Posts Tagged “NYC”

I returned from New York City with a supply of foods hard to find elsewhere, including extra-salty belly lox, chocolate babka, and a bakers half-dozen bialys.

“Isn’t that the bagel’s bastard cousin?”

There’s not a retort icy enough for that one, so I just stayed silent. Feh, if others don’t appreciate them, there’s more bialys for me. I used to inquire at bagel places outside of New York City if they had bialys. The good answer was “no, sorry” the usual answer was “what?” and the worst answer turned out to be “sure” pointing to something that was definitely not a bialy. I stopped asking.

In this spirit of instructing all four kinds of child, this is a bialy:

It measures about 4 inches across, maybe 3/4 of an inch thick at the thickest to barely 1/8 inch in the thin center. The center contains some shredded onion, and in some versions, poppy seeds. It’s baked but not boiled (as bagels are) and has a crunchy upper surface and a chewy somewhat salty interior. Useful comparisons include pizza crust and English muffin, but not bagel. It was born in the 19th century in or around Bialystok, Poland. It does not come in cinnamon raisin or sundried tomato basil.

Where’s Bialystok? Deep in the heart of Ashkenaz, that’s where. Northeastern Europe, near the confluence of Poland, Lithuania and Russia/USSR/Belarus. The linguogeek should note that the “Bialy” in Bialystok might just be the same as the “Bela” or “Bylo” of Belarus/Bylorussia, which is бело, the slavic root for “white.”

The best explanation of why this is more than just a roll comes from Mimi Sheraton’s mouth-watering, stomach-churning and heartbreaking book, The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and Lost World, now also available as an ebook. This book inspires a great deal of navistalgia and should be required reading for bakers, gourmands and Holocaust scholars. The book is full of memories of pre-war Polish jews and the then-regional bialy, both now scattered around the world but absent in Poland.

For a taste of what’s in the book, see this transcript of an interview with Sheraton by Paul Solman of WGBH in Boston. For a hopeful if gaudy sign of the bialy’s future, check this out.

The tallest in my
NYC will always be
The Chrysler Building

My view is that it’s not enough to be tallest in meters alone, but a building must earn that stature with great design. The Empire State building certainly has more going for it than the WTC ever did, but I don’t think it holds a candle to the Chrysler. It’s a bit like the comparison of Boston’s Prudential Center and John Hancock Tower, (I favor the taller Hancock this time) or China’s Jin Mao Tower and Taiwan’s Taipei 101. For me, 101’s additional height doesn’t give it sufficient edge over Jin Mao’s unity of design. Plus, the top floor of Taipei 101 has a touristy observation deck, and Jin Mao has a swanky bar at its summit. Those in search of way too much unpoetic and literal information on the topic of the tallestness of various buildings may wish to consult the Wikipedia article on same.

It was my first semester away at college in a small Connecticut town. A group of other freshmen were talking about going down the hill into town and I heard the word “subway” in the conversation. “There’s a subway in this town?” I asked incredulous and at the same time hopeful - I had no car (or drivers license for that matter) and the prospect of public transportation was exciting and home-sick-making all at the same time. Of course, they were talking about Subway, the chain sandwich shop. Still, the fantasy of widely interconnected subway systems set up camp in my head to stay.

Some years later I was joking around with N and we developed the idea that all subway stations with the same name are connected. For example, if you took the Boston MBTA Orange line to Forest Hills (Jamaica Plain), you could go through some kind of wormhole there and transfer to the F train on New York City’s MTA at Forest Hills (Queens). The fact that the F train is orange on the MTA map just adds credence to this goofy concept, plus the bonus synchronicity that there’s a Jamaica stop at the end of the F train. More exciting still, there’s the possibilty of an interchange between my current home stop, Central on the MBTA Red line with Central on the Tsuen Wan line of Hong Kong’s MTR, which is also colored… red.

Imagine my carto-geeky joy at finding this fantasy global subway map on the Strange Maps blog.

It’s clearly based on the London map with little regard for the realities of politics or geography or the relative importance of the stations - for example, Newark and Rotterdam are interchange points but New York and Amsterdam are not (and how cool would it be to take a train from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam?) - but it’s an awesome work nonetheless, and it provides a checklist of major metro systems to visit and ride

I also like that the line connecting New York and Boston is red, the color of the MTA 1-2-3 trains and MBTA Red line which run past my childhood home in New York City and my current home in Cambridge - and which also connect those homes with the cities’ respective train stations, Penn and South stations, which define the endpoints of the Amtrak and Acela route from New York to Boston.  Wow.

Check out the book, Transit Maps of the World, by Mark Ovenden, for which this fantasy map was a promotion. It’s too bad they didn’t use this promo as the actual cover of the book.

It’s like a weird dream that I didn’t even know I had come true. There’s a sandwich shop dedicated to peanut butter sandwiches. Peanut Butter & Co. Since 1998, the sign says - why was I not informed earlier?

They have 11 “classic” PB sandwiches (including sandwiches named for both Jerry and Presley alongside a PB BLT and something called the “Pregnant Lady”) and six “gourmet” offerings. For the party-poopers, there are six PB-free sandwiches and a salad available. Plus ten desserts and a variety of drinks. They will cut the crusts off your sandwich. No extra charge.

The operation is built around six peanut butter varieties, which are sold for $5 or $6 a jar or in a six-pack with carrying handle for $30 — smooth, creamy, cinnamon raisin, spicy, white chocolate and dark chocolate, pictured below in the Peanut Butter Sampler ($7.50) with (most of) their cute names visible.

I didn’t know where to start. Well, that’s not totally true, it seemed obvious to start with creamy, move to crunchy, then get adventurous and finish up with the chocolates,light to dark like a wine flight. I give high marks to both creamy and crunchy, and I usually don’t care for crunchy. Both were appropriately peanutty, not too sweet, not too salty. The middle was weak: I boycotted cinnamon raisin and found the spicy variety to be a bit too hot - think thai peanut sauce. But I was surprised by the finish. The dark chocolate was excellent but not all that peanutty, more like dark nutella with a bit of salt, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the white chocolate was the come from behind star. Usually, I’m quite critical (that’s being kind) of white chocolate, but it mated beautifully with the PB, reminding me of the inside of a Five Star Peanut Bar, creamy, sweet but not obnoxiously so, bringing in the salty peanut thing without getting weighed down by complex cocoa flavors. Well done. As Alex said, “yummers” - and she bought a jar, too.

If you can’t get to the shop in Greenwich Village, you can get PB&Co. peanut butters in many stores, including Whole Foods, also my preferred purveyor (pusher?) of Lake Champlain Chocolates.

This post is making me hungry. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see if I can stuff a chocolate turkey with peanut butter.

Hot chocolate, a peanut butter cookie, and a map!

This is the third post this month featuring Broadway, and the second one combining it with chocolate.  Not the most helpful web site, but giving credit where soupy, chocolaty credit is due: The City Bakery on 18th street in NYC.