Black Construction Mastic

Writing from the Heart.   Assignment in class, 6-17-2023.

I can never ever forget the smell of…

Black Construction Mastic

 

   The heavy, tar-like, construction mastic was on everything I wore and all over the work truck.  My hands were covered up to the elbows with black splotches of the malodorous mastic, used to put down wooden floor tiles and used as a sealant.

   The only way to wash it off was to use a heavily saturated rag with Kerosene – another fun smell.  Thank God I didn’t have a hankering for a smoke (I didn’t smoke); I would have surely gone out in an inglorious blaze.

   The truck seat had smears of sat-upon mastic.  The once blue steering wheel had smears and blobs of the caustic, odiferous gunk.  I couldn’t get it off of my pants or work boots.  If I get in the truck like this, I am sure to take it all home with me.  The worst part was that this old, smelly, mastic-addled pick-up truck was my conveyance to my date that night.

   Will Lorraine dig me smelling like this?  It is highly doubtful – unless she, herself, was dirtied and sullied by thick, black construction mastic permeating her clothes, her hands, and her being.

  The flowers I got for her smell like mastic.  I will not be getting lucky tonight.

 

Richard Melnick, 6-26-2023. 

   *It was October 21, 1998.  The only upside to that night was that the New York Yankees defeated the San Diego Padres and won the 1998 Baseball World Series.  I drove home in my smell bomb of a vehicle.  I did not get another date with Lorraine.  RM

  

A Reminiscent Scent

 

If only I was poorer. If only we were on “home relief.” Then I would be able to have that soup. The poor children can eat lunch in the basement of P.S. 54. They get to have that soup; that tomato soup; that warm reddish orange bowl of cream of tomato soup.

I can never ever forget the aroma of the tomato soup emanating from the basement lunchroom. How I longed to taste that soup, to join the lucky children who were served that soup .I can’t describe that scent, except to say the aroma was a delicious one. 

I walked home for lunch. Momma usually served me bananas and sour cream, maybe cream cheese and jelly on Wonder Bread or cold grated tomatoes soup. Momma never made hot tomato soup.  

As an adult, when I now open a can of Cambell’s Tomato Soup and add some milk, I have a correct visual of the cream of tomato soup but never that reminiscent scent.

Ethyl Haber

CRAIG

 

 

Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey

 

As a young chef, there were two people that had an enormous impact on me. Craig Claiborne, the New York Times restaurant critic, food journalist and cookbook author and his sidekick, the famous French chef, Pierre Franey were that for me. I think I bought every one of their books (and there were many) and looked forward to his articles in the NYT Wednesday Food Section and in the Sunday Times Magazine. If I had a food idol, it was Craig. He embodied everything I was about at the time. His recipes were so meticulous and he never let chefs pull the wool over his eyes. When I was living in Grand Rapids, I remember driving to the airport each Sunday to buy a copy of the Sunday Times so as to not miss anything he was doing.  He was always breaking into new trends, his recipe writing was exacting and intelligently done, and he didn’t let chefs hide their secrets.

 

In 2000, when he passed away, he gave his entire estate to my alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America. Many chefs at that time would put out beautiful cookbooks and the recipes that these books would contain were sad, incomplete versions of what they actually did. Craig had a very specific way of interviewing chefs and their dishes. He would invite them into his kitchen in Amagansett in the Hamptons, sit down at his typewriter that sat right on top of the center kitchen table. (see photo above taken the summer I met him there). Pierre was always right next to the guest chef watching every move and every ingredient.

 

I remember buying Chef Paul Bocuse’s beautiful cookbook and making his Chicken with Tarragon, Tomatoes and Vinegar. It came out awful! I then produced the same recipe as Craig recorded it when Bocuse was in his kitchen. Fantastic! With Pierre watching so carefully and Craig recording everything so perfectly, I realized Bocuse had to finally give up the goods!!

 

When I had my restaurant in the Hamptons, Craig heard I was there and invited me to meet both of them. They had invited a chef friend who was then the chef of “Bobby Vans’s” an East Hampton longtime hangout and eatery and myself to come to his home and watch our former teacher make some charcutiere for them. It was such a thrill to be there and be part of that day

 

The meeting was later featured as “A Kitchen Soloist’s Homemade Sausage” from NYT Nov 4^th 1981. Jacques F. de Chanteloup, was a chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and was renowned for his charcuterie. He would always say ''The most important thing I can teach them, is quality, the difference between what they should use and what big industry uses. They should use pork butts because they contain an ideal amount of fat for sausage making.”

Robert