Two cent lunch

I've lost track of how many lunches I have consumed, oblivious at my desk, sandwich in left hand to free my right for the mouse. Lunch is mostly fuel in a working life: nuked leftovers, a pound of takeout swathed in petrochemicals, drive-thru cardiac incidents. It wasn't always so; somewhere I lost the knack for leisure, the rest and playfulness and companionship that once divided the day.

Not that I was ever a cafe caballero, lingering over latte and pondering Proust. What I miss is--somebody help me--the elementary school cafeteria. The simplest of fare--brown bag, white bread, gooey peanut butter, purple jelly--milk in a glass bottle, carrot sticks in wax paper, raisins in a cardboard box. And the company of two hundred other yammering children. One guy at my table would eat his sandwich down to the shape of a flipped "bird," for the benefit of his recess rivals. Another would squish the whole thing into his mouth at once, roll it into a glutinous ball and display it on extended tongue. I forget why. Carrot sticks can double as Dracula fangs. A California raisins box, once empty, makes a dandy kazoo. The uses of a milk straw are too numerous to mention, and the lunch bag itself can be inflated and exploded immediately behind a girl carrying a full tray of spaghetti and meatballs.

It's the greening grass that brings it all to mind, and the memory of milk--two cents for a half-pint bottle, stoppered with a cardboard tab. One day each year it would become transformed from funky white liquid into pure ambrosia, when the local dairyman switched from hay to pasture. You could see the Holstein it came from out the cafeteria window. If you had a good arm, you could hit it with a dried chip from the edge of the schoolyard.

Three Bowls

There had been much talk lately about the so-called "hundred mile diet"--living primarily or completely on foods grown and prepared within 100 miles of where you live. Economy looks very different when one of the factors in the bottom line is "Do I know who grew this? Do I know who made this?"

Lately, my wife and I have been getting a lot of use out of three bowls, survivors of a set of four thrown and fired more than 30 years ago in the house where we lived with our potter friend, Annie. Any vessel would do to keep the soup from our lap, but the feel and the history and the look of these particular bowls add to the savor of anything contained within. The profile is a simple unbroken curve of high-fired stoneware with a milk-white crackled glaze. Each is decorated with a few seemingly offhand brush strokes that suggest a cobalt flower with translucent leaves. And each has an elegant bulb handle, itself a tiny separately-thrown pot, half closed at the top, with its foot smoothly mated to the curve of the body. The notch is a perfect fit for the thumb web when the bowl is cradled in the palm to feel the warmth within. They are not identical as machine ware, but are meticulously consistent, in the way a quality crafter demonstrates focus and integrity.

They were made as gifts for my mother-in-law, and returned to our hutch on her death a few years back. So whenever I use one now, I think of Annie, and I remember my mother-in-law, Betty, as I turn it slowly in my hand to admire. What would we own and what would we pass over, if this was the standard toward which our desires aspired?

Lean Regime

We would all have been living long since in communal Utopia, I am convinced, were it possible to share a kitchen without friction. As things stand, Middle East peace seems to be a less ambitious goal than kitchen comity. I have been through many schemes in a long career of communal home and work kitchens, each fine in theory, each, uhh--suboptimal in execution. There was the short-lived Procrustean democracy of seventies socialist living: from each, regardless of talent; to each, because it’s Thursday. Fasting also came into vogue about then, as I recall.

Work kitchens seem to cycle though a number of states, from Spartan disuse to competitive group force-feeding. But in all these states, domestic tranquility founders on the rock of cleaning up. It is a law of nature that at least one user will scatter food litter with the casual aplomb of a giraffe browsing the treetops, and another will always be just about to wash the dishes he/she left to soak in the sink. There will always be ancient mystery food in the fridge, waiting for someone to have the courage to pop the lid before the gases of decomposition do the job for him. These issues have once again led to an ardent round of station email, and to yet another ingenious peace plan--anything dirty will be disappeared. The Junta Plan, I call it. The kitchen, now containing many fewer items, does indeed look cleaner. But the day is not far off, I fear, when I will be stirring sugar into a mayonnaise jar full of coffee with a plastic fork.

Modest fare

It may just be my nicotine-withdrawal munchies, but the topic of food seems to be everywhere lately: Hidden Kitchens specials, the steady stream of food book stories and recipes, the Very Special Places series that has highlighted traditional diners, ice cream and hot dog stands. Also, my lunch hour is approaching soon, but not soon enough.

One lack I have noticed in the food discussion so far has been tavern fare. Time was when beer was considered an essential part of a balanced lunch. In Potsdam, in the '60s and early '70s, the best place for the balancing act was Blanche's, a modest green brick establishment tucked between the Roxy Theater and the Arlington Hotel. Blanche and her brother Harold ran the show, dispensing draft and bottled beer along with the core elements of tavern lunch--burgers, dogs, chips, pickled eggs (AKA "boneless chicken dinner"), and French fries topped with a mysterious fluid made from "brown gravy base." I've never been sure what kind of creature a brown is, but this concoction constituted half of many 50-cent lunches during my lean college years.

The other half consisted of a "frosty," which was one pound of draft beer tapped off into two pounds of glass mug that had been chilled to near absolute zero in the freezer behind the bar. Oh yeah. One day my friend Paul walked up to the bar and asked Harold for one. He drew the brew and said, "That'll be 25 cents." The guy standing behind Paul asked for the same. Harold said, "That'll be 30 cents." "Wait a minute--you charged him a quarter!" he protested. Harold gave the bar a thoughtful wipe and told him "Price had to go up sometime."

Food sports

After six weeks of kitchen renovation, I had revisited most of the North Country restaurants in easy commuting distance, and was heartily sick of dining out. Not that you can’t get good food in the North Country, it’s just that most of the really top-end cuisine comes out of personal kitchens. Especially since fast food chains have ground down the heights formerly, if erratically, reached by the mom and pop establishments that used to abound. You can still transcend the merely nutritional in places like Donnelly’s, the seasonal ice cream stand near Saranac Lake that gives me an excuse to visit the Adirondacks as soon as Memorial Day rolls around, or the pie palace of Keene Valley--the Noon Mark Diner. And there are bright spots still throughout the region. But the average is—pretty average.

While I’m sure that Boston (where I spent the weekend) also has its share of average food, the good stuff is pursued with religious zeal. Tracking down the best little spots is the urban substitute for bloodsports—long walks, long waits, high overhead: nothing deters the enthusiast. And everyone has their own secrets, the way a fly fisherman knows the river, or an elderly uncle hides the spot where he always bags his buck. But the rewards! Divine chicken-potato curry consumed beneath a benignly beaming portrait of the Dalai Lama. Top cooks from a hundred nations appear to have washed ashore in the harbor. For Mother’s Day brunch we took a long ride on the T and waited over an hour for a table in Zaftig’s, a Coolidge Corners deli. The line outside was so impressive, I thought it was a bus stop. You could build a shrine to the crunchy and creamy potato pancakes, the melt-in-the-mouth pastrami. I could go on, but I would want to be alone with my memories. Now that I’m home, I’m thrown back on my own devices, albeit with a much classier kitchen. And now that I have been to the mountaintop, as it were, it’s harder to please myself, like picking out a tune on the guitar after listening to a Django Reinhardt CD. I know how it is supposed to be.

Weighing in (on food)

The pathetically compelling photo of the late Anna Nicole Smith's refrigerator led a number of newsrooms to give their audiences a peek into various network kitchens. (The demands of a 24/7 schedule frequently lead to folly.) I had been noticing a decline in NCPR's collective refrigerator lately. Where's the peanut butter? Is milk supposed to be a solid? Slim pickings. But bring on a foot or so of snow and everything changes. Today Saint Kelly brought in enough venison stew to make all the carnivores sigh, and Saint June brought in her moveable birthday feast of chocolate fondue. Strong work! as my daughter says.

Our Ice Age instincts kick in when winter wallops, and we want mammoth--the whole mammoth. Snowed into the cave, nothing much to do--might as well eat some more just to keep up morale. And when you can't eat another bite, you can still talk recipes. What do you hanker for when there's nothing out the window but snow? Send in your favorite winter comfort food recipes and we'll put together a little page of big food for next week. Write dale@ncpr.org