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Philadelphia, here I come, off to get my semi-annual haircut, go to Reading Terminal Market, drink wine and eat cheese and watch hours of cooking shows with my mom, and celebrate a belated Mother’s Day with said mom and a belated birthday with my brother, who turned 26 on May 9.  I love my mom and my brother so much I could write encyclopedias about them both, but because I have to leave for my train in 10 minutes, I only have time for one little brag on how smart my brother is.

How smart is my brother? 

When I was 21, I worked in the special sales department at Viking Penguin.  Special Sales sells to any account that is not a bookstore, library or school.  We’re talking mail order catalogues, corporate gift buyers, non-book specialty retailers, wholesalers, jobbers and public broadcasting (PBS) stations.  Selling to PBS was my favorite part of the job, and thus it was not long before my boss decided to let me handle all of the PBS sales.  One day I received a call from the PBS station in Scranton, PA, one of the few channels which broadcasted to my little redneck mountain town, from which I had escaped just months before.  I told the buyer that I was actually a member of her station, having just come from the area, and we had a nice little chat.

I don’t remember relating this story to my mother, but I must have, because the following Sunday night I made my regular Sunday night phone call home, at which point Mom said, “Your brother wants to talk to you.” (Brother was 11 at the time.) I heard the telltale receiver handover noises, followed by my brother’s excited little voice.  “Jenny! Guess what! Mom and I were watching Mystery, and they broke for a pledge break, and they said if you sent them money they would send you books, and they said ‘we want to thank these new members…and we want to give special thanks to one of our members, Jennifer Mathis [this would be your Bakerina’s maiden name] at Viking Penguin in New York City, who helped us get our books on time!”

Dear friends, in those days I was not the experienced media whore that I am today, so even a mention on the Scranton public tv station’s pledge drive was a really big deal for me.  I was thrilled at the thought of my name being read on the air; I was touched that the buyer remembered me; and I hoped that all the kids who were mean to me in high school were watching Mystery that night (answer:  not bloody likely).  “Why, honey!,” I said to my sweet baby brother, “you’re kidding me!”

His excited little voice dropped down an octave, all excitement gone, replaced by a giggling snort.  “Yeah,” he said.  “I am.”

I know I proceeded to have a real conversation with him, followed by a conversation with my mom, but I remember none of it.  All I could remember, all I can still remember to this day, was thinking, “I’m 21 goddamn years old, living in goddamn New York City, and I just got swanked by a fifth-grader.”

Happy birthday to Lloyd,
Happy birthday to Lloyd,
Happy birthday, y’old bastard,
Can we eat cake now?

(No, I’m not being needlessly cruel.  He likes it when I get a little cruel with him. 

Note to Lloyd: No, I didn’t tell anyone how old you are.  Your secret’s safe with me, Methuseleh.

Back in my young bride days, I was a big fan of a food zine called Cooking on the Edge ("The Food Newsletter for Distracted People"), which I used to pick up at Tower Books on Lafayette Street, at least until I bought a subscription.  Dear friends, Cooking on the Edge was a lark, filled with brilliant, funny, whimsical writing, mostly by the publisher, Jill Cornfield; her husband, Jeff Stimpson and her sister-in-law, Julie Schuman, with occasional guest writers.  The recipes were, as promised, easy for distracted, vaguely anxious workerbees to put together.  The graphic design, by Julie Schuman, was largely composed of sweet and whimsical (there’s that word again, but it’s really the best one) clip and stamp art.  It was published bimonthly from 1993 to 1996.  When a new issue showed up, I fell on it.  When publication ceased, I thought my little heart would break.  I still miss it.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about food writing, what I like to read, what I don’t like to read, and why.  This will be the subject of a scintillating, hot-blooded essay later in the weekend—okay, you can stop guffawing now, guys...guys…—but for now I want to share with you what is probably my favorite Cooking on the Edge moment ever, an essay by Jill Cornfield entitled “Doing the Subcontinental,” published in the May/June 1994 COTE.  I love this piece because it embodies all that I found best in the zine:  a warm, friendly, funny editorial voice; a profound and comforting sense of place and time; a set of terrific recipes; and, although I can’t replicate it here, some truly fine stamp art.  Jill has very graciously given me permission to reprint her essay here, for which I thank her profusely.

Doing the Subcontinental (c1994, Jill Cornfield)

1.  Cook lentils in water with salt until tender (about 25 minutes).  Since lentils have a tendency to froth, use a large pot.  Set aside.
2.  In a skillet over medium flame, heat the oil.  Add the cumin and fry for half a minute.  Next, add onions, garlic, ginger and hot pepper.
3.  Fry until the onions and garlic begin to turn golden brown.  Add the tomatoes and cook for a couple of minutes.
4.  Now add the lentils to the saucepan or the contents of the saucepan to the lentils.  Either way is fine, as long as the lentils aren’t absolutely swimming in extra water.  If they are, drain some of it off and proceed.
5.  Serve with rice and chopped fresh coriander.

Notes from Jen:

1.  Lately we have on a bit of a keema macaroni bender.  I’ve made it for lunch the past two Saturdays.  Jill is right; you really want to eat this at room temperature, not hot.  The last time I went to the Indian grocery, they were out of fennel, so I bought a spice mix called panch puram, which is a blend of fennel, whole cumin, mustard seeds and kalonji (also known as black onion seeds, black caraway and nigella).  It is a great blend for this dish.  I also like to throw a handful or two of frozen peas into the pot when I put the tomatoes in.  For some reason, I just think that keema needs peas.

2.  We had Mrs. Ramachandran’s chicken for dinner tonight, with hot chapatis instead of rice.  Bee-yootiful.

3.  Curries Without Worries can be ordered through the usual internet channels, or you can call my pals at Kitchen Arts and Letters (212-876-5550) and ask them to order a copy for you.  They will ship.  Tell them that Jen McAllister sent you.

I call it a Fisher King moment.  Not long ago in this very space, I mused at how it could be possible for me, a die-hard Terry Gilliam fan, one who has seen Brazil about 15 times, one who has lost count of how many times she has seen Jabberwocky, who still brags about the time she and Lloyd went to see 12 Monkeys at the Ziegfeld, not knowing that what turned out to be the Blizzard of 1996 was raging on the other side of the exit door, to have waited 13 years to see The Fisher King.  I didn’t do it on purpose; it wasn’t as though I were trying to avoid the movie.  Everyone I knew who had seen it not only loved it, but they all made the same comment:  “Every time I see that scene in Grand Central, I think of you.” And yet, somehow, I missed its theatrical run, I kept missing it on HBO, I never rented it once we got our VCR.  Then Lloyd picked it up on DVD, I watched it, I adored it, and I thought, where was I during all this time?  How did I let this get away from me?

I had another Fisher King moment on Tuesday.  A few weeks ago, on an egg-research-book-buying trip to Kitchen Arts and Letters, I picked up Bobby Freeman’s wonderful book about Welsh cookery, First Catch Your Peacock (Y Lolfa Press, 1996).  This book is worth a post all its own, as it is such delightful, charming reading and the research and recipes are solid, but tonight I just have to share the following passage, which she said was the only written record of a dish for which she’d only been able to find verbal confirmation.  It is a quote from Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel, How Green Was My Valley:

Out to the back to mix the potch, then.  All the vegetables were boiled slowly in their jackets, never allowed to bubble in boiling, for then the goodness is from them, and they are full of water, and a squash, tasteless to the mouth, without good smell, an offence to the eye, and an insult to the belly.  Firm in the hand, skin them clean, and put them in a dish and mash with a heavy fork, with melted butter and the bruisings of mint, potatoes, swedes, carrots, parsnips, turnips and their tops, then chop small purple onions very fine, with a little head of parsley, and pick the leaves of small watercress from the stems, and mix together.  The potch will be a creamy colour with something of pink, having a smell to tempt you to eat there and then, but wait until it has been in the hot oven for five minutes with a cover, so that the vegetables can mix in warm comfort together and become friendly, and the mint can go about his work, and for the cress to show his cunning, and for the goodness all about to soften the raw, ungentle nature of the onion.

Dear friends, it makes my heart trill to read this, and my fingers tingle as I type it.  Not only is it one of the most glorious pieces of food writing I have ever read, but it is practically a textbook on vegetable cookery in one paragraph.  I can see that creamy pink; can smell the mint, onion and watercress; I marvel at the elegance of both the cooking technique and the description of it, at the love, honor and respect contained in here for the plain-yet-grand traditions of Welsh home cookery.  I consider the vegetables becoming friendly together, snug in their warm comfort in the oven, and I am in love.  All this in a book that has been sitting quietly on a shelf somewhere all my life.  This is a novel written seven years before my mother was born.  It was made into a film in 1941, directed by John Ford and widely considered to be one of his best films.  How did I miss this?  How did I get to be 36 years old without having read this book?

I went to Coliseum on Wednesday morning.  There it was, sitting on the shelf as though it were waiting for me.  I picked it up, opened it to Chapter One. 

I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley.

This cloth is much too good to pack things in and I would keep it in my pocket only there is nothing else in the house that will serve, and the lace straw basket is over at Mr. Tom Harries’, over the mountain.  If I went to to Tossall the Shop for a cardboard box I would have to tell him why I wanted it, then everybody would know I was going.  That is not what I want, so it is the old blue cloth, and I have promised it a good wash and iron when I have settled down, wherever that is going to be.

Where was I during all this time?  How did I let it get away from me?  I don’t know, but I do know this:  I have it now, and I will never let it go.

Dear friends, I was going to wait to post this until I could get my Phila. photographs off our desktop computer.  However, our network is being a bit wonky, refusing to acknowledge my laptop’s presence, so I’m having trouble getting my photos.  The ushistory.org page has some nice, albeit small, photographs.  Of course, if you’d like to see it all these beauties for yourself, and take your own pictures, I know an excellent tour guide. 

It sounds either like the beginning of a joke or a punchline:  I love Philadelphia.  Always have, always will.

It is a weird, not-always defensible love.  People who hate Philadelphia—and there are plenty who do—will remind you of the history of staggering corruption; of the sheer strip of billboarded ugliness that is I-95; of former police commissioner and mayor Frank Rizzo jumping on the ribcages of unruly perps; of that day in May 1985 when Wilson Goode sent the cops to bomb the radical separatist group MOVE from its house on Osage Avenue, which ended with the near-destruction of the entire neighborhood; of the vacant lot/hole on 8th and Market; of that beautiful building on 10th and Chestnut now falling to ruin and being stripped of its copper wiring by desperate junkies; of the smell of the city in the dead heat of August; of that accent, that squashed nasally swallowed vowel accent.  I know it all, I understand it all, I cringe at it all, and still I love Philadelphia, the way the protagonist in “Leader of the Pack” loved her juvie delinquent boyfriend:  “They told me he was bad, but I knew that he was sad.” I love Philadelphia for completely irrational reasons, the kind that will not change the mind of dyed-in-the-wool Philahatas, or sway any fence-sitters, but they are mine.

When my mom was pregnant with me, she and my dad were living in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, attending East Stroudsburg State College (now East Stroudsburg University).  A friend of my mom’s said that she should arrange to deliver me either in New York or Philadelphia, so that I would not bear the stigma of being born in a little whitebread redneck mountain town, even a wb/rn mountain town with a teacher’s college.  It turned out that she didn’t have to, though, because as soon as I was big enough to be bundled into a car seat, we were headed down to Philadelphia on an almost weekly basis.  My mom and dad both grew up in Philadelphia and my stepdad grew up in south Jersey, so there were always plenty of relatives to visit.  In 1991, my mom and stepdad decided that they’d had more than enough of the bucolic charms of the Poconos, and ran screaming back to the big city, where they’ve remained happily ever since.  The summer they moved back, I was working for Tower Books and managed to get a promotion that involved relocating from New York to Philadelphia, so I moved in with them for a while.  My mom was a sight to see that summer.  We would drive into the city, or take the train, to go shopping, to have lunch, to just walk around the city, and her eyes would be bright.  “Go ahead and say it, Mom,” I’d say.  “I love it here,” she’d reply.

So do I.  So does Mary Elizabeth Williams, who wrote this travel essay for Salon back in 1997.  I will admit that while I understand Mary Elizabeth’s affection for the strange vibey aspects of the city, I am a bit more sympathetic than she is to the people who come in for the galleries, for the historical sites and for the pretty neighborhoods like Society Hill and the entire length of Delancey Street.  I love that there is a place for everyone here, art fans and Art Problems, tourists, the marginally employed, the overemployed, frat boys and anarchists, M. Night Shyamalan and David Lynch (although I’m sure David Lynch would be just as glad to give his place to someone else).

I love those pretty neighborhoods, and the ugly ones, and the inbetween ones.  I love the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Mutter Museum, the museum of medical curiosities not for the faint-of-heart.  I love the main branch of the Free Library, and the fountain of Leda and the Swan in front of it.  I love TLA on South Street, where Lloyd took me on my birthday to see Television, and Chestnut Cabaret, where we saw Bleach, Kingmaker and Kitchens of Distinction on a triple bill.  I like the cheesesteaks at Pat’s and Geno’s just fine, but I really love the cheesesteaks at Jim’s on South Street.  I used to love the water ices at Jennie’s, but I understand that Jennie’s is long gone.  No worries, though; you can’t keep a good water ice stand down.  (Rogues and plebeians may call it “Italian ice,” but those of us in the know know that “water ice” is the only correct nomenclature.) I love the Reading Terminal Market, and I know I’m not alone.  I love the Bassett’s Ice Cream counter at the market, and the ice cream itself.  I love getting breakfast at the Down Home Diner, one of the stomping grounds of Jack McDavid, who used to do the “Grilling and Chilling” show on Food Network with Bobby Flay.  Jack is still behind the counter at the Down Home, making some of the best breakfasts in the city, when he’s not at the stoves at his restaurant near the Art Museum, Jack’s Firehouse.  He also shops at Reading Terminal, champions the small farms from which he buys the lion’s share of his produce, and waves hello to anyone who calls out, “hey, Jack”—and a lot of people do.  I love that whenever my mom buys meat at Ochs’ Prime Meats, and she hands over her credit card, they always ask her, “were your husband’s people in meat?” (Indeed they were; my stepdad’s grandfather and uncle ran a butcher shop in south Jersey.) I love that Saveur magazine put Philadelphia at the top of its annual Saveur 100 list in January, and that its sister magazine in France, Saveurs, ran a travel piece on Philadelphia in March, entitled “Philadelphie:  La vie ‘made in USA.’” And I love the Melrose Diner in South Philadelphia, because everybody who knows goes to Melrose.

Heaven help me, I even love that oddball nasally Philadelphia accent, that of the squashed vowels.  Steve Lopez, the former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist turned novelist, has a great scene in his novel The Sunday Macaroni Club, in which the newly-arrived-from-Boston assistant district attorney gives a secretary a coffee order, and the secretary asks her, “Do you want that in a starfame cup, hon?” Flooded with frustration and homesickness, the a.d.a. runs to the women’s room, locks herself in a stall, and holds her head in her hands, chanting to herself, “sty-ro-foam, sty-ro-foam, sty-ro-foam” until she feels grounded and fit to reenter the office again.

While the city has plenty to recommend it, and I will be pleased and happy to show it off to anyone who wants to visit, I will allow that my affections may not be completely transferable.  I love Philadelphia because, simply put, I fell in love down there, and thus even the darkest, saddest, chronically-broke-and-underemployed-bookstore-clerk memory still has a warm amber-and-rose patina about it.  To me, this city is love.

The summer I moved back in with my parents, I was not thrilled to be back in Philadelphia, although I was glad that I wasn’t moving back to the Poconos.  I had been in New York for two years, laid off from a job I loved, trying to live on minimum wage and failing, spiralling deeper into debt.  Come help us open our new store, said Tower.  You can be the children’s book buyer.  You can work in the record store for the summer if you’d like. Thus it was that I found myself at 23, living in my parents’ new house, working at Tower Records, feeling like I’d had one chance at a shiny interesting New York City life and I had failed at it, failed myself, failed my parents, failed, failed, failed.  I was tedious company that summer.

Shortly after I’d moved, my friend Val came down from New York to visit me.  We trooped around the city, ending up at Sassafras Bar on Second and Chestnut, which became on that day, and remains to this day, my favorite place in Philadelphia to while away an afternoon.  Tin ceiling, white lights, dark and cool in the summer, dark and warm in the winter, kind yet unobtrusive service, small but perfectly-executed menu, menschy bartenders, and the most beautiful tile on the walls, mottled green, blue and brown, the exact color of bruises.  The women’s room is on the second floor of the building, up a flight of stairs.  It’s a huge bathroom, almost the size of the whole first floor, complete with deep, claw-footed bathtub.  The first time I went in there, I saw a languid, recumbent figure in the tub.  “Oh!  I’m sorry!,” I cried, startled.  She didn’t move.  On closer inspection, I discovered that the bather was a mannequin.  She sat in the tub for years, startling countless female patrons.  One day she was gone.  “What happened to our friend?” my mom asked the bartender.  It turned out that she gave up her head to a local art society’s Bastille Day celebration.  I appreciate the sacrifice, but I miss the weird little frisson she brought to my every trip to the bathroom.

After that first trip to Sassafras, Val and I, fortified by several perfect vodka gimlets, decided to visit the Tarot reader next door, just for giggles.  “You will have two daughters and one son,” she announced.  ("Shows you what she knows,” I said to Val later.  “I’m only having one, tops.” “Maybe you’ll have triplets,” she said.) “And you will marry someone who is in your circle.  You may not know him now, but he is present in your life.” ("She must be kidding.  I don’t want to marry anybody I know right now.” “Maybe you’ll meet someone while you’re here,” said Val.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  Who am I going to meet in Philadelphia?")

Lloyd showed up in Philadelphia eight months later, having moved from Seattle, transferred from Tower Books in Bellevue, Washington, to run shipping and receiving for our store.  Within a month, I was in love.  Within six weeks, we were shacked up, living in sin, on love and cheap food, drinking dollar beers at McGlinchey’s, going out to breakfast at Diner on the Square off Rittenhouse Square, sitting in Washington Square Park, fingers interlaced, staring at the similarities in our skin tones.  Within six months we were engaged; within a year we were married at First Unitarian Church on 21st and Chestnut.  Since we couldn’t get away for a honeymoon, we dropped some cash on the bridal suite at Hotel Atop the Bellevue on Broad Street.  We didn’t change out of our wedding clothes before leaving the church, mainly so we wouldn’t have to schlep my ginormous and impractical wedding gown around.  This turned out to be a smart tactical move.  If you ever want to be treated well at check-in, show up in the Full Wedding Monty.  You will practically be handed champagne and foie gras as you turn over your credit card.  Our window had a clear view of the statue of William Penn atop City Hall.  A local artist had designed a giant Phillies cap for Billy P, in honor of the Phils’ confounding our expectations and making it to the World Series.  We turned the game on and watched to the fifth inning, when ignominious defeat was all but inevitable.  “Well, that’s about enough of that,” I said to Lloyd.  “What should we do now?”

Last October, almost 10 years to the date after that wedding, my no-longer-baby brother and his beautiful and excellent girlfriend were married at Arch Street Presbyterian Church.  The weather was warm and beautiful for October.  The trees in Rittenhouse Square were still in bloom.  The air smelled pretty and green.  I saw friends and relatives I hadn’t seen in years.  It was a weekend made for a wedding, a weekend made for me to feel goofy with love.  I love Philadelphia.  Always have, always will.