Sopped in Cream.Finally, this little extravagance—“Cream Toast”—from Janet McKenzie Hill’sPractical Cooking and Serving (1902):
Prepare four slices of toast; dust with salt and pour over 1½ cups of cream heated to 160—F for 15 minutes. With cheese: Sprinkle hot toasted bread with grated [Cheddar], and set in the oven until the cheese melts; pour over hot cream, and serve at once. A beaten egg may be added to the cream.
CINNAMON TOAST
Elisheva S. Urbas
When Avital, my three-year-old, wants nothing else for breakfast, she will happily eat cinnamon toast. I have made hundreds of slices over the past months, but increasingly more of them are for myself, to eat at my desk while she’s in nursery school. I vividly remember my own very first slice of cinnamon toast, offered as a snack by the mother of a boy I had a crush on in my kindergarten class, and my description of this memory was what persuaded my daughter that it was, at least, worth trying. But now she’ll eat it anytime (as long as I cut the crusts off, to be sure, but there’s only so much one can hope for before one’s child’s fourth birthday).
Cinnamon toast is a treat because, of course, it is covered with cinnamon and sugar. But it is, as Avital says, “a treat that is food,” meaning that I don’t need to feel guilty about giving it to my children for breakfast, because it is at its best made with whole-wheat bread. Unlike French toast, whose fluffiness is best complemented by eggy challah, or the French schoolchild’s snack where chocolate is laid into bread of strongly contrasting whiteness, cinnamon toast is supposed to tastebrown. After some experimentation we have all found our favorite to be the same presliced whole-wheat loaf we buy in the health food store for sending peanut butter sandwiches to school. It is not a distinguished bread, but one with some wheaty flavor and no fake-food taste.
Here’s how we make it. First, toast your bread to just a bit lighter than you normally would your plain toast. In my case that is pretty dark and crunchy, whereas Avital likes hers, as she says, “more tender,” meaning barely warmed and staled.Chacun à son goût. When your toast is ready, spread it immediately with butter. How thickly you spread it is up to your taste, but be sure to cover the whole surface, right up to the edges of the crust, with at least a light layer.
Next, sprinkle cinnamon and sugar surprisingly heavily over the entire buttered surface. This does not take very much of either. When Avital and I began making cinnamon toast last year, we first shook cinnamon from the spice jar onto the bread, then stood the bread up and tapped it so that the excess cinnamon in some spots fell and spread to cover others. Then I half-filled a teaspoon from the sugar jar and sprinkled it lightly—but again thoroughly—over the whole slice, as Avital said, “just like snow.”
This is easy but slightly fussy, and eventually, when I realized I was doing this twice a day, I invested $1.49 at my local housewares store in a spice-jar-sized shaker, which has speeded up the process. Mix the cinnamon and sugar up well, remembering that a teaspoon of the former is enough for a shakerful of the latter, and you can thereafter shake the two together over the whole slice with no tapping, spooning, et cetera.
Then it’s back into the toaster oven. Most recipes I’ve seen assume you’ll do the first part in a pop-up toaster and the second under the broiler, which is what you really need to melt the sugar into a glaze with the butter and cinnamon. However, using a toaster oven at home, I’ve found that if the bread is slightly undertoasted the first time through, you can just put it back to toast on the lightest setting and the final result will be perfect.
The melted sugar is wickedly hot when it first hits the plate, and the toast itself still melted-butter soft, but within moments it will have cooled into a crisp slice of toast that has died and gone to heaven. Avital likes hers in quarters, no crust. Her baby sister, Ronit, still working with toothless gums, needs hers cut into tiny pieces. But I wait until they’re all out of the house and eat mine with strong black coffee.
HOW RESTAURANTS MEAN
What are we looking for when we go out to eat? I don’t mean when necessity forces a pit stop for a quick bite; I mean when we head for a restaurant with no other expectation but pleasure. If the answer to this question seems entirely self-evident … consider.
Matt and I drive miles and miles through the darkness of the Canadian woods to a restaurant in a tiny hamlet in the middle of New Brunswick where we have a reservation for supper. When we arrive, the place is so dark and silent that, instead of just walking in, we ring the doorbell. The door is opened by a very young woman—the owner-chef’s daughter, she later tells us—who ushers us to a table in a dining room about the size of a spare bedroom. Ours is the only table in it. A menu, short but appealing, is written out on a chalkboard.
Shortly thereafter, in the ghostly quiet, we hear thepad-pad-pad of footsteps as the young woman comes to take our order. We give it to her—we have already decided that we drove too far through too much wilderness to back out now (fleeis actually the word in our minds)—and listen to thepad-pad-pad of her footsteps as she heads back down the hall to the kitchen. Then … silence. No voices, no sounds of cooking, nothing. The stillness is finally broken by a somehow familiar but not quite placeableping. A moment later, we hear thepad-pad-pad again and our appetizers arrive, along with a carafe of the house red (this turns out to be Carlo Rossi Burgundy, a name forever after associated with this evening).
We begin to eat. Again, the retreating footsteps, the total silence in the kitchen, followed by that telltaleping. Now it dawns on me where I have heard this noise before. “Matt,” I whisper, “it’s a microwave oven.There’s no one here but her and us. ” We look at each other and then at the chalkboard menu, which our server has left propped up on its little stand. All the dishes—soups, appetizers, and entrées (including the lamb stew Provençale that we have both ordered)—however otherwise various, either require no cooking (smoked salmon) or can go straight from freezer to microwave.
The cook our restaurant guidebook had so lavishly praised had indeed made the meal we were eating, but she’d prepared it—and dozens of others exactly like it—days ago. Matt and I are nothing more than two strangers eating in her empty house. We drive back to our hotel in an unsettled state, feeling, if not swindled, at least betrayed.
When we think of restaurants, we think of food. We go to them because we like to eat, and there are certain dishes that only taste good—or taste good in a way that can’t be reproduced at home—when we eat them in a restaurant. But saying that restaurants are about food is like saying a job is about money: it’s the reason we’re there, yes, but that says nothing about the work we have chosen to do or the salary that we end up earning. When we first set out to look for a job, we encounter powerful, unarticulated forces that push us in one direction and keep us, even against our will, from heading in another, whatever our dreams or ambitions.
The same with restaurants. This is why most of us have favorite places that would not fare all that well in a serious restaurant review, and why when we do decide to treat ourselves to dinner at a four-star restaurant, we are—at least secretly—somewhat disappointed. You can’t just turn up—least of all at those places—and expect to have a good time. Restaurants give us something more than food, and that means they ask for something more than money in return.
Two books have recently been published that cast an illuminating light on the mysterious intimacy between restaurants and those who eat there: Robert Cornfield’sLundy’s—Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant and Frank Pellegrino’sRao’s Cookbook—over 100 Years of Italian Home Cooking. Both books not only tell a fascinating story but, even more interestingly, manage to make reading about the experience of eating in these places almost as compelling as it was—and, at least in one instance, still is—to the actual customers.
LUNDY’S
This happened in the late sixties: my date and I had ordered the famous Shore Dinner. My lobster was served to me, but it wasn’t cracked well enoug
h to get at the meat of the body and claws. We called the waiter over and explained the problem to him. He took my lobster, wrapped it in my dinner napkin, and smashed it against the nearest wall. He returned to our table, unwrapped my dinner, placed it on my plate, and said, “How’s that, lady?” That was the essence of Lundy’s.
— Lydia Greenblatt16
Lundy’s is the sort of restaurant that can generate longing in those who never ate there (or, for that matter, have never in their lives been to Brooklyn) simply because it evokes such a powerful burst of nostalgia in those who did. This is important: if Lundy’s story were told without their testimony, it would hold your complete attention, to be sure, but you wouldn’t understand why anyone ever patronized the place.
The restaurant’s owner was Irving Lundy, born into a family of oystermen who lived in Sheepshead Bay, then a lively and attractive stretch of Brooklyn’s southern shorefront. His first seafood restaurant, which he opened in 1926 at the age of thirty, was a shack built on the Lundy family pier. But Irving was ambitious, for both himself and his restaurant, and—thanks to income from bootlegging during Prohibition and a windfall from public shoreline redevelopment—he was able to purchase a choice piece of waterfront property. There he built, in the then-fashionable Spanish Mission style, what might without exaggeration be called the Lundydrome: a stucco-covered two-story leviathan topped with a red tile roof. It could accommodate 850 diners on the first floor and as many on the second, where you could sit on a veranda with a panoramic view of Manhattan Beach across the bay.
Such a restaurant could be only one of two things: a dismal failure or a spectacular success. For decades, even during the Depression, Lundy’s was the latter, mobbed on summer weekends, serving ten thousand meals on a typical Mother’s Day, and, indeed, usually so crammed with noisy families that, as one patron remembers, “The roar of thousands of conversations all but pushed the new arrival back onto the avenue.”
If the customer were truly new, he or she would encounter something much more unusual for a restaurant that size than noise: Lundy’s had no one assigning seating. It was all catch-as-catch-can, with newcomers scouting the enormous dining hall for tables where the patrons had reached the stage of dessert and coffee, then surrounding that table—both to encourage its occupants to finish up and to discourage anyone else from even thinking they could claim it.
Knowledgeable customers would scan the room for anyone they knew who had a table, then pull up a chair and join them, while their families stood in the background, waiting for the signal that the table was about to be theirs. Then they would fight through the crowd to their seats, dodging waiters bearing huge trays—called Big Berthas—heaped with food and crockery, and busboys struggling to clear away the remains of the last meal and reset the table.
The moment everybody had settled in, someone at the table would start calling out for one of Lundy’s specialties—the heaping basket (or, as some describe it, the towering pyramid) of fresh-baked biscuits, which arrived at the table still hot enough to melt a pat of butter instantly. The appearance of these was a matter of great anticipation—an anticipation charged with an undercurrent of anxiety. To get your biscuits you first had to get the attention of your waiter, which in Lundy’s hectic atmosphere was almost as challenging as claiming a table.
The waiters, all black, all male, all dressed in a special Lundy’s uniform, which at one time included mint-green jackets and tan pants with a pink stripe down the side, were brusque, efficient, imposing, and extremely busy.17It paid to get to know one and stay in his good graces, or else to bring a pack of cards and play gin rummy while waiting for your meal. It wasn’t until you got your waiter to bring that first batch of biscuits that you could be really sure your meal at Lundy’s had begun.
It’s almost impossible to reconcile the image that seaside eating places usually summon—the white tablecloths set flapping by the cooling ocean breeze, the mingled aromas of salty sea air and boiling lobsters—with the claustral pandemonium that was Lundy’s. Indeed, everything about the place seemed wrong: there was no air conditioning (it was so hot in the summer that waiters had to change their jackets seven or eight times during their shift), and there was such a clamor that the only way to carry on a conversation was to shout. So shout you did. But mostly you ate … and then, with new arrivals literally breathing down the back of your neck, you got out.
The food, you think, must have been terrific.
Certainly this is how those who ate there remember it. “I believe the fried onion rings were the most delicious I ever had.” “The pumpkin pie … could not be duplicated.” “My father would always start with a wonderful lump crabmeat cocktail.” “The thick, golden-brown Manhattan clam chowder … was delicious.” “Lundy’s was the only restaurant that could broil a lobster without drying it out.” “Lundy’s always had the best clams.”
Most of all, people remember those biscuits. “The hot biscuits on the table were a family favorite.” “Food: the biscuits were to die for!” “Those biscuits were unequaled anywhere on this planet.” “I could hardly wait for the little warm muffins to come out.” People recall smelling them the moment they came through the door, the number of baskets their family would eat, and how they filled their pockets with them, only to discover that they were never as good the next day.
The particular intensity with which these biscuits are remembered provides us with an unexpected insight into what eating at Lundy’s was all about. The people who ate there were immigrants and the children of immigrants. To them, baking-powder biscuits were something new, an emblem of America and American food. They were hot; they were tasty; they were rich; they soaked up melted butter; they were free. You could eat all you wanted of them and nobody cared. It was almost like finding gold bricks lying around on the streets.
Patrons look back on the menu selection as vast, but in truth it was rather limited. Fish was served broiled, fried, or made into chowder. Shellfish could be had the same ways, or pan-roasted or on the half-shell. Shrimp, crab, and lobster meat could be eaten as a salad, in a Newburg, or au gratin. Those who didn’t care for seafood could order steak, ground steak, or lamb chops. Potatoes in various forms were the standard accompaniment; vegetables were few; dessert was ice cream, pie à la mode, or watermelon.
However, for those who ate there, these offerings seemed more than sufficient. Lundy’s was democratic in the best sense of the word: it was inclusive, affordable, and pleasurable, and the menu was easy to understand. Remembering his own childhood as part of an immigrant family, Jerry Della Femina writes inAn Italian Grows in Brooklyn,
We didn’t go to restaurants, because we thought we’d be made fun of. Maybe we wouldn’t be able to read the menu and the waiter would laugh at us.
The Della Femina family would have felt at ease at Lundy’s. There, such customers were made to feel not like bumpkins but like real Americans. Instead of the foods they had at home—pasta and tomato sauce, chicken soup with matzo balls, boiled beef and cabbage—they dined on huge boiled lobsters, thick slabs of steak, hot buttered biscuits, fat wedges of blueberry pie, all served by a black waiter … a waiter, that is, who might intimidate but never patronize them.
On the contrary, because of their race, these were waiters with whom Lundy’s customers could feel quite comfortable—perhaps even discern a certain commonality. This, in turn, prompted generosity. Customers prided themselves on leaving big tips and not only remembering their waiter’s name but buying him drinks, giving his children snowsuits at Christmas, and referring to him as a family friend—none of which would have been true had the waiter been white, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon.
What Lundy’s did was turn the immigrant’s struggle to become American into a kind of game—even better, into the kind of game where everyone wins. Everything was part of it: the restaurant building itself, with its grandiose size and ostentatious design; the roar of confusion as newcomers plunged into unfamiliar chaos and found themselves pushed aside by
the aggressive hustle of everyone else.
Wasn’t this exactly like their first encounter with the streets of New York? No one had told them anything; they had had to pay attention, watch how others succeeded, in order to figure out how they could, too. Learning the ropes at Lundy’s—finding the order in the chaos and then summoning the brazenness to claim a table and thus join the feast—transformed what in real life often had a bitter edge into something wholly sweet. No wonder patrons delighted in playing that same game over and over again.
None of this, of course, was what Irving Lundy had in mind when he started his restaurant; little of it is articulated by those who share their reminiscences of eating there. But this is what made the place a success, and it also meant that the more acclimatized the customers became to America, the less eating at Lundy’s would provide that old familiar thrill. Lundy’s began to falter as the decades passed; Irving was now too old to change it and too loyal to his customers not to keep it running, at an ever-increasing loss, until his death in 1977. Soon thereafter, Lundy’s closed its doors.
But it refused to die. Through the efforts of former patrons, the building was declared a historic landmark in 1991, keeping it safe from destruction. In 1995, it reopened under new management: same name, same Shore Dinner, same hot biscuits. Cornfield writes:
The old-timers return, driving from Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut…. Many begin to cry when they remember what the old days were like. Lundy’s stands for vanished youth, family bonds, happier times. Before patrons order, they ask for the manager, Steve Gattulo, to show him where their table was in the old days, to talk of clams thirty cents a dozen, to recall the waiter who was their friend.
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