“Tis a far, far better Reuben I find than I’ve ever found before.”
— “A Tale of Two Delis” by Chaim Dickens
“A knish! A knish! My kingdom for a knish!”
— Shecky Shakespeare’s “King Irving III”
“Listen! Billy Pilgrimowitz has come unstuck in time. And boy is he hungry!”
— Yitzhak Vonnegut’s “Schnitzelhouse Five”
It’s not unusual to get hungry. It’s not unusual to crave a pastrami sandwich. It’s not unusual to hop in the car and drive to a deli to satiate that desire.
But it is unusual to hop in one’s car in Mountain View, hit the 101, drive, drive, drive and drive some more, pull off 350 miles and five hours later in Tarzana in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, order a pastrami sandwich, eat it in the parking lot and then leap back into the car and gun it north to the Bay Area.
“Well,” replies Sandy Gardner, who has repeatedly done just that, “have you ever had a good pastrami sandwich?”
Case closed.
Gardner, a native of the Bronx, was one of dozens of readers who responded to j.’s “What would you do for a knish?” ad with extravagant tales that resemble gastronomically tinged recitations of the Irving Berlin ditty “How Deep is the Ocean?”
For some Bay Area Jews, hauling vast quantities of goodies across the nation can be chalked up as the unintended consequence of past lives spent as smugglers along the Spanish Main. How else to understand why socially responsible, polite men and women who normally wouldn’t even hum in a crowded elevator feel the need to stink up a cross-country flight with contraband wheels of kosher cheese, slabs of brisket, bags of bagels or jars of pickles — especially pickles.
In fact, following this article’s publication, Steve Lipman may find himself placed squarely on the No-Fly List.
Lipman hails from Fullerton, an Orange County town about as Jewish as a Ford F-150 pickup truck. But boy could his mom make pickles. Pickles so good that the neighbors’ kids used to come by the house and beg for them. (They might not have been so eager if they knew that his mother was very adamant that it just wasn’t a pickle unless you dunked your bare feet in the vat along with the cucumbers and brine.)
Suffice it to say that Lipman’s standards are very high when it comes to pickles. And, living in Foster City, he might as well have been in Kyrgyzstan. So when he had the chance to buy what he concedes are “the world’s most expensive pickles,” at $10 a jar, while in New York City (“not as good as mom’s”), he jumped at it.
When the time came to fly back to the Bay Area, Lipman broke out the tape and rubber bands and thought he’d sealed the deal. Not quite.
The brine was strong enough that it ate right through the tape and, when the baggage screeners did that back-and-forth move they like to do on the X-ray conveyer belt in the off-chance they can destroy your property, the pickles tipped over.
“We had a little wardrobe malfunction with the X-ray screener. I didn’t want anyone to find out. I ran. I asked for a plastic bag at a store, tied it up and didn’t alert any of the bomb squad,” he recalls.
“I do feel kind of bad. I probably got pickle juice on someone’s Gucci bag — but they were damn good pickles.”
Lipman, it seems, has bad luck when you mix Jewish food and flying. He never got to eat a kosher salami his mother air-mailed him when he was living in Israel — when he opened the package, he found that about half a million maggots had beaten him to the bite.
So many of us complain about the food we got on the plane, but Barbara Segal managed literally to get food on the plane — on the carpet, that is.
Like Lipman, she decided to satiate her pickle jones with a jar of the Lower East Side’s finest, which she plopped between her feet on a flight to Michigan. But the same little demon of air pressure that causes your toothpaste and shampoo to bubble over at 30,000 feet also has its way with jars of pickles, and fairly soon she was sitting atop a kosher Mt. St. Helens.
“The first thing you smell is the pickle juice and the garlic. People asked, ‘What is that smell?’ and the jar was just sitting there between my legs. It smelled good to us,” recalls Segal, a Bronx native now teaching kindergarten and living in Berkeley.
When Segal and her husband left the Big Apple in the late 1960s to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, it was the first time she wasn’t within stumbling distance of a really good Jewish deli. And she didn’t know which was more upsetting — that, or someone casually calling her husband a “Jew commie bastard” at a faculty party.
With cocktail company like that (and Chinese restaurants in Ann Arbor sporting ketchup, Gulden’s mustard and Wonder Bread on the table), it’s no wonder the Segals took every opportunity to head back to the Lower East Side, first via a 12-hour trip in a Volkswagen Beetle, and then in the friendly skies.
And after one trip to Yonah Schimmel’s famous knish eatery (a name that will come up again in this article, and soon), Segal carried a massive doggy bag onto the plane. A man jostled her and she shouted, “Careful! You’ll crush my knishes.”
The gentleman replied, “I’m sorry. On which part of your body are ‘the knishes’?”
While the Bay Area produces facsimiles of deli or bagels or, dare we say it, pizza, you might as well put a picture of a knish on the back of a milk carton, because you just can’t find what devotees label authentic.
Unless, of course, you know Harold Meschel.
When the San Mateo resident got a cell phone call from “the missus” telling him about an ad in j. asking what you’d do for a knish, he could only laugh.
After all, he was at the Festival Flea Market in Pompano Beach, Fla., waiting in line to buy knishes. So he picked up an extra one and brought it to j.’s offices. (And, in case no one was here to receive it, he even left handwritten instructions on how to enjoy it properly. Mustard, in the proper proportion, is a necessity every bit as important as putting your feet in the pickle brine, it would seem.)
“I wanted you guys to have some of the real thing. The real thing you could die for,” explained the altruistic octogenarian who, while living in Houston in the 1970s, brought back an entire suitcase full of Nathan’s hot dogs and held a bash for all the New York expats.
If you don’t have Meschel knocking on your door, knish in hand, there are other options (though Lynn Firestone, who grew up in South Fallsburg, N.Y., in the heart of the Catskills, remembers when people really did go door-to-door selling knishes).
Like Segal, you can stuff them in the overhead compartment. And Yonah Schimmel’s and other East Coast bakers do ship out large orders. This can, however, have disastrous consequences.
Dr. Dick Cohen was “weaned on Mrs. Stahl’s knishes just under the subway tracks at Brighton Beach.” After a hot summer evening at the beach, it was de rigeur to pick up a dozen or so knishes before hopping on the subway, and equally de rigeur to scarf down at least two before heading through the turnstiles.
Cohen’s Coney Island past and his San Francisco present collided neatly and deliciously when a patient of Cohen’s oncology practice arranged for a shipment from Schmulka Bernstein’s Bakery to be sent to the doctor’s office. Cohen’s laboratory technician, a Puerto Rican woman raised in Manhattan, actually cried when she bit into her knish, overcome with nostalgia of time spent sharing knishes with her sisters in their neighborhood deli.
“Nobody has captured the New York knish out here. That’s a slam dunk. In New York you can go to Zabar’s and insist on a big knish — and that’s another thing, knishes here are medium to small compared to the real zaftig New York knish. New Yorkers would never stand for a small knish just like they’d never stand for a small corned beef sandwich,” rhapsodizes the doctor, who has obviously put a lot of thought into the matter.
Recalling the golden family memories spent shared over steaming knishes, Cohen, like his lab tech, sheds a tear.
“It was our youth. It recaptures a happy time — the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, when for New Yorkers, part and parcel, your Sunday was at the delicatessen with the family. It’s more than just knishes. It’s part of the joy of living.”
And the aforementioned disaster? That happened when a box of frozen knishes arrived when Cohen was out of town and his staff assumed it was medicine and chucked it in the refrigerator. By the time it thawed and the odors of rotting kasha, potato and liver were evident, it was a complete loss.
But while knishes are a remnant of Cohen’s past, they’re an everyday reminder of Jason Porth’s future. That’s because he named his son, currently not quite a toddler, after a knish.
No, his name isn’t Knish Porth. It’s Jonah Porth. Jonah means “dove” in Hebrew and is the name of a biblical prophet — “and a close third was [naming him] after Yonah Schimmel.”
Porth, a civil rights attorney working in Oakland, and his wife, Abby, the associate director of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council, recently snapped a photo of Jonah in front of Yonah’s. They also brought home a bunch of knishes, which Jonah isn’t yet clamoring to eat.
“We got him a T-shirt, but he doesn’t fit into it yet. But he’ll probably wear it,” says Jason Porth.
“I guess the most important thing is, for me, [knishes] are like tasting history. It’s a connection to our people’s past and I can partake in it; I’m a vegetarian and that really limits my ability to enjoy a host of Jewish foods people associate with being Jewish.”
Knishes certainly aren’t the only Jewish food that locals have paid top dollar to ship here or hauled back on their own.
In a strike against the New York-centric view many Jewish noshers have adopted, Claudette Greenblatt of Fairfax thinks that the best hot dogs in the world — and she feels very strongly about this — come from Quinter’s in Toronto. She’s hauled back 40 pounds at a time, though she’s been less inclined to do so since her husband’s heart attack in 1982 (which she insists was not Quinter’s-related).
Lauren Shinar serves the same role for Oakland’s kosher community as Morgan Freeman’s character in “The Shawshank Redemption” did for the prison population — anything you want, she can get it.
She’s hauled back kosher red wine vinegar, Chinese food (she’ll stop at kosher takeout joints on the way to the airport), cuts of meat and even a hubcap-sized wheel of cheese. She’s never shlepped back a kosher pizza but only because the logistics are just too ridiculous.
Richard Frank, meanwhile, doesn’t bring kosher food back from New York. He brings New York to him.
The psychologist-turned-stock speculator decided to show all his San Francisco friends what real bagels and Nova lox were supposed to taste like, and plunked down $500 for enough to feed a party of 30 with plenty left over.
“When it’s a craving, it’s cheaper than flying to New York for a couple of days,” he rationalizes.
But how can the food from his hometown be so much better? Isn’t it just a matter of the ambience of being in New York?
“I’m 99 percent sure it’s not ambience,” he says. “We could teach San Francisco waiters to be rude, but it wouldn’t work. The food wouldn’t be as good.”
As people grow older, the memories of the foods of their youth invariably grow sweeter. But in the present, the realities of the fat and cholesterol in a Reuben sandwich roughly the size of a 1974 Ford Grand Torino are hard to ignore.
Before too long, Sandy Gardner will once again be hopping in her car, hitting the 101 and driving, driving and driving some more until she pulls off in the San Fernando Valley. This time, though, the goal of her trip won’t be to visit Mort’s Deli, but her grandchild.
“We’re in our 70s, so we’re not supposed to eat like that,” she says with more than a hint of sadness.
So she will not be buying a pastrami sandwich. But what if one was bought for her? She thinks for a moment.
“Well, I would not turn it down.”