During a recent attempt to cull my cookbook collection, I discovered an old volume of Cooking for One is Fun by Henry Louis Creel, the book that taught me how to cook for myself.
For a period in the late 1970s, I lived in a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. I was working for a politician whose district office was in Bensonhurst, about as far from Manhattan action that you can get. At the time, Bensonhurst was a neighborhood of detached brick houses with neat yards, and small apartment buildings, populated mostly by Jews and Italians. Parts of the movie “Saturday Night Fever” were filmed there and one of my colleagues had a cameo as a bouncer in the Odyssey disco where Tony Manero ruled the dance floor.
Even though my decision to live in the Heights meant that I had a long commute to the Bensonhurst office, there was no way that I was going to live in what was essentially a suburb of Manhattan and a distant one at that. I was young, single, and curious. Just across the river separating Brooklyn from Manhattan, the Heights was and is a posh neighborhood. A favorite pastime was to explore the neighborhood at dusk, when the rich people turned on the lights in their brownstones so I could figuratively press my nose against the windows for a glimpse of how I hoped to live one day.
My apartment was an alcove studio: one room with an added section where I fit my bed, and a bathroom. There was a tiny closet for clothing. The lilliputian kitchen was concealed behind French doors and comprised a small oven, a sink, and a strip of a counter. While I can’t picture it, there must have been a refrigerator.
The furniture, given to me by a friend of my mom’s, included a daybed, chair, and coffee table with hidden storage. I wish I had held on to it because it was good quality mid-century modern of the kind that today would fetch a fortune on Facebook marketplace.
The only window in the apartment was next to the kitchen, which opened to the fire escape. Consequently, an air conditioner was verboten. The rent was $125 a month. It would be kind to say that the apartment was a dump: neglected, cockroach infested, with a buildup of cracked cheap landlord paint on the walls.
Nevertheless, I was determined to make this “one little room an everywhere” and that meant that I would cook for myself.
Cooking for One is Fun had received a favorable review in the New York Times, so I picked up a copy and worked my way through it. At first I found the writing a bit too emphatically cheerful but after I had tried some of the recipes I discovered that planning meals and cooking for one was fun and still gives me pleasure. The book included recipes for an individual meatloaf with carrots, curried chicken wings, a single serving of rice pudding, among many others.
My favorite was the Blanquette of Veal. At some point during the day my mind would drift to dinner and I would often settle on this classic French dish. On my way home, feeling very much like an urban sophisticate doing her marketing, I would stop by the butcher shop in Bensonhurst for the veal, the produce shop for two carrots and one onion and oftentimes—bank balance permitting--the liquor store for an appropriate bottle of wine. Creel recommends that the stew be served with rice but I preferred a single roll from the Italian bakery a few doors down from my office. (In summer, the bakery made and sold Cremolata, an ice milk flavored with almonds and vanilla and served in a small pleated paper cup. To this day I’m haunted by the memory of that delicious concoction.)
Since I was determined to lead a civilized life, in good weather I would plate my veal, pour myself a glass of wine, and climb onto the fire escape to dine en plein air. So good.
I wasn’t entirely happy in those years. My father had recently died and the sudden loss set me on a bit of a downward spiral. I missed him. He loved New York City and dreamed of retiring there with my mother. It was not to be and I wondered what he would have made of my life at the time.
Many times I imagined we were meeting at my apartment on a Saturday to walk together, as I often did alone, from my apartment, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and all the way uptown to see a ballet at Lincoln Center. Google maps tells me it’s a roughly 7-mile walk. What fun we would have had!
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