Eating - Jason Epstein [13]
There are lots of other ways to fry potatoes as cakes or hash browns—for example, by using day-old mashed or baked potatoes, or raw potatoes shredded on a mandoline or diced, but the basic procedure is the same. Unless they have already been mashed or baked and are therefore dry, remove as much water as possible, heat a little oil or butter or a combination in a smooth pan, and cook them slowly with your choice of extras. Then turn them over and brown the other side. For hash browns, don’t form a cake but hash them up, flipping or tossing them with a spatula as they brown.
The restaurant where I worked that summer was an ambitious Howard Johnson franchise with a full dining room, table linens, and a bar opening onto an outdoor dance floor under a canopy with live music on weekends. That first postwar summer, I came of age, believing along with everyone else that we had won the war to end all wars and looking forward to a peaceful future in the best of all possible countries under the world’s wisest rulers. I had learned the rudiments of a craft that I have never forgotten and, even more important, learned to respect the skills and the wisdom of my fellow workers—even those who plundered the boss’s bar—who showed me, in the days when stainless steel couldn’t hold an edge, how to care for my carbon-steel knives, which would turn black at the merest hint of acid and rusted in the humid kitchen. I learned that summer to make emulsions, to reduce veal stock for demi-glace, to sear and sauté fish and meat without having it stick in the days before Teflon, to use arrowroot to keep a blueberry pie from leaking without making it gummy, and to test a steak for doneness with my thumb until, by the end of summer, I could tell just by looking when a steak was rare, medium, or well. At midnight, after work, the cooks and waitresses would drive down with a case of beer to the stone breakwater at Hyannisport to cool off, and when the nights were too hot for us to sleep indoors we would spend the night on the flat rocks until awakened by the dawn. I also fell in love that summer, with a witty girl whose picture was on the cover of the August issue of the Woman’s Home Companion, and wonder still from time to time what became of her.
FOUR
LUNCH IN A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
For much of my life, I worked in the book-publishing business, mostly as editorial director at Random House, content to let others do the writing while I served them as banker, midwife, valet, and press agent. I also published a number of cookbooks by famous chefs and wrote several articles on cooking for various magazines. This probably explains why my friend Billy Norwich, who was working at The New York Times, called me in the summer of 2002 and asked if I could write a food column appropriate to the first anniversary of 9/11 for the Style Supplement of the Times Magazine. New York was still in pain from the attack, and Billy did not have to explain that his readers needed encouragement rather than another batch of recipes for autumn vegetables or turkey stuffing for the fall holidays.
I was intrigued by this assignment, and as I wondered how to approach it, I remembered that the late food writer M. F. K. Fisher had in her twenties written bravely about food during a similarly grim period, midway through the 1930s in Europe, when the so-called civilized world was working itself up once again into a paroxysm of self-destruction and she was caught in the gathering chaos. So I thought it might interest readers of the Times on the first anniversary of 9/11 to learn how Fisher confronted her own world as it