You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the downpouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are—people of the city—and we, who are almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales.
“Does every sink grow on your farm?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s marvellous. Absolutely every sink?”
“Some things we get from neighbors up the road.”
“You don’t have no avocados, do you?”
“Avocados don’t grow in New York State.”
“Butter beans?”
“They’re a Southern crop.”
“Who baked this bread?”
“My mother. A dollar twenty-five for the cinnamon. Ninety-five cents for the rye.”
“I can’t eat rye bread anymore. I like it very much, but it gives me a headache.”
Short, born abroad, and with dark hair and quick eyes, the woman who likes rye bread comes regularly to the Brooklyn Greenmarket, at Flatbush and Atlantic. I have seen her as well at the Fifty-ninth Street Greenmarket, in Manhattan. There is abundant evidence that she likes to eat. She must have endured some spectacular hangovers from all that rye.
Farm goods are sold off trucks, vans, and pickups that come into town in the dark of the morning. The site shifts with the day of the week: Tuesdays, black Harlem; Wednesdays, Brooklyn; Fridays, Amsterdam at 102nd. There are two on Saturdays—the one at Fifty-ninth Street and Second Avenue, the other in Union Square. Certain farms are represented everywhere, others at just one or two of the markets, which have been primed by foundation funds and developed under the eye of the city. If they are something good for the urban milieu—tumbling horns of fresh plenty at the people’s feet—they are an even better deal for the farmers, whose disappearance from the metropolitan borders may be slowed a bit by the many thousands of city people who flow through streets and vacant lots and crowd up six deep at the trucks to admire the peppers, fight over the corn, and gratefully fill our money aprons with fresh green city lettuce.
“How much are the tomatoes?”
“Three pounds for a dollar.”
“Peaches?”
“Three pounds for a dollar twenty-five.”
“Are they freestones?”
“No charge for the pits.”
“How much are the tomatoes?”
“Three pounds for a dollar. It says so there on the sign.”
“Venver the eggs laid?”
“Yesterday.”
“Kon you eat dum raw?”
We look up from the cartons, the cashbox, the scales, to see who will eat the eggs raw. She is a good-looking big-framed young blonde.
“You bet. You can eat them raw.”
“How much are the apples?”
“Three pounds for a dollar.”
Three pounds, as we weigh them out, are anywhere from forty-eight to fifty-two ounces. Rich Hodgson says not to charge for an extra quarter pound. He is from Hodgson Farms, of Newburgh, New York, and I (who come from western New Jersey) have been working for him off and on for three months, summer and fall. I thought at first that I would last only a week, but there is a mesmerism in the selling, in the coins and the bills, the all-day touching of hands. I am often in charge of the peppers, and, like everyone else behind the tables by our truck, I can look at a plastic sack of them now and tell its weight.
“How much these weigh? Have I got three pounds?”
“That’s maybe two and a quarter pounds you’ve got there.”
“Weigh them, please.”
“There it is. Two and a quarter pounds.”
“Very good.”
“Fantastic! Fantastic! You see that? You see that? He knew exactly how much it weighed.”
I scuff a boot, take a break for a shiver in the bones. There are unsuspected heights in this game, moments that go right off the scale.
This is the Brooklyn market, in appearance the most cornucopian of all. The trucks are drawn up in a close but ample square and spill into its center the colors of the country. Greengage plums. Ruby Red onions. Yellow crookneck squash. Sweet white Spanish onions. Starking Delicious plums.
Fall pippins (“Green as grass and curl your teeth”). McIntoshes, Cortlands, Paulareds. (“Paulareds are new and are lovely apples. I’ll bet they’ll be in the stores in the next few years.”)
Pinkish-yellow Gravensteins. Gold Star cantaloupes. Patty Pan squash.
Burpless cucumbers.
Cranberry beans.
Silver Queen corn. Sweet Sue bicolor corn, with its concise tight kernels, its well-filled tips and butts. Boston salad lettuce.
Parris Island romaine lettuce. Ithaca iceberg crunchy pale lettuce. Orange tomatoes.
Cherry Bell tomatoes.
Moreton Hybrid, Jet Star, Setmore, Supersonic, Roma, Saladette tomatoes.
Campbell 38s.
Campbell 1327s.
Big Boy, Big Girl, Redpak, Ramapo, Rutgers London-broil thick-slice tomatoes.
Clean-shouldered, supple-globed Fantastic tomatoes. Celery (Imperial 44).
Hot Portugal peppers. Four-lobed Lady Bell glossy green peppers. Aconcagua frying peppers.
Parsley, carrots, collard greens.
Stuttgarter onions, mustard greens.
Dandelions.
The people, in their throngs, are the most varied we see—or that anyone is likely to see in one place west of Suez. This intersection is the hub if not the heart of Brooklyn, where numerous streets converge, and where Fourth Avenue comes plowing into the Flatbush-Atlantic plane. It is also a nexus of the race. “Weigh these, please.” “Will you please weigh these?” Greeks. Italians. Russians. Finns. Haitians. Puerto Ricans. Nubians. Muslim women in veils of shocking pink. Sunnis in total black. Women in hiking shorts, with babies in their backpacks. Young Connecticut-looking pants-suit women. Their hair hangs long and as soft as cornsilk. There are country Jamaicans, in loose dresses, bandannas tight around their heads. “Fifty cents? Yes, dahling. Come on a sweetheart, mon.” There are Jews by the minyan, Jews of all persuasions—white-bearded, black-bearded, split-bearded Jews. Down off Park Slope and Cobble Hill come the neo-bohemians, out of the money and into the arts. “Will you weigh this tomato, please?” And meantime let us discuss theatre, books, environmental impacts. Maybe half the crowd are men—men in cool Haspel cords and regimental ties, men in lipstick, men with blue eyelids. Corporate-echelon pinstripe men.
Their silvered hair is perfect in coif; it appears to have been audited. Easygoing old neighborhood men with their shirts hanging open in the summer heat are walking galleries of abdominal and thoracic scars—Brooklyn Jewish Hospital’s bastings and tackings. (They do good work there.) A huge clock is on a tower high above us, and as dusk comes down in the autumn months the hands glow Chinese red. The stations of the hours light up like stars. The clock is on the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, a skyscraper full of dentists. They go down at five into the Long Island Rail Road, under us. Below us, too, are all the subways of the city, in ganglion assembled.
“How much are the cabbages?”
“Forty cents a head.”
“O.K. Weigh one, please.”
We look around at empty storefronts, at J. Rabinowitz & Sons’ SECURITY FIREPROOF STORAGE, at three gold balls (Gem Jewelers Sales), at Martin Orlofsky’s Midtown Florist Nursery. Orlofsky has successfully objected to our presence as competitors here, and we can sell neither plants nor flowers. “HAVE YOU HAD ANY LATELY? CLAMS, STEAMERS.”Across Fourth Avenue from the Greenmarket is the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, a century and a quarter old, with what seem to be, even in the brightest morning light, black saints in its stained-glass windows. Far down Fourth, as if at rest on the paved horizon, stands a tower of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. To the northwest rises the Empire State. Not long after dawn, as trucks arrive and farmers begin to open boxes and set up wooden tables, a miscellany of whores is calling it a day—a gradual dispersal, quitting time. Their corner is Pacific and Fourth. Now and again, a big red Cadillac pauses at the curb beside them. The car’s rear window is shaped like a heart. With some frequency, a squad car will slide up to the same curb—a week-in, week-out, endless duet with the Cadillac. The women hurry away. “Here come the law.” The Greenmarket space, which lies between Atlantic and Pacific, was once occupied by condemned buildings—spent bars and liquor stores. The block is fenced and gravelled now, and is leased
by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which charges the Greenmarket seventy-five dollars a Wednesday. The market does not fill the lot—the rest is concession parking. Here in the din of the city, in the rivers of moving metal, some customers drive to the Greenmarket as if it were a roadside stand in Rockland County, a mall in Valley Stream.
On a sidewalk around the corner, people with a Coleman stove under a fifty-five-gallon drum are making sauce with our tomatoes. Tall black man in a business suit now picks up a slim hot pepper. Apparently he thinks it sweet, because he takes most of it with a single bite and chews it with anticipant relish. Three … two … one. The small red grenade explodes on his tongue. His eyeballs seem to smoke. By the fistful, he grabs cool stringbeans and stuffs them into his mouth.
I forget to give change to a middle-aged woman with bitter eyes. I charged her forty-five cents for a pound and a third of apples and she gave me half a dollar. Now she is demanding her nickel, and her eyes are narrower than the sides of dimes. She is a round-shouldered person, beaky and short—shortchanged. In her stare at me, there is an entire judiciary system—accusation, trial, and conviction. “You give me my nickel, mister.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot. Here is your nickel.”
She does not believe my mistake a mistake. She walks away in a white huff. Now she stops, turns, glowers. She moves on. Twice more, as she departs from the market, she stops, turns, and stares angrily back. I watch her all the way to the curb. She waves at the traffic and gets into a cab.
A coin will sink faster through bell peppers than it will through water. When people lose their money they go after it like splashing bears. Peppers everywhere. Peppers two deep over the apples, three deep over the plums. Peppers all over the ground. Sooner or later, the people who finger the eggs will spill and break the eggs, and the surface they walk on becomes a gray-and-yellow slurry of parking-lot gravel and egg—a Brooklyn omelette. Woman spills a dozen now. Her purse is hanging open and a falling egg plops in. Eleven smash on the ground. She makes no
offer to pay. Hodgson, who is young and whimsical, grins and shrugs. He is not upset. He is authentically amused. Always, without a sign of stress, he accepts such losses. The customer fingers another dozen eggs, and asks if we are sure they are good.
I err again, making change—count out four ones, and then a five, “and ten makes twenty.”
The customer says, “I gave you a ten-dollar bill, not a twenty.”
I look at her softly, and say to her, “Thanks very much. You’re very nice.”
“What do you mean I’m very nice? I gave you a ten-dollar bill. Why does that make me very nice?”
“I meant to say I’m glad you noticed. I’m really glad you noticed.”
“How much are the tomatoes?”
“Weigh these, please.”
“Three pounds for a dollar.”
“How much the corn?”
“Ten cents an ear. Twelve for a dollar.”
“Everything is so superior. I’d forgotten what tomatoes taste like.”
“Will you weigh these, please?”
“The prices are so ridiculously cheap.”
“How can you charge so little?”
“In nine years in the city, I’ve never seen food like this.”
“How much are these?”
“Fifty-five cents.”
“Wow! What a rip-off!”
“Three pounds for a dollar is too much for tomatoes. You know that, don’t you? I don’t care how good they are.”
“How much are these?”
“A dollar-ten.”
“A dollar-ten?”
“Three eggplants. Three and a half pounds. Three pounds for a dollar. You can have them for a dollar-ten.”
“Keep them.”
“In the supermarket, the vegetables are unspeakable.”
“They are brought in from California.”
“You can’t see what you are getting.”
“When the frost has come and you are gone, what will we do without you?”
Around the market square, some of the trucks have stickers on them: “NO FARMERS, NO FOOD.” Alvina Frey is here, and Ronald Binaghi, from farms in Bergen County, New Jersey. John Labanowski and his uncle Andy Labanowski are from the blackdirt country, the mucklands, of Orange County, New York. Bob Engle and Jim Kent tend orchards in the Hudson Valley. Bill Merriman, the honey man, is from Canaan, Connecticut; Joan Benack and Ursula Plock, the bakers, from Milan, New York. Ed and Judy Dart grow “organic” on Long Island, Richard Finch in Frenchtown, New Jersey. John Henry. Vincent Neglia. Ilija Sekulovski. Don Keller. Cleather Slade completes the ring. Slade is young, tall, paunchy, silent, and black. His wife, Dorothy, sells with him. She has a nicely lighted smile that suggests repose. Their family farmland is in Red Springs, North Carolina, but the Slades are mainly from Brooklyn. They make occasional trips South for field peas, collards, okra, yams, and for the reddest watermelons north of Chichicastenango.
Jeffrey Mack works for Hodgson part time. He has never seen a farm. He says he has never been out of the city. He lives five blocks away. He is eight years old, black. He has a taut, hard body, and glittering eyes, a round face. He piles up empty cartons for us and sometimes weighs tomatoes. On his better days he is some help.
“Jeffrey, that’s enough raisin bread.”
“Jeffrey, how many times do I have to tell you: get yourself out of the way.”
“What are you doing here, Jeffrey? You ought to be in school.”
He is not often pensive, but he is pensive for a moment now. “If you had a kid would you put him up for adoption?” he asks.
“What is that supposed to mean, Jeffrey? Why are you asking me that?”
“My mother says she’s going to put me up for adoption.”
With two, three, and four people working every truck, the farmers can occasionally take breaks, walk around—eat each other’s apples, nectarines, and pears. Toward the end of the day, when their displays have been bought low and the crowd is becoming thin, they move around even more, and talk in small groups.
“What always surprises me is how many people are really nice here in the city.”
“I was born in New York. My roots are here, you know. I’d throw away a bad cantaloupe, anything, so the people would come back.”
“We have to leave them touch tomatoes, but when they do my guts go up and down. They paw them until if you stuck a pin in them they’d explode.”
“They handle the fruit as if they were getting out all their aggressions. They press on the melons until their thumbs push through. I don’t know why they have to handle the fruit like that. They’re brutal on the fruit.”
“They inspect each egg, wiggle it, make sure it’s not stuck in the carton. You’d think they were buying diamonds.”
“They’re bag crazy. They need a bag for everything, sometimes two.”
“They’re nervous. So nervous.”
“Today I had my third request from someone who wanted to come stay on the farm, who was looking for peace and quiet for a couple of days. He said he had found Jesus. It was unreal.”
“I had two Jews in yarmulkes fighting over a head of lettuce. One called the other a kike.”
“I’ve had people buy peppers from me and take them to another truck to check on the weight.”
“Yeah, and meanwhile they put thirteen ears of corn in a bag, hand it to you, and say it’s a dozen. I let them go. I only get after them when they have sixteen.”
“They think we’re hicks. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘We’re hicks and you’re hookers. You’re muggers and you breathe dirty air.’”
“I hardly smoke in the city. Down home I can smoke a whole
pack of cigarettes and still have energy all night. You couldn’t pay me to live here. I can’t breathe.”
If the farmers have a lot to say about their clients, they have even more to say about each other. Friendly from the skin out, they are deep competitors, and one thing that they are (in a sense) competing for is their right to be a part of the market. A high percentage of them seems to feel that a high percentage of the others should be shut down and sent away.
The Greenmarket was started in 1976. Farmers were recruited. Word got around. A wash of applicants developed. There was no practical or absolute way to check out certain facts about them—nor is there yet. For example, if some of the goods on a truck were not grown by the farmer selling them, who did grow them, and when, and where? The Greenmarket quickly showed itself to be a prime outlet for the retailing of farm produce. On a good day, one truck with an eighteen-foot box could gross several thousand dollars. So every imaginable kind of seller became attracted. The ever-present problem was that anyone in jeans with a rustic address painted on his truck could load up at Hunts Point, the city’s wholesale fruit-and-vegetable center, and head out at 5 A.M. for the Creenmarket—a charter purpose of which was to help the regional farmer, not the fast-moving speculator, survive. Authentic farmers, moreover, could bring a little from home and a lot from Hunts Point. Wholesale goods, having been grown on big mass-production acreages (and often shipped in underripe from distant states), could be bought at Hunts Point and retailed—in some instances—at lower prices than the customgrown produce of a small Eastern farm. Prices, however, were an incidental issue. The customers, the people of the city, believed—and were encouraged to believe—that when they walked into a Greenmarket they were surrounded by true farmers who had grown the produce they displayed and were offering it fresh from the farm. That was the purpose and promise of the Greenmarket—if not the whole idea, an unarguably large part of it—and in the instances where wholesale, long-distance, gassedout goods were being presented (as some inevitably were) the
principle was being subverted. In fact, the term Greenmarket had been coined—and registered in Albany—to set apart these markets in the public mind from certain “farmers’ markets” around the city that are annually operated by Hunts Point hicks.
“Are you a farmer, or are you buying from an auction?” was a challenge the farmers began to fling around. Few were neighbors at home—in positions to know about each other. They lived fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty miles apart, and came to the city to compete as strangers. They competed in sales, and they competed in slander. They still do. To a remarkable—and generally inaccurate—extent, they regard one another as phonies.
“He doesn’t even know what shoe-peg corn is.”
“Never trust a farmer who doesn’t know shoe-peg corn.”
“What exactly is shoe-peg corn?”
“Look at him. He has clean fingernails.”
“I happen to know he has them manicured.”
“I bust my hump seven days a week all summer long and I don’t like to see people bring to market things they don’t grow.”
“Only farmers who are not farmers can ruin this market.”
“These hustlers are going to work us off the block.”
“There’s farmers selling stuff they don’t know what it is.”
“What exactly is shoe-peg corn?”
“I like coming here. It gets me out of Vineland. Of course, you pick your ass off the night before.”
“Look at Don Keller’s hands. You can see the farm dirt in them.”
“His nails. They’ll never be clean.”
“Rich Hodgson. See him over there? He has the cleanest fingernails in New York State.”
“That Hodgson, he’s nice enough, but he doesn’t know what a weed looks like. I’ll tell you this: he’s never even seen a weed.”
Around the buildings of Hodgson Farms are some of the tallest volunteers in New York, topheavy plants that sway overhead—the Eastern rampant weed. With everybody working ninety hours a week, there is not much time for cosmetics. For the most part,
the buildings are chicken houses. Rich’s father, Dick Hodgson, went into the egg business in 1946 and now has forty thousand hens. When someone in the city cooks a Hodgson egg, it has quite recently emerged from a chicken in a tilted cage, rolled onto a conveyor, and gone out past a candler and through a grader and into a waiting truck. A possible way to taste a fresher egg would be to boil the chicken with the egg still in it.
Dick Hodgson—prematurely white-haired, drivingly busy—is an agrarian paterfamilias whose eighty-two-year-old mother-in-law grades tomatoes for him. His wife, Frances, is his secretary and bookkeeper. He branched into truck farming some years ago specifically to keep his daughter, Judy, close to home. Judy runs the Hodgsons’ roadside stand, in Plattekill, and her husband, Jan Krol, is the family’s vegetable grower, the field boss—more than a hundred acres now under cultivation. Rich, meanwhile, went off to college and studied horticulture, with special emphasis on the fate of tropical houseplants. To attract him home, his father constructed a greenhouse, where Rich now grows wandering Jews, spider plants, impatiens, coleus, asparagus ferns—and he takes them with him to Harlem and wherever else he is allowed to sell them. Rich, who likes the crowds and the stir of the city, is the farm’s marketer.
The Greenmarket, even more than the arriving Hodgson generation, has expanded Hodgson Farms. Before 1976, the family had scarcely twenty acres under cultivation and, even so, had difficulty finding adequate outlets for the vegetables Jan grew. The roadside stand moved only a minor volume. Much of the rest was sold in New Jersey, at the Paterson Market, with discouraging results. “Paterson is semi-wholesale,” Rich says. “You have to sell in units of a peck or more. You’re lucky if you get three dollars for a half bushel of tomatoes. You ask for more and all you hear all day is ‘That’s a too much a money. That’s a too much a money.’” (A half bushel of tomatoes weighs twenty-six pounds, and brings at least eight dollars at the Greenmarket, giving good weight.) The Hodgsons tried the fruit-and-vegetable auction in Milton, New York, but the auctioneer’s cut was thirteen
per cent and the farmers were working for him. They also tried a farmers’ market in Albany, but sold three bushels of peppers and a couple of bags of corn in one depressing day. They were more or less failing as small-scale truck farmers. Dick Hodgson’s theory of family cohesion through agricultural diversification was in need of an unknown spray. NBC News presented a short item one evening covering the début of the Greenmarket. The Hodgsons happened to be watching.
“The first place we went to was Fifty-ninth Street, and the people were fifteen deep waiting to get to the eggs. I couldn’t believe it. There were just masses of faces. I looked at them and felt panic and broke into a cold sweat. They went after the corn so fast I just dumped it on the ground. The people fell on it, stripped it, threw the husks around. They were fighting, grabbing, snatching at anything they could get their hands on. I had never seen people that way, never seen anything like it. We sold a full truck in five hours. It was as if there was a famine going on. The people are quieter now.”
Quietly, in a single day in the Greenmarket, Rich has sold as many as fifteen hundred dozen eggs. In one day, nearly five thousand ears of corn. In one day, three-quarters of a ton of tomatoes.
“How much are the tomatoes?”
“Fifteen hundred pounds for five hundred dollars.”
Rich is in his mid-twenties, has a tumbling shag of bright-red hair, a beard that comes and goes. When it is gone, as now, in the high season of 1977, he retains not only a mustache but also a pair of frontburns: a couple of pelts that descend from either end of the mustache and pass quite close to his mouth on their way to his chin. He is about six feet tall and wears glasses. Their frames are pale blue. His energy is of the steady kind, and he works hard all day with an easygoing imperturbability—always bemused; always a controlled, sly smile. Rarely, he looks tired. On market days, he gets up at four, is on the Thruway by five, is setting up tables and opening cartons at seven, has a working breakfast around nine (Egg McMuffin), and, with only a short
break, sells on his feet until six or seven, when he packs up to drive home, take a shower, drop into bed, and rise again at four. His companion, Melissa Mousseau, shares his schedule and sells beside him. There is no market on Mondays, so Rich works a fourteen-hour day at home. He packs cartons at the farm—cartons of cauliflowers, cartons of tomatoes—and meanders around the county collecting a load for Harlem. The truck is, say, the six-ton International with the Fruehauf fourteen-foot box—“HODGSON FARMS, NEWBURGH, N. Y. , SINCE 1946.” Corn goes in the nose—corn in dilapidating lath-and-wire crates that are strewn beside the fields where Jan has been bossing the pickers. The pickers are Newburgh high-school students. The fields, for the most part, are rented from the State of New York. A few years ago, the state bought Stewart Air Force Base, outside Newburgh, with intent to lengthen the main runway and create an immense international freightport, an all-cargo jetport. The state also bought extensive farms lying off the west end of the base. Scarcely were the farmers packed up and on the road to Tampa Bay when bulldozers flattened their ancestral homes and dump trucks took off with the debris. The big freightport is still in the future, and meanwhile the milieu of the vanished farms is ghostly with upgrowing fields and clusters of shade trees around patches of smoothed ground where families centered their lives. The Hodgsons came upon this scene as farmers moving in an unusual direction. With the number of farms and farmers in steady decline in most places on the urban fringe, the Hodgsons were looking for land on which to expand. For the time being, rented land will do, but they hope that profits will be sufficient to enable them before long to buy a farm or two—to acquire land that would otherwise, in all likelihood, be industrially or residentially developed. The Greenmarket is the outlet—the sole outlet—that has encouraged their ambition. In the penumbral world of the airport land, there are occasional breaks in the sumac where long clean lines of Hodgson peppers reach to distant hedgerows, Hodgson cantaloupes, Hodgson cucumbers, Hodgson broccoli, collards, eggplants, Hodgson tomatoes, cabbages, corn—part vegetable
patch, part disenfranchised farm, with a tractor, a sprayer, and a spreader housed not in sheds and barns but under big dusty maples. The family business is integrated by the spreader, which fertilizes the Greenmarket vegetables with the manure of the forty thousand chickens.
Corn in the nose, Rich drives to the icehouse, where he operates a machine that grinds up a three-hundred-pound block and sprays granulated snow all over the corn. Corn snow. He stops, too, at local orchards for apples, Seckel pears, nectarines, peaches, and plums. The Greenmarket allows farmers to amplify their offerings by bringing the produce of neighbors. A neighbor is not a wholesale market but another farmer, whose farm is reasonably near—a rule easier made than enforced. The Hodgsons pick things up—bread included—from several other farms in the county, but two-thirds to three-quarters of any day’s load for the city consists of goods they grow themselves.
In the cooler of E. Borchert & Sons, the opiate aroma of peaches is overwhelming, unquenched by the refrigerant air. When the door opens, it frames, in summer heat, hazy orchards on ground that falls away to rise again in far perspective, orchards everywhere we can see. While loading half-bushel boxes onto the truck, we stop to eat a couple of peaches and half a dozen blue free plums. Not the least of the pleasures of working with Hodgson is the bounty of provender at hand, enough to have made the most sybaritic Roman prop himself up on one elbow. I eat, most days, something like a dozen plums, four apples, seven pears, six peaches, ten nectarines, six tomatoes, and a green pepper.
Eating his peach, Rich says, “The people down there in the city can’t imagine this. They don’t believe that peaches come from Newburgh, New York. They say that peaches come only from Georgia. People in the city have no concept of what our farming is like. They have no idea what a tomato plant looks like, or how a tomato is picked. They can’t envision a place with forty thousand chickens. They have no concept how sweet corn grows. And the people around here have a false concept of the city. Before we went down there the first time, people up here
said, ‘You’re out of your mind. You’re going to get robbed. You’re going to get stabbed.’ But I just don’t have any fears there. People in black Harlem are just as nice as people anywhere. City people generally are a lot calmer than I expected. I thought they would be loud, pushy, aggressive, and mean. But eighty per cent of them are nice and calm. Blacks and whites get along much better there than they do in Newburgh. Newburgh Free Academy, where I went to high school, was twenty-five per cent black. We had riots every year and lots of tension. Cars were set on fire. Actually, I prefer Harlem to most of the other markets. Harlem people are not so fussy. They don’t manhandle the fruit. And they buy in quantity. They’ll buy two dozen ears of corn, six pounds of tomatoes, and three dozen eggs. At Fifty-ninth Street, someone will buy one ear of corn for ten cents and want it in a bag. The reason we’re down there is the money, of course. But the one-to-one contact with the people is really good—especially when they come back the next week and say,”Those peaches were really delicious.’”
In the moonless night, with the air too heavy for much sleep anyway, we are up and on the road, four abreast: Anders Thueson, Rich Hodgson, David Hemingway … A door handle is cracking my fifth right rib. Melissa Mousseau is not with us today, and for Hemingway it is the first time selling. He is a Newburgh teenager in sneakers and a red football shirt lettered “OKLAHOMA.” Hemingway is marking time. He has mentioned January half a dozen ways since we started out, in a tone that reveres the word—January, an arriving milestone in his life, with a college out there waiting for him, and, by implication, the approach of stardom. Hemingway can high-jump seven feet. He remarks that the Greenmarket will require endurance and will therefore help build his stamina for January. He is black, and says he is eager to see Harlem, to be “constantly working with different people—that’s a trip in the head by itself.”
When the truck lurches onto the Thruway and begins the long rollout to the city, Hodgson falls asleep. Anders Thueson is driving.
He is an athlete, too, with the sort of legs that make football coaches whistle softly. Thueson has small, fine features, lightblue eyes, and short-cropped hair, Scandinavian yellow. He is our corn specialist, by predilection—would apparently prefer to count ears than to compute prices from weights. When he arrives in Harlem he will touch his toes and do deep knee bends to warm himself up for the corn.
Dawn is ruddy over Tappan Zee, the far end of the great bridge indistinct in mist. Don Keller, coming from Middletown, broke down on the bridge not long ago, rebuilt his starter at the tollbooth apron, and rolled into market at noon. Days later, Jim Kent’s truck was totalled on the way to Greenmarket—Hudson Valley grapes, apples, peaches, and corn all over the road. Gradually now, Irvington and Dobbs Ferry come into view across the water—big square houses of the riverbank, molars, packed in cloud. In towns like that, where somnolence is the main resource, this is the summit of the business day. Hodgson wakes up for the toll. For five minutes he talks sports and vegetable prices, and again he dozes away. On his lap is a carton of double-yolk eggs. His hands protect them. The fingernails are clean. Hodgson obviously sees no need to dress like Piers Plowman. He wears a yellow chemise Lacoste. The eggs are for Derryck Brooks-Smith, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, who is a regular Hodgson city employee. Brooks-Smith is by appearances our best athlete. He runs long distances and lifts significant weights. He and Thueson have repeatedly tried to see who can be the first to throw an egg over an eight-story building on Amsterdam Avenue. To date their record of failure is one hundred per cent—although each has succeeded with a peach.
We arrive at six-fifteen, to find Van Houten, Slade, and Keller already setting up—in fact, already selling. People are awake, and much around, and Dorothy Slade is weighing yams, three pounds for a dollar. Meanwhile, it is extremely difficult to erect display tables, open boxes, and pile up peppers and tomatoes when the crowd helps take off the lids. They grab the contents.
“Weigh these, please.”
“May I have a plastic bag?”
“Wait—while I get the scales off the truck.” The sun has yet to show above the brownstones.
This is the corner of 137th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, known elsewhere in the city as Seventh Avenue. The entire name—Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard—is spelled out on the street sign, which, as a result, has a tip-to-tip span so wide it seems prepared to fly. The big thoroughfare itself is of extraordinary width, and islanded, like parts of Broadway and Park Avenue. A few steps north of us are the Harlem Performance Center and the Egbe Omo Nago African Music Center, and just east along 137th Street from our trucks is the Mother A.M.E. Zion Church. For the Tuesday Greenmarket, the street has been barricaded and cars sent out, an exception being an old Plymouth without tires that rests on flaking steel. On the front wall of the church is a decorous advertisement: “Marion A. Daniels & Sons, Funeral Directors.” The block has four young sycamores, and contiguous buildings in every sort of shape from the neat and trim to broken-windowed houses with basements that are open like caves. On 137th Street beyond Adam Clayton Powell are two particularly handsome facing rows of brownstones, their cornices convex and dentilled, their entrances engrandeured with high, ceremonious flights of stairs. Beyond them, our view west is abruptly shut off by the City College cliffs in St. Nicholas Park—the natural wall of Harlem.
The farm trucks are parked on the sidewalks. Displays are in the street. Broad-canopied green, orange, purple, and red umbrellas shield produce from the sun. We have an awning, bolted to the truck. Anders Thueson, with a Magic Marker, is writing our prices on brown paper bags, taping them up as signs. “Is plums spelled with a ‘b’?” he asks.
Hemingway tells him no.
A tall, slim woman in a straw hat says to me, “I come down here get broke every Tuesday. Weigh these eggplants, please.”
“There you are. Do you want those in a bag?”
“You gave me good weight. You don’t have to give me bags.”
Minerva Coleman walks by, complaining. She is short and acidulous, with graying hair and quick, sardonic eyes. She wears bluejeans and a white short-sleeved sweatshirt. She has lived in this block twenty-three years. “You farmers come in too early,” she says. “Why do you have to come in so early? I have to get up at four o’clock every Tuesday, and that don’t make sense. I don’t get paid.”
Not by the Greenmarket, at any rate. Minerva works for Harlem Teams for Self-Help, an organization that is something like a Y.M.-Y.W.C.A. It is housed, in fact, in a former Y, the entrance to which is behind our truck. Minerva is Director of Economic Development. As such, she brought the Greenmarket to 137th Street—petitioned the city for it, arranged with the precinct to close off the street. While her assistants sell Harlem Teams for Self-Help shopping bags (fifteen cents), Minerva talks tomatoes with the farmers, and monitors the passing crowd. As the neighborhood kleptos come around the corner, she is quick to point them out. When a middle-aged man in a business suit appears on the scene wearing a sandwich board, she reads the message—“HARLEM TEAM FOR DESTROYING BLACK BUSINESS”—and at once goes out of her tree. “What do you mean, ‘destroying black business’? Who is destroying black business? What is destroying black business? Get your ass off this block. Can’t you see this market is good for everybody? The quality and the price against the quality and the price at the supermarket—there’s no comparison.”
Exit sandwich board.
“How much are the apples?”
“Three pounds for a dollar, madam.”
“Are they sweet?”
“You can eat them straight or bake them in a pie.”
“Give me six pounds of apples, six pounds of tomatoes, and three dozen extra-large eggs. Here the boxes from the eggs I bought last week.”
Mary Hill, Lenox Avenue. Florrie Thomas, Grand Concourse. Leroy Price, Bradhurst Avenue. Les Boyd, the Polo Grounds.
Ylonia Phillips, 159th Street. Selma Williamson, 141st Street. Hattie Mack, Lenox Avenue. Ten in the morning and the crowd is thick. The sun is high and hot. People are drinking from fireplugs. A white cop goes by, the radio on his buttock small and volcanic, erupting: “ … beating her for two hours.” In the upstairs windows of the houses across the street, women sit quietly smoking.
“Are these peppers hot?”
“Those little ones? Yeah. They’re hot as hell.”
“How do you know how hot hell is? How do you know?”
The speaker is male and middle-aged, wears a jacket and tie, and is small, compact, peppery. He continues, “How do you know how hot hell is? You been over there? I don’t think you know how hot hell is.”
“Fifty cents, please.”
The hundreds of people add up into thousands, and more are turning the corner—every face among them black. Rarely, a white one will come along, an oddity, a floating moon. Just as a bearded person becomes unaware of his beard and feels that he looks like everyone else, you can forget for a time that your own face is white. There are no reminders from the crowd.
Middle-aged man with a woman in blue. She reaches for the roll of thin plastic bags, tugs one off, and tries to open it. The sides are stuck together and resist coming apart. She looks up helplessly, looks at me. Like everyone else on this side of the tables, I am an expert at opening plastic bags.
“These bags are terrible,” I tell her, rubbing one between my thumb and fingers. When it comes open, I hand it to her.
“Why, thank you,” she says. “You’re nice to do that for me. I guess that is the privilege of a lady.”
Her husband looks me over, and explains to her, “He’s from the old school.” There is a pause, some handling of fruit. Then he adds, “But the old schools are closing these days.”
“They’re demolished,” she says. “The building’s gone.”
They fill their sack with peppers (Lady Bell).
The older the men are here, the more likely it is that they are
wearing suits and ties. Gray fedoras. Long cigars. The younger they are, the more likely it is that they are carrying shoulder-strapped Panasonics, turned on, turned up—blaring. Fortunately, the market seems to attract a high proportion of venerable people, dressed as if for church, exchanging news and some opinion.
Among our customers are young women in laboratory smocks with small gold rings in the sides of their noses—swinging from a pierced nostril. They work in Harlem Hospital, at the end of the block, on Lenox Avenue.
Fat man stops to assess the peppers. His T-shirt says, “I SURVIVED THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE.” Little boy about a foot high. His T-shirt says, “MAN’S BEST FRIEND.”
Our cabbages are in full original leaf, untrimmed, each one so broad and beautiful it appears to be a carnation from the lapel of the Jolly Green Giant. They do not fit well in collapsible shopping carts, so people often ask me to strip away the wrapper leaves. I do so, and sell the cabbage, and go back to weighing peppers, making change, more peppers, more change. Now comes a twenty-dollar bill. When I go into my money apron for some ones, a five, a ten, all I come up with is cabbage.
I prefer selling peppers. When you stay in one position long enough, a proprietary sense develops—as with Thueson and the corn. Hodgson, the true proprietor, seems to enjoy selling anything—houseplants and stringbeans, squash and pears. Derryck Brooks-Smith likes eggs and tomatoes. Hemingway is an apple man. Or seems to be. It is early to tell. He is five hours into his first day, and I ask how he is getting along. Hemingway says, “These women in Harlem are driving me nuts, but the Jews in Brooklyn will be worse.” Across his dark face flies a quick, sarcastic smile. “How you doing?” he asks me.
“Fine. I am a pepper seller who long ago missed his calling.”
“You like peppers?”
“I have come to crave them. When I go home, I take a sackful with me, and slice them, and fill a big iron skillet to the gunwales—and when they’re done I eat them all myself.”
“Cool.”
“These tomatoes come from a remote corner of Afghanistan,” Derryck Brooks-Smith is saying to some hapless client. “They will send you into ecstasy.” She is young and appears to believe him, but she may be in ecstasy already. Brooks-Smith is a physical masterpiece. He wears running shorts. Under a blue T-shirt, his breasts bulge. His calves and thighs are ribbed with muscle. His biceps are smooth brown loaves. His hair is short and for the most part black, here and there brindled with gray. His face is fine-featured, smile disarming. He continues about the tomatoes: “The smaller ones are from Hunza, a little country in the Himalayas. The people of Hunza attribute their longevity to these tomatoes. Yes, three pounds for a dollar. They also attribute their longevity to yogurt and a friendly family. I like your dress. It fits you well.”
Brooks-Smith teaches at John Marshall Intermediate School, in Brooklyn. “A nice white name in a black neighborhood,” he once remarked. He was referring to the name of the school, but he could as well have meant his own. He was born in the British West Indies. His family moved to New York in 1950, when he was ten. He has a master’s degree from City University. “It is exciting for me to be up here in Harlem, among my own people,” he has told me over the scale. “Many of them are from the South. They talk about Georgia, about South Carolina. They have a feeling for the farm a lot of people in the city don’t have.” He quotes Rimbaud to his customers. He fills up the sky for them with the “permanganate sunsets” of Henry Miller. He instructs them in nutrition. He lectures on architecture in a manner that makes them conclude correctly that he is talking about them. They bring him things. Books, mainly. Cards of salutation and farewell, anticipating his return to the school. “Peace, brother, may you always get back the true kindness you give.” The message is handwritten. The card and its envelope are four feet wide. A woman in her eighties who is a Jehovah’s Witness hands him a book, her purpose to immortalize his soul. She will miss him. He has always given her a little more than good weight. “I love
old people,” he says when she departs. “We have a lot to learn from them.”
“This is where it is, man. This is where it is!” says a basketball player, shouldering through the crowd toward the eggplants and tomatoes, onions and pears. He is well on his way to three metres in height, and his friend is taller still. They wear red shorts with blue stripes and black-and-white Adidas shoes. The one who knows where it is picks up seven or eight onions, each the size of a baseball, and holds them all in one hand. He palms an eggplant and it disappears. “Man,” he goes on, “since these farmers came here I don’t hardly eat meat no more.”
Now comes a uniformed racing cyclist—All-Sports Day at the Greenmarket. He is slender, trained, more or less thirty, and he seems to be on furlough from the Tour de France. He looks expensive in his yellow racing gloves, his green racing shoes. Partly walking, partly gliding, he straddles his machine. He leans over and carefully chooses peppers, apparently preferring the fire-engine-red ones. Brooks-Smith whispers to me, “That bicycle frame is a Carlton, made in England. It’s worth at least five hundred dollars. They’re rare. They’re not made much anymore.”
“That will be one dollar, please,” I say to the cyclist, and he pays me with a food stamp.
Woman says, “What is this stuff on these peaches?”
“It’s called fuzz.”
“It was on your peaches last week, too.”
“We don’t take it off. When you buy peaches in the store, the fuzz has been rubbed off.”
“Well, I never.”
“You never saw peach fuzz before? You’re kidding.”
“I don’t like that fuzz. It makes me itchy. How much are the tomatoes?”
“Three pounds for a dollar.”
“Give me three pounds. Tomatoes don’t have fuzz.”
“I’m a bachelor. Give me a pound of plums.” The man is tall, is wearing a brown suit, and appears to be nearing seventy.
“They’re only for me, I don’t need more,” he explains. “I’m a bachelor. I don’t like the word ‘bachelor.’ I’m really a widower. A bachelor sounds like a playboy.”
“Thirty-five cents, please. Who’s next?”
“Will somebody lend me a dollar so I can get some brandy and act like a civilized human for a change?” We see very few drunks. This one wears plaid trousers, a green blazer, an opencollared print shirt. He has not so much as feigned interest in the peppers but is asking directly for money. “This is my birthday,” he continues. “Happy birthday, Gus. My mother and father are dead. If they were alive, I’d kick the hell out of them. They got me into this bag. For twenty years, I shined shoes outside the Empire State Building. And now I’m here, a bum. I need to borrow a dollar. Happy birthday, Gus.”
Slade, opposite, is taking a break. He sits on an upturned tall narrow basket, with his head curled into his shoulder. Like a sleeping bird, he has drifted away. I need a break, too—some relief from the computations, the chaotic pulsations of the needle on the scale.
“Two and a quarter pounds at three pounds for a dollar comes to, let’s see, seventy-five cents. Five and a half pounds at three for a dollar twenty-five, call it two and a quarter. That’s three dollars.”
“Even?”
“Even.”
“Y‘all going up every week. Y’all going to be richer than hell.”
“How much are the nectarines?”
“Weigh these, please.”
Turn. Put the fruit in the pan. Calculate. Turn again. Spin the plastic bag. Knot the top. Hand it over. Change a bill.
“You take food stamps?”
“Yes, but I can’t give you change.”
“How much are the green beans pounds for a dollar and with you in a minute next one—please.”
I take off my money apron, give it to Rich, and drift around
the market. I compare prices with the Van Houtens. I talk cows with Joe Hlatky. We are from the same part of New Jersey, and he once worked for the Walker-Gordon dairy, in Plainsboro, with its Rotolactor merry-go-round milking platform. Hlatky is a big, stolid man with a shock of blond hair not as neatly prepared as his wife’s, which has been professionally reorganized as a gold hive. They work together, selling their sweet white corn and crimson tomatoes—not for nothing is it called the Garden State. Hlatky’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Juanita, often sells with him, too. She is a large-boned, strongly built, large-busted blonde like her mother. Hlatky says that he and his family are comfortable here in Harlem, feeling always, among other things, the appreciative good will of the people. I remember Minerva Coleman telling me that when the farmers came into Harlem the first Tuesday they were “a little nervous—but after that they were O.K.” She went on to say, “You can tell when people don’t feel quite secure. But now they come in here and go about their business and they don’t pay nobody no mind. They like the people here better than anywhere else. I don’t know why. I would assume they’d get ripped off a little bit—but not too much.” And now Hlatky, standing on 137th Street weighing tomatoes, says again how much he likes this market, and adds that he feels safer here than he does in other parts of the city. He says, “I’ll tell you the most dangerous place we sell at. The roughest part of the city we go to is Union Square.” So rough, he confides, that when he goes there, on Saturdays, he takes along an iron pipe.
Hlatky today has supplemented his homegrown New Jersey vegetables with peaches from a neighbor in California. They are wrapped in individual tissues. They are packed and presented in a fine wooden box. He bought them at a wholesale market. Robert Lewis, assistant director of the Greenmarket, happens along and sees the peaches. Lewis is a regional planner about to receive an advanced degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a gentle person, slight of build, a little round of shoulder, with a bandanna around his throat, a daypack on his back, steel-rimmed spectacles—all of which contribute to an impression of amiable, academic
frailty. He says to big Joe Hlatky, “Get those peaches out of sight!”
With an iron pipe, a single tap on the forehead could send Lewis to heaven twice. Hlatky respects him, though, and is grateful to him, too, for the existence of the market. Hlatky says he will sell off these peaches, with a promise not to bring more—never again to bring to a Greenmarket so much as a single box of wholesale fruit.
“The peaches are from California,” says Lewis. “They must go back on the truck.”
Hlatky casts aspersions up one side of 137th Street and down the other. Has Lewis noticed Slade’s beans, Hodgson’s onions, Van Houten’s lettuce, Sekulovski’s entire load? He says he feels unfairly singled out. He knows, though, that without Lewis and Barry Benepe, who created and developed the Greenmarket, the Hlatky farm in New Jersey would be even more marginal than it is now. (“Here you can make double what you make wholesale. If I sold my stuff in a wholesale market, I couldn’t begin to exist.”) And while Lewis and Benepe might lack a certain shrewdness with regard to the origin of beans, they contribute an essential that no farmer could provide: a sophisticated knowledge of the city.
One does not just drive across a bridge with a load of summer squash, look around for a vacant lot, and create a farmers’ market in New York. Tape of every color is in the way: community boards, zoning committees, local merchants, City Hall. In order to set up even one open-air market—not to mention five or six—it was necessary to persuade, and in many cases to struggle against, nine city agencies, which Benepe describes in aggregate as “an octopus without a head; pull off one tentacle and another has a grip.” Benepe is an architect who has worked as a planner not only for the city government but also in Orange County, watching the orchards disappear. When he conceived of the Greenmarket, in 1974, it seemed “a natural answer to a twofold problem”: loss of farmland in the metropolitan area and a lack of “fresh, decent food” in the city. Moreover, farmers selling
produce from their trucks would start conversations, help resuscitate neighborhoods, brighten the aesthetic of the troubled town. “It seemed too obvious to ignore,” Benepe says. “But most obvious things do get ignored.” Benepe, like Lewis, is a native of the city. Son of an importer of linen, he studied art history at Williams College (1950) and went on to M.I.T. His dress and appearance remain youthful. To the Greenmarket office, on Fortieth Street, he wears brown denim highwaters, polo shirts, and suède Wallabees. He has long sandy graying hair, a lithe frame, a flat stomach. He rides a bicycle around town. He has a steady gaze, pale-blue eyes. He knows where City Hall is. He once worked for the Housing and Redevelopment Board. To start the Greenmarket, he knew which doors to knock on, and why they would not open. He approached the Real Estate Department. “They seemed to think I wanted to rip them off.” He affiliated the project with the Council on the Environment of New York City in order to be eligible to receive foundation funds. He tried the Vinmont Foundation, the Richmond Foundation, the Fund for the City of New York, the America the Beautiful Fund. Finally, the J. M. Kaplan Fund said it would match anything he raised elsewhere. He went back to the others, and enough came through. Of the Greenmarket’s overall cost—forty-two thousand dollars in 1977—the farmers, renting space, pay a third.
Lewis, twenty years younger, was a colleague of Benepe in Benepe’s urban-planning firm, and helped him start the market. They searched for sites where farmers would be welcome, where neighborhoods would be particularly benefitted, where local fruit-and-vegetable stores were unlikely to open fire. Lewis to a large extent recruited the farmers. He sought advice from Cornell and Rutgers, and wrote to county agents, and interviewed people whose names the agents supplied. He went to roadside-marketing conferences, to farmers’ associations, to wholesale outlets. Under his generally disarranged locks, his undefeated shrug, Lewis has a deep and patient intelligence that tends to linger over any matter or problem that comes within its scrutiny. If he is ready to rebuke the farmers (for selling West Coast peaches), he is also ready to
listen, without limit, to their numerous problems and even more numerous complaints. Day by day, market to market, he is a most evident link between the farmers and the city. He binds them to it, interprets it for them. Son of a New York University professor, he has no idea what shoe-peg corn is, but he was born in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, grew up in Crown Heights, and has a sense of neighborhoods, of urban ways, that reaches from Flatbush to the hem of Yonkers. He is not much frightened by Harlem or intimidated by Fifty-ninth Street. He is a city man, and, more important, he is an emeritus city kid.
After staring up the street for a while, Hlatky puts the peaches back on the truck.
“Cigarette lighters! Cigarette lighters!”
The Zippo man did not grow his produce down home. “Cigarette lighters!” Never mind where they’re from. They’re fifty per cent off and selling fast. While Lewis goes after the Zippo man—effecting an at best temporary expulsion—I return to my peppers.
“Give me two, please. Just two. I ain’t got nobody with me. I live by myself. I throw food in the pot. I stick a fork in it. When it gets soft, I eat it.”
“Lysol! Lysol!”
A man has come along selling Lysol. He offers cans to Rich Hodgson and, at the same time, to a woman to whom Rich is selling apples. One result of the Greenmarket’s considerable success is the attraction it presents to street hucksters, not the Sabrett’s-hot-dog sort of street venders, who are licensed by the city, but itinerant merchants of the most mercurial kind. Some conceal things under their jackets. They are readily identifiable because their arms hang straight, as whose would not with five pounds of watches on either wrist? They sell anything—ski hats, tooled-leather belts, turquoise rings, inflatable airplanes. They spread blankets on the sidewalk and sprinkle them with jewelry. Man comes by now selling his dog. They always try to sell to the farmers, who are possibly better customers than the customers. A guy came up to me once in Brooklyn and offered me a case
of hot mangoes. I assume they were hot. What other temperature could they be when the case-lot price was two dollars? Another day in Brooklyn, a man pulled up to the curb in an old Chevrolet sedan, opened the trunk, and began selling Finnish porgies. Cleaning them, he spilled their innards into a bucket and their scales fell like snow on the street.
As to nowhere else, though, such people are attracted to 137th Street. All day they come by, selling coconuts, guavas, and terminal-market cucumbers out of carts from the A. & P. “Crabs! Crabs!” The crab man has bright-red boiled blue crabs. Three for a dollar, they dangle from strings. Now a man arrives with a rolling clothes rack crammed with sweaters and pants. He wants eighteen dollars for a two-piece ensemble. “No, thanks,” a woman tells him. “I don’t want to go to jail.” She turns to the peppers and glances up at me, saying, “If a cop came around the corner they’d drop that stuff and run.” Now a young man and woman in turtlenecks and Earth shoes wheel up a grocery cart full of comic books, cotton hats, incense, and tube socks. He has a premature paunch. Her eyes are dreamy and the lids are slow. She leans on him in a noodly manner. She looks half asleep, while he looks half awake, as if they were passing each other in the middle of a long journey. “Tube socks! Incense! Tube socks!” The man fixes his attention on Rich. “It’s going to get—I’m telling you—cold on that farm, man.” The socks are still in the manufacturer’s package, marked a dollar ninety-five a pair. “Cold, man, I’m telling you. Here’s six pairs for five dollars.” Sold.
Minerva Coleman, who has been watching, stares after the couple as they go. “That must have been a Long Island girl,” she says. “A Harlem girl would know I’d break her ass.”
There was a firehouse across the street once. It was razed, and a vest-pocket park is there now, smoothly paved, with a chain-link fence, three strands of barbed wire, and a fan-shaped basketball backboard that (most weeks) has a net. When I am not turned toward the scale, and while I wait for customers to fill their plastic bags, I often watch the games across the street. Some of the boys who play there move like light, their gestures rehearsed,
adroit. They go both ways, hit well from the outside. The game they play, almost to the exclusion of any other game, begins from the outside.
Say five, in all, are playing. One starts things off with a set from outside.
“How much are the peppers?”
“Three pounds for a dollar.”
“Pick me out three pounds. I’ll be back after I get some corn.”
“Where are your beans? What happened to your beans today?”
The shooter hits five straight from twenty feet. He is a pure shooter. Now he misses. He and the four others go for the rebound. The one who gets the ball is now on his own to try to score, while everyone else tries to stop him. He dribbles right, into the one-on-four. He stops. Jumps. Shoots. Misses.
“Weigh these, please.”
“Weigh mine, please.”
Another player grabs the ball. Now he makes his moves, trying to score against the four others. The ball pulsates in his hands. His legs are flexed. His feet do not stir. He picks his moment, leaps, arches his back (ball behind his head), scores. The ball is handed to him. He goes outside and shoots an unguarded set. He hits. He shoots another. He misses. Someone else gets the rebound. Now it is four against that player as he tries to drive and score. He misses. The player who gets the rebound now faces the four others … .
“Mister, will you weigh these peppers? Do you want to sell them to me or not?”
“Sorry. Three and a half pounds. Take them for a dollar.” Who wants to make change?
After a reverse pivot that is fluid beyond his years, the kid with the ball scores. He walks to the outside. He takes a free set. Swish. He hits again.
“Weigh these, please.”
The shooter misses. The rebound goes high. All five are after it. The boy who grabs it turns and faces the mob.
We see the same game all over the city. Always, the player
with the ball is alone, the isolated shooter, the incubating star—versus everyone else on the court. There is never a pass, a screen, a pick, a roll, a two-on-two, a two-on-three, a three-on-two, a teammate. I turn with some peppers and rattle the scale.
Bartley Bryt comes by and says a cop caught a thief who was ripping off Sekulovski. Bryt is young and white, in bluejeans, Pumas, and a rugger shirt. He is doing a summer job, helping administer the market. He is slim, good-looking, with a shock of light-brown hair—Dalton School, 1977.
I ask him how old the thief was.
“About forty-five,” says Bryt. “The only elderly person I’ve ever seen stealing here. When there’s trouble here, it’s usually from kids, but there’s not much trouble, because the community feeling is so great here. People are so nice to you. Where I live, people go in and turn on their air-conditioners and that’s it.”
“Where do you live?”
“Seventy-fifth Street between Park and Lexington.”
[“Brigade de Cuisine” is about a chef who grew up in Spain, was trained at the Euler in Basel and the Ritz in Paris, and not long ago returned to Europe after years cooking in rural Pennsylvania. He asked John McPhee to give him a pseudonym, but as things developed he chose his own.]
Sometimes, at the height of an evening there are two customers in his dining room. His capacity is fifty-five, and he draws that number from time to time, but more often he will cook for less than forty. His work is never static. Shopping locally to see what is available today, reading, testing, adding to or subtracting from a basic repertory of roughly six hundred appetizers and entrées, he waits until three in the afternoon to write out what he will offer at night—three because he needs a little time to run to the store for whatever he may have forgotten. He has never stuffed a mushroom the same way twice. Like a pot-au-feu, his salad dressing alters slightly from day to day. There is a couple who have routinely come to his dining room twice a week for many years—they have spent more than fifteen thousand dollars there—and in all that time he has never failed to have on his menu at least one dish they have not been offered before. “I don’t know if they’re aware of this,” he has told me. “We owe it to
them, because of the frequency of their visits. They keep us on our toes.”
In the evening, when his dining room is filling and he is busy in the rhythm of his work, he will (apparently unconsciously) say aloud over the food, and repeat, the names of the people for whom he is cooking. A bridge-toll collector. A plumber. A city schoolteacher. A state senator—who comes from another state. With light-edged contempt, he refers to his neighborhood as Daily News country. There are two or three mobsters among his clientele. They are fat, he reports, and they order their vegetables “family style.” There is a couple who regularly drive a hundred and twenty miles for dinner and drive home again the same night. There is a nurse from Bellevue who goes berserk in the presence of Anne’s meringue tortes and ultra-chocolate steamed mousse cakes, orders every dessert available, and has to be carted back to Bellevue. There is an international tennis star who parks his car so close against the front door that everyone else has to sidle around it. Inside, only the proprietors seem to know who the tennis star is. The center of attention, and the subject of a good deal of table talk, is the unseen man in the kitchen.
In part, the philosophy of this kitchen rests on deep resources of eggs, cream, and butter, shinbone marrow, boiled pig skins, and polysaturated pâtés of rich country meat. “Deny yourself nothing!” is the motto of one of the regulars of the dining room, who is trim and fit and—although he is executive vice-president in charge of public information at one of the modern giants of the so-called media—regards his relationship with the chef as a deep and sacred secret.
The chef is an athletically proportioned man of middle height—a swimmer, a spear fisherman. One day when he was thirteen he was picking apples in a tree between North Oxford and St. Giles and he fell out of the tree onto a bamboo garden stake. It impaled his cheek at the left corner of his mouth. His good looks are enhanced, if anything, by the scar that remains
from this accident. He has dark hair, quick brown eyes, and a swiftly rising laugh. Anne is tall, finely featured, attractive, and blond. Each has eaten a little too well, but neither is falling-down fat. They work too hard. She works in a long ponytail, a cotton plaid shirt, unfaded dungarees, he in old shirts with the sleeves rolled up, rips and holes across the chest. His trousers are generally worn through at the knees. There are patches, sutures of heavy thread. His Herman boots are old and furred and breaking down. He pulls out a handkerchief and it is full of holes. “I don’t mind spending money on something that is going to be eventually refundable,” he explains. “A house, for example. But not a handkerchief.” Most of the time, he cooks under a blue terry-cloth sailor hat, the brim of which is drawn down, like his hair, over his ears.
He was working with a Fulton Market octopus one morning, removing its beak, when he happened to remark on his affection for the name Otto.
“I like Otto,” he said. “I think Otto is a sensational name. It’s a name you would have to live up to, a challenging name. It suggests aloneness. It suggests bullheaded, Prussian, inflexible pomposity. Someone called Otto would be at least slightly pompous. Intolerant. Impatient. Otto.”
Anne said, “He has written his autobiography in that name.”
“I like Otto,” he said again. “Why don’t you call me Otto?”
I said, “Fine, Otto. I’ll call you Otto.”
Otto stepped outdoors, where he set the unbeaked octopus on a wide wooden plank. “Otto,” he repeated, with savor. And he picked up an apple bough, a heavy stick about as long as his arm, and began to club the flesh of the octopus. “Otto,” he said again, moving from one tentacle to the next. “I like that very much.” Smash. “You do this to break down the fibres.” Steadily, he pounded on. In time, he said, “Max is a good name, too—a sort of no-nonsense, straightforward name. Otto sounds humorless, and I don’t think I’m humorless.”
“Fine, Max. I’ll call you Max.”
“I like the way Max looks,” he said. “It looks wonderful written on paper. You have the imagery of ‘maximum,’ too. And all the
Maximilians.” He struck the octopus another blow with the apple bough. “However,” he went on, “I prefer Otto. Otto is autocratic. One word leads to another.”
He carried the octopus inside. He said he has a cousin in the Florida Keys who puts octopuses in his driveway and then drives over them. “It’s just to break down the fibres. I don’t know what happens. I just know that it works.” He went into the restaurant bar and took down from a wall an August Sander photograph of an anonymous German chef, a heavy man in a white coat of laboratory length over pin-striped trousers and highly polished shoes. The subject’s ears were small, the head a large and almost perfect sphere. On the upper lip, an aggressive mustache was concentrated like a grenade. The man was almost browless, his neck was too thick to permit a double chin, and his tiny black eyes—perhaps by the impertinence of the photographer—were opened wide. In his hammy hands were a bowl and a woodenhandled whip. “This pig-faced guy is a real Otto,” said the chef. “When our customers ask who that is in the picture we say he is our founder.”
As we returned to the kitchen, I thought about the chef’s actual name, which, like the man’s demeanor, like the man himself in nearly all his moods, is gentle and unaggressive—an all but dulcet name, ameliorative and smooth, a name like Randal or Malcolm or Neal or Duncan or Hugh or Alan or John. For all that, if he wished to call himself Otto, Otto he would be.
Anne said, “He is less pompous than when I met him.”
“Never let it boil,” said Otto, lowering the octopus into a pot. “It mustn’t boil. It should just simmer.”
Nine o’clock in a spring morning and with a big square-headed mallet he is pounding a loin of pork. He has been up for three hours and has made school lunches for the two of his children
who are still at home, boned some chicken, peeled potatoes, peeled onions, chopped shallots, shucked mussels, made coffee, swept the kitchen, made stock with the head of a twenty-pound grouper, and emptied outside a pail of scraps for the geese. His way of making coffee is to line a colander with a linen napkin and drip the coffee through the napkin. He ate a breakfast of leftovers—gâteau Saint-Honoré, Nesselrode cream-rum-chestnut mousse. He said, “I always eat dessert for breakfast. That’s the only time I like it. For the rest of the day, if I’m working, I don’t eat. It’s wonderful not to eat if you’re in a hurry. It speeds you up.”
Anne works late and sleeps late. Otto goes to bed when his cooking is done and is up, much of the year, before dawn. Even at 6 A.M., he is so pressed with things to do that he often feels there is no time to shave. Into the school lunches today went small pork cutlets. He said, “I really don’t believe in letting children eat the food served at school. Hot dogs. Baloney. Filth like that.” His children carry roast chicken, veal, various forms of fish instead. At home, at the inn, they cook their own meals and eat more or less at random. The family business being what it is, the family almost never sits down at a table together. Sometimes the children, with friends, have dinner in the restaurant. Otto says, “They dress as if they’re going to a disco, contemptibly wearing their collars outside their jackets, which is worse than wearing a blazer patch.” He charges them half price.
The pork loin flattens, becomes like a crêpe. He dips the mallet in water. “All the cookbooks tell you to pound meat between pieces of waxed paper,” he remarks. “And that is sheer nonsense.” He is preparing a dish he recently invented, involving a mutation of a favored marinade. Long ago he learned to soak boned chicken breasts in yogurt and lemon juice with green peppercorns, salt, garlic, and the seeds and leaves of coriander, all of which led to a flavor so appealing to him that what he calls chicken coriander settled deep into his repertory. In a general way, he has what he describes as “a predilection for stuffing, for things with surprises inside,” and so, eventually, he found himself wondering, “Maybe you could translate a marinade into a stuffing. You could pound
a pork loin thin and fold it like an envelope over a mixture of cream cheese, fresh coriander leaves, lemon juice, and green peppercorns. Then you’d chill it, and set it, and later bread it. Sauté it a bit, then bake it. It should have a beguiling taste.”
Anne is Latvian and was six when she left the country. Her American-accented English contains no trace of those six years (that I, at any rate, can discern). Her predominant memories of Riga are of food—wide bowls full of caviar, mountained platters of crayfish, smoked lampreys served under crystal chandeliers at banquets in her home. In an album is a photograph of Anne’s mother all in white satin among sprays of lilies and roses bending attentively toward a bunting-covered drape-folded canopied bassinet—the day of the christening of Anna Rozmarja. Anna Rozmarja Grauds.
Otto sums it up. “They were rich,” he says. “I mean, they were rich rich.”
“When I was a little girl, I was swathed in ermine and mink. I don’t have a need for it now. It’s been done.”
“Her family had flocks of money, many ships. It was one of the First Families of Latvia, which is like being one of the First Families of Scranton.”
“When the Germans took over the house, they allowed us to live on the top floor.”
Words rise quickly in Anne’s mind, but in speaking them she often hesitates and stumbles, and most of what she says comes slowly. “When the Russians were after us, we had to hide in the country. I remember the cows and the river and the food. Latvia is rich in milk and cheese and eggs. Even in the war no one was hungry. When we were escaping, we stayed at a farm where there were hams and wheels of cheese and things.”
“Was that far from Riga?”
“In LLLatvia, nnnnnnothing is far from Riga.”
Tilsit was not far from Riga, and Tilsit was not even in Latvia. Otto’s grandfather was an architect in Tilsit. One day, the architect saw an advertisement in a newspaper in which sums of money were mentioned in connection with the connubial availability of a young woman in Salzburg. “Her brother placed the ad, and this chap came down from Tilsit and married her,” Otto recounts. “It was the only way she could attract a man. She was quite plain.”
“She was a handsome woman,” Anne informs him.
Otto says, “She was about as handsome as Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a violent Nazi, that grandmother.”
Her husband, at any rate, was excoriated by his family for “promiscuous marrying into the proletariat.” Her son, Otto’s father, went to Gymnasium in Salzburg and was later trained in hotels in Berlin and Munich. By 1936, when he was asked to be manager of the Reina Cristina, in Algeciras, he had been married, in England. The Mediterranean and Iberian Hotels Company, Ltd., an English concern, wanted someone they could trust who could also get on with the Germans. Otto’s father carried a German passport during the Second World War.
Otto was born in Buckinghamshire, in July, 1938, and was taken home on a Japanese ship. Food was scarce in Spain for many years thereafter—to the ends of, and beyond, two wars. Gypsies, near starving, came to the hotel, asked for food, performed circus stunts as a way of paying, and then ate less than they were given. Asked why they would ignore food set before them, they said that if they ate a great deal they would soon be hungrier than they would be if they ate little. When Otto was nine, he discovered a boy in a persimmon tree on the hotel grounds stealing fruit. Otto happened to be carrying an air rifle. Pointing it, he ordered the boy to descend. On the ground, the boy “broke for it,” and began to climb a garden wall. Otto threw a brick and knocked him down. Proudly, he reported the achievement to his parents. His father cracked him over the head. Otto saw the boy as a thief; his father saw the boy as someone so hungry that he had to steal—and therefore it was proper to let him steal.
“You must remember,” Anne will say of her husband, “that he learned early what food really is. He knows what it is to be without it. He has a grasp of the sanctity of food. That is his base. He finds delight just in seeing his ingredients. He goes on to luxury after that. Remember, too, that he ate awful meals endlessly—for years. He was in school in England after the war.”
Tutored from the age of three, Otto was sent to Britain a year after the German surrender—to Tre-Arddur House School, on Tre-Arddur Bay, in North Wales, a place that, according to him, “specialized in ridding industrialists’ sons of their accents, boys from Yorkshire and Lancashire.” Otto spoke Spanish, French, and German, and virtually no English, so he had several accents that were targeted for destruction, too. He was called Dago or Greaser, because he came from “Franco Spain.” When he was caught in this or that misdemeanor, the headmaster, gnashing craggily, told him not to “use your Spanish tricks” at Tre-Arddur. “My character was deformed there.” Otto’s tone is more factual than bitter. “I was a happy kid before then, and I became a morose loner. Eventually, when I was invited to join things, I realized I no longer needed to join.” The headmaster whipped the boy for his miserable handwriting. On the rugger field, the headmaster caned anyone who funked a tackle. “We won a lot of rugger matches. I was a hooker—in, you know, the center of the scrum.” The Tre-Arddur year had its fine moments. The assistant headmaster fished in Scotland and brought back enough salmon to feed everyone in school.
Otto lived for the long vacs in Spain, for the big sardines on sticks over beach fires, the limpets, the wild asparagus, the fishing, and the catch of red mullet baked on fig leaves and tile. The Reina Cristina was lush beyond thought with its fountains and pools under bougainvillea, its date palms and tangerines, its Islamic arcades and English gardens. “You would have to be a Saudi sheikh to live that life again.” English colonials, Andalusians, Murcians, titled and rich, “the whole of the south of Spain knew each other very well, they were very cliquey, and when they came to Gibraltar to clothe their women in English finery they stayed at the Reina Cristina.” Above them all stood
Otto’s father, six feet five inches, thin and regal, actually a dominant figure among the sherry people and the rest of his distinguished guests. Guy Williams (Williams & Humbert), the Gonzalezes, the Palominos, the Osbornes, the Domecqs. “My father was, you know, amigo íntimo with all of them.” Having four hundred employees, he was as well a figure of first importance in back-street Algeciras. He and a cork company were the principal employers in the town. He had his standards. He never hired a former altar boy. He felt that altar boys were contaminated by priests. He was scrupulously sensitive to the needs and natures of his staff. When Otto called the chef’s son a mariquita azúcar, his father made him write a calligraphically perfect note of apology. On a tour of countries to the north, the family went out of its way to stop in Lourdes, because the Reina Cristina’s housekeeper had mentioned that she would like some holy water with which to cure her black dog, which had come down with terminal mange. Approaching home through dry hundred-degree heat on the brown plains of the Iberian plateau, Otto and his younger brother suffered so with thirst that they drank the holy water. Their father filled the bottle from a tap, gave it to the housekeeper, and the dog was cured. The boys were thrashed about once a week—their mother’s riding crop, their father’s hand. There was no cruelty in it, merely custom. Otto calls his parents “permissive,” and cites his father’s reaction to his experiments with hash. Otto had an underwater-diving companion named Pepe el Moro who would sniff kif before diving in order to clear his sinuses and increase the depth of the dives. Otto sniffed, too. When his father learned that his son was using narcotics, he said only, “Stop that. It’s unhealthy.” When the cuadrillas were in town, the great matadors stayed at the Reina Cristina. Otto as a child knew Belmonte, and later Litri, Ordonez, Miguelín. Their craft so appealed to him that he knew every moment of their ritual, from the praying in the chapel to the profiling over the sword. In the album is a snapshot of Otto with Ernest Hemingway on the veranda outside the Cristina’s bar. Otto marvels at “the incredible patience” Hemingway displayed toward “a callow youth” in his
teens. Otto’s family had a farm in the mountains with an irrigation system that he still thinks of as nothing less than lyrical—its pools and rivulets descending among terraced beds of kitchen plants. His father also managed the Hotel Reina Victoria, in Ronda. Otto would go there on horseback, the more to be involved in the beautiful country—the Serranfa de Ronda—and he paid for all his needs with Chesterfield cigarettes. He went slowly when he went back to school.
His mother’s parents lived in Oxford, and he moved on from Tre-Arddur to St. Edward’s because St. Edward’s was there. It was a distinguished public school, distinguished for having been repugnant to young Laurence Olivier some decades before. Otto was hungry there, not caring for the food. With his air rifle, he killed sparrows and thrushes in his grandparents’ garden and roasted them on spits over open fires. In his form, he won the St. Edward’s general-knowledge prize in all the years he was there. He was very fond of his grandparents. His grandfather was J. O. Boving, an engineer known for a proposal to harness the Severn bore. He gave his grandson a copy of the Boving family tree, which is fruited, for the most part, with farmers. Its mighty trunk, emerging from the soil, has cracked to pieces a Corinthian temple, thus implying the family’s durability relative to the artifacts of the earth. Anne, absorbed, now looks up from the picture. She says, “Most of my family should hang from a tree.”
She pours cream from a cup into a bowl, and the cream is so thick that it clings to the upside like mayonnaise. In bottles, it will not pour at all. To have such cream, she drives many miles each week to a farm in another state. Between layers of pecan cake, she is about to establish three concentric circles of royale chocolate and whipped cream. She has turned to this project after finishing another, in which a layer of meringued hazelnut was covered with a second story of hazelnut Bavarian cream that was in turn covered, top and sides, by a half-inch layer of chocolate cake that had been formed upon an overturned pie plate. Atop this structure was a penthouse confected of chocolate, butter, egg yolks, and brandy. “It looks simple, but it takes so bloody long,”
she said as she finished. “To admit you eat something like that, these days, is almost like confessing to incest. I was a size twelve before I met Otto. Now I’m size eighteen.” Her height saves her. One might well say that she is grand, but she could not be described as fat. Her husband, for his part, works sixteen hours a day, is in constant motion, professes to eat almost nothing, and should be quite slim. By his account, “a couple of cucumbers” is about all he consumes in a day. Somehow, though, he has acquired at least twenty-five pounds that he would like to do without.
Now and again, he will stop to hold a pastry sleeve for her or hammer a dented cake pan back into form, but in the main they work separately, and rapidly, at spaced stations of the table, he slicing some salmon, completing a brioche to enclose it, she making puff paste, or a cake from yogurt cheese. (It takes a couple of days to drip, through cloth, the whey out of a gallon of yogurt. The yield is a quart of cheese.) She makes two, three, four, even five new desserts in a day. A light almond dacquoise is—as much as anything—the standard, the set piece, from which her work takes off on its travels through the stars. The dacquoise resembles cake and puts up a slight crunchy resistance before it effects a melting disappearance between tongue and palate and a swift transduction through the bloodstream to alight in the brain as a poem.
For all his rampant eclecticism—and the wide demands of his French-based, Continentally expanded, and sometimes Asian varietal fare—he knows where the resources of his trade are virtually unlimited. Mondays, when the inn is dark, he leaves his Herman boots in his bedroom—his terry-cloth hat, his seam-split dungarees—and in a dark-blue suit like a Barclays banker he
heads for New York City. “In a few square blocks of this town are more consumer goods than in the whole of Soviet Russia,” he remarked one time as he walked up Ninth Avenue and into the Salumeria Manganaro, where he bought a pound of taleggio (“It’s like a soft fontina”) and was pleased to find white truffles. “They’re from Piedmont. Grate them on pasta and they make it explode.” At Fresh Fish (498 Ninth), he bought river shrimp from Bangladesh weighing up to a quarter of a pound each. He bought sausage flavored with provolone and parsley at Giovanni Esposito (500), and at Bosco Brothers (520) he stopped to admire but not to purchase a pyramid of pigs’ testicles, which he said were delicious in salad. “Texas strawberries, you know. They’re wonderful. They’re every bit as good as sweetbreads. Boil them tender. Dry them. Dredge them in flour. Pan-fry them.” At Simitsis International Groceries & Meat (529), he bought a big hunk of citron in a room full of open bins of loose pasta, of big bags and buckets full of nuts and peppers, of great open cannisters of spices and sacks full of cornmeal, hominy grits, new pink beans, pigeon peas, split peas, red lentils, semolina, fava beans, buckwheat kasha, pearl barley, Roman beans, mung beans. “This place is fabulous. If I had a restaurant in New York—oh, boy! New York has everything you could possibly want in food. If you look hard enough, you’ll find it all.” At Citarella (2135 Broadway, at Seventy-fifth), he admired but did not buy a twenty-pound skate. He had walked the thirty-five blocks from Simitsis to Citarella. He prefers to walk when he’s in town. I have seen him on the street with a full side of smoked salmon, wrapped in a towel, tied to a suitcase like a tennis racquet. If Anne is with him, he rides. “You poach skate and serve it with capers and black butter,” he said. “It’s a wonderful fish, completely underrated. I shot a big electric one in the Caymans.” Citarella had flounder roe for eighty-five cents a pound. “You pay four dollars a pound for shad roe,” said Otto. “Flounder roe is every bit as good. Shad roe has the name.” He stopped for tea, ordering two cups, which he drank simultaneously. At Zabar’s (Eightieth and Broadway), he bought thin slices of white-and-burgundy Volpi
ham. “It’s from St. Louis and it’s as good as the best jamón serrano.” At Japanese Food Land (Ninety-ninth and Broadway), he bought a couple of pounds of bean threads and four ounces of black fungus. On the sidewalks and having a snack, he ate twelve dried bananas. “That’s, actually, nothing,” he remarked. “I once et thirty-six sparrows in a bar in Spain. Gorriones, you know—spitted and roasted.”
He tried to prove to himself not long ago that with United States ingredients he could duplicate the taste of chorizo, a hard Spanish sausage. He had to throw a good part of it away, because he failed to pack it tight enough and “fur grew inside.” Casa Moneo, on Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth, “is the best place for chorizos,” he says. “They’re made in Newark. They’re as good as you can get in Spain.”
He also buys chorizos at La Marqueta—a series of concession stalls housed below the railroad tracks on Park Avenue in Spanish Harlem. Chorizos. Jamón serrano. Giant green bananas—four for a dollar. Dried Irish moss. Linseed. Custard apples. “When they’re very ripe they get slightly fermented. Mmm.” He will buy a couple of pounds of ginger, a bunch of fresh coriander, a couple of pounds of unbleached, unpolished rice—letting go the dried crayfish and the green peanuts, the Congo oil and the pots of rue, letting go the various essences, which are in bottles labelled in Spanish: Essence of Disinvolvement, Essence of Envy and Hate. Breadfruit. Loin goat chops. “OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY” shopping bags. “Goat is milk-white when it’s young. I don’t want to get into an argument with these people, but that is not kid, it’s lamb.” Seeing a tray of pigs’ tongues, he calls them “beautiful.” And high-piled pigs’ ears: “You slice them thin.”
He drops in at the Bridge Kitchenware Corporation, 212 East Fifty-second Street, nods at Fred Bridge, and says, “I’m looking for a whip for crème fouettée. I have never seen one in America that’s any good.” Bridge hasn’t either. Bridge has overcome the problem, however, by having a supply of stainless ones made for him in France. Otto looks over several as if he were choosing a new squash racquet. “Perfect,” he says, eventually, to Bridge.
“Very beautiful. Flexible.” He buys a quenelle scoop. Rummaging in the back of the store, he picks up a tin sieve. A clerk frankly tells him not to take it because it is no good. “That’s why I want it,” he says. “I’ve never seen one that was any good. The best of them won’t last six months.” He asks for parchment paper. To “make stuff en papillote,” he sometimes uses, instead of parchment, narrow bags from liquor stores. “Tied at each end and oiled, they are perfect en papillote bags, as long as the paper has not been recycled. You can’t make things en papillote in recycled paper because of the chemicals involved. Some restaurants use aluminum foil for en papillote. Contemptible.”
He has lieutenants—certain fish merchants from his general neighborhood—who shop for him at the Fulton Market. But often enough he goes there himself, his body, at 4 A.M., feeling what he calls the resaca—“when the tide goes out and leaves the dry sand.” He loves this world of rubber boots and bonfires, wet pavement and cracked ice, and just to enter it—to catch the bright eye of a fresh red snapper—is enough to cause his tides to rise. “There is no soul behind that eye,” he says. “That is why shooting fish is such fun.” Under the great illuminated sheds he checks everything (every aisle, bin, and stall), moving among the hills of porgies and the swordfish laid out like logs of copper beech, the sudden liveliness in his own eyes tempered only by the contrast he feels between the nonchalance of this New York scene and the careful constructions of the Algeciras wholesale fish market, where “they display the food with a lot more love.”
“You never know what is going to be good. You have to look at everything,” he says, and he looks at bushels of mussels, a ton of squid, bay scallops still in their shells. “Make sure they’re not Maine mussels,” he remarks, almost to himself. “If they are, forget it. Maine mussels are very clean, but they’re small and awfully tough. You just want the big squid. The New Jersey squid.” He looks at a crate of lobsters. They are dragons—up into their salad years—and three of them fill the crate, their heads seeming to rest on claws the size of pillows. “People think they’re dragons because they look like dragons, but they’re called that
because they are caught in dragnets,” he says, picking one up and turning it over, then the second, and the third. The third lobster has many hundreds of green pellets clinging like burrs to its ventral plates. “Eggs. They’re better than caviar,” says Otto. “They’re so crunchy and so fresh-tasting—with lemon juice, and just enough bland vegetable oil to make them shine. You remove them from the lobster with a comb.”
Baskets of urchins disappoint him. “See all the white spots? The freckles? See how the spines are flat? If the spines are standing, the creature is very much alive.” For many months, he and his legates have been on the watch for urchins that are up to his standards. They must be very much alive because their roe, which is what he wants, is so rich and fragile that it soon goes bad.
He views with equal scorn a table of thin fresh herrings. He serves herring fillets in February, and this is not February. “That’s the only time of year when we can get big fat herrings. They’re sensational then, maybe a day or two out of the sea. You have et bottled herring, have you? Awful. Herring, or salmon, in sour cream. They don’t use crème fraîche. They use a sauce with dubious taste but with better keeping qualities.” Otto never prepares herring the same way twice, but his goal is the same if his ingredients are not. He uses, say, vinegar and dill with peppercorns and onions, and his goal is to give the herring “a taste so clean it’s lovely.”
He feels the slender flanks of sand lances, and he says, “You dredge them with flour, drop them into deep fat, and eat them like French fries.” He presses the columnar flank of a swordfish, pleased to have it back in the market. He quotes Ted Williams. It is Williams’ opinion that the surest way to save the Atlantic salmon is to declare the species full of mercury and spread the false word. “Swordfish is a bummer in the freezer,” Otto says. “But there are all sorts of fish you can freeze. Shrimp are better frozen properly on a ship than carried for days to market unfrozen. In properly frozen shrimp there’s never a hint of ammonia. Scallops freeze well, too—and crabmeat, octopus, striped bass, flounder, conch, tilefish, grouper. Red snapper frozen is no good. It
gets watery, waterlogged. A soft-fleshed fish like a sea trout is no good frozen. Freezing tuna or bluefish precipitates the oily taste. No frozen fish is better than fresh, but well-frozen fish is better than fish a week old.”
Groupers—weighing thirty, forty pounds—face him in a row, like used cars. “You can split those big heads,” he says. “Dredge them in flour and pan-fry them. Then you just pick at them—take the cheeks, the tongue.”
There are conger eels the size of big Southern rattlesnakes. “With those I make jellied eel, cooked first with parsley, white wine, and onions. Almost no one orders it. I eat it myself.”
As he quits the market, he ritually buys a pile of smoked chub, their skins loose and golden. “Smoked chub are so good,” he says. “They just melt like butter. You can eat half a dozen quite happily on the way home in the car.”
Now the inn is quiet, Anne up and working while her family sleeps. She says she believes in guardian angels. She says her good luck is so pervasive that she pulls into gas stations and has flat tires there. She had luck today. When the sea urchins came, she had made enough trifle and baked enough cake to cover her desserts. She works on urchins now—cracking, scooping, separating out the roe. The column of gold is rising in the jar. She says of their move to another place that they are not going far, not far from New York, no telling where. “He has to feel comfortable. I trust in his paranoia to tell us where to go. What is certain is that we’ll be between nowhere and no place, and things will be the same. For all those people who want flames and white gloves, there will be no flames or white gloves. What we have is simple food. Simple food if it is good is great. If you understand that, you understand him.”
Her hair has come out of its knot, and a long strand crosses one eye. She puts down her work, dries her hands, and runs them backward from her temples. She speaks on, slowly. “You may have grasped this, but I don’t know him very well. If you’re close to a screen you can’t see through it. He doesn’t know me, either. We’re just together. People are unknowable. They show you what they want you to see. He is a very honest person. Basically. In his bones. And that is what the food is all about. He is so good with flavor because he looks for arrows to point to the essence of the material. His tastes are very fresh and bouncy. He has honor, idealism, a lack of guile. I don’t know how he puts them together. I don’t know his likes and dislikes. I can’t even buy him a birthday present. He has intelligence. He has education. He has character. He has integrity. He applies all these to this manual task. His hands follow what he is.”