Six on History: Food
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"Tourists slurp up spaghetti in Manhattan’s historic Little Italy, but for authentic Italian atmosfera, New Yorkers have long headed up to storied Arthur Avenue in The Bronx.
Today, however, Italians rule The Bronx’s Little Italy no more. Just as Manhattan’s Little Italy gave way to Chinatown and gentrification, The Bronx’s answer to red-sauce rapture is now much more diverse.
“When you walked down the streets, all you heard was Italian, and immigrants were still moving here from Italy,” Frank Franz, 67, told The Post of his childhood in the community.
A historian and co-founder of the Belmont Business Improvement District — which promotes Little Italy businesses spanning Arthur and Crescent Avenues, along with 187th Street – Franz said that the monoculture began to change back in the 1970s with the arrival of Albanian immigrants. But, he added that the biggest shift in the neighborhood happened in just the last decade. Increasingly, peoples of Asian, Latin and African-American descent call the borough’s Little Italy home.
“Of course, old timers like me reminisce about how it used to be, but we recognize that things can’t be the same forever,” Franz said of the thousands of Italians still living in the community.
And while Italian bakeries, butchers and cheese shops are still open and thriving here, the area’s newest restaurants now boast a variety of cuisines.
Here are five restaurants that are part of the new wave of old Little Italy — all of which have comfortable setups for outdoor dining. ... "
Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.
A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim.
I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”
The vegetables grow naturally, with no human intervention whatsoever, and are again the center of attention after scientific research demonstrated their importance to the health of the Greek people, especially the Cretans.
Knowledge about the wild vegetables of our country is fading from generation to generation, but fortunately, there are still people who keep the tradition alive.- Panayiotis Sainatoudis, founder, Peliti"We know that the cesium-137 production from the Pacific and Russian sites was more than 400 times the production of the New Mexico and Nevada explosions," Kaste says.
"A single Russian bomb, the Tsar Bomb, was more than 50 times more powerful than all the Nevada and New Mexico tests combined."
While there's no way of knowing which of these explosions produced the fallout that can still be found in American foods today, we can at least explain how the isotope could disperse so far and wide.
"Many of the air detonations were so powerful that dozens of radioactive fission products were injected into the stratosphere and distributed globally with a residence time of [approximately] one year before deposition primarily by rainfall," Kaste and fellow researchers explain in a new study."
"The presence of radioactive pollution from nuclear testing is globally ubiquitous, and detectable on every continent and even in deep ocean trenches."
