Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  You can see why it is not hard not to cook, in New York.

  I love to cook. I’ve always loved to cook. Like walking, cooking relaxes me. I often cook when I am not writing. Before I started my last novel I decided to make a chickpea curry. I was a late adaptor to online shopping, but over time, I have developed quite a degree of expertise. It took me less than two minutes to find the perfect chickpeas. The Palouse Brand chickpeas, or garbanzo beans, as they are also called, came with a great pedigree.

  The five-pound bags of chickpeas were hand-filled and came in hand-sewn burlap bags. The bags looked upliftingly rural. These chickpeas were also ‘Identity Preserved’. I found that notion irresistible. What this meant was that each bag came with a barcode you could scan with your smart phone to identify the exact field in which the chickpeas were grown.

  This was a bonus. I’d never seen a field of chickpeas. The barcode apparently also told you the precise date on which the chickpeas were harvested, which is like knowing each chickpea’s date of birth, as well as where the chickpeas were washed.

  Online you could also see what sort of neighbours the chickpeas had grown up with. Although I am not very good at reading maps, these chickpeas looked as though they had grown up in a mixed neighbourhood. Green split peas and Spanish brown lentils seemed to be living close by.

  Altogether, that is quite a lot of intimate information to know about a chickpea. Knowledge of the provenance and genealogy of food is becoming more and more common. We possibly now know more about our food than we know about each other.

  I ordered two five-pound bags of chickpeas. I was quite excited about meeting my chickpeas. By email I was told that the chickpeas would arrive in two days. I went out to buy the rest of the ingredients I needed for my chickpea curry, although part of me felt a little inhumane at the thought of cooking these carefully brought-up legumes.

  I walked to Chinatown to buy onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes. I buy most of my vegetables in Chinatown. I love shopping there. I do most of my Chinatown shopping on Grand Street between the Bowery and Allen Street and, lower down, on East Broadway. There is so much intensity and so much life in every street. There are hardly ever any tourists.

  I bought my Indian spices at Dual, on First Avenue, in the East Village. It is my favourite spice store in New York. I bought cumin, coriander, cardamom, turmeric, fenugreek, red chillies and cinnamon. I felt very well prepared.

  The chickpeas arrived. They really did look beautiful. Each chickpea was a creamy sort of colour and perfectly formed. They were also large. They looked wholesome and healthy. I started preparing for the curry. Just as when I write, I like to be organised when I cook. I put all the spices out on the kitchen bench and soaked the chickpeas in the two large pots in which I intended to cook them. And felt happy.

  Overnight, everything changed. The raw chickpeas, which had looked like a manageable portion, had swollen. I had two very large pots filled with chickpeas. Any more chickpeas and they would have popped out of the pots. I felt daunted.

  If I had been less enamoured of the chickpeas’ history and family tree and if I had read less about the chickpeas’ bathing habits, I might have read some of the practical information that was also available. I would have then known that after they have been soaked, chickpeas grow to two-and-a-half times their original size. I had cooked chickpeas before, but it was a long time ago. I had clearly forgotten what happened with they were soaked.

  My ten pounds of virginal uncooked chickpeas now looked semi-threatening and capable of taking over the whole kitchen. The two pots felt as though they weighed about fifty pounds each. I rushed out to Chinatown to buy some more onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes.

  ‘You have a restaurant?’ the woman who sold me the extra onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  This conversation was clearly going nowhere. I said goodbye with an almost forced cheerfulness and walked home. I felt flat. And stupid. Who in their right mind would buy ten pounds of uncooked chickpeas?

  I cooked the chickpea curry in two enormous saucepans. The sort of saucepans used in restaurants that serve hundreds of people. I do not want to even try to explain why I possess saucepans this size.

  Each saucepan was filled to the brim. I had to cook the curry very slowly in order to even get it to a simmer and I had to stir it constantly. This was becoming a far less pleasurable enterprise than I had anticipated.

  By the end of the day, I was still stirring what felt like a thousand pounds of chickpea curry. And feeling even more stupid. In mid-stir, I remembered a high-school essay my younger daughter had written when we had first arrived in New York, twenty-five years ago. She was thirteen. The first line of her essay was ‘My mother has never been able to cook in normal portions.’ Further on in the essay, she was still on the same theme. ‘My mother thinks it is normal to own two large freezers and think she needs another one.’ She went on to list the trials and tribulations of having a mother who preserved large quantities of fruits and vegetables and made her children chop them when other children were out having fun. I remember laughing when I first read the lines. I was not laughing now.

  I was thinking about the seemingly endless day about fifteen years ago when I made 240 meatballs. It is surprisingly hard work to make 240 meatballs in one day. For a start, you need to have a lot of surface space. By the middle of the day I had covered every surface in my apartment with plastic wrap and raw meatballs.

  Why was I making 240 meatballs? My husband had swapped a piece of his artwork for meat from a meat wholesaler in the Meatpacking District. For a large work on paper we got a discomfiting amount of veal and beef, which my husband had carried home on his shoulders. It looked as though he was hauling home three-quarters of a wildebeest. I had to do something with the meat. Hence the meatballs.

  By about eight p.m. on the day of the chickpea marathon, the chickpea curry was done. I filled sixty-three plastic containers with chickpea curry. Luckily, I still owned two freezers, one of which was squeezed into my laundry.

  Well over a year later, I still have about thirty-six containers of chickpea curry in my freezer. I think I could safely say that not a lot of New Yorkers have thirty-six containers of chickpea curry in their freezer. Maybe there are also even some meatballs.

  It dawned on me one day that I really am very Jewish. I don’t know why this was such a surprise. I know, and have always known, that I am Jewish. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that just how Jewish I am really hit me.

  What made me see how Jewish I am? Many things. Firstly, I cook too much food. Way too much food. The first time my new literary agent came to my place for dinner, I served an enormous platter of seafood and pasta. There were pounds of scallops and shrimp and mussels and sea bass on this platter.

  My literary agent and her husband are both slim. They don’t look like big eaters. The volume of food shocked even me. What was I thinking, I thought to myself. I didn’t have an answer. There was enough food on the table to feed at least twelve people. Twelve hungry people.

  It is a very Jewish thing to cook too much food. I don’t know any Jews who serve small meals. I have cooked two twenty-six-pound turkeys for a Thanksgiving meal for eight. My excuse was that I thought ten people were coming.

  I also worry. Worrying is one of the prerequisites for being Jewish. I worry about everything. I worry about my husband, my children, my friends, my neighbours. I worry about the weather and the effect of the weather on my hair. I worry about missing buses or trains or the beginning of a play or concert. I worry about being late. For everything. I worry about this even though I don’t think I have ever been late for anything in my life. This is not a proud admission. I envy people who have the ability to be late. I am embarrassed about my need to be punctual. ‘I am pathologically punctual,’ I say in a rather pathetic way to pe
ople who know that I will have arrived anywhere that we have arranged to meet, early. My husband jokes that the only way I could relax and not worry about being late would be to arrive wherever I am going a day early. I don’t find that funny. I do worry about so many things. I may have been able to understand quantum physics or complex algebraic equations if I hadn’t expended so much time worrying.

  I have been known to check the New York itineraries and schedules of friends who have stayed with us to make sure that they will get to where they are going on time. I pointed out to a friend who funds a hospital in Uganda and an orphanage in Nepal as well as looking after the investment of large amounts of money for other people, that she had not allowed enough time to get from point A to point B on one day of her short stay. It would be New York taxi changeover time, I explained, and taxis could be quite scarce. I booked a car to pick her up from point A. I think she could still be laughing about this.

  My favourite Jewish joke, and the only one I can ever remember, is the Jewish telegram. It reads, ‘Start worrying. Details to follow.’

  Another piece of evidence that I am very Jewish is that I am shameless in the way I manage to mention that my son is a doctor. I can slip that piece of information seamlessly into any conversation. Especially in conversation with other doctors. I don’t think I have ever had a doctor’s appointment without mentioning, within minutes of my arrival, that my son is also a doctor. My son is now the medical director of two departments of the teaching hospital where he works. No obstacle can prevent me from adding this information to the conversation. I surprise even myself by the frequency with which statements about my doctor son leave my lips. In my relatively quiet way, I fit the stereotype of every caricature of the Jewish mother. ‘My son the doctor’ is a line that has been used in thousands of Jewish mother jokes.

  Years ago I saw a series of Jewish mother cartoons in a book called French for Mrs. Katz. The drawings were accompanied by text in English and French. I howled with laughter as I was reading them. After about twenty minutes, I ached, I was laughing so hard. None of the mothers illustrated looked happy. The captions said things like, ‘Of course I worry, I’m your mother.’ ‘But, who am I to complain? I’m only your mother.’ ‘Some day when you’re a mother you’ll understand.’ ‘Eat, darling, eat.’ ‘When you leave, I’ll stick my head in the oven.’ ‘You can have ten husbands in a lifetime but you can only have one mother.’

  I was howling with recognition. In French, they sounded even funnier.

  There are other qualities apart from my mothering that make me very Jewish. I am not athletic. I think I can safely say that most Jews I know are not athletic. They are not constantly running off for a game of tennis or a ten-mile jog. They are much more likely to be sitting or standing somewhere, talking. We talk a lot.

  I definitely talk a lot. I over-explain everything. Especially when I lie. There is no detail too small for me to argue about. There is also no decision too menial for me to have less than a dozen possible options. It is not a pretty picture. And it doesn’t get any better.

  I am easily bothered. Things that go entirely unnoticed by my husband can bother me for days. My husband says that if I had been born in Emily Brontë’s time, I would have written not Wuthering Heights but Bothering Heights. I don’t think Bothering Heights would have done as well.

  Yiddish, the language of Jews, is full of complaints. I used to think that I complained a lot. Until my dentist, who is also Jewish, told me I was very uncomplaining. Maybe that is just as a dental patient. I don’t think you could say that about me as a wife.

  My husband is not a complainer. He never complains. He can feel sick or have not slept all night and he won’t say a word about it. I have to pry complaints out of him.

  I like people who complain. There is something comforting about knowing what’s wrong with other people’s lives. I also just like knowing about other people’s lives.

  I also like to know the details of illness. All illnesses. I collect medical symptoms in the way that other people accumulate knowledge about algorithms or other languages. I read the side effects of all medication. These side effects are often written in miniscule print and I have to find a magnifying glass.

  The four most common over-the-counter drugs in America are all painkillers. Between them they can cause liver damage, ulcers, elevated blood pressure, kidney disease, heartburn, dizziness, bloating and constipation. I don’t know why I need to know this. I don’t take a lot of painkillers. As for prescription drugs, it is sometimes a mistake to read their side effects because often the side effects sound worse than whatever you are trying to treat – and can make you feel terrible about what can go wrong with your body.

  In Yiddish there are hundreds of ways to express how you feel. None of them has a hint of cheerfulness. Here are some Yiddish words. Farblondjet: mixed up; fardrayt: dizzy, confused; farmisht: shook up; fartummelt: befuddled.

  ‘Oy, yoy,’ is a Yiddish exclamation of sorrow and lamentation. I say ‘Oy, yoy, yoy’ several times a day. I say it when I am tired. When I am cold. When I am hot. When I am frazzled. It is a very useful, all-purpose expression. I was a little worried, though, when I heard my daughter’s small son walking around the house saying ‘Oy, yoy yoy.’ He was attending a Jewish kindergarten at the time.

  Yiddish is also very good for curses. ‘May you run to the toilet every three minutes or every three months’ is one of my favourites.

  In the 1930s Yiddish was spoken by more than ten million people. By 1945, seventy-five percent of them were dead.

  New York is a very Jewish city. In New York, Yiddish words are used by Jews and non-Jews. Yiddish has been used in New York politics for over a hundred years. In 1922 Fiorello La Guardia, an Episcopalian who went on to become the ninety-ninth mayor of New York, was re-elected to Congress after he rebutted accusations of anti-Semitism by challenging his rival to debate in Yiddish. La Guardia, who had an Italian-Catholic father and an Italian-Jewish mother, was fluent in Yiddish. His Jewish rival was not.

  I sometimes show my father YouTube videos of old Yiddish songs. A few weeks ago, we sang ‘Oy, Mottel Mottel’ together. ‘Oy, Mottel Mottel’ is about a young student called Mottel who is not very studious. The lyrics, translated, mean ‘Mottel, Mottel, what is going to become of you? The rabbi says you are refusing to learn.’ It then goes on to describe how Mottel is doing nothing much with his life. It is particularly poignant when I sing it with my father, as neither of us can sing. There is not a bright note in ‘Oy, Mottel Mottel’. I don’t mind. I’m wary of too much cheerfulness.

  Americans tend to be very cheerful. Americans greet everyone cheerfully. This can be very wearing. My orthopedic surgeon’s nurse rang me the day after I had shoulder surgery. ‘How are you?’ she said brightly.

  ‘Not great,’ I said. I was trussed up in a giant contraption to hold my shoulder in position and was also in considerable pain.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, sounding very surprised. I felt bad. I felt I should have had a more cheerful answer.

  Unlike Americans, Russians are not known for their excessively cheerful dispositions. Alina Simone, a Russian-American author and singer, wrote a piece in the New York Times about the Russian response to the question ‘How are you?’ Americans, she said, answered the question with ‘Fine.’ When Russians hear this answer, she explained, ‘They think one of two things: (1 ) you’ve been granted a heavenly reprieve from the wearisome grind that all but defines the human condition and as a result are experiencing a rare and sublime moment of fineness or (2) you are lying.’ Russians would answer the question, she added, with ‘a blunt pronouncement of dissatisfaction punctuated by, say, the details of any recent digestive troubles’.

  I sent the article to my friend Jack Schwartz, a professor of journalism. He emailed me to explain that while Russians have to respond to the stimulus of ‘How are you?’, the Jews dispense with such extraneous necessities and provide the answer without need of the question.

&nbs
p; I also sent the article to a Russian friend who lives in Australia. She is a wonderful and enormously successful woman. She made no mention of the article in the subsequent email I received from her. ‘My stress levels are enormous and I sometimes think I’ve spent most of my life bathed in adrenaline,’ she wrote. She also mentioned that she was seeing a kinesiologist and a reiki therapist to try to sort things out. And that she wouldn’t, at the moment, go into any detail about the state of her pancreas but would save that for another time. As soon as I began to read her email, I started laughing.

  I often laugh. Mostly at myself. Most Jews do. Laugh at themselves, I mean, not laugh at me. I get my sense of humour from my father. He has a great sense of humour. When he laughs, he laughs so hard he almost cries. Often, like a child, he can’t stop laughing. This worries me as at his age, overly prolonged laughter could be harmful.

  Recently I told my father that I had called a cheap, local car service, Delancey, to pick me up, as it was pouring with rain and I needed to get to an appointment. I wasn’t wearing my glasses when I dialled and had inadvertently called my dentist at home and asked if I could be picked up in SoHo as soon as possible. ‘I wish I could,’ my dentist said, ‘but I live in Queens.’ I spent the next ten minutes apologising to my dentist for calling him at home.

  My father laughed so hard when I told him the story that he could barely breathe. When he finally stopped he said, ‘Lucky you didn’t ring the car service and ask them to fix your teeth.’ And started laughing all over again.

  Yakub, who repairs shoes in the back of a nondescript dry-cleaning store in Sullivan Street, can repair any pair of shoes. Again and again. Looked after by Yakub, your shoes will have an active life long after you are gone. Really. Ask any of his customers. They use words like ‘magical’ and ‘genius’ and, as an afterthought, ‘inexpensive’ or ‘cheap’.