Secret Ingredients (42 page)

Malena came onstage at one in the morning. She began with a ballad that had been made famous in Cuba in the fifties by a singer called La Lupe, who used to get so emotional when she reached the crescendo that she hurled things at the audience—usually her shoes and her wig. The room had been roaring before Malena came out, but now it was hushed. Malena had left Cuba just a few months earlier. Someone told me that the tears she sheds when she’s singing about lost love are really real. By then, I was sitting at a table in the back of the room with Totty. I had some snapshots with me that I had taken in Havana for the family, because I’d thought they might like to see the old home again. Just as I was about to slide the pictures across the table to Totty, the singer sobbed to her crescendo, so I decided to wait until another day.

1996

THE MAGIC BAGEL

CALVIN TRILLIN

M
y wife and I came up with differing interpretations of a conversation I had with our older daughter, Abigail, not long after a dimsum lunch in Chinatown. Abigail, who lives in San Francisco, was in New York to present a paper at a conference. As a group of us trooped back toward Greenwich Village, where she’d grown up and where my wife, Alice, and I still live, Abigail and I happened to be walking together. “Let’s get this straight, Abigail,” I said, after we’d finished off some topic and had gone along in silence for a few moments. “If I can find those gnarly little dark pumpernickel bagels that we used to get at Tanenbaum’s, you’ll move back to New York. Right?”

“Absolutely,” Abigail said.

When I reported that exchange to Alice, she said that Abigail was speaking ironically. I found it difficult to believe that anybody could be ironic about those bagels. They were almost black. Misshapen. Oniony. Abigail adored them. Both of my daughters have always taken bagels seriously. My younger daughter, Sarah, also lives in California—she’s in Los Angeles—and she often complains about the bagels there being below her standards. For a while, I brought along a dozen bagels for Sarah whenever I went to L.A., but I finally decided that this policy was counterproductive. “If a person prefers to live in California, which happens to be thousands of miles from her very own parents,” I told her, “it seems to me appropriate that such a person eat California bagels. I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat-germ bagels you get one bee-pollen bagel free.”

Abigail, it should be noted, always had bagel standards at least as high as Sarah’s. I have previously documented the moment when I realized that she was actually a New Yorker (until she was four or five, I had somehow thought of her as being from the same place I’m from, Kansas City): we were back in Missouri visiting my family, and she said, “Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?” In other words, she knew the difference between those bagel-shaped objects available in American supermarkets and the authentic New York item that had been hand-rolled and boiled in a vat and then carefully baked by a member in good standing of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union. My sadness at the evidence that she wasn’t actually from my hometown was offset by my pride in the evidence that she was precocious.

Would Proust have been ironic about the madeleine, particularly if he had fetched up in a place where you couldn’t get a decent madeleine if your life depended on it? When my daughters were children, bagels were not only their staple food but also the food of important rituals. On Sunday mornings, I often took them to Houston Street, on the Lower East Side. At Russ & Daughters, which is what New Yorkers call an appetizer store, we would buy Nova Scotia salmon—a transaction that took some time, since the daughters (of Joel Russ, the founder, who stared down at us from a splendid portrait on the wall) had to quit slicing fish now and then to tell me in glorious detail how adorable my girls were. Then we’d go next door to Ben’s Dairy to get cream cheese and a delicacy known as baked farmer’s cheese with scallions. Then we were at Tanenbaum’s, a bakery that was probably best known for a large, dark loaf often referred to as Russian health bread. We were not there for Russian health bread.

“So you think she’s just humoring her old dad?” I asked Alice, when we discussed the conversation I’d had with Abigail on the way back from Chinatown.

“I do.”

Alice was probably right. I understood that. Abigail enjoys living in California, and she’s got a job there that she loves. Children grow up and lead lives of their own. Parents are supposed to accept that. Still, I decided that I’d look around for those pumpernickel bagels. As my father used to say, “What could it hurt?”

It wasn’t my first try. When the pumpernickel bagels disappeared, I immediately made serious inquiries. Without wanting to cast blame, I have to say that the disappearance occurred on Mutke’s watch. Mutke’s formal name is Hyman Perlmutter. In the early seventies, he bought Tanenbaum’s Bakery and transformed it into the downtown branch of a bakery he ran eight or ten blocks away called Moishe’s. For some time, Mutke carried Tanenbaum’s full inventory. Then one day—I don’t remember precisely when, but Abigail and Sarah were still living at home—the pumpernickel bagels were no longer there. Confronted with the facts, Mutke was sanguine. Those particular bagels weren’t available anymore, he explained, but, as a special order, he could always provide me with a dozen or two just like them. Eventually, he did. I pulled one out of the bag. It was a smooth bagel, uniformly round. It was the color of cappuccino, heavy on the milk. It was a stranger to onions. It was not by any means Abigail’s bagel.

I realize now, of course, that I gave up too easily. Sure, I stopped by to try the pumpernickel anytime I heard of a promising new bagel bakery—even if it was uptown, a part of the city I don’t venture to unnecessarily. But I didn’t make a systematic search. How was I to know that bagels can be instrumental in keeping families intact? This time, I was going to be thorough. I had read in Molly O’Neill’s
New York Cook Book
about a place in Queens where bagels were made in the old-fashioned way. I figured that there must be similar places in Brooklyn neighborhoods with a large population of Orthodox Jews—Williamsburg, maybe, or Borough Park. I was prepared to go to the outer boroughs. But I thought it made sense to start back on Houston Street.

The area where Abigail and Sarah and I used to make our Sunday rounds has seen some changes over the years. The old tenement streets used to seem grim. Now they sport patches of raffish chic. On Orchard Street, around the corner from our Sunday-morning purveyors, stores that have traditionally offered bargains on fabrics and women’s clothing and leather goods are punctuated by the sort of clothing store that has a rack of design magazines and a coffee bar and such a spare display of garments that you might think you’re in the studio apartment of someone who has bizarre taste in cocktail dresses and no closet to keep them in. These days, the Lower East Side is a late-night destination—both Orchard and Ludlow have bars too hip to require a sign—and a cool place to live. After spending years listening to customers tell him that he ought to move Russ & Daughters uptown, Mark Federman, the son of one of the daughters, is renovating the apartments above the store and expressing gratitude that his grandfather held on to the building.

Ben’s Dairy has closed, and Moishe’s Bakery has moved to a tiny place around the corner. But Russ & Daughters has been carefully preserved to look pretty much the way it did when the founder himself still had his arms deep in the herring barrel. I figured Mark might have some information I could use, and he was bound to be sympathetic to the project: his daughter, Niki, recently graduated from college and moved to San Francisco. “Do you think Niki might come back, too, if we found the bagels?” I asked, as Mark and I edged ourselves into the tiny office he shares with his wife, Maria.

“I don’t think she’d come back for bagels,” he said. “Maybe for an apartment upstairs.”

Maria shook her head. “I already offered,” she said.

Mark said that he knew precisely the bagel I was talking about, but that he had no idea where to find it. He phoned his mother, who’s retired, in Florida. “Do you remember when Tanenbaum next door used to have this sort of gnarly—” he began, and then started to laugh. “Not an old woman,” he said. “I’m asking about bagels.” Apparently, his mother remembered the gnarly old woman quite well. Not the bagels.

Although Russ & Daughters carries bagels these days, Mark insisted that he didn’t have the expertise to be much help in tracing a particular baker; locating an obscure source of belly lox would have been more his line of country. Still, he made a couple of calls, including one to Mosha’s Bread, a wholesale operation in Williamsburg, which has been turning out pumpernickel since the late nineteenth century. (Mosha’s Bread, it almost goes without saying, has no connection with Moishe’s Bakery.) As I was about to leave Russ’s, the boss of Mosha’s, who turned out to be a woman named Cecile Erde Farkas, returned Mark’s call. Mark introduced himself, and before he could explain my quest he began to sound like someone on the receiving end of a sales pitch. “To tell you the truth, I don’t sell much bread,” I heard him say, and then, “Here’s what I could use—a good babka. I could sell the hell out of a good babka…plain, yeah, and chocolate.”

There was a message on my answering machine that evening from Mark. He had reached a friend of his named Danny Scheinin, who ran Kossar’s, a distinguished purveyor of bialys, for decades before selling out a year or two ago. “Danny says he thinks Tanenbaum got that bagel from somebody named Poznanski,” Mark said when I got back to him. “Also, he says it wasn’t a real bagel.”

“Not a real bagel!”

“I don’t know exactly what he means,” Mark said. “Talk to him.”

When I reached Scheinin, I found out that what he’d meant was this: In the old days, there was a sharp split between bagel bakeries and bread bakeries. The bagel bakers had their own local, No. 338. They didn’t bake bread and bread bakers didn’t make bagels. Originally, of course, bagels were made only with white flour. But some bread bakers who trafficked in pumpernickel would twist some bread dough into bagel shapes and bake them. By not going through the intermediate boiling that is part of the process of making an authentic bagel, they stayed out of another local’s jurisdiction. Scheinin was confident that Abigail’s bagel had been made that way for Tanenbaum’s by a bread baker named Sam Poznanski, in Williamsburg, who died some years ago. As far as Scheinin knew, the bakery still existed, under the management of Poznanski’s wife. He gave me the number. “Tell her Danny from the bialys said to call,” he told me.

Mrs. Poznanski, I have to say, did not seem terribly engaged by my quest. The longest answer she gave was when I asked her if Poznanski’s had quit making the pumpernickel bagel when her husband died, and she said, “No. Before.” Still, she confirmed that the object of Abigail’s adoration was from Poznanski’s and that it was not boiled. This was hard news to take. It sounded perilously close to saying that the bagel we were searching for was just round bread. But what bread!

The bread/bagel split was confirmed by Herb Bostick, a business agent of Local 3 of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union, which by now has absorbed No. 338 into a local that mixes bagel bakers and bread bakers and cake bakers together the way someone faced with baking a pie at the last minute might mix in bits of whatever kinds of flour happened to be in the cupboard. What Bostick said was in line with what I’d learned from Cecile Farkas, of Mosha’s, with whom I’d arranged a meeting after her babka pitch to Mark. She’d told me that for years her late father offered pumpernickel bagels that were baked without being boiled first. “Then they weren’t real bagels?” I’d said.

“If my daddy called them bagels they were bagels,” Mrs. Farkas said.