Read Online Eating by Jason Epstein - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jason Epstein
Tags: Food
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intensity is noticeable. My fried clams are much more delicate than the heavily battered, more durable version sold by roadside stands. They should be eaten while still warm. With fried squid, oysters, and whitebait, if you can find it, they make a great fritto misto.
STEAMED SOFT-SHELL CLAMS
For steamed soft-shell clams, simply rinse the clams under the faucet to wash away the sand, and place the clams in a covered pot over a medium flame. In five minutes or so, the shells will have opened. Scoop up the clams from the pot with a Chinese strainerand drop them into a serving bowl. Strain the broth from the pot into as many mugs as you have guests, and serve each guest a small cup of melted butter. Guests should remove the clams from their shells and slip off and discard the black membrane from the neck. Then they should dip the clam into the broth to remove any remaining sand, and from there into the butter.
My mother, who needed no lessons in self-esteem, enjoyed, in her damp, drizzly November moods, taunting my father with the claim that she had agreed to their courtship only when he offered to treat her to fried Ipswich clams at Hugo’s Lighthouse Restaurant on Boston’s South Shore. Thus I learned at a vulnerable age that because of a fried clam I am. Perhaps this is why New York, where Ipswich clams are hard to find, still doesn’t seem, after so many years, like home.
SIX
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT GO TO SEA IN A BEAUTIFUL FRENCH LINE BOAT
O n the morning of December 30, 1953, my first wife, Barbara, and I were married at a friend’s apartment in Morningside Heights in upper Manhattan, adjacent to Columbia University, from which I had graduated in 1949, with no idea what to do with the rest of my life and in no hurry to find out. At Columbia my friends and I read and studied literature as a kind of religion, an inexhaustible source of wisdom, we believed, to which we became addicted: Plato, the unknown authors of Ecclesiastes and Job, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Gibbon, Tolstoy. I wanted only to read, and after graduation that’s what I did that summer, at a lakeside cabin, alone in Oakland, Maine, with Proust, Balzac, and Gibbon and, at bedtime, Yeats, whose concern for the fragility of cultures and their artifacts I share. I was too much in awe of the writers I worshipped to think that I might become a writer myself,but after a pointless year in graduate school, I was ready to leave the academy. My favorite pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, said that character is fate: we become what we are. So, relying upon Heraclitus, I wandered into the book-publishing business and became a valet and evangelist for writers.
This unexpected vocation explains why Barbara and I were speeding, after our wedding, down Manhattan’s West Side Highway, beside the sparkling Hudson, under a brilliant windswept sky, to the pier where the stately
Ile de France,
its old-fashioned perpendicular bows towering over the highway, was preparing to sail at noon. We had booked a first-class cabin. Neither of us had money, but two years previously I had suggested to the publishing company where I worked that, with the market for books bound to expand as a result of the GI Bill, the kinds of books my classmates were reading would sell many more copies as inexpensive but well-made paperbacks than as expensive hardcovers, which students could not afford. There was nothing new about my idea. European publishers had been publishing serious books in paperback, the kind I had in mind, for years. But in the United States at that time, paperback books, except for a few imported Penguins, were mostly ephemera sold in drugstores and at newsstands and removed at the end of each month along with that month’s magazines, to be replaced with next month’s thrillers, mysteries, and westerns. My plan to publish important books on good paper, slightly larger thandrugstore paperbacks, and stock them permanently in bookstores, succeeded beyond anyone’s
STEAMED SOFT-SHELL CLAMS
For steamed soft-shell clams, simply rinse the clams under the faucet to wash away the sand, and place the clams in a covered pot over a medium flame. In five minutes or so, the shells will have opened. Scoop up the clams from the pot with a Chinese strainerand drop them into a serving bowl. Strain the broth from the pot into as many mugs as you have guests, and serve each guest a small cup of melted butter. Guests should remove the clams from their shells and slip off and discard the black membrane from the neck. Then they should dip the clam into the broth to remove any remaining sand, and from there into the butter.
My mother, who needed no lessons in self-esteem, enjoyed, in her damp, drizzly November moods, taunting my father with the claim that she had agreed to their courtship only when he offered to treat her to fried Ipswich clams at Hugo’s Lighthouse Restaurant on Boston’s South Shore. Thus I learned at a vulnerable age that because of a fried clam I am. Perhaps this is why New York, where Ipswich clams are hard to find, still doesn’t seem, after so many years, like home.
SIX
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT GO TO SEA IN A BEAUTIFUL FRENCH LINE BOAT
O n the morning of December 30, 1953, my first wife, Barbara, and I were married at a friend’s apartment in Morningside Heights in upper Manhattan, adjacent to Columbia University, from which I had graduated in 1949, with no idea what to do with the rest of my life and in no hurry to find out. At Columbia my friends and I read and studied literature as a kind of religion, an inexhaustible source of wisdom, we believed, to which we became addicted: Plato, the unknown authors of Ecclesiastes and Job, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Gibbon, Tolstoy. I wanted only to read, and after graduation that’s what I did that summer, at a lakeside cabin, alone in Oakland, Maine, with Proust, Balzac, and Gibbon and, at bedtime, Yeats, whose concern for the fragility of cultures and their artifacts I share. I was too much in awe of the writers I worshipped to think that I might become a writer myself,but after a pointless year in graduate school, I was ready to leave the academy. My favorite pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, said that character is fate: we become what we are. So, relying upon Heraclitus, I wandered into the book-publishing business and became a valet and evangelist for writers.
This unexpected vocation explains why Barbara and I were speeding, after our wedding, down Manhattan’s West Side Highway, beside the sparkling Hudson, under a brilliant windswept sky, to the pier where the stately
Ile de France,
its old-fashioned perpendicular bows towering over the highway, was preparing to sail at noon. We had booked a first-class cabin. Neither of us had money, but two years previously I had suggested to the publishing company where I worked that, with the market for books bound to expand as a result of the GI Bill, the kinds of books my classmates were reading would sell many more copies as inexpensive but well-made paperbacks than as expensive hardcovers, which students could not afford. There was nothing new about my idea. European publishers had been publishing serious books in paperback, the kind I had in mind, for years. But in the United States at that time, paperback books, except for a few imported Penguins, were mostly ephemera sold in drugstores and at newsstands and removed at the end of each month along with that month’s magazines, to be replaced with next month’s thrillers, mysteries, and westerns. My plan to publish important books on good paper, slightly larger thandrugstore paperbacks, and stock them permanently in bookstores, succeeded beyond anyone’s
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