Party shopping on the North Fork: Better than Mrs. Dalloway

We have a barbecue party every year in early June to celebrate my husband’s birthday.  It is such a beautiful time of year out here.  The weather is usually great, but I do remember one year when it was in the 50s, and another year when it was in the 90s.  This year they were predicting thunderstorms and there was even a tornado warning, but they spared us and the spectacular weather we have been having this season held out all afternoon.

One of the many great pleasures of my life is driving out Sound Avenue (the northerly of the North Fork’s two main arteries) with party planning in my head.  It takes me past Briermere, past horse farms, vineyards and innumerable planted fields with avenues of sight down their crop rows opening up for a split-second as I drive by. 

I love to cook for parties but I’m careful not to overdo it.  It’s no fun to be so exhausted and stressed from cooking and preparations that you can’t enjoy talking with your guests.  Believe me, I’ve been “in the weeds” (as they say in the restaurant biz) at many of my own parties.  This time I managed to stay out of the weeds by planning a menu that combined a few homemade items with some prepared foods from local institutions.

My first stop was Sang Lee.  We’ve been devouring every bit of our CSA items (mainly in the form of salads, salads, salads), but for a party I needed extra provisions. 

I picked up some exquisite little baby squash to grill along with several bunches of asparagus.  Perfect multicolor carrots, sugar-snap peas and cucumbers to serve as crudites with dips.  Two bunches of beets to steam-roast and marinate, and local Catapano Farm goat cheese to top them.  Also three 8-ounce bags of their pre-washed baby spinach with a bottle of Sang Lee’s own Asian Dressing to make a quick, easy salad.  (Pretty much the only time I allow myself to use a bottled dressing is Sang Lee’s Asian Dressing, which everybody loves, for a party when I don’t want to take the time to dress it my usual way.)

My next stop was for vino.

There are so many wonderful vineyards on the North Fork, we are literally spoiled for choice.  I swung into Lieb on my way back west and picked up a mixed case of Bridge Lane chardonnay (unoaked), Pinot Blanc (a Lieb specialty and a personal favorite grape) and Cabernet Franc (my favorite of the local red wine varietals).

In the old days, before I had my son, I was deeply into wine and bought all kinds of local vintages to age in my basement.  I don’t do that any more.  But for a party featuring local foods, it only makes sense to serve local wines.

For hors d’oeuvres, I made beets with goat cheese (marinated beets with a dollop of goat cheese and a sprinkling of fleur de sel.  This was the opening spread.

The beet hors d’oeuvres were a big hit, as always. 

Here are the veggies before they went onto the grill:

The rest of the menu included barbecued spare ribs (homemade, yummy), Sang Lee spinach salad with their Asian Dressing, and, from another North Fork institution — the Modern Snack Bar, in Aquebogue — delicious potato salad, cole slaw and fried chicken. 

As my cousin once remarked:  “any place with ‘modern’ in the title is certain not to be.”   So it is with the Modern Snack Bar:  it has not changed since 1960 at the latest, thank god.  It still has the same businesslike waitresses in uniform dresses and a classic, limited, home-cooked menu that is totally unaffected by any food trend of the last fifty years.  In fact, while a large part of its clientele comes from the retirement home across the street, I could imagine the place becoming trendy these days simply by virtue of its immunity to trends.

Dessert was two fresh strawberry-cream pies from Briermere.  They were devoured before I could snap any pictures, but I can describe this pie for you:   a sweet, flaky crust, piled with not-too-sweet mixture of whipped cream cheese and whipped heavy cream, and on top, a huge pile of fresh strawberries and a light glaze.  Some of our repeat guests at this barbecue dream about this pie all year (myself included).  It’s only available for a few weeks, when strawberries are in season, and it’s a perfect way to celebrate a birthday at the beginning of summer.

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Drinking vicariously

My favorite book about food is The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.  Of course, that book is about a lot of things — the lost generation, the impact of war, bullfighting, impotence — but most importantly, to me, it’s about the experience of an American eating and drinking in Europe. 

Jake Barnes is the type of narrator I like.  He doesn’t tell you much about what he’s thinking, and he never judges anyone.  But he does give you all the facts so you can draw your own conclusions.  He tells you how much money is in his bank account, everything that everybody says, no matter how drunk and obnoxious they get, and everything he eats and drinks.

The book proceeds in phases which to me feel a lot like the courses of a meal, as Jake and his coterie of expatriate Americans and low-level English nobility make their way around Europe, partying.  They start with a strong apperitif in Paris, proceed on to a bracing fishing trip on the Irati River in the Basque country of Spain (oysters?  ceviche?), then down to Pamplona for the bullfights (the pièce de résistance), then briefly to Biarritz for a bracing Atlantic swim (coffee) and, finally, a bittersweet reunion in Madrid with his brilliant, classy, uninhibited leading lady Brett Ashley (petit fours).

This being Hemingway, there’s minimal description of the food and drink, but he makes every word count.  When he and his fishing buddy, Bill, leave two bottles of wine in a cold spring in the hills near the Iraty River and retrieve it at lunchtime, Bill takes a swig and says:  “Whew!  That makes my eyes ache!”

The greatest meal comes at the end of the book, in Madrid, at a restaurant that apparently still exists:

“We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s.  It is one of the best restaurants in the world.  We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta.  Brett did not eat much.  She never ate much.  I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.”

Yes, you read right.  Three bottles of wine at lunch.  For one person.  Ok, perhaps the rioja alta was fairly low in alcohol (maybe), but he also had two martinis at the bar before lunch!  Is that even physically possible?  How much does he weigh?  How can he stand up and go about his business? 

I love to read about people drinking in books, because it feels like getting  drunk vicariously, without the hangover or liver damage.  One of my favorite characters for drinking vicariously is Tom Ripley, the sociopathic anti-hero of the Patricia Highsmith series (another American eating and drinking his way through Europe).  But Jake Barnes’s three bottles of wine strain even my imagination. 

On a recent visit to Key West, Florida, I picked up a Hemingway novel written there much later in his career:  To Have and Have Not.  It’s crap!  (The movie version, by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is very loosely based on the novel, and is excellent.) 

John Irving, in a Paris Review interview, opined that Hemingway and Fitzgerald got worse as writers as they aged, rather than better (as they should have), because their excessive drinking took a toll on their synapses.  Comparing The Sun Also Rises to To Have and Have Not, I think Irving may have a point.  What do you think?

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