How Did This Happen to Me?
Before I start publishing excerpts from my dinner party journals, sharing recipes and other tidbits about lifestylings- I thought I should start explaining how my love affair with cooking and entertaining began.
I'll start with 6 posts including this FIRST one!
It wasn’t always like this. I doubt if I was born with the entertaining gene. My family rarely gave dinner parties and I didn’t have a clue about the world of food. The meals in my home were always abundant. I was encouraged to eat, eat, and eat more. My mother was a good Jewish cook so it was easy to do.
Before I start publishing excerpts from my dinner party journals, sharing recipes and other tidbits about lifestylings- I thought I should start explaining how my love affair with cooking and entertaining began.
I'll start with 6 posts including this FIRST one!
It wasn’t always like this. I doubt if I was born with the entertaining gene. My family rarely gave dinner parties and I didn’t have a clue about the world of food. The meals in my home were always abundant. I was encouraged to eat, eat, and eat more. My mother was a good Jewish cook so it was easy to do.
I knew this about food: Smoked salmon was lox and lox and smoked whitefish and sable and sturgeon were known as Appetizing. Meats were known as Delicatessen. I ate chicken, chopped liver, soup with matzo balls, and soup with kreplach, or barley and flanken soup. We had pot roast and gelfilte fish, which my mother and her sisters would make from scratch. On occasion, there was a faux Italian or Chinese dish.
It wasn’t until I left Astoria, Queens for Manhattan that I began to eat in a wide variety of restaurants and experience a broader taste of food. Accomplished chefs were turning out classic cuisines—French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Japanese… I gobbled it all. The food was so inspiring that I wanted to eat the same way at home, too. Like a bolt of lightening, it struck me that food was an art and could be an enduring source of pleasure. As if I were the first to get this message, almost overnight I became a zealous convert and was determined to recreate each delectable meal for my husband and friends. I had no training. But I did have my taste buds.
Let me praise my inspiration. Credit goes to the legendary restaurants of the era: Le Pavillon, Lutece, Brussels, The Four Seasons, Le Cygne, La Cote Basque, La Caravelle, San Marino, Le Perigord, The Leopard, Laurent, Romeo Salta, The Rainbow Room, Quo Vadis, Orsini’s, Nanni’s, Pietro’s, and Le Cirque. But I need to single out two that drew me to their tables for countless satisfying meals and valuable instruction on how to prepare them. These two were a Northern Italian Restaurant called Romeo Salta(on West 56th Street in NYC) and the best French Restaurant in NYC - Lutece.
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My husband, Bill, designed and produced this matchbook poster Actually, he created posters for both the east and west sides of Manhattan. This one is for the east side. To this day it hangs in our home as a reminder of some of our favorite haunts. It's so much fun to look at. Back then, we created a rating list for restaurants(we assigned a certain number of stars after having an experience, we'd jot down notes and stars in a ledger book).
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With my next blog posting, How it all began- part II, I'll share my experiences at the restaurants that influenced me, plus some recipes and more tidbits that led me to creating my Dinner Party Journals! Hope you return to read and see more! Please feel free to post comments, mention memories that I may have sparked or ask questions! xxoo Sheila
