Reflections on a New YearFirst of all, a belated Happy New Year to both of you still out there reading despite the irregular posting schedule of the staff at Rick’s.
2003, for reasons too numerous to mention here, was a very difficult year for me - so 2003 isn’t the year I want to look back on. Instead, I want to look back on 1969 - specifically December 13, 1969, the day my parents got married.
My father’s cousin, a 99-year-old woman, has had a rent-controlled apartment in the East 30’s since roughly 1940. My immediate family finally moved her out of her apartment - and into an assisted-living facility - a few years ago, but we held on to the apartment because we were paralyzed by the daunting task of cleaning 60 years of history out of her apartment. This was especially challenging because she didn’t become a pack rat in her old age - she had always been a pack rat. The apartment had everything from troves of ketchup packets to personal letters from Chaim Gross and John Dos Passos. There were volumes of her well-intended doggerel and good-natured rejection letters of same from Ron Alexander. Not surprisingly, among the many finds in her apartment were family history. There were photographs (though fewer than I expected), my thank you notes (both bar mitzvah and graduation), letters from my dad in WWII (Pharmacist 1st Class aboard the USS Mattaponi) and his cousin Joe during Vietnam (I don’t think he ever shipped out of Fort Benning). But the best find of the day was the menu from my parents’ wedding at Chateau D’Or on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn (which is now a bingo parlor).
I love this menu because it represents the 60’s that my parents appear to have experienced -which was really more like a Brooklyn-Jewish version of the idealized 50’s. (I am comfortable with this as the truth. I have no desire to see my mother as “free love” flower child.)
It also reflects the way I see my father before I knew him. The man I knew was very set in his ways and so I thought there was a lot of friction in the relationship and I thought of him as anything but cool. But I knew from old photos and letters - and my mother’s assurances - that my father was both a suave and stylish guy. He was a clotheshorse and a world traveller and even though he married old he wasn’t lonely young. So the Chateau D’Or seems like the kind of place that he would have a wedding. Still, the inconsistent use of French is pretty funny. Here is the bill of fare:
Smorgasbord Continentale
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Pineapple Supreme
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Coeurs de Celery
Olives Vertes et Noires
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Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup
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Roast Prime Ribs of Beef au Jus
Peas and Mushrooms with Almonds
Dutchess Potato
Derma Farci
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Chocolate Mousse
Wedding Cake
Demi Tasse
I love the use of the term Pineapple Supreme - it was, I am told, a fruit salad served in a hollowed-out pineapple. Celery sticks and olives certainly sounds better in French (though “couers de celery” is an abuse of language almost as bad as The Olive Garden’s “Chicken Con Broccoli"). But my favorite entry is “Derma Farci”.
Derma Farci is kishke. Kishke is essentially a sausage made from chicken fat and flour using cow intenstine for the natural casing. It is the ultimate in Jewish cuisine, both horrifying and spectacular. It is most certainly not French. But derma farci is the combination of Bronx Jew and suave fellow that was my father. And for that I was happy to see it on the menu.
I miss you, Dad.
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