Secret Ingredients (62 page)

A SANDWICH

NORA EPHRON

T
he hot pastrami sandwich served at Langer’s Delicatessen in downtown Los Angeles is the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world. This is not just my opinion, although most people who know about Langer’s will simply say it’s the finest hot pastrami sandwich in Los Angeles because they don’t dare to claim that something like a hot pastrami sandwich could possibly be the best version of itself in a city where until recently you couldn’t get anything resembling a New York bagel, and the only reason you can get one now is that New York bagels have deteriorated.

Langer’s is a medium-sized place—it seats 135 people—and it is decorated, although “decorated” is probably not the word that applies, in tufted brown vinyl. The view out the windows is of the intersection of Seventh and Alvarado and the bright-red-and-yellow signage of a Hispanic neighborhood—bodegas, check-cashing storefronts, and pawnshops. Just down the block is a spot notorious for being the place to go in L.A. if you need a fake ID. The Rampart division’s main police station, the headquarters of the city’s second-most-recent police scandal, is a mile away. Even in 1947, when Langer’s opened, the neighborhood was not an obvious place for an old-style Jewish delicatessen, but in the early 1990s things got worse. Gangs moved in. The crime rate rose. The Langers—the founder, Al, now eighty-nine, and his son Norm, fifty-seven—were forced to cut the number of employees, close the restaurant nights and Sundays, and put coin-operated locks on the restroom doors. The opening of the Los Angeles subway system—one of its stops is half a block from the restaurant—has helped business slightly, as has the option of having your sandwich brought out to your car. But Langer’s always seems to be just barely hanging on. If it were in New York, it would be a shrine, with lines around the block and tour buses standing double-parked outside. Pilgrims would come—as they do, for example, to Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City and Sonny Bryan’s in Dallas—and they would report on their conversion. But in Los Angeles a surprising number of people don’t even know about Langer’s, and many of those who do wouldn’t be caught dead at the corner of Seventh and Alvarado, even though it’s not a particularly dangerous intersection during daytime hours.

Pastrami, I should point out for the uninitiated, is made from a cut of beef that is brined like corned beef, coated with pepper and an assortment of spices, and then smoked. It is characterized by two things. The first is that it is not something anyone’s mother whips up and serves at home; it’s strictly restaurant fare, and it’s served exclusively as a sandwich, usually on Russian rye bread with mustard. The second crucial thing about pastrami is that it is almost never good. In fact, it usually tastes like a bunch of smoked rubber bands.

The Langers buy their pastrami from a supplier in Burbank. “When we get it, it’s edible,” Norm Langer says, “but it’s like eating a racquetball. It’s hard as a rock. What do we do with it? What makes us such wizards? The average delicatessen will take this piece of meat and put it into a steamer for thirty to forty-five minutes and warm it. But you’ve still got a hard piece of rubber. You haven’t broken down the tissues. You haven’t made it tender. We take that same piece of pastrami, put it into our steamer, and steam it for almost three hours. It will shrink 25 to 30 percent, but it’s now tender—so tender it can’t be sliced thin in a machine because it will fall apart. It has to be hand-sliced.”

So: tender and hand-sliced. That’s half the secret of the Langer’s sandwich. The other secret is the bread. The bread is hot. Years ago, in the 1930s, Al Langer owned a delicatessen in Palm Springs, and, because there were no Jewish bakers in the vicinity, he was forced to bus in the rye bread. “I was serving day-old bread,” Al Langer says, “so I put it into the oven to make it fresher. Hot crispy bread. Juicy soft pastrami. How can you lose?”

Today, Langer’s buys its rye bread from a bakery called Fred’s, on South Robertson, which bakes it on bricks until it’s ten minutes from being done. Langer’s bakes the loaf the rest of the way, before slicing it hot for sandwiches. The rye bread, faintly sour, perfumed with caraway seeds, lightly dusted with cornmeal, is as good as any rye bread on the planet, and Langer’s puts about seven ounces of pastrami on it, the proper proportion of meat to bread. The resulting sandwich, slathered with Gulden’s mustard, is an exquisite combination of textures and tastes. It’s soft but crispy, tender but chewy, peppery but sour, smoky but tangy. It’s a symphony orchestra, different instruments brought together to play one perfect chord. It costs eight-fifty and is, in short, a work of art.

2002

SEA URCHIN

CHANG-RAE LEE

J
uly 1980. I’m about to turn fifteen and our family is in Seoul, the first time since we left, twelve years earlier. I don’t know if it’s different. My parents can’t really say. They just repeat the equivalent of “How in the world?” whenever we venture into another part of the city, or meet one of their old friends. “Look at that—how in the world?” “This hot spell, yes, yes—how in the world?” My younger sister is very quiet in the astounding heat. We all are. It’s the first time I notice how I stink. You can’t help smelling like everything else. And in the heat everything smells of ferment and rot and rankness. In my grandfather’s old neighborhood, where the two-and three-room houses stand barely head-high, the smell is staggering. “What’s that?” I ask. My cousin says, “Shit.”

“Shit? What shit?”

“Yours,” he says, laughing. “Mine.”

On the wide streets near the city center, there are student demonstrations; my cousin says they’re a response to a massacre of citizens by the military down south in Kwangju. After the riot troops clear the avenues, the air is laden with tear gas—“spicy,” in the idiom. Whenever we’re in a taxi moving through there, I open the window and stick out my tongue, trying to taste the poison, the human repellent. My mother wonders what’s wrong with me.

I don’t know what’s wrong. Or maybe I do. I’m bored. Maybe I’m craving a girl. I can’t help staring at them, the ones clearing dishes in their parents’ eateries, the uniformed schoolgirls walking hand in hand, the slim young women who work in the Lotte department store, smelling of fried kimchi and L’Air du Temps. They’re all stunning to me, even with their bad teeth. I let myself drift near them, hoping for the scantest touch.

But there’s nothing. I’m too obviously desperate, utterly hopeless. Instead, it seems, I can eat. I’ve always liked food, but now I’m bent on trying everything. As it is, the days are made up of meals, formal and impromptu, meals between meals and within meals; the streets are a continuous outdoor buffet of braised crabs, cold buckwheat noodles, shaved ice with sweet red beans on top. In Itaewon, the district near the United States Army base, where you can get anything you want, culinary or otherwise, we stop at a seafood stand for dinner. Basically, it’s a tent diner, a long bar with stools, a camp stove and fish tank behind the proprietor, an elderly woman with a low, hoarse voice. The roof is a stretch of blue poly-tarp. My father is excited; it’s like the old days. He wants raw fish, but my mother shakes her head. I can see why: in plastic bins of speckled, bloody ice sit semi-alive cockles, abalones, eels, conches, sea cucumbers, porgies, shrimps. “Get something fried,” she tells him, not caring what the woman might think. “Get something cooked.”

A young couple sitting at the end of the bar order live octopus. The old woman nods and hooks one in the tank. It’s fairly small, the size of a hand. She lays it on a board and quickly slices off the head with her cleaver. She chops the tentacles and gathers them up onto a plate, dressing them with sesame oil and a spicy bean sauce. “You have to be careful,” my father whispers, “or one of the suction cups can stick inside your throat. You could die.” The lovers blithely feed each other the sectioned tentacles, taking sips of
soju
in between. My mother immediately orders a scallion-and-seafood pancake for us, then a spicy cod-head stew; my father murmurs that he still wants something live, fresh. I point to a bin and say that’s what I want—those split spiny spheres, like cracked-open meteorites, their rusty centers layered with shiny crenellations. I bend down and smell them, and my eyes almost water from the intense ocean tang. “They’re sea urchins,” the woman says to my father. “He won’t like them.” My mother is telling my father he’s crazy, that I’ll get sick from food poisoning, but he nods to the woman, and she picks up a half and cuts out the soft flesh.

What does it taste like? I’m not sure, because I’ve never had anything like it. All I know is that it tastes alive, something alive at the undragged bottom of the sea; it tastes the way flesh would taste if flesh were a mineral. And I’m half gagging, though still chewing; it’s as if I had another tongue in my mouth, this blind, self-satisfied creature. That night I throw up, my mother scolding us, my father chuckling through his concern. The next day, my uncles joke that they’ll take me out for some more, and the suggestion is enough to make me retch again.

But a week later I’m better, and I go back by myself. The woman is there, and so are the sea urchins, glistening in the hot sun. “I know what you want,” she says. I sit, my mouth slick with anticipation and revulsion, not yet knowing why.

2002

“If you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

AS THE FRENCH DO

JANET MALCOLM

With the left hand, hold an asparagus upright in the heart of an artichoke while a wall of the sauce is built around it with the right hand.

—The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook

H
ow can a sauce be a wall? Why does Toklas swerve from the hortatory to the passive in midsentence? To answer these questions, it is necessary to cook the dish called Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, which Toklas offers as an example of French haute cuisine on pages 11 to 12 of her cookbook. It was, she tells us, one of the courses in a nine-course lunch for sixteen at a fashionable French home to which she and Gertrude Stein had been invited, and which included Aspic de Foie Gras, Salmon Sauce Hollandaise, Hare à la Royale, Pheasants Roasted with Truffles, Lobster à la Française, Singapore Ice Cream, cheese, and fruit.

“It does not take as long as it sounds to prepare this dish,” Toklas writes of Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy, and she is right. The recipe is actually harder to read than the dish is to prepare. There are so many steps that one cannot take them in; one’s eyes glaze over, one’s thoughts wander. However, shopping for the ingredients (which Toklas doesn’t list—you just bump into them as you read) refocuses the mind. The ingredients are: artichokes, asparagus, lemons, cardamom seeds, sweetbreads, shallots, coriander seeds, butter, flour, dry champagne, and bread crumbs.

You cook the artichokes in water to which lemon juice, cardamom seeds, and salt have been added, and then remove the leaves and put them aside. They are not part of the dish. (“The leaves can be scraped with a silver spoon and mixed with a little cream to be used in an omelette or under mirrored eggs,” Toklas writes, trying to be helpful, but only adding to the forbidding length of the recipe.) Then you boil the asparagus until it is just tender, and cut each spear “within 2 inches of the tip.”

Earlier, you have started to deal with the sweetbreads. Toklas says to soak them in cold water for an hour; boil them for twenty minutes with salt, shallots, coriander seeds; plunge them into cold water; “remove tubes and skin” (very messy); and, finally, put them through a strainer with a potato masher. I found that unworkable and made a mush of them in the Cuisinart. Next, you sauté the sweetbread mush in butter, and add flour and then champagne. “Cook gently until this sauce becomes stiff.”

And now comes the improbable (and, as it proved, impossible) building of the wall of sauce. Toklas’s wobbly sentence clearly expresses the anxiety of the moment and subtly enacts the disparity between what the two hands are doing: the left hand confidently clutching the asparagus spear, the right hand helplessly plastering its base with the sauce, which no amount of cooking can make into the cementlike substance needed to hold the spear upright when the left hand releases it. The recipe called for twelve artichoke hearts. I cooked six, and six times failed to keep the asparagus from drooping miserably into the pool of sauce gathering in and messily spilling out of the artichoke heart. There was no way to make the dish presentable.

Well, was it good? No. The champagne (two cups of it), and a final browning with buttered bread crumbs, muddied the delicate taste of the sweetbread, and the asparagus and artichoke hearts similarly had no reason for being together—they canceled out each other’s virtue. Nor could you taste the cardamom and coriander seeds. The dish took about two hours to prepare, three minutes to serve to game friends, who politely pushed it around on their plates, and ten seconds to throw out.

But the first time I cooked from
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook,
in 1954, the year of its publication, when it was given to me for my birthday by an arty friend, was to quite different effect. Seven years had yet to pass before the appearance of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking,
and, like most people living in pre-Julia America, I had never eaten real French food. Thus, when I took my first bite of the coq au vin I had made from Toklas’s recipe, on page 149, I could hardly credit my senses. I was stunned by the suave deliciousness of what I had produced. In all my life, I had never eaten anything of such complex and rich, and yet clear and pure, flavor. It was a moment of astonished rapture, one that I will never forget.

When I decided to cook the dish again recently, I doubted that the moment would be repeated. In 2002, Americans no longer need to be told, as Toklas told us with great condescension in 1954, that “the French never add Tabasco, ketchup or Worcestershire sauce, nor do they eat any of innumerable kinds of pickles, nor do they accompany a meat course with radishes, olives or salted nuts…. To cook as the French do one must respect the quality and flavor of the ingredients.” (When I first read these words, I was properly awed by them. I had not yet made Hearts of Artichokes à la Isman Bavaldy.)

But Toklas’s coq au vin—or Cock in Wine, as she called it for the sake of her radish-eating American readers—remains wonderful. The combination of fowl, pork lardoons, butter, carrots, shallots, onions, wine, brandy, and mushrooms is as felicitous as the combination of artichokes, asparagus, and sweetbread mush is ridiculous. It differs in one respect from the usual coq-au-vin recipe: Toklas uses white wine instead of red for the sauce, and I, for one, think this is a good idea. But in either manifestation coq au vin remains one of the glories of French bourgeois cuisine. The butter and pork fat aren’t good for the heart, but the dish is good for the soul.

Below, I reprint Toklas’s appealingly short recipe—its brevity and the ordinariness of the ingredients were what attracted me to it in 1954—followed by a sort of hovering Jewish mother’s version for use in 2002.

COCK IN WINE NO. 1

Cut a young cock or a young chicken in serving pieces. In an enamel-lined pot melt 3 tablespoons butter, add
³
/4 cup diced side fat of pork, 6 small onions, 4 shallots and 1 medium-sized carrot cut in thin slices. Brown these in butter. Remove and place pieces of chicken in pot and brown over high heat. Add salt, pepper and 2 cloves of crushed garlic. Remove the browned pork fat, onions, shallots and carrot. Heat 3 tablespoons brandy, light and pour into pot. Sprinkle 3/4 tablespoon flour into the pot. Stir with a wooden spoon for 2 or 3 minutes, then add 1 cup fresh mushrooms and 1 cup hot good dry white wine. Increase heat, add pork fat and vegetables. Cook uncovered for
¹
/4 hour. Serve very hot.

COCK IN WINE NO. 2

Buy four pieces of chicken and as small a slab of pork fat or bacon as you can find. Fill a cup to the
³
/4 mark with pork fat you have diced into small pieces. Heat 1 tablespoon butter in a heavy enameled or stainless casserole, and sauté the pork pieces until brown. Remove to a side dish. Add another tablespoon of butter to the pot (if needed) and sauté 12 small white onions, 8 large quartered shallots, and 4 sliced carrots until lightly browned. Remove and add to the side dish with two cloves of crushed garlic. Rub chicken pieces with salt and pepper, and brown over medium-high flame in the fat left in pot; then remove. Pour 3 tablespoons brandy into pot and light. When flames subside, add
³
/4 tablespoon of flour and stir with a wooden spoon for about a minute over very low heat. Add one and a half to two cups dry white wine, then return chicken and vegetables and pork pieces to the pot. Cook covered over low heat for half an hour or until the chicken is properly done. While the chicken is cooking, sauté 4 or 5 sliced mushrooms in 1 tablespoon butter over high heat. Add them to the pot in the last five minutes of cooking. Taste the sauce—it will probably need salt. Serve with boiled new potatoes.

2002

“I’ll have the barbecued half-pounder, with all the ramifications.”