Author: Mara L.

It is undeniable that my longings for European food are not inspired by UK cooking. It’s the cooking from the Alps, and Italy, and ultimately the whole Mediterranean that I am missing. However, I was a student in England for a semester, and there is one deep truth to be learnt from the British: tea is a heal-all. It’s not like Italians think, that tea is only for the five days per year when you have the flu. Tea cures everything, loneliness, sadness, exhaustion, nervousness, you name it. “Have a cup of tea”—the very sound of these consoling words shuts out the world, and here you are, already getting better!

So, when fall sets in, and you find yourself in Manhattan, where people believe in modern science rather than the spell of a cup of tea, where do you turn? There’s not a single truly British tea place here (in the semi-sad, nostalgic sense that makes it all work). So, there’s one more reason to explore the Asian cuisines. In fact, this is not only advisable for cold autumn days. If you are one of these weaklings from Europe like me who freezes to death in Manhattan’s air-conditioned restaurants during summer, you might want to always steer your friends to Asian restaurants, with your secret plan of surviving the lunch hour by holding on to endless cups of hot green tea.

But the true curing experience, the one that will faintly remind you of England, can only be revived in very few places. Clearly, the “Tea Box” restaurant at Takashimaya on 5th Avenue is one of them. Tea comes in the most beautiful pots and cups (very unlike the tea you had in England), and tastes simply amazing. While there’s really nothing European in this experience at all, it will strike a note and make you happy.

Only a few weeks ago I was complaining about not having had enough of a beach summer. Strangely, I only feel the pain of the end of the summer when it’s still there, but oh so cruelly nearing its end. Now, I feel like embracing the crispness of autumn. And accordingly, my regrets take a different shape: desire for some heart-warming fall-food, right from the Alps.

So here is one thing that expatriates can cook in New York in precisely the same way they would at home: potato-pancakes with apple-sauce, as every mountain kid loves them. Several stores, including Balducci’s, carry a German (or Austrian?) product by Pfanni, a kind of pre-shredded, dried potato-cum-herbs mix. That’s what literally everyone, even the most sophisticated gourmets, use in Europe. You only add water, wait a couple of minutes, and off you go. Some olive oil in a pan, and the little potato pancakes are done in just a few minutes.

Apple sauce, in Italy, is done differently from the way it’s done here. The word “apple sauce”, in fact, is a little distasteful for me, since it suggests a sauce. In Italy, we love real pieces of apple, not a sauce-like substance, which to us tastes as if one were in a hospital. So you buy the best apples you can get (right now a lot of stores carry organic apples from the region, which have a nice mix of acid and sweetness), cut them up, add some (very little) sugar, and then either of the following: lots of freshly squeezed lemon juice; or some lemon juice and some orange juice; or some lemon juice and some white whine. You will easily guess that the latter is the real Italian way of doing it.

Eating your potato pancake with cooked apples (let’s call it that), you will genuinely feel at home.

Last week, a business trip took me outside of New York, a real adventure for the Europe-based Manhattanite – and therefore a welcome occasion for musings about food, as it relates to the meaning of life. Bear with me if, as an Italian lover of poetry, I tell you that for Dante, the bad is the mere absence of the good. The deeper down in hell you are, the further away you are from God. Beware, the bad is not a counter-force to the good! It’s merely the lack of the good. Now, looking at one’s plate at a number of restaurants all over the world, the phrase ‘absence of good’ rings very true. But is Dante right? Isn’t there more to bad food?

So, one of these evenings, I’m sitting in the most ridiculously over-ambitious restaurant in my hotel, with nothing less than a harp player entertaining me and the only other, single female diner in the whole room. Given the fact that I was going to sit there on my own, I thought I was going to order two small dishes, so as to give me something to do with my lonely evening. The first was shrimp in a herb sauce. Sounds like a safe bet. But wait until some chef (why is no one simply a cook?) puts the shrimp on rosemary branches, and grills them all for the same amount of time, irrespective of the fact that they differ in size. So one shrimp was uneatably raw, and the rest were uneatably well done. The second course, which I expected to be a selection of cheese with fruit (you see the reasoning here, I was going for the simplest possible), turned out to be a whole brie baked in some terrible crust, with something perhaps best described as strawberry jam around it.

Now here I’m sitting, pitying the harp player, a harmless student, put into this depressing position of playing for an empty room by the restaurant’s hopeless pretensions. My thoughts drift back to the good and the bad: Is the bad a force that aims to assert itself, even if it has to come in the guise of ambition for the good?