The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [14]
Three of New York City’s cheapest restaurants are called the Original California Taqueria; all are in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, and two appear to be owned by the same person. A convenient F train whisked us nearly door-to-door to 341 Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, where a fresh and pungent interpretation of East Los Angeles cuisine, an attractive and friendly ambience, and a boldly painted mural that incongruously included the Golden Gate Bridge awaited us. We exceeded $4.50 apiece by only 12 cents, ignoring the $3.00 for round-trip transportation. If my wife’s tostada was not quite enough for a day’s ration, my ample plattio, which included a beef taco, guacamole, beans, and rice, more than made up for it. Of all the restaurants I visited, only at the Original California Taqueria could I buy something approaching a balanced diet with my limited funds. To celebrate this achievement and our unaccustomed sojourn in Brooklyn, we returned to the F train and rode it to the very last stop, in Coney Island, where close by the desolate ruins of Luna Park and its famous Parachute Jump, and two blocks from the original Nathan’s, still stands Totonno Pizzeria Napolitano, historically one of the most important restaurants in America. (Totonno, with its coal oven and thickly painted pressed-tin walls and ceiling, opened in 1924, making it the second-oldest surviving pizzeria in this country.) Though Totonno is unjustly listed by Zagat as only the thirty-sixth-best bang for the buck in New York City, a small pizza with a remarkable crust covered by nothing but handmade mozzarella and a sauce of imported canned tomatoes—all unchanged from the founder’s original recipe—cost us only slightly more than the following day’s entire $9 food budget for two.
At Gray’s Papaya and Papaya King the customer can easily stop short of $4.50 by ordering two first-rate beef frankfurters (70 cents apiece at Gray’s, more at Papaya King) or one chicken fajita (only at Papaya King) and one large fresh pineapple juice ($1.75). For a more varied diet I journeyed to Amir’s Falafel near the Columbia University campus and to the Cupcake Cafe on Ninth Avenue. Perhaps because I relished the food at both addresses, I failed to keep the tab under $4.50. Next time I will try harder. But dining at New York City’s ten cheapest restaurants merely confirmed that eating out is extremely difficult on the average American daily food budget of $4.50. And on a subsistence diet, you simply cannot leave your own kitchen.
M. F. K. Fisher wrote How to Cook a Wolf in 1942 to help Americans eat well in a time of scarcity and rationing. A chapter called “How to Keep Alive” was directed to her least affluent readers and gave Fisher’s formula for what she called Sludge, a mixture of grain and ground meat and vegetables that she created as “a streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best possible way for the least amount of money.” I had always wanted to try the recipe.
“The first thing to do, if you have absolutely no money, is to borrow some,” she begins. “Fifty cents will be enough, and should last you from three days to a week, depending on how luxurious are your tastes. [Here Fisher veers off into a species of coyness that makes her recipe very difficult to replicate today.] Buy about 15 cents’ worth of ground beef from a reputable butcher.… Buy about 10 cents’ worth of ground whole-grain cereal. Almost any large grocery carries it in bulk. It is brownish in color, coarsely mealy in texture, and has a pleasant smell of nuts and starch. Spend the rest of your money on vegetables.… Get