David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Piscivores Delight: The Capital of Smoked Fish

On a recent visit to Manhattan, I had a lunchtime craving only one place could satisfy, so I stopped at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side.  The narrow, brightly lit storefront on East Houston Street is a pilgrimage site for us lovers of smoked fish.  Gleaming glass and chrome cases display row upon row of golden, silver, orange and ivory whole fish and filets whose shapes have a streamlined elegance that invite tasting.  Fortunately, smiling countermen answer questions with a savory slice.  I find sturgeon has a meaty, almost turkey-like flavor.  Sable is soft and buttery.  It melts in my mouth.

There’s quite a bit of bustle around noon with a regular rhythm to the comings and goings of customers and the deft movements of countermen busily slicing fish and building sandwiches.  Lacking seating, the shop processes a crackling energy as people grab their orders and go.

In addition to sturgeon and sable, whitefish, trout, mackerel and yellow fin tuna are arrayed behind glass.  Over a dozen kinds of salmon are available, including wild Baltic, kippered, pastrami cured, and double smoked Danish.  Of herring, there are ten styles ranging from selyodka to smoked French, schmaltz to pickled with onions or smothered in cream sauce.  There are also various caviars as well as salmon, flying fish, and trout roe.

Clutching a bialy stuffed with sable and Scottish salmon and smeared with caviar cream cheese, I leave the cool, spicy atmosphere salted with the light odor of fish for a bench just beyond the plate glass.  Sitting below the pretzled neon sign with its fanciful piscine images, I watch a parade of humanity even more diverse—in age, skin tone, dress, gait and other ways—than the variety of fish displayed in the store.

Run by the same family since 1914, Russ & Daughters has been justly lauded in guidebooks and magazines for the quality of its offerings, and as a last bastion of the traditional Jewish appetizing shop selling smoked fish, salads and other foods that go with bagels. The Sunday Times of London called it “the Louvre of Lox,” and The Smithsonian Institution considers it “part of New York’s cultural heritage.”

Biting into a sandwich exploding with flavor, I’m suddenly transported to my childhood of Sunday mornings with lox, bagels, and family.  World renowned publications and famous restaurant reviewers may have their reasons for extra helpings of accolades.  As for me, I know that my long gone immigrant grandmother would have been comfortable here.  She’d have known exactly what she wanted and relished every morsel.

Edible Neighborhood

Wildman” Steve Brill was in the area not long ago, eating his way through shrubs and weeds not far from my neighborhood.  An expert on foraging wild food, Brill is perhaps best known for being arrested in New York’s Central Park for picking and eating a dandelion.  A showman to the core, he dresses in a pith helmet, backpack, and sneakers with trousers bloused into his socks giving him a lovable eccentric look.

While pointing out edible elderberry flowers (good in pancake mix), violet leaves (eat like lettuce), and milkweed flower buds (boil like vegetables until tender), he keeps up a constant patter of amusing stories that range from Greek myths to his own family.  He’s a lively, upbeat fellow who instructs insects not to bite and makes a delightful percussive music by clapping his hands in front of his open mouth.  A nature boy, perhaps, he is no technophobe, whipping out an ipad to show illustrations of various plants.  Not subservient to authority, he advises a listener to “watch out for that Peterson book,” referring to the venerable wildflower guide, “it has some serious mistakes.”

Wood sorrel has a lemonade-like flavor when chewed; jewelweed juice is good for poison ivy.  Its seeds are excellent sprinkled on ice cream. Sarsaparilla root makes a fine “male tonic” when boiled for twenty minutes and consumed as a tea, he says with a grin and a wink.

All these exotic uses for common plants were fascinating, but when Brill remarked that the rough, scaly, cherry-like fruit of Kousa dogwoods have a delicious apricot flavor, I suddenly felt as if I’d rediscovered the street I’ve lived on for over 25 years. Where before I’d gazed at several handsome ornamental trees laden with flowery white bracts in spring, now I had a late summer orchard full of tasty fruit.  His website recommends a Kousa dogwood parfait that includes crunchy almond butter, carob crème, wild apricot jam, and five of the berries.

Imagine an edible neighborhood!  Sometimes it takes people like Brill to bring us the joy of seeing the familiar in a wholly new light.  To the surprise of many, the natural habitat of this wild food forager is not some distant wilderness or vast woodland, but the roadsides, yards, and ragged open spaces of our urban and suburban areas.

Brill brings an entertaining playfulness to his task.  He has a happy curiosity that gets people as close to nature as possible by urging them to put a little of it’s healthful nutrition into their bodies.  If eating wild food can keep a person in such an ebullient state, give me a double helping.

Taking Flight (poem)

Feral eyes smoldering, a broad-winged hawk grips
so tightly it seems to burn my flesh through gloves thick
enough for glowing embers.  I’m fooled by the light,
delicate, warrior-striped body that wrestles the hands
struggling to confine its wings.

Armored with saber-like talons and a fishhook bill honed
by ripping the roughest muscle, it’s the deadliest of aircraft,
radar-like spotting rats and frogs a mile away.  Momentarily,
I hold the sizzling power like a wizard’s wand.

Squatting slightly, I push up and let go in an explosion
of feathers and wingbeats.  The bird flaps and glides, flaps
and glides over fresh-cut fields, ledges, and oak treetops
until dissolving to silhouette.  Soaring with a piece of my
heart held like prey, it leaves me longing to hold it again
though I’d more easily grasp the horizon.

Vows Among the Roses

Roses are not the sole thing blooming this time of year in the Rose Garden of Hartford, Connecticut’s Elizabeth Park.  On a recent early evening visit I found three weddings taking place simultaneously.  Brides wore traditional white and the grooms looked a bit uncomfortable in their ties and coats. As at most weddings, the dresses were startlingly bright.  But with yellow, white, pink, and red roses glowing in every shade and variegation like colored lights set among the dense, thorny greenery, such confections of cloth seemed hardly worth noticing.

Roses have long been conscripted as symbols of love and beauty, so it’s not surprising that tens of couples celebrate their nuptials among the grandifloras and floribundas.  “If love were what the rose is,” wrote the nineteenth century English poet Swinburne, “our lives would grow together.”

Certain landscapes contain an emotional resonance that we feel, but are at a loss to explain.  The intoxicating perfumes, velvety colors and luscious petal clusters of roses somehow invite people to draw closer.  Affection, longing, a sense of fleeting time seem to grow among the flowers.

These weddings took place with brides primping behind shrub roses and photographers popping out from among rectangular beds of foliage.  Couples walked down grassy allees beneath arched trellises of buds toward their pledge.  The garden created an outdoor room, formal in its regular geometry, but casual in its outdoor location where the sounds of children playing and birdsong accompanied the vows.

Rose garden weddings not only witness a couple’s union, they forge a union between people and a place that itself is created jointly by natural forces and human toil.  With its message of hope, beauty, and faith in nature, the rose garden is a fitting place for a couple to affirm their love.  As the years wear on, they’ll undoubtedly have the chance to draw strength from those garden memories because, as Robert Louis Stevenson observed, “marriage is . . . not a bed of roses.”

New England Forest Magic

If you want to know what southern New England’s forested landscapes are all about, you can’t do better than wandering the Jones Mountain preserve in New Hartford, Connecticut.  A mere 158 acre slice of rugged hill country, its synergy between man and nature epitomizes what makes this region endlessly fascinating.

The property is entered on a narrow trail that twists and winds through a dense forest of mixed hardwoods islanded with stands of hemlock.  A typical rocky and rooty forest path, it’s deeply shaded with thick napped moss covering fallen logs and small boulders.  Tall columnar oaks give the woods a dignified air.  Birch and beech grow well with laurel thriving in dense understory thickets along with moosewood and witch hazel.

It doesn’t take long to reach a clearing where the fieldstone back and sidewall remains of a large shed-style building stands roofless near a small tea colored pond with an earthen dam.  Like almost all the woods in this area, this is not a pristine swatch of nature, but a place that has felt a tug-of-war between human and natural forces for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  Most recently, it was part of an estate in the Jones family for several generations.  They loved it for its beauty and turned it into a sort of garden writ large.

After a short climb, the trail spills onto a broad carriage road, part of a network of graded paths the Jones’ built just after the turn of the last century, in the waning days of wagon wheels and horsepower.  Yellow hawkweed, wild geranium and laurel were blooming recently along the edge of the road which was carefully engineered with stone gutters and a fieldstone arch bridge said to be built by Irish stonemasons.  The rustic bridge is a work of art that would be the pride of any town center.  Moss grows so thickly on the stones that the structure almost seems constructed of the plush emerald sod.

The trail rises to an overlook facing west toward more forested hills with the steeples and other buildings of New Hartford center clustered below.  The ledges are neatly carved with nineteenth-century graffiti, names and dates as early as the 1830s.

Beyond the ledges and by way of a side trail, a neat rectangular enclosure of fieldstone is reached.  It has cobble finials at the corners and one end is made of a massive glacial erratic boulder affixed with memorial plaques to members of the Jones family.  The forest is so thick and moss so rampant that the light is deeply virescent.  I’m reminded of seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell’s line that a garden annihilates “all that is made/to a green thought in a green shade.”

The peak offers no view, but rather something much more unusual.  Affectionately known as the “foam dome” is an ersatz igloo-looking structure made of steel, wood, concrete and foam.  It has a stone floor and a fireplace with a tall metal stovepipe poking from the roof.  Splotched with moss and sporting small trees, the dome is slowly reverting to nature.  Built by a Jones family member while she was an architecture student at Yale in the 1970s, it appears influenced by futurist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller and could be the perfect home for a high tech hobbit.

Like most forested tracts in New England, this is not a wilderness, but a landscape tooled by both man and nature.  Each has left their mark and shaped the other.  Nature’s power and beauty are better understood because of the contrast, and the works of humankind stand in stronger relief for the same reason.  It’s a naturalized plot of ground that invites discovery on many levels.

Going with the Flow: Roadside Springs

Hartford Courant, June 6, 2010

 Bubbling clear and cold from the ground, there’s probably no more singular marker of place than a roadside spring.  They were a boon in the days when hay- and water-fueled horse-powered   
transportation and longer travel times induced people to stop for a drink.  Today they are more of a highway hazard, undermining macadam and causing winter icing.  Many have disappeared, victims of road widening and development, or closed by health authorities justifiably worried about contamination and landowners fearful of liability.  Some springs are polluted while others have simply been forgotten.

 Alex Cassie Spring in Windham may be the state’s best-known roadside water source; Jim Hooper of the local water department has seen lines of people waiting to fill their jugs there.  Situated at the edge of a park in a thickly settled area of homes and businesses, the spring flows from a small, stone castle-like structure.  Regularly tested, it’s sometimes closed for cleaning or due to elevated bacteria.

 Pouring from an iron pipe that rises thigh-high out of the ground in an upside-down “L,” the icy water of a spring in Salmon River State Forest in Colchester has been periodically monitored for contamination ever since it was threatened with closure several years ago.  But testing is an exception, and, as a result, springs often have stern warning signs about potential pollution.  A large blue placard stands guard next to a North Stonington spring that pours from a white PVC pipe stuck into a grassy embankment at the rural intersection of Routes 184 and 49.  Even on a remote dirt road ascending Mount Riga in the state’s far northwest corner, an alert is posted beside an iron pipe spilling clear water into a basin made from a split log.