in the ICE kitchen; bread mod
As we travel through our days and years we find there are common threads among us and, we attach ourselves to characters who share various loves and winsome urges to make things, be they simple or grand, the origins of which are written perhaps in the very DNA sent to us from some powerful, knowing energy and meant to urge us to express them onto the unsuspecting but appreciative landscape…….
at home
The often-rapid procession of bakery openings and closings in NYC is no secret to anyone who is familiar with the City landscape. Further, it is no mystery, that if your passion is baking, how difficult it is to keep your dream alive in the form of that can’t-escape-it-ever Accounting 101 concept “going concern”. Often, after I finished pastry school, and for decades before actually, I sat with pencil and paper in hand and tried to calculate how many scones, cakes and pies I’d have to sell each day to cover rent. My mind’s eye traveled along the thread of favorite childhood bakeries I had known while I did this, never underestimating the respect I had for the people who chose this vocation and knowing the odds, still pursued making a living at it. My exercise was always a most frustrating experience, as I could never get even close to getting to the equilibrium point of possible output and cost-covering. And yet, some people can do it, even in this day and age of astronomical rents in New York. They, it goes without saying, are truly wonders.
image courtesy soutine.com
This week, three events melded into my mind, illustrating once again, the formidable depth that is my devotion. First, Ralph Gardner published an article in the Wall Street Journal about a particular rolling thread of bakeries on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In it, he discussed the phenomenon of potential extinction of recipes and the soulful person who endeavors to prevent this. This sentiment so immediately struck me that I sent off a letter to him within minutes. In it I re-opened my vast treasure trove of memories of bakeries that struck me so strongly in my early youth that they are among the foundational and formative elements of my life. That may sound somewhat overstated and possibly even cheeky, but, I assure you it is not. In fact, as I look back, I see that there are a handful of memories so poignant and so striking that I can’t stop thinking about them, even in my advancing decades. What is so powerful to me now is that I can still see myself in each and every one of those spots, a young girl marveling in awe as I peer into the bakery cases and resoundingly try to hold tight to the cement in my mind’s eye, of the faces of the bakers and the offerings of their labor, creativity, love – and product.
in the ICE kitchen during our bread mod
Then later in the week, a friend mentioned with admiration if not all-out glee, that she had been so lucky as to step into the classroom of my bread instructor at ICE, Mr. Sim Cass. This struck me again as her remarks stood recall to a stroke of luck so meaningful for me, it took little more than that to get me to inhale deeply and recognize the seeds, continuing to sew, of my life thread. That classroom time in the hands of such a talent was earmarking to say the least. Along with the wry sense of humor and oft-seen glimpses and saunter of apparent nonchalance, came the eagle eye and razor-like insight of a man who meant business, bread business. That I got to study at the knee of and in his tutelage was brain-changing. At one moment when he perhaps doubted my commitment to the endeavor, he seized upon me with questions, in front of the entire class, to challenge my knowledge of the precise characteristics of starter formations. Lucky for me, they came forth and I escaped the wrath of a teacher who couldn’t be more serious about his bread and wouldn’t waste his time in the suffering of fools. There was a respect exchange moment there that I will never forget. That I had this man unroll my croissants and carefully and determinedly show me over and over how to do it properly was the stroke of luck of star-aligning time and place.
The third event of the week was finding and reflecting upon an article about the incomparable Sylvia Weinstock, a home-taught baker who has keenly woven herself into the halls of infamy when it comes to wedding cakes. Here is the culmination of interest, skill, determination and love at its pinnacle, and where decades of dedication and devotion have paid-off, and big time . Here is a woman who, when most have folded up their tent, perhaps decades earlier, and headed hinder and yon to the mind-numbing outreaches of “retirement communities”, continues to expand her mark and daily, bakes specialty cakes for the most demanding of customers anywhere. This is where the risk of messing up is too high for those with anything but nerves of steel. Here the unit cost to income ratio seems most palpable, and yet this does not seem to be the endgame at all. Here is a woman whose example I seek as in the ageless pursuer of single-minded passion and perfection – someone I look for in the landscape of past-middle-age surgers and pursuers without regard to time and limits. Remarkable, unique, irreplaceable. http://www.timesofisrael.com/at-86-nys-queen-of-cakes-still-sits-sweetly-on-her-throne/
That I continue to keep these memories as the hallmark of my travels today and tend to judge a place, in such a deep and instinctive, piercing and unempathetic way, that it feels like some born-to mission, is no mistake. I could step upon a plane every morning and pursue the need to, as I like to say, ogle pastries. Who, anyway, doesn’t want to sit outside in the Piazza della Repubblica – Firenze, in the early morning, with a plate of sfogliatelle, apricot jam and honey with a cup of coffee, the morning paper and the sun shining, as a means of beginning the most awesome of days? I don’t know, I can hardly think of anything better.
And so, as I think back at my studies and formative experiences over the years, I scan in my head a multitude of snippets in time. There are the sketching, painting, clothes designing, poetry-writing, and gardening moments that stick there. But, what are burned into my old brain are the doorways of bakeries, some so long ago that there is hardly a memory left in posterity of them.
Born among images of my Grandmother’s kitchen, that I so miss, with it’s timeless aluminum-legged, formica-topped table and counters, a large and bright kitchen that I hold dear, there lies behind it, my Mom’s tiny space of workability and not without expansive output. When we stepped out to buy baked goods we went to Danzinger’s in Morristown (the mocha cake) and to my all-time favorite, the French Pastry Shop on Washington Street. That was the quintessential after-church event that perhaps first drew me in in the most indelible way. There, in the lingering darkness of deep Winter mornings, we were greeted by the cardigan-clad Frenchwoman with her salt and pepper hair wound in a twist. Once in awhile her husband, the baker, would poke his head out of the back to nod a brief greeting. The aromas and the quality of their coffee cakes, laden with nuts, frangipane and the lightest touch of glazes were incomparable. No other spot has touched me as this. It was possibly 1964. Well, I have written about this in a few other posts on this blog and have spent hours at the Morristown Library trying to track down any mention of the place, with barely a result. How sad that the tangible memory of this place has to exist only in the minds of those who were lucky enough to know it.
Another of most indelible places was the Charleston Garden Bakery at B. Altman and Co in Short Hills. There, in my late adolescence and early teens, I met the most unique of creations, the bakery offering I have never been able to know again or recreate, the infamous honey loaf. The time – perhaps 1967. Offered via wafting waves out the door and in, in dark and light selections, this loaf of bread sealed with a crust of an oven-dried honey coating was the supreme love of my youth. That I could never find the recipe or baker after the store closed by hounding the Altman’s archives, writing to Gourmet in the 70s or serendipitously coming upon a colleague of the baker’s decades later in Bloomingdales one day continues to haunt me. Perhaps it is this degree of loss, this deep and instinctive appreciation for the creation of goodies, so inextricably intertwined with my youthful innocence and wonder, instilled in me a life-long fascination of and yearning for, the magical place that is the small-scale, single proprietor bakery.
Decades later I still cull out and drag anyone who’s with me along to step in and peer at bakery cases, near and far. There is no other as-magical-assault-to-senses moment for me than that combination of aroma, sight and hello to those who do this daily. I have done it in many a city and small town and will continue through my days to embrace, not just these people who remain committed to their craft and love, but who, of course, continue to hold unto none other that moment when you bite down into that irreplaceable crunch of the sfogliatelle.
Who but the ingenious of often paltry resources could have created such magnificence with the likes of flour, water and sometimes a little off-sourced fat, I ask myself often? These ingredients can be wound, coddled, and otherwise invented into the most endearing of forms, not just to feast upon with the eye and nose, but with the palate – offering such a simple and yet magical experience that they have endured through time and remain stuck, like a briar in your sweater, in the most random, but lucky, of idiosyncratic minds such as mine.
No more simple cookie than my Grandmother’s Taralli, or that fragrance of baking frangipane, or those crisp butter cookies from Polåine will ever match some grocery-cum-factory-made substitution for the gift that is a hand made pastry. Yes, many an Italian baker must learn to turn out those sfogliatelle in a quick and efficient manner and yes, these are labor-intensive little swaddles of dough that must have the hand of an expert. But, they are worth every single bit of skill and investment in exchange for the gratitude of the senses for me.
What winds these thoughts together? Will I ever quench the thirst to see and inhale these people and these experiences? I certainly hope not. And, what gives me perhaps the most extreme pleasure of all is to recognize along some psychic timeline, those who share a somewhat inexplicable passion for the grand coalescence that is basic pastry and baking. All at once it is simple and complex. But it is never successful in the hands of the uninspired and uncommitted. This is the difference between work and artfulness. This is the difference between relative indifference and being drawn by understanding of what is in your own soul. That I love all the people whose threads have interwoven with mine is no misunderstanding of circumstances. That I continue on my own little quest to visit and remember as many as I can remains my singular goal – and I can’t thank them and the existence of pure serendipity and outright fate enough.