Yesterday my friend Tania and I spent the entire afternoon constructing this baroque but delicious dinner. We started with a pile of food magazines — Bon Appetit, the sadly final issue of Gourmet, and two imported issues of Jamie Oliver’s food magazine — and a plan to make sausage with my Kitchen Aid mixer’s new meat grinder attachment. In one of the Jamie magazines we found a recipe for squash “shaggy dumplings,” a sort of gnocchi that begin with a base of Jamie’s “mothership” recipe for pureed roasted butternut squash or pumpkin and are finished with brown butter, pancetta, parmesan and sage. We also found a recipe for a simple vanilla panna cotta whose only flaw was that it, like the dumpling recipe, would have to have its UK-style metric measurements converted into cups and teaspoons. Surmountable, we thought. We found a simple fresh sausage recipe from an old issue of Gourmet on Epicurious, made a list, and set out to do our shopping.
Entering the (in)famous Park Slope Food Co-op for the first time as Tania’s guest was oddly thrilling. “Have penetrated the co-op. Madness!” I texted Ruth, who has been on the waitlist to attend a New Members orientation session for months. This venerable members-only, volunteer-staffed grocery store’s labyrinthine bureaucracy and rock-bottom prices for organic produce have long been the stuff of legend in its Brooklyn neighborhood, but right now the co-op seems to be hitting a peak of notoriety, thanks in part to Amy Sohn’s new novel ‘Prospect Park West.’ In one section of the novel, a JenniferConnellyesque celebrity joins the co-op in order to seem more green to her public. This calculated move has doubly disastrous results — her own mandatory volunteer shift nets her a stalker, and her PaulBettanyesque husband’s shift nets him an affair with the novel’s AmySohnesque protagonist. And last week, a Times article which chronicled one woman’s love-hate relationship with the co-op tapped a rich vein of member and non-member anxiety and unrest about the place’s draconian rules, and maybe even the economic and political philosophies — and realities — that inform those rules.
Before I ever visited the co-op, I scoffed at the idea that someone would submit herself to an unavoidably heinous shopping experience (because the staff are volunteers, the store is bound to operate like it’s every employee’s first day, every day) just to save a few pennies on swiss chard. I no longer scoff. My Damascene moment occured in the bulk aisle, where I picked up a twist-tied plastic baggie full of bay leaves.
Even though I have had some success with my fire escape herb garden, I still find herb/spice-acquisition one of the most irritatingly expensive things about cooking. A recipe that might cost only a few dollars to make often has its price doubled when you realize you lack fennel seed or dried marjoram, and at most grocery stores herbs and spices are only available in such large quantities that, in a household with average fennel-seed consumption (so: maybe a teaspoon every 6 months), the vast majority of your at-least-$5-purchase (what, I should buy the irradiated, plastic-jarred brand?) will inevitably go stale and scentless in your spice cabinet. Meanwhile, your simple soup has become so expensive that you could have saved money by ordering takeout, even factoring in a generous tip.
Well, this packet of bay leaves was big enough to last the average maker of soups and stews for exactly as long as it would take for the last leaf in the packet to lose its zing, and it cost 13 cents. 13 cents. 13 CENTS!! Just seeing a label with a zero before the first decimal point is enough to make any New Yorker a bit starry-eyed; in that moment, I was sure that our shopping trip would end with my going upstairs to the humming-with-activity offices of the co-op and filling out a membership application.
But here, ultimately, is why I won’t, and it has nothing to do with my unwillingness to work a shift stemming arugula or cleaning toilets, or how far away from the co-op I live, or how long we stood in line and how ineptly —but cheerfully! — we were rung up. (“What kind of squash is this? Does anyone know?”) It is that I still, years later, am driven insane by Park Slope. Just walking down the street there admiring the brownstones makes me feel complicit in something awful, something hard to name, but something that seems all the more awful for its veneer of righteous, ostentatious wholesome Goodness. It’s this unnameable thing, I think, that kept me in the thrall of Amy Sohn’s novel, helplessly turning pages until, finished, I put down the book feeling like I had just eaten several pounds of free trade fleur de sel dark chocolate by myself. The unnameable thing may just be the sense that all of the rich white baby-having gentrifiers of Park Slope are a bit awful, and that they know that, but they have come to this place — the co-op at the center of this tidy intra-city suburb — to be Good. Real estate here is so fetishized that even crappy houses on the outermost edges of this neighborhood are worth a literal million dollars, and that means this is a place where the very rich can easily convince themselves that they are poor. You’d think living alongside the actual poor would disabuse people of this notion, but this doesn’t seem to be the case: the reality of city living is that, faced with almost infinite sights and sounds and stimuli, we survive by creating our own small worlds. And in the small world of the Park Slope Food Coop, only someone who can afford to spend 2.75 hours every month working for free deserves to save up to 40% on what also amount to fetish items — the crisp mulitcolored radishes and Italian cheeses that upper-class people consider life unlivable without, and that aspiring middle-class people use to salve the ache of not being able to afford the larger status items that we covet, like apartments and babies.
Everything Good about the Co-op — volunteering time in exchange for saving money, fretting about sustainability, feeling a part of one’s community — is, for most working people, a luxury. It’s hard to get around this. The Times article described a single mother contemplating working off the shifts she owed the co-op by using her vacation days, and having her membership and shopping priveleges suspended when she decided not to. It seems clear that whoever the co-op’s rules were once designed to help is no longer being helped by them. Someone else is being helped: people like me, who are somewhere in a gray area between playing at being poor (which is fun, when you’re very young: “I said pretend you’ve got no money/ She just laughed and said you’re so funny, I said yeah/ I can’t see anyone else smiling in here”) and coming to the realization that unless something changes very dramatically very soon, the game’s stakes will become much higher, and also we won’t be able to opt out of playing.
Yesterday, though, was a day to forget all this as much as possible, and to take advantage. Tania and I filled our reuseable bag with truffled Italian cheese and dehydrated kale chips and spices and squashes and a beautiful watermelon radish and, after another stop at Paisanos for two pounds of pork butt and some slices of pancetta, headed home to cook. The conversions were trickier than we’d thought, and the Kitchen Aid’s grinder attachment turned out to be shockingly inferior to a freestanding grinder in terms of speed and power, but we persevered. The result was nothing more or less than dinner. (Well, and today’s lunch, and, sausage-wise, tomorrow’s breakfast). For now, I think I ought to feel that “nothing more or less than dinner” is more than enough.
