THE INVINCIBLE ARMOR OF PLEASURE:

First in a series of culinary greats who I have loved, admired, learned from and sometimes cooked for.

Beard Foundation award winning author John Birdsall quotes me in his 2014 article for Eater subtitled “In the 1970s and ’80s, Jeremiah Tower, who shaped American gastronomic culture in his own image, had no formal cooking experience.”

“But he was an amateur in the literal sense of the word—he was a lover of food, and he knew who Fernand Point and Elizabeth David were. Not to mention Lucien Tendret, Urbain Dubois, Auguste Escoffier, Edouard Nignon, and, of course, the Francophile American expat, Richard Olney. At a time when culinary academies were essentially vocational schools for hotel cooks and institutional hash-slingers, where drab food generally ruled, Tower's deep versing in culinary aesthetics and literature drove him to compose his menus.” Which, as Anthony Bourdain said, “Made a complete re-evaluation of not just American food and ingredients – but food.:

And, as Birdsall pointed out, was always wearing, as I said in my book Jeremiah Tower's New American Classics describing an ice cream soda, "the invincible armor of pleasure."

Hardly a great culinary triumph, but a memory no less intense, is the black-and-white soda of American soda fountain fame. I remember hot, humid days in Manhattan, walking along hoping I would pass a Schrafft’s so that I could nip into the air-conditioned room, sit at the cool marble counter, and order a black-and-white. In those days the ice cream was good, the chocolate syrup was real, and the soda had big, lasting bubbles. The bite of the soda water against the sweetness of the chocolate was what battling the heat was all about.

To make a black-and-white soda, use the best chocolate sauce you can find, get some good Italian or Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream and very lively soda water. Put the syrup in the bottom of a tall glass, add scoops of ice cream, pour in the soda, and stir briefly with a long-handled spoon just enough to mix the chocolate and soda so that the whole thing is frothy and marbled. Drink through a long straw and then scoop up the last of the ice cream with the spoon. A few contented sighs, and then out onto the streets again, able to face anything, wearing the invincible armor of pleasure.

Or a shot of very cold Zubkova, waiting a second or two for the burn to be swept away by the first bite of a hot buckwheat blini submerged in melted butter, cool sour cream and gobs of Sevruga caviar.

Either will do. As do many others. But nothing gives me more culinary pleasure than reading about past greats.

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