The Art of Purveying, 3



At sometime in the dead of night this past weekend, whoever does this sort of thing went around and did it. I am talking about the festooning of the streets. When I went about my workaday business on Friday and Saturday morning, I don’t remember seeing golden stars arcing over my head on every thoroughfare. But when we walked around Brooklyn yesterday, there they were. And this morning when I went looking for a new toothbrush, I found that my neighborhood had not been spared.

In August, I was indignant when merchants busted out the Halloween decorations before the pools and beaches were closed, but when I look at the calendar, sadly, I have to admit that this time “they” may be within their rights, declaring “open shopping season.” Already Mark is rising at the crack of dawn to cover “the biggest one-day sale ever.” (“You mean the biggest one-day sale since last week?” I sneer. “No, it’s the biggest sale of the year!” he rejoins, quite earnestly.)

            There are, after all, only 39 shopping days left before Christmas! As is my wont, as the Giving Season kicks into gear I feel myself becoming more and more stingy. Especially this year. It’s probably time for an intervention from those Ghosts who helped Scrooge so much.

            But, I still like food. Even if I can’t face those one-day sales, I still like shopping for comestibles.

Sahadi’s, 187 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY,  http://sahadis.com/. I thought I’d stay in Brooklyn, since I was just talking about yesterday’s visit there. Our friends Nick and Joseph live just off Smith Street, which, I have already told you, is rife with restaurants, but there’s not much point in going to a restaurant when you have friends who prepare fabulous French food, which they serve beautifully and accompany with great drinks and conversation. It was on our post-prandial stroll on Court Street that I noticed the municipal Christmas decorations. If you keep on going down Court Street you’ll hit Atlantic Avenue (Trader Joe’s is right on the corner of Atlantic and Court) and if you walk down Atlantic toward the water, you will pass one of my all-time favorite stores, Sahadi’s. But never go on a Sunday, because it isn’t open. Whoever heard of that, in an age when Mark’s store is open 24/7 at Christmas, for those who might like to shop at 3 am? But there it is; Sahadi’s is closed on Sundays, so don’t try to go. 

            But if you go on any other day, between 9 am and 7 pm, you are in for a treat. Sahadi’s, which has been in the New York area for over 100 years (although not always in the same storefront), has a great collection of imported Middle Eastern delicacies. They carry a wide variety of oils, spreads, vinegars, crackers. They have a pretty good cheese counter, always a few bargains. Their store-prepared food is really tasty. I happen to be very fond of their store-made hummus. It’s very smooth, almost unctuous, but it has a nice kick of tahini and spice. I also love the lebany with garlic, which they don’t always have. It’s a thick yogurt, thoroughly infused with garlic. Great by itself, with a cut-up raw vegetable salad, on top of a baked potato, or as an unusual sandwich spread.

But all of these items are only a teaser. The real strengths of this store are in the bulk department. Here you can get every variety of dried fruit and nut, in as large or small a quantity as you wish, without spending an arm and a leg. You can also get bulk olives and pickles of various kinds, and they are consistently superior to most other purveyors (perhaps Zabar’s is the exception, but it is more expensive). And the surrounding shelves are piled high with a wide variety of coffees, grains, and common and exotic herbs and spices, which you can purchase either in bulk or pre-packed.

            It’s really a great place to shop, but be warned: you are definitely NOT going to make it out of there without impulse buys. Oh, look, lavash, we haven’t had that in a while. .  . I wonder what pomegranate molasses tastes like? . . . look at the deal on phyllo!

Know what I’m saying?    

The Art of Purveying 2

This is going to be a lengthy series, because Mark and I really like our food and beverage purveyors.
         This post is for those who are into meat eating. If you’ve read Mrs. Talling’s Pig before, you know that I have some trepidation and some moral qualms, but I do enjoy seeing somebody enjoying their food, even if it is the charred flesh of a fellow creature. Maybe I should change the name of this blog to “The Biggest Hypocrite in the World.”

Here are a couple of places out in Brooklyn, our late, lamented home borough. Not in Park Slope, which was our neighborhood until it got so genteel we couldn’t afford to live there anymore, but in one of the neighborhoods we had to bike through in order to get to the Brooklyn Bridge. I guess these markets fall on either side of the Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens divide.

Paisanos Meat Market, 162 Smith Street Brooklyn, NY 11201.  Paisanos sits on Brooklyn’s “restaurant row,” which is what Smith Street came to be known as after William Grimes deemed Grocery a serious restaurant back in 2000. Now, when I walk down Smith Street from Carroll Gardens to Cobble Hill, especially on a Monday night, I always think, there can’t possibly be enough people eating dinner in the entire city of New York to keep all these bars and restaurants afloat. I’m sure I’m showing my age; by now the real, cutting edge “restaurant row” is probably in Bushwick, Canarsie, or East New York.

Paisanos pre-dates them all, having been in business for nearly half a century. Once again, the posts of some Yelpers and Chowhounders have been disdainful, insisting that the butchers in this shop have not all mastered their craft, but I am thrilled by this place, principally because they cut the meat to order. You tell them how thick you want the steak, and they take that big ole hunk of cow over to the bandsaw, and, voila, your two-inch steak, madam. They also sell a nice selection of sausages. Of course, Mrs. Talling’s Pig likes it when I bring back a brown paper package from this place (although, sadly, it’s not tied up with string). He likes the steak; I like the sizzle.

G Esposito’s and Sons Pork Store, 357 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231. Speaking of pigs. . . . so, you hopped on your bike, took the 9^th Street Bridge across the Gowanus and you’re tooling down Court, feeling a little peckish, when you see this giant, kind-of-sinister-looking pig wearing a chef’s hat, beckoning to you from a storefront. Actually, I’m thinking you probably shouldn’t be tooling down Court Street FROM the 9^th Street Bridge, because I think it’s a one-way street that goes in the opposite direction. . . .but I digress. At any rate, you’re feeling hungry and like you deserve to be because you’re biking, and the Pig is strangely compelling. So, you go into his store—which, 5 seconds of painstaking research reveals, has been around since 1922—and you get the prosciutto bread. It’s a heavy loaf, studded with nubbins of pork. That’s for now. You think you’re not going to eat the whole thing, but by the time the bike ride is over, so is the bread. You also get store-made hot soppresseta. That's for later. It’s spicy and chewy, and it tastes like an animal. But, in a good way! If you’re going to be a meat eater, this is an honest way to do it.

The Art of Purveying, Part I

To purvey: To furnish or supply (esp. food or provisions) ---pur-vey-or n. (New World Dictionary of the American Language)

I first encountered the word “purveyor” in reading about the Crimean War, specifically about Florence Nightingale’s heroic battle to improve the hospital care for the wounded at Scutari. In the tangled bureaucracy of the British military, the Commissariat comprised the cooks, carters, and shop keepers who were responsible for filling the stomachs of the troops—whether they were in the field or in the hospital. However, once men were too ill to eat regular food (and if they ended up at the hospital in Scutari, they were likely to become too ill to eat regular food, even if they were only slightly damaged when they entered its portals), the job of supplying the “invalid food” became the purview of the Purveyor. However, the Purveyor only cooked and disseminated the beef broth, puddings, port wine, and other Victorian comfort foods. It was still the Commissariat who made the budget for the food, picked the merchants who supplied it, and decided if the quality was suitable. And it was the doctor who chose which patients should receive the special diet.

Do not think the Purveyor powerless, for, although the doctor could order specific foods for the patient, his order could easily be countermanded by the whim of the Purveyor. If you think this set up sounds confusing, you’re right. The administrators of this institution were also confused. But what kind of order do you expect in a hospital that had a city of whores living in the basement?

But I digress. . .

Ever since then, I have been a fan of the word Purveyor. I like it capitalized like that, like the Terminator, or The Grand Inquisitor. I like the fact that Mark and I can spend his days off purveying, going from one shop to another to pick up our provisions for the week, and that the merchants we patronize are also purveying when they supply us with said delicacies.

So, without further ado, here are some of our favorites.

East Village Cheese, 40 3^rd Avenue, New York, NY. Okay, some Yelpers may complain that East Village’s supplies are not always the freshest. Yes, it’s true, I have bought the odd pound of port salut there that was almost too pungent to eat by the time we got it home, and no amount of telling ourselves that it was supposed to taste like that and that we would grow to love it, could make it palatable. Yes, sadly, sometimes East Village Cheese’s specials are past their prime. But to my mind if you can pay 2.99 a pound for port salut, St. Andre’s, and other cheeses that normally retail for 14 bucks a pound, it is worth the occasional dud. A pound of port salut in the garbage is a small price to pay for the entire kilo of Castello we got for two bucks that was so delicious we ate it in a week! Actually, our arteries are probably thankful.

East Village Cheese is really big on atmosphere, too. The specials are hand-printed on butcher’s paper, and taped the windows. The long, narrow store is nearly impossible to navigate any time a holiday is approaching. When they say that they’re closing at 6:30, they mean they’re locking the doors at 6:30, so you’d better be finished. And they have this old European way of charging you for items, which I have not encountered anywhere else in the United States. You get on one, long serpentine line, and when you finally get to the counter, you tell the guy what you want and he gathers it, cuts it, weighs it, and wraps it. He then uses an old fashioned adding machine to assess the damages. He hands you the tape, and you walk across the store (about three feet away), hand your slip to the cashier, and pay. After that, the cheese counter guy will hand over your groceries. Not sure why they keep this system in place, but it does add to the experience.