HOME SWEET HOME IN NEW YORK
I live in Merida, Mexico, but before moving here, I moved from Manila to New York City in 2000. The place I chose to live there was within a comfortable walk from the Union Square market, even with full bags of hours-old flowers and produce.
The first day in my apartment on Mercer Street, I bought paper towels that had “Home Sweet Home” written on them. I didn’t even notice until I got home and unwrapped them. And even then, it took a few moments to see the horror in front of me, because I couldn’t remember where I had put my reading glasses.
Senility is a terrible thing.
Not that I don’t love my ‘home,’ even if I call it a house. Not that it really is one - more like a pad, a pied-a-terre, a place to unpack and shut the door. It could be in a hotel, and often I wish it were, since it would then come with a cleaner who would always know where my glasses had last been put. This place to live has my cookbooks, Burmese cats, a Yorkie, old Burgundies, a freezer full of Meyer lemon-infused gin, and the wooden mask from Gabon that I had just bought in Paris.
But as I write this, I am shocked to remember that there was more to eat in the under-counter refrigerator at the incomparable Georges V in Paris than there is in mine in Manhattan. And that’s with a Gristedes next door that I wish was a Citarella, an Astor Wine that I wish was the Berkeley Wine Shop, Balthazar’s bakery and Dean & Delucca within ten blocks that I could wish were in Paris. But most of the time I do just fine here.
Often excellently.
So why did I have so little in my refrigerator (oranges, Evian, milk, Schweppes Tonic, limes, Kerala lime pickle, and Normandy butter) when I was in the center of the world’s richest (then) and most abundant city? Because I cannot shop with ease or pleasure inside a building with fluorescent lights, canned music, broken shopping carts, and cashiers who hate their job. That’s why I love New York when Union Square becomes a cornucopia, its market bursting with heirloom tomatoes like Pink Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, or Lucky Tiger.
Photo Courtesy of Oh My Veggies
As well as other wonderful things like Royal Jelly, raw milk cheeses, cut flowers, peaches and apricots that have not seen a drop of irrigation water, and every vegetable one could ever want.
Often it was the onion stand that trapped me. It was next to a stand selling old-fashioned roses, so the smell of the glisteningly fresh onions and the heady perfumes of the Duchesse de Brabante combined to make my mouth water.
Photo Courtesy of https://www.nycgovparks.org/
Photo Courtesy of https://antiqueroseemporium.com
I saw the bread stand nearby, and the Vermont “European Style” butter, and was tempted to make a sandwich on the spot. All I needed was some sea salt and Lampong pepper. There they were, those onions, in all their glory: salad whites, cooking yellows, rocambole, shallots on the stem, garlic tops about to flower, scallions large and small and white and red, purple and snow baby pearls, gold coin, luscious leeks, red cipolle, small red Italian, Kelshe (sweet and mild) and the Walla Walla Sweets. I took home the Walla Walla, sliced them thinly, marinated them in fleur de sel and freshly squeezed blackberry juice for fifteen minutes. And served them with a sauce of the Brabante rose petals ground up in a mortar with egg yolks and lemon juice, adding light French yellow extra virgin olive oil to make a rose petal mayonnaise.
Then I made a sandwich on baguette and contemplated dinner.
As anyone would as the weather warms and the farmer’s markets open up. Buy some wonderful olive oil (before it becomes rare and even more expensive) and the first heirloom tomatoes. The ones that still smell of the plant heated in the sun, for an easy, fast, and delicious dinner.
First grab the frozen Plymouth gin out of the freezer and make a several large ice cube drink with chilled Schweppes Indian tonic and put some spaghetti on to cook in lots of water no oil.