Tag: nostalgia

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How Sweet It Is: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of the Bakery

The events are fresh in my mind though the incident had occurred 6 decades earlier. My 6th birthday party was, by all metrics, a rousing social success. A spirited game of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, engaging conversation about the latest “Romper Room” TV episodes and gourmet entrees of Nathan’s hot dogs gave way to a highly anticipated dessert. A platter of Hostess Twinkies were brought out  and distributed by my mom to the sugar craving denizens of North Queens, N.Y. A shadowy arm crossed my plate and and as fast as you could say “Captain Kangaroo,” my Twinkie was snatched by the pig-tailed girl who hastily ran through the door with her purloined goods and back to her lair one block away. New York City penal codes, my mom explained to my inconsolable self, did not apply to minors stealing baked goods. From that moment on, I never took pastries for granted. Was there something out there that could replace that lost Twinkie? 

New York City was the crucible for inspired bakeries. The 19th Germans were more interested in wars (Austro-Prussian War , Franco-Prussian War) than dessert cuisine, encouraging  German bakers to bring their flour, butter, eggs and sugar to the land of opportunity across the Atlantic. The Glasers, a Bavarian family, established a bakery in Yorkville, New York City and in 1904 invented the black and white cookie. Frosting, atop a cake dough base, it became a metaphor for racial equality (Seinfeld Black and White Cookie) as well as an iconic cookie. In Stuttgart Germany, an emigre, William Entenmann relocated to Brooklyn, N.Y. and peddled baked goods starting in 1898 to the hungry borough. His children expanded the product line and produced the near perfect N.Y. Style Crumbcake, enjoyed by proletariat and luminaries such as  Frank Sinatra who had the cake delivered weekly to his abode. The same year as William Entenmann was delivering his horse carriage delivered sweetness, a German couple, Catherine and George Ebinger started their version of cakes and pastries in South Brooklyn. My paternal grandmother, Celia, always had an Ebinger’s 7 layered chocolate cake prominently displayed in the kitchen.

The excellence of the bakeries in Brooklyn and Manhattan spilled out to Queens by the 1960’s. Storks, a German Bakery in Whitestone, was replete with their own version of buttery-inspired petit fours, black and whites and crumb cakes. Adventurer’s Inn, an amusement park near LaGuardia Airport, had an in house bakery that deconstructed the black and white cookie and re-engineered v. 2.0: a double-decker sandwich with a 2nd base cookie layered with thick fudge in the middle.

As my dessert satisfaction score and body mass index (BMI) rose in tandem, I felt some trepidation relocating to Los Angeles to further my education. Was this going to be baked goods hell or a hidden cookie oasis? I promptly found Canter’s Deli in L.A. and scored a West Coast black and white. Entenmann’s fortuitously expanded their crumb cake empire to the West Coast in the ‘70s and introduced the left coast to the wonders of their cookies and cakes. Ramen noodles and crumb cake; Mac and Cheese and black and whites; chef boyardee ravioli and Entenmann chocolate chip cookies: these were the student Michelin 4 star meals that resonated.

All things must pass, proclaimed George Harrison, and so did this pastry paradise. Cholesterol consciousness, living longer and the eating healthy mafia chipped away at my treasured baked goods. Ebinger’s went bankrupt, Glaser’s of Yorkville closed after a century of business and Entemann’s was sold and resold and nearly expunged all of their crumb cake production. Bakeries were shuttered and replaced by juice bars and  Acacia bowl outlets. Even the venerable Twinkie was re-engineered to include synthetic compounds that had little taste resemblance to earlier Twinkie generations. A dark age of baked goods was a foot. 

With a sullen demeanor, I capped off a recent lunch with apple slices and a bran muffin and set out to walk off some calories around Manhattan. Past the healthy bowl places and the passion fruit bars I went until I came across a serpentine line stretching multiple blocks down 3rd Avenue. “A new cookie store just opened” opined a prospective customer who was  at least 45 minutes from being served. Crumbl, a cookie emporium based in Utah was opening up their first store in New York City. Sullen looks turned to smiles as I contemplated the possible resurgence of the New York baked goods scene. Twinkies may come and go, I mused,  but the circle of spice arcs toward sweetness.  

Crumbl Cookies
N.Y. Crumb Cake
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Travel Mishaps

Fifty-two years ago my dorm roommate and I hitchhiked from the University of Buffalo to        SUNY Albany. Three successive rides found us in the commercial district of Syracuse. As the day passed, the temperature dropped and the cars whizzed by our outstretched hypothermic thumbs. Dejected, we walked to the Bus Station and contemplated our next step. With no time and no money for a round-trip to Albany and back to Buffalo, we bought a one way ticket back to our starting point of Buffalo. We sat down next to a middle aged man in a wrinkled suit and waited for our Greyhound bus. “Is there a decent restaurant around here?” we asked our seatmate. “There is a great Italian restaurant around the corner,” he stated confidently. Pooling our meager resources we sought out the trattoria and ordered a plate of pasta. The spaghetti was served as stiff as straw.  Our resident restaurant critic at the bus station had clearly steered us wrong.

Twenty years later, my hitchhiking days behind me, I drove with a friend to San Francisco. With the passenger seat littered with AAA and Rand McNally maps, my navigator advised staying on I-80 as the Embarcadero came into view.  “On no!”, I muttered, as I realized I was going the wrong way on the LONG Oakland Bay Bridge toward Oakland and was doomed to pay a double toll. 

Undeterred by my past travel mistakes, my family embarked on a European vacation at the turn of the century. My spouse, a capable cartographer and blessed with a directional sense like a passenger pigeon,  assured me that we were not going to get lost. We rented a Renault in Paris, buckled up our two boys,  and set out to discover the continent.  A few miles out  I failed to translate the “sens unique” (one-way sign, not covered in High School French). Sweating profusely, I made an instantaneous U turn and avoided a vacation ending collision. We arrived in Aachen, Germany and entered a museum devoted to Charlemagne. The exhibit explanations were in German with no translation. Ich bin ein Berliner and aufedasein were the extent of our German vocabulary. We detoured to the snack bar to complete the museum experience. That evening we arrived in Strasbourg with a thimble full of gas in the tank. The next morning, I pulled into the gas station, opened the gas tank door and noticed French instruction on the inside door (words, again not covered in High School French). I filled the tank and set off to Switzerland. A few miles onto the highway, the car started to lurch and emit a high pitched moan as I was shifting my manual transmission into 2nd gear. I got off the highway into rush hour Strasbourg traffic when the car led out a cringe worthy groan and stalled. Behind our Renault were at least 50 angry French commuters yelling French words (that again were not covered in High School French class). Later that day, a mechanic, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lip, informed me of my error of filling up a diesel engine with regular gas. He muttered some unintelligible French sentences but my rudimentary French picked up some words (stupide: stupid, guignol: clown).

After the ordeal, we decided to recharge with French cuisine. The bill came and I calculated the tip by mentally converting dollars into Francs. I mistakenly used the wrong currency in the calculation and was off by a factor of ten. The waiter was elated by his generous tip and my wallet was a good deal lighter.  I had finished the day with a trifecta of vacation gaffes.

I am now millions of neurons lighter in the 21st century compared with my youthful self but have gained “vacation bonus IQ points” with the advent of smartphone technology. Currency converters keep tabs on the foreign exchange markets by the nanosecond.  Apple and Google Maps keep me on track and down the right one way streets. I was cruising in the Mojave Desert on I-15 last week and the app warned of an accident (truck on fire) halting all traffic for 2 hours. As the temperatures soared in the desert, I placed a  call to the California Highway Patrol.   The California Highway Patrol representative asked, “ What lane are you in?”  “The far left lane,” I answered. “Stay in that lane. We just opened up that lane 60 seconds ago and you should be good.” Seconds later, the cars started to inch forward and we made our way past the accident. It was highway nirvana. 

Language barriers have fallen. Despite English ubiquity, Google Translate helped convert German menus, German museum placards and German signs into understandable jargon.  Impractical high school French classes devoid of real life vocabulary are no longer  dangerously impactful. Choosing a restaurant no longer requires a recommendation from a fellow bus passenger.  Today, Yelp, Google and TripAdvisor have us covered wherever we go in the world. 

 In May of this year, we took a trip through Eastern Europe for almost a month without a hitch.  I relied heavily on my technology loaded Iphone, T-Mobile cell towers and an occasional friendly recommendation from an equally tech savvy European citizen.  But travels would not be travels without mishaps that many times end up being memorable happy accidents.  The proof:  many years later these are the stories my family and I speak of and write about.

I am still recovering from my Diesel Mishap but encouraged to know that fossil fuels are in the rear view mirror and electric vehicles in the future will have only one plug to choose from. 

I

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COVID and Nasal Memories

Pizza in my Olfactory Dreams

The Door Dash delivery was on the top of the steps, delivered from a  pizza service in San Diego that claimed “New York Style Pizza.” After the ritual disinfection of the pizza carton, the lid was lifted and I was delivered into another time and place. Scotty, the owner of a Queens pizza restaurant 60 years ago, was ensconced in my olfactory memory. He was flipping the dough as his octogenarian mother was lovingly molding a veal parmigiana hero that could make a grown man cry. Melted mozzarella, oregano, sausage and mushroom fumes reawakened a gustatory experience that I experienced for the first time, many years ago. With hops entering my nostrils from my Dad’s 1965 Miller High life, I left the COVID virus prison and entered a happier time when New York City  was a palace of gustatory delights and my childhood garden was in full bloom.

Through my nose, to the ethmoid sinuses, onto the olfactory epithelium and 60,000 smell neurons directed my pizza delivery directly to the frontal lobes and limbic system where Scotty’s still lived in vivid memory. This ecstatic experience is being stolen from millions by a renegade virus which has shut down the world for the last year. Expunging the smell and taste in some of the 25 million who have had COVID, which may have long lasting and permanent damage of the olfactory system. Malnutrition, depression and the loss of warning symptoms to natural gas leaks or tainted foods may be the legacy of sufferers of nasal COVID injury.

The least regarded of the five senses, smell and taste have taken a back seat in medical training and in popular culture. Medical school has few lectures on the proper function and diseases of smell and taste. Medical history taking neglects inquiry of one’s nasal and lingual capabilities. Olfaction has been a butt of jokes for generations of comics from the Simpson’s “smell you later”, Hawkeye Pierce’s ridicule on food sniffing in M*A*S*H and  Mel Brooks flatulence scene in “Blazing Saddles.” 

The dismissal of this forsaken sense is belied by its prominent location. The olfactory nerve, the shortest of the cranial nerves, sits in the front of the brain and sends projections to multiple areas including the emotional hub, the limbic system. Our evolutionary ancestors and current mammalian brethren rely on scent to distinguish friend from foe and food from poison. Our beloved canine, Millie, the Jack Russell Terrier from times past would apply the sniff test and rarely made a bad decision on food or domicile choices.

Obscure medical jargon has entered the mainstream with anosmia (lack of smell), parosmia (smell that fails to correctly match the odor) and phantosmia (phantom smells) appearing on long hauler COVID social sites. “Everything smells like burnt coffee” I heard a patient exclaim. “No longer can I taste the citrus in my tea,” another laments. “I ate a hamburger and I miss the onion smell and taste.” Essential oil kits are hawked on Amazon in the hope that olfactory re-education may hasten recovery. While the long term outcomes are not apparent in so recent a disease, it appears that up to 5% of smell sufferers may not  regain perception at 6 months.

“Don’t it always seems to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til its gone,” Joni Mitchell’s ballad went in the ’60’s.  And so it goes with Scotty’s appetizing, fragrant pies from the same decade. Enjoy your senses and don’t forget to stop and smell the pizza.