BOOK REVIEW : Recipes From a Fantasy Island : NEW YORK COOKBOOK, By Molly O’Neill ; (Workman Publishing: $17.95; 509 pp.)
The chief impressions one takes away from this enthusiastically overstuffed work are of good intentions, good humor and good food. It is also true that I, as a former New Yorker, kept mentally subjoining, “Good grief!” at Molly O’Neill’s notions of the place, possibly in the manner of a divorcee observing another woman’s romantic vision of her ex-husband. Still, there can be a certain charm in that.
It’s a blissfully showcase-y book with the air of young love, not at all the kind of thing that would have been written by either a long-term New Yorker (O’Neill got there a mere eight years ago) or a student of American food interested in placing the city in a larger context. (Anyone who can sincerely write that “only a New Yorker would dare braising her brisket in ginger ale--and be rewarded with a glorious thing” needs to travel a little.) I recommend going straight to the best feature, the recipes.
Now, right away many New Yorkers or ex-New Yorkers will be tempted to second-guess the selection, with loud squawks about the absence of some favorite dish that absolutely spells “New York” to them. The temptation should be resisted. The choice of recipes might not match those all kibitzers would make, but it represents a brave course through a minefield.
O’Neill, a New York Times reporter, claims to have gone looking for real cooking as done by a cross-section of modern humanity. What makes this a minefield is that the food mavens who inescapably form a big chunk of her audience don’t always like or understand much of the real cooking that goes on around them. To produce recipes that will please trendy hobby-cooks without absolutely falsifying very humble kinds of everyday cooking is a tall order. Of course, it helps that O’Neill happily buys into the New Yorker’s “Nothing is humble here” faith. Still, it must have taken some doing to make a great gamut of plain and fancy dishes conjure up the ambience of Fun City with so little sense of anything distorted or phony in the food itself.
The organization is more or less “cookbook as a crowded subway car”. A huge assemblage of recipes has been jammed into a sort of conventional sequence (appetizers, soups, breads, vegetables, pasta dishes, meat, poultry, seafood and desserts), but odes to assorted traditions and unorthodox mini-sections of specialties (dumplings, barbecues, cheesecakes, etc.) keep intervening. All chapters are liberally splashed with snapshots (mostly by Howard Earl Simmons) of beaming contributors--professors, housewives, restaurateurs, butchers, retired schoolteachers, businessman, manicurists.
I could joyously cook my way through the resulting recipes about seven days a week. The key to everything is the sense that O’Neill herself connects with every dish she includes, be it Le Cirque’s spaghetti primavera with all those elegantly prepared vegetables or someone’s “emergency spaghetti” topped with just a mass of sauteed onions. That same feeling of connectedness instantly transfers itself to the reader, at least this reader, with the likes of shrimp with feta cheese, potato pierogi , spiced olives, cabbage with noodles, chicken hash (a la “21”), sushi hand-rolls with glazed eel, tomatoes stuffed with sausage meat, a version of Schrafft’s hot butterscotch sauce and hundreds of other entries from homey to hokey. I can’t imagine not wanting to head for the kitchen on the double.
A word to the wise: To squash 450 recipes into one relatively cheap paperback means sacrificing a lot of instructional detail. You may hit snags in many recipes if you don’t know: A) how to cook, and B) what results you’re after. Except for a dull, dull version of pad Thai (woefully under-seasoned, the rice noodles soggy from too-long pre-soaking), what I tried worked just fine--with a little adjusting here and there. The soupy Jamaican curried goat stew was excellent, but I’d certainly saute the second dose of curry powder before adding it, instead of chucking it in raw. A “pie” of sliced potatoes was about as good as anything you can do with this splendid vegetable. The miniature crab cakes were delicious too, but the suggested proportions are on the bread-y side. Let’s say that novices may want more hand-holding than they’ll find in this stimulating collection.
When it comes to the non-recipe aspects of the “New York Cookbook,” my enthusiasm falls off sharply. The two big stumbling blocks, for me, are the large doses of extremely uneven historical/cultural and “service” information and the author’s glib way of mining everything for “adorableness.”
After the twentieth or so factual error or muddle, I just gave up trying to keep tabs. What kind of chronicler can claim H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, as a New Yorker? And what kind of New Yorker thinks “Chinatown is still contained within the five-block area bounded by Canal, Mulberry, and the Bowery”? Helpful-looking guides to things such as pasta types or Asian vegetables turn out to be maddeningly hit-or-miss. And the publishers do their bit with numerous idiotic typos, like re-christening 19th-Century cooking teacher Juliet Corson’s works “Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Sin” (that should be six ).
Mistakes never ruined any work full (as this is) of charm and affection. I think, though, that too much of the affection here gets filtered through cute poses and arch generalizations. I came away wishing O’Neill had tried more seriously to identify something about New York food that can’t be found in other corners of the American landscape--and I don’t count coyly cross-referencing an ordinary chicken stock as “New York Penicillin” in recipe after recipe as much of an effort. Lord knows how many of her local-color touches jibed perfectly with my childhood memories of Philadelphia.
One thing she does get right is the highly, though not uniquely, New York quality of laying claim to your neighbors’ heritage with maximum self-congratulation. It’s an endearing trait, up to a point. How deep does it go? In this case, just as deep as Molly O’Neill’s grasp of lives lived beyond the frontiers of winsomeness when she suggests “choosing from the many inexpensive ingredients” sold in a major Polish neighborhood and “taking them home to cook” rather than subjecting yourself to the way real Polish people cook.