Eating - Jason Epstein [18]
In 1912, the fantasy of a deepwater port at Montauk and a fast ride by rail into New York sank along with the Titanic, which had been rumored to inaugurate the long-awaited Montauk terminus. But by then the railroad had already made the South Fork of Long Island a fashionable resort, edged by miles of magnificent beachfront, part of the strand stretching from Montauk west to Coney Island, at the entrance to New York Harbor.
I have offered this brief history of Long Island to locate, for readers who may not be familiar with this part of the world, the old whaling port of Sag Harbor, which I consider my home, and which was settled three centuries ago as the sheltered, deepwater port for the prosperous towns of Southampton and Maidstone, before it became East Hampton. It was on a Sag Harbor whaler that Queequeg, Melville’s Polynesian harpooner in Moby-Dick, stowed away, hoping to become a Christian and return to convert his royal Polynesian family. But after coming ashore at rowdy Sag Harbor, he decided to take a look at Nantucket, then chose to remain a pagan. This louche reputation lingered well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1970s, the East Hampton Star seldom referred to Sag Harbor without a condescending snicker. Though this fertile end of Long Island has now been wantonly overdeveloped, there is still enough protected farmland left to supply the surviving hedge-funders and investment bankers in their beachfront palaces with magnificent tomatoes, sweet corn, greens, peaches, and apples well into autumn, when the billionaires straggle south, leaving the gleanings of their summertime abundance to the Canada geese who strut across the abandoned golf courses and pick the harvested fields clean.
Sag Harbor, its old houses jammed side by side on crooked streets and occupied now mainly by writers, editors, and philosophers, has been spared this overdevelopment, for there has been almost no open space here to build upon since the nineteenth century. For years following the decline of the whaling trade and the failure of all but a handful of industries, Sag Harbor fell silently into decrepitude, too poor even to demolish its fading old houses and commercial buildings. Most of these sturdy structures have now been artfully restored, so that visitors interested in vernacular styles of American domestic architecture will find here a living museum of Federal, Greek Revival, as well as a rare Egyptian Revival church, Swiss Cottage, and other Victorian styles, inhabited not by bewigged actors in period costume but by actual dogs, people, and children.
A century ago, families would take the train out to Southampton for weekend duck dinners at John Duck’s famous restaurant, a short walk from the depot. Never a favorite of the seasonal nobility, John Duck’s was patronized by the local burghers and known not so much for its ducks, which were still roasted in their own fat rather than with the fat extruded in the current fashion, but for its addictive coleslaw, which was served as a kind of amuse-bouche. John Duck’s is now out of business, but the composition of its coleslaw continues to intrigue local cooks.
One day last summer, at Halsey’s farm stand in Watermill, as I waited to be served, I was wondering aloud to a friend whether to buy yet another cabbage and try once again to solve the mystery of John Duck’s coleslaw. “I know the recipe,” conspiratorially whispered the farm-stand proprietor, who had been following