
Maria shook her head. “I already offered,” she said.
Mark said that he knew precisely the bagel I was talking about, but that he had no idea where to find it. He phoned his mother, who’s retired, in Florida. “Do you remember when Tanenbaum next door used to have this sort of gnarly—” he began, and then started to laugh. “Not an old woman,” he said. “I’m asking about bagels.” Apparently, his mother remembered the gnarly old woman quite well. Not the bagels.
Although Russ & Daughters carries bagels these days, Mark insisted that he didn’t have the expertise to be much help in tracing a particular baker; locating an obscure source of belly lox would have been more his line of country. Still, he made a couple of calls, including one to Mosha’s Bread, a wholesale operation in Williamsburg, which has been turning out pumpernickel since the late nineteenth century. (Mosha’s Bread, it almost goes without saying, has no connection with Moishe’s Bakery.) As I was about to leave Russ’s, the boss of Mosha’s, who turned out to be a woman named Cecile Erde Farkas, returned Mark’s call. Mark introduced himself, and before he could explain my quest he began to sound like someone on the receiving end of a sales pitch. “To tell you the truth, I don’t sell much bread,” I heard him say, and then, “Here’s what I could use—a good babka. I could sell the hell out of a good babka…plain, yeah, and chocolate.”
There was a message on my answering machine that evening from Mark. He had reached a friend of his named Danny Scheinin, who ran Kossar’s, a distinguished purveyor of bialys, for decades before selling out a year or two ago. “Danny says he thinks Tanenbaum got that bagel from somebody named Poznanski,” Mark said when I got back to him. “Also, he says it wasn’t a real bagel.”
“Not a real bagel!”
“I don’t know exactly what he means,” Mark said. “Talk to him.”
When I reached Scheinin, I found out that what he’d meant was this: In the old days, there was a sharp split between bagel bakeries and bread bakeries. The bagel bakers had their own local, No. 338. They didn’t bake bread and bread bakers didn’t make bagels. Originally, of course, bagels were made only with white flour. But some bread bakers who trafficked in pumpernickel would twist some bread dough into bagel shapes and bake them. By not going through the intermediate boiling that is part of the process of making an authentic bagel, they stayed out of another local’s jurisdiction. Scheinin was confident that Abigail’s bagel had been made that way for Tanenbaum’s by a bread baker named Sam Poznanski, in Williamsburg, who died some years ago. As far as Scheinin knew, the bakery still existed, under the management of Poznanski’s wife. He gave me the number. “Tell her Danny from the bialys said to call,” he told me.
Mrs. Poznanski, I have to say, did not seem terribly engaged by my quest. The longest answer she gave was when I asked her if Poznanski’s had quit making the pumpernickel bagel when her husband died, and she said, “No. Before.” Still, she confirmed that the object of Abigail’s adoration was from Poznanski’s and that it was not boiled. This was hard news to take. It sounded perilously close to saying that the bagel we were searching for was just round bread. But what bread!
The bread/bagel split was confirmed by Herb Bostick, a business agent of Local 3 of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union, which by now has absorbed No. 338 into a local that mixes bagel bakers and bread bakers and cake bakers together the way someone faced with baking a pie at the last minute might mix in bits of whatever kinds of flour happened to be in the cupboard. What Bostick said was in line with what I’d learned from Cecile Farkas, of Mosha’s, with whom I’d arranged a meeting after her babka pitch to Mark. She’d told me that for years her late father offered pumpernickel bagels that were baked without being boiled first. “Then they weren’t real bagels?” I’d said.
“If my daddy called them bagels they were bagels,” Mrs. Farkas said.
I hadn’t had to journey to the outer boroughs to see Cecile Farkas. By chance, she was doing a bread promotion at a store on Twenty-third Street. She turned out to be a chatty woman in her sixties, who told me that she had joined Mosha’s only when her father became elderly; she’d been trained as an electrical engineer. That didn’t surprise me. Mark Federman had been a lawyer. A family business is no respecter of degrees. Mrs. Farkas told me that her own daughter, having earned her master’s in career counseling, plans to launch Mosha’s West. Would Mosha’s West be a few blocks closer to Manhattan than the original Mosha’s? No. Her daughter lives in San Francisco. Cecile Farkas said that with only a few hours’ notice, Mosha’s could duplicate the sort of bagel Abigail craves. “It would be my pleasure,” she said.
“If that happens and Abigail moves back to New York, you would have done a mitzvah,” I said. “It would be written next to your name in the Book of Life.”
Mrs. Farkas shrugged off any thought of reward. “It would be my pleasure,” she repeated. I had recognized her as a person of character the moment she’d told me that whatever her daddy said was a bagel was a bagel.
I tried to present the situation to Alice in an objective way: “I suppose you think that if Mosha’s really did succeed in duplicating the bagel and I told Abigail that it was readily available in the neighborhood and I didn’t trouble her with the really quite arcane information that it’s not, technically speaking, a bagel, I would be acting completely contrary to everything we tried to teach her about honesty and integrity.”
“Yes,” Alice said.
“I thought you might.”
She’s right, of course. I know that. Lately, though, it has occurred to me that there were areas I left unexplored in my conversation with Mrs. Poznanski. It’s true that she expressed no interest w
hatsoever in bagels, but what if I got Mark Federman to agree to carry those little pumpernickel numbers—not instead of Mrs. Farkas’s babkas, I hasten to say, but in addition to Mrs. Farkas’s babkas. Would the Russ & Daughters account be enough to propel Poznanski’s back into the bagel business? This is assuming, of course, that Sam Poznanski’s recipe still exists. All in all, it’s a long shot. Still, I’m thinking of making a trip to Williamsburg. What could it hurt?
2000
A RAT IN MY SOUP
PETER HESSLER
“Do you want a big rat or a small rat?” the waitress asked.
I was getting used to making difficult decisions in Luogang, a small village in southern China’s Guangdong province. I’d come here on a whim, having heard that Luogang had a famous restaurant that specialized in the preparation of rats. Upon arrival, however, I discovered that there were two celebrated restaurants—the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City. They were next door to each other, and they had virtually identical bamboo-and-wood décors. Moreover, their owners were both named Zhong—but then everybody in Luogang seemed to be named Zhong. The two Zhongs were not related, and competition between them was keen. As a foreign journalist, I’d been cajoled to such an extent that, in an effort to please both Zhongs, I agreed to eat two lunches, one at each restaurant.
The waitress at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, who was also named Zhong (in Chinese, it means “bell”), asked again, “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?”
“What’s the difference?” I said.
“The big rats eat grass stems, and the small ones eat fruit.”
I tried a more direct tack. “Which tastes better?”
“Both of them taste good.”
“Which do you recommend?”
“Either one.”
I glanced at the table next to mine. Two parents, a grandmother, and a little boy were having lunch. The boy was gnawing on a rat drumstick. I couldn’t tell if the drumstick had belonged to a big rat or a small rat. The boy ate quickly. It was a warm afternoon. The sun was shining. I made my decision. “Small rat,” I said.
The Chinese say that people in Guangdong will eat anything. Besides rat, a customer at the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant can order turtledove, fox, cat, python, and an assortment of strange-looking local animals whose names do not translate into English. All of them are kept live in pens at the back of the restaurant and are killed only when a customer orders one of them. Choosing among them involves considerations beyond flavor or texture. You order cat not just because you enjoy the taste of cat but because cats are said to impart a lively jingshen (spirit). You eat deer penis to improve virility. Snakes make you stronger. And rat? “It keeps you from going bald,” Zhong Shaocong, the daughter of the owner of the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, told me. Zhong Qing jiang, the owner of the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City, went further. “If you have white hair and eat rat regularly, it will turn black,” she said. “And if you’re going bald and you eat rat every day, your hair will stop falling out. A lot of the parents around here feed rat to a small child who doesn’t have much hair, and the hair grows better.”
Earlier this year, Luogang opened a “restaurant street” in the newly developed Luogang Economic Open Zone, a parkland and restaurant district designed to draw visitors from nearby Guangzhou city. The government invested $1,200,000 in the project, which enabled the two rat restaurants to move from their old, cramped quarters in a local park into new, greatly expanded spaces—about 1,800 square feet for each establishment. The Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, which cost $42,000 to build, opened in early March. Six days later, the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City opened, on an investment of $54,000. A third restaurant—a massive, air-conditioned facility, which is expected to cost $72,000—will open soon. A fourth is in the planning stages.
On the morning of my initiation into rat cuisine, I visited the construction site of the third facility, whose owner, Deng Ximing, was the only local restaurateur not named Zhong. He was married to a Zhong, however, and he had the fast-talking confidence of a successful entrepreneur. I also noticed that he had a good head of hair. He spoke of the village’s culinary tradition with pride. “It’s more than a thousand years old,” he said. “And it’s always been rats from the mountains—we’re not eating city rats. The mountain rats are clean, because up there they aren’t eating anything dirty. Mostly, they eat fruit—oranges, plums, jackfruit. People from the government hygiene department have been here to examine the rats. They took them to the laboratory and checked them out thoroughly to see if they had any diseases, and they found nothing. Not even the slightest problem.”
Luogang’s restaurant street has been a resounding success. Newspapers and television stations have reported extensively on the benefits of the local specialty, and an increasing number of customers are making the half-hour trip from Guangzhou city. Both the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant and the New Eight Sceneries Wild Flavor Food City serve, on average, three thousand rats every Saturday and Sunday, which are the peak dining days. “Many people come from faraway places,” Zhong Qing jiang told me. “They come from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macao. One customer came all the way from America with her son. They were visiting relatives in Luogang, and the family brought them here to eat. She said you couldn’t find this kind of food in America.”
In America, needless to say, you would be hard-pressed to find twelve thousand fruit-fed rats anywhere on any weekend, but this isn’t a problem in Luogang. On my first morning in the village, I watched dozens of peasants come down from the hills, looking to get a piece of the rat business. They came on mopeds, on bicycles, and on foot. All of them carried burlap sacks of squirming rats that had been trapped on their farms.
“Last year, I sold my oranges for fifteen cents a pound,” a farmer named Zhong Senji told me. “But this year the price has dropped to less than ten cents.” Like many other peasants, Zhong decided that he could do a lot better with rats. Today, he had nine rats in his sack. When the sack was put on a scale in the rear of the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, it shook and squeaked. It weighed in at just under three pounds, and Zhong received the equivalent in yuan of $1.45 per pound, for a total of $3.87. In Luogang, rats are more expensive than pork or chicken. A pound of rat costs nearly twice as much as a pound of beef.
At the Highest Ranking Wild Flavor Restaurant, I began with a dish called Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans. There were plenty of other options on the menu—among them, Mountain Rat Soup, Steamed Mountain Rat, Simmered Mountain Rat, Roasted Mountain Rat, Mountain Rat Curry, and Spicy and Salty Mountain Rat—but the waitress had enthusiastically recommended the Simmered Mountain Rat with Black Beans, which arrived in a clay pot.
I ate the beans first. They tasted fine. I poked at the rat meat. It was clearly well done, and it was attractively garnished with onions, leeks, and ginger. Nestled in a light sauce were skinny rat thighs, short strips of rat flank, and delicate, toylike rat ribs. I started with a thigh, put a chunk of it into my mouth, and reached for a glass of beer. The beer helped.
The restaurant’s owner, Zhong Dieqin, came over and sat down. “What do you think?” she asked.
“I think it tastes good.”
“You know it’s good for your health.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“It’s good for your hair and skin,” she said. “It’s also good for your kidneys.”
Earlier that morning, I’d met a peasant who told me that my brown hair might turn black if I ate enough rat. Then he thought for a moment and said that he wasn’t certain if eating rat had the same effect on foreigners that it did on the Chinese—it might do something entirely different to me. The possibility seemed to interest him a great deal.
Zhong Dieqin watched me intently. “Are you sure you like it?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, tentatively. In fact, it wasn’t ba
d. The meat was lean and white, without a hint of gaminess. Gradually, my squeamishness faded, and I tried to decide what, exactly, the flavor of rat reminded me of. But nothing came to mind. It simply tasted like rat.
After a while, Zhong Dieqin excused herself, and the waitress drifted away. A young man came over and identified himself as the restaurant’s assistant manager. He wanted to know whether I had come to Luogang specifically to report on the restaurants. I said that I had. “Did you register with the government before you came here?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too much trouble.”
“You should have done that—those are the rules,” he said. There was a wariness in his voice, which I recognized as part of a syndrome that is pervasive throughout China: Fear of a Foreign Writer.
“I don’t think the government cares very much if I write about restaurants,” I said.
“They could help you,” he said. “They would give you statistics and arrange interviews.”
“I can find my own interviews. And if I registered with the government I would have to take all of the government officials out to lunch.” A scene appeared in my mind: a gaggle of Communist cadres, middle-aged men in cheap suits, all of them eating rat. I put my chopsticks down.
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