The Second Avenue Deli Cookbook (25 page)

Somewhat in the style of Marcel Proust, most of the customers at the Second Avenue Kosher Delicatessen and Restaurant … are involved in a contemporary
recherche du temps perdu.
The very menu is a remembrance
of things past, of a Jewish way of life all but destroyed by upward mobility.

Some of us grew up as part of that past. Others heard of it from their Italian, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Jewish, etc., parents or grandparents who came to America carrying a large bundle of hopes and a small bundle of pots, chopping bowls, rolling pins, mortars and pestles. After all, man does not live by freedom alone. They landed, along with their rich dreams and even richer appetites, on the Lower East Side—all at the same time.

There was not a cold tenement that did not smell of hot food. The aromas seeped through closed doors, dumbwaiters, halls, cellars, and the letter boxes. “Eating out” was unheard of. In the first place, you couldn't afford it. In the second place, “Poison they feed you.” In the
last, and most important place, to eat out was an insult to mama's cooking and to family tradition.

If you reached the point where you could eat out, or had to (a tragedy), you naturally sought out some place run by a mama and a papa, often by a whole family. The mama had to look like, dress like, talk like, and cook like “mama,” and the food had to be kosher.

Eating out at the Second Avenue Delicatessen is like eating in. There is papa Lebewohl, mama Lebewohl, and two pretty daughters who “keep an eye.”

The clue to Abe's success is culinary doubt—creative, inventive, positive doubt. He is privy to the highly inexact alchemy of traditional, instinctual Jewish cooking as handed down by word of mothers. The vital ingredient is “sense,” not sense-organ sense, but common sense based on years of common scenting.

You have to feel what the food calls for and add that imprecise pinch, dab, smear, drop, or blip (an onomatopoeic word derived from the sound of one drop of oil falling into boiling water).

You can teach anyone, Jewish or not, how to make chicken soup, but you can't teach anyone (an ancient ethnic mystery) how to get it up to the temperature of molten lava. A good matzoh ball from such soup does melt in the mouth, but it also hardens again in the stomach. Cases of intestinal matzoh-ball blockage can be cleared by doses of 340-degree chicken soup.

The most popular main courses are chicken in the pot, boiled beef, Hungarian beef goulash, and Roumanian tenderloin steak. These are served with the Yiddish K rations: kasha (groats), kugel (noodle pudding), knaidle (billiard ball–size dough balls), kishka (stuffed cow's intestine). Interesting that linguistically there is no singular for certain Jewish delicacies. No one (except maybe an illegal alien) refers to a krep or a farf. It is kreplach, or farfel (confetti-size dough drops).

Among the fish specialties, gefuilte fish still leads the school. There are world-wide variations, but Abe Lebewohl has preserved the time-and-mama tested formula. Classical gefuilte fish experts started from the live fish in combinations of buffel (buffalo) carp, pike, or whitefish—depending upon the cost (“for the holidays they raise the price, the holdupnicks”)—added egg, matzoh meal, and onions all chopped and molded into oval shapes. Onions were crucial. They made the mama cooks cry, releasing the salt tears (the secret ingredient?) which ran down their faces into the chopped fish, adding the flavor of four thousand years of Jewish suffering. The final product is eaten with
horseradish strong enough to make the cooked fish tremble on the plate.

The East Side is now the home of new immigrants. The Second Avenue Delicatessen and Restaurant caters to some of these, but mostly to nostalgia-hungry exurbanites from every urb and suburb of America, who come a-searching in the old foods for some of the old values that made the crowded “co-op” living not only possible but stimulating; to value again fragrant human imperfection over deodorized, dehumanized perfection; to let the earthy horseradish, a real root, bring back bittersweet root-memories of a
temps perdu,
a time when dreams of a great tomorrow spiced many an unappetizing today.

Perhaps these customers are pilgrims in search of soul food for the soul, and Abe Lebewohl's menu proclaims: We deliver.

Years ago,
New York Post
columnist Jack Newfield introduced me to his pal Abe Lebewohl at the Second Avenue Deli. Soon, Abe and I developed a friendship, and visiting his restaurant became like visiting family. He was a big boxing fan, but he never went to a single fight, because
he was too damned busy at that restaurant. He always had time to go out to eat, though. My goodness, did he love to eat! He used to ask me how I stayed in such good shape, and, like most people, he thought I killed myself working out at the gym. Actually, though I do, of course, work out—especially after gorging on pastrami sandwiches at his place—my real trick for staying thin is simple: I don't eat a lot.

Abe could never really believe a big tough guy like me didn't eat that much. When he had his famous pickle-eating contest in 1994, he tried his damnedest to talk me into entering. I wanted to help out—not only for Abe but because my son, José, is a manager at United Pickles in the Bronx, which supplies the Deli and co-sponsored the contest. But I knew I could only get down two or three pickles tops; so, finally, I agreed to be a judge.

Abe was one of the sweetest men I ever knew. His philosophy was to be nice to everyone and to enjoy life, and all his friends enjoyed life a little more because he was around.

FOR THE BEANS

FOR THE RICE AND BEANS

CHICKEN WITH RICE

Note:
Beans should be soaked 6 to 8 hours before cooking. Place them in a large bowl or pot, and cover with water by 2 inches.