Panettone--Breakfast of movie stars!

December 21, 2019

We've had a large panettone, still in its box*, on our kitchen counter for about two weeks now. It won't be opened until after Christmas, not for any reason except that we went a bit nutty on Christmas goodies to eat this year, and simply haven't got there yet. And we won't, until after two days of traveling to see friends and two days of feasting with them.

Panettone is not something I grew up with. In fact, I had only seen it in bread cookbooks until a day about 15 years ago in Baltimore. I had a friend who lived in Charles Village, a part of Baltimore tucked in behind the Johns Hopkins campus and the rougher parts of downtown, to be very unfocused about it. It was close to Roland Park, too, a fairly upscale neighborhood. Itself? Well, Charles Village has much to recommend it including a stock of lovely brick and stone Victorian and Edwardian houses. My friend lived in one with her two sons and her husband, who is an Italian doctor who is generous in treating her horse-riding buddies, most of whom are usually broke. At the time, I was among those.

Anyway, she and I and her mother and her two sons went out for lunch to Rocco's Capriccio, a well-thought-of Italian restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. Rocco was a friend of her husband, who had helped him get started in business.

It was a great lunch. We three ladies sat at one table and the two boys at another one where they happily talked about whatever it is a 13- and 15-year-old talk about over pizza. We adults, naturally, had some more complex dishes and wine. Of course.

I'd like to tell you about Rocco's menu, but I can't. It turns out that it closed in 2013, after a time, apparently, of sliding downward on the culinary “must visit” list, having been, for a long time, the recipient of five stars on the social media opinion pages.

As we left, Rocco greeted us, and gave my friend, her mother and me each a box containing a small panettone.

I didn't open the box right away. I was fairly broke at the time and thought it would be a nice thing with coffee as I banged the keys after Christmas to sell enough writing to keep from starving in the spring. But then I did.

What a treat! It was a lovely yeast bread, sprinkled with lemon and orange peel and vanilla. I ate as much of it as I could before it went stale. When it did, I made it into French toast, buttered and sprinkled with icing sugar and fresh lemon juice.

I've always loved Rocco for that gift, not that I knew him well as my friend did. But he gave me something just as precious on an evening a year or two later. By that time, I was dating the man who is now my husband. He worked in Frederick, MD, lived near Westminster, MD, and drove the hour+ to see me a few nights each week. One Friday in the fall, we decided to go to Rocco's. I dressed as I usually did for that sort of romantic but laid-back evening: black silky dress trousers, a white semi-sheer shirt, and dangly earrings. I had had my hair styled that day, though, and it looked quite extravagant. So I applied some red lipstick to complement the hair. And then I flung a dark red pashmina around my shoulders in case of a chill later.

Simon was dressed as always for work: khaki trousers, white dress shirt and dark blue double-breasted blazer.

When we walked in the door to Rocco's, Rocco himself was standing at the end of the bar. He greeted me warmly, remembering me from visits with my friend over the previous year or so, and said, “You look like a movie star.”

Well, that was good for my ego.

Then he looked at Simon, who is 6'2” and not scrawny, and said, “And you...you look like a bouncer.”

A masterful verbal assessment, fully accurate, but not one most people would blurt out.

And Rocco wasn't even a New Yorker!

*This year's panettone is genuine Italian, ordered via an Italian imported foods company in the UK.

 Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride Please feel free to quote up to 25 words without asking; beyond that, please email me for permission via this site. Thank you.

A New York Story in camera

New York Coffee Shop Suite, c. Laura Harrison McBride

The noise of the street is left behind. The taxis honking, the delivery vans being robbed of their clinking, squeaking hand trucks' siren songs. The sounds from the pavement—stiletto heels clicking, people laughing, babies crying, the odd shout of a person signaling to a friend he noticed far ahead—all are shut off with the suddenness of a thunder clap when the second of the air-lock doors closes behind you.

The odors greet you. No exhaust fumes here, no sewer pong. No brazier smoke, in winter, from the hot-chestnut vendor's pushcarts.

Well, OK. That last odor is delightful, and lasts all too short a time, only while the Great Christmas Tree is up in Rockefeller Plaza which has, probably more than Santa walking into sponsor Macy's department store at the end of the Thanksgiving Day parade, signalled the season of joy.

Once those doors have closed, and until another seeker of warmth, light and sustenance opens them to enter, there is peace and the welcome beauty of a traditional Manhattan coffee shop. Not, mind, a coffee shop in the Starbucks mode. No. These predate designer coffee. Here, it comes in white porcelain cups rimmed with a strip of green, burgundy or blue, a stainless steel spoon perched on the saucer. (Remember saucers?) A Manhattan coffee shop opens early to serve breakfast to the hordes emerging from the subways, clambering off the bus, or hoofing it from their home to their office or shop. At 7-ish, it finds financial types there, stoking up on caffeine and calories before a hard day of mind-reading to see where the dollar, the pound, the yen will go today, and how many they can load into their own pockets.

Then relative quiet until ten or so, when office workers begin to arrive. Those who go to work early—few in Manhattan—will have been at their tasks since 8, so they are the first second wave. Then between 10:|30 and 11, the 9 a.m.-ers arrive. That's when I went, and even then, it was early for me. As a freelancer, I didn't really get started until 9:30. But the attractions of the coffee shop were such that I was willing to leave my tasks on many days, even if it meant a delayed lunch or dinner. Or none at all.

The smell of coffee, the rattle of the porcelain dishes and clank of stainless steel cutlery, the squeak of a counter stool as its occupant get s up to return to work, the soft clank of the coins she leaves as a tip. All this, and so much more, attracted me. I happily walked the two short blocks and four long ones to get there, in any weather.

“What will you have?” Betty asked each day. Had asked 100 times, probably, before that coffee shop became one of my spiritual homes. Just because I would beard any miscreant in search of journalistic fodder for my job didn't mean I would easily join in the slipstream of casual friendships that develop at a lunch counter in Manhattan. But I did, finally, with Betty as the acolyte who introduced me to the high altar of casual community.

And I loved it. All of it. The spotless counter. The spotless mirror behind it. Betty's spotless uniform, and, eventually, the perfectly filled cup of coffee that arrived before she even asked me what I wanted. She knew her customers; she knew I wanted the coffee long before she knew I wanted the connection. Before I did.

Winter in Central Park, NYC, copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride

As for sustenance, sometimes I wanted an English muffin, toasted and dripping with butter. Sometimes it was a slice of something sweet and delicious from the gleaming glass pie safe at the end of the counter. A slice of fat, dense, strawberry jam-topped New York cheesecake. A slice of lemon meringue pie, furnished with 2 or more inches of lightly browned meringue above the perfectly sweet-tart filling and crumbly crust. Or maybe a slice of spicy sweet potato pie topped with a huge dollop of whipped cream.

As a New Yorker would say, what's not to like? If you couldn't find comfort—warmth, food and camaraderie—in the interior of a Manhattan coffee shop, the only answer must be that your soul dried up and disappeared a long, long time ago and is past resurrecting.

I miss the gleaming silvery coffee urns, drained by hyper New Yorkers so fast that you'd never get burnt, too-long-heated coffee. Always fragrant, never fouled by neglect, like the bulbous glass pots that deliver undrinkable brown muck 'out of town.' The tall fresh OJ press, pressing hundreds of oranges into vitamin cocktails for sun- and air-starved New Yorkers. The scent of frying bacon all day long. The sweet greasy smell of that coffee shop favorite lunch, a grilled cheese on white with or without tomato. (If you order it with tomato, be warned; let it cool a bit because the thinly sliced fresh tomatoes in the middle will be way hotter than the cheese, and will burn your tongue. A mystery of science.)

About 10:30, the air-lock doors would get a workout, from the staff of the publishing house across the street. This was my favorite time; the conversation was always good, once I loosened up enough to join in, and witty. Memorable. Like the tales about Amelia Persky. But they are a story in themselves, and so shall wait a while, to be offered up to the gods of my cultural baptism with a few other notables of various stripes.

The loss of this milieu from my life is poignant and somewhat sad, possibly. But the wealth of having had it so long in my life is stronger still, a touchstone for my soul when I find myself in lands less vibrant, company less alive and interested. The memories are greater than any sadness. The memories are comforting, as the visits to Burger Heaven were all those years ago. They will live in me forever, and I bless them.

Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride