Posted: July 26th, 2011 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Brooklyn, NYC mon amour | Comments Off
One of the great places to come to do work — on knishes or anything — is the Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection, second floor of the Central branch at Grand Army Plaza. It’s quiet and lined with volumes about all aspects of Brooklyn life.
I’ve consulted a fair number of titles of all stripes, including Joseph Heller’s Now and Then in which he issues a clarion cry for Shatzkin’s knishes of Coney Island and lists Mrs. Stahl’s as a rival concern favored by those with roots in Brighton Beach. Today I pulled this off the shelf:
Sodom by the Sea: An Affectionate History of Coney Island
By Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson
Garden City Publishing Company
copyright 1941
Page 242:
In addition to thousands of frankfurters every day, the newcomer [Nathan's] also dispensed hundreds of gallons of root beer, Coca-cola, soda pop, and carloads of potato chips and knishes, Jewish potato cakes flavored with onion and fried in deep fat.
Yum. That’s your Coney Island knish, all right.
Posted: August 24th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: bike, Brooklyn, place | Tags: french | Comments Off
Mon pannier neuf. (My new saddlebag).
I have new panniers for my red bike. The fancy metal baskets on the dearly departed Silver Wing departed with that splatter-painted steed from Cadman Plaza in March, so I opted for something a bit more sporty and waterproof. My ancient panniers were ripped to shreds (tserisene, in Yiddish) with lazy, disobedient zippers and zero waterproof-i-tude. So, welcome Ortliebs. Makes me think of a French rhyme.
Un deux, trois,
nous irons au bois
quatre, cinq, six
cueillir de cerises
sept, huit, neuf
dans mon panier neuf
dix, onze, douze
elles seront toutes rouges.
My panniers are, of course, bleus, with silver splotches for reflectivity. Ortlieb brand: German. Using my powers of Yiddish, I can discern:
ort= place
lieb= love
ortlieb= place-love or love of place…
I do love place. Being. Sitting. Observing. Taking part in a locale, seeping into it by eavesdropping.
Aller-Retour
This project is in no small part about place, finding the place I am from, la terre, the ground where my forebears walked and shlepped and hunkered down and happened to have landed and stayed and strived. The project is about finding place, uncovering it, making peace with what is there, and with what is not there and pinpointing, amid the whirlwind, places that make me feel welcome. Places that embrace the awkward past, the uncomfortable present, the uncertain future and still, onward, last and lilt onward. I want to map, this places, to trace them and showcase them, to match them to documents and objects and stories and to move forward on my own power, essentials in tow.
Are you trying to get yourself killed?
a truck driver asked me on Ashland Place after BAM, en route to the passthrough to the Manhattan Bridge approach ramp. “No,” I answered, “Are you trying to kill me?”
I was in the bike lane. I was going in the right direction, not being reckless, just moving forward — and making more headway than he was. He opened the door of his cab to ask me this question.
Vulnerability makes people nervous. And being on a bike is an act of vulnerability, of faith and risk taking and hope. It’s how I urge on the messiah. How I pray. Not walking, or rather marching, with my feet as Abraham Joshua Heschel intoned, but pedaling, returning to the same revolutions of the wheel, putting my feet, my heart, my soul into the practice of revolution, turning, movement.
Posted: April 5th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Brooklyn, Homemade, performance | Tags: about the knish hunter | Comments Off
I’ve sent my presentation off to Adult Ed for Tuesday night’s shindig, and in a very rare email message from my mother’s account, Mickey the Mustardeur (aka my dad) reports that his latest homemade batch is ready to go. It’s five-star (his term, echoed by friends who have tried it) and several alarm, à la chili. It’s going to be spicy, kiddies.
And I can only hope the same for my talk and slide show, which will obviously include a special post-Passover State of the Knish address. I can’t reveal any of that before the fact, of course, but I will let you in on some of my planning for the talk. I started out with this schematic, handily posted in my living room, which covers the bulk of my knish research over, oh, say, the last five years.
It morphed quite a bit and now focuses on six of the original ideas on the post its, but that’s the joy and the rigor of editing.
Now to practice the delivery. And yes, there will be homebaked knishes on hand.
Posted: March 29th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Brooklyn, Homemade | Comments Off
No way I want anyone at the Consider the Knish talk to go hungry. A big knish order calls for some elbow grease, kneading and plain old handiwork. No one in my family made knishes when I was growing up. They were something you bought on the street. Cheap, easy food.
But yesterday, whcn I covered my kitchen table in seventy some odd circles of dough topped with pyramids of potato and onion, they were anything but easy. I channeled the ancestors: Nana, who changes all the dishes for Passover; Gramma, who made immeasurable batches of apple sauce pinked and sweet stuffed cabbage; and the ones I never met, who sustained generations. Wow, it is not easy to manufacture a lot of edibles. After the first half dozen came out of the oven, I cracked open a beer. Three mounds of dough loomed and I had to run out for onions to make a new round of innards. A knish without onions is like the Jewish people without tsuris (troubles). * I sliced the onions and welled up. Not an emotional thing, but an hommage to women of every background who urge food into shape, put it on the table and wait until everyone has been served to eat.
My kitchen still has the scent of fried onions. I handed off a few beers to a friend who came over to sample knishes (he ate four, with some of my dad’s homemade mustard, so I guess they’re OK) and am sweeping out crumbs, getting rid of bread and heading out to a seder.
It’s not so kosher to stash the knishes in the freezer for Passover, but that’s where they are. And, as Barry Levenson, the founder of the Mustard Museum, intoned, eating a knish is a holy act, one that could even cause a person, i.e., him, to bend the rules of the holiday. He’s of Ashkenzi descnet, but come Pesach, he flips into Sephardic mode, which permits the ingestion of mustard during the holiday. Who can blame the guy?
* I just made that up, but I’m sure someone else said it before.
Posted: March 26th, 2010 | Author: knish hunter | Filed under: Brooklyn, Homemade, Jewish celebration | Comments Off
The week before Passover is all about getting rid of bread products — taking a good, hard look at the extra floury stuff in one’s life, and getting rid of it.
I bought more flour and had ten friends help me urge it into knishes. Here’a a preview.
You can sample one post-Passover, the night right after the holiday ends, I’ll be giving a talk as part of the Adult Ed lecture series, Homemade and Homespun edition.
