COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: LAZY CABBAGE ROLLS

This is a Ukrainian/Russian dish called "lenivie golubtsi," which I am told translates as "lazy cabbage rolls," presumably because the meal is usually the sort of thing you'd put into a roll, but you couldn't be bothered. This may be the best-named food yet -- how many other cultures have recipes that insult your work ethic?

I have located a recipe that finely chops the ingredients, adds rice, gets squeezed into little balls, and then deep fried, but I was feeling especially lazy, so I went with the simplest recipe. This is a mix of shredded cabbage, diced carrots, tomato paste, onion, and ground beef (as I am a vegetarian, I used a vegetarian substitution). The whole of it is fried on a stovetop and left on a low heat for a while, and then just plopped onto a plate and seasoned with salt, pepper, and, this being an Eastern European dish, dill.

The results are pure comfort food, and, as a Minnesotan, a comfort food that was unexpectedly familiar. We have a rather famous local meal called hotdish, which is a savory casserole, and there are two types -- those made with a tomato base, and those made with cream of mushroom soup, which we call "Lutheran Béchamel." This tastes like the sort of thing a Minnesotan with tomato sauce might whip up, although, in Minnesota, you never know what they might throw in -- cocktail weenies, wild rice, chow mein noodles, even marshmallows, god help us. 

I decided to try an experiment and mix the leftovers with a traditional Minnesotan hotdish ingredient, egg noodles, which also seemed appropriately Jewish, because if I dumped some cinnamon on the resulting dish I could pretend it was a kugel that went terribly wrong somehow. 

And in answer to my own unstated question: Yes. Lazy cabbage rolls on top of egg noodles is a hotdish. In fact, there is an almost identical Minnesota recipe called Cabbage Hamburger Hotdish. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this, or by the fact that almost everything I have made so far tastes oddly familiar. Despite Minnesota's insistence that it is the unrecognized seventh Scandinavian country, we also boast a sizable Eastern European population, especially in the the Twin Cities, Duluth, and the Iron Range. 

I suppose it had never occurred to me that Eastern Europeans were secretly inserting their ingredients into Minnesota hot dish recipes. But now I know. The intention of this project was to explore the recipes of Eastern Europe, but I've come to the realization that I've already explored a lot of these recipes. They were just loaded into casserole dishes and served in church basements.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: WHISKEY TOMATO SOUP

I first had whiskey tomato soup in an Irish bar/restaurant in Minneapolis about 10 years ago. The place was called Kieran's, and has since moved to a more prominent location near Target Field in the ever-troubled Block E.

Then it was homey and genial and catered to after-work-hours businesspeople. It still does, but on a grander scale, and I like both versions of Kieran's about equally, but the older was a short walk from my old apartment and felt like my neighborhood bar. I would often go in, and I would almost always get the whiskey tomato soup.

I have since worked with the former owner and namesake, Kieran Folliard, when he launched his own whiskey, called 2 Gingers. My girlfriend worked for a while in one of his other bars, The Local, which had a longstanding record for leading the world in the amount of Jameson it served. And yet I have not been able to get the recipe for whiskey tomato soup from Kieran.

I can't be sure, but I think the soup was introduced there. It's not indigenous to Ireland, unless the Irish have been especially secretive about this food. The oldest reference I can locate to this peculiar combination of liquor and soup is from March 15, 2010, and, son of a gun, I wrote it:

"Let it be noted, however, that sometimes authenticity isn't always desirable," I wrote. "For instance, we have a number of Irish pubs in the Twin Cities, but most don't serve authentic Irish pub fare. You're not able, for instance, to order KP Meanies, which is a pickled onion-flavored corn snack. Most don't offer black pudding either, which is a sausage made from animal blood. To the best of our knowledge, nobody in town offers dulse, which is a red algae sometimes enjoyed as a snack food. Some foods just don't make the jump to the United States, so, if you're eating at, say, Kieran's, you're probably going to be having a whiskey tomato soup rather than crubeens, which are salted pig's feet."

There was a pub, Killarney House Restaurant in Davidsonville, MD, that also offered a whiskey tomato soup in 2010, but this first appears online in November of that year; maybe they read my article and got ideas.

I've scoured newspaper archives and old books, and I can find nothing that predates my 2010 article. So I'm going to go ahead and call it, barring further evidence: Whiskey tomato soup is an Irish-American innovation, began in Minneapolis at Kieran's, and I was the first person to make note of it.

Why do I like it so? I suppose it must be the whiskey, as I am not especially keen on tomato soup. But, then, the Irish make tomato soup differently than we yanks -- they make it creamy, and that's how Kieran's offered it. So maybe the creaminess had something to do with it.

Eventually I did manage to track down the original recipe, and Kieran's also used fresh tomatoes, rather than pouring their soup from a tin, and, having made it myself, it makes a difference. What results us robust and sweet, and the tomato and whiskey flavors combine as though they had been yearning for each others for years. I imagine Kieran's used Jameson, as that was the whiskey that made their reputation for a while, and certainly the soup seemed to have Jameson's mix of malt and spice.

Here's a version of the recipe: You're going to want to roast fresh plum tomatoes for about 45 minutes, and then combine it with a saute of garlic, onions, and, if you like, basil. Add to this a can of plum tomatoes, including the juice from the can, and heavy cream. At the end, dump in Jameson to taste, spooning the soup to break up the tomatoes.

The whole of it will probably take about two hours, which is terrible, just terrible. It took me 10 minutes to walk to Kieran's and five for them to serve me the soup, and that seems like it's about the outer limit of time that a person should reasonably be expected to wait for whiskey tomato soup.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: FRIED EGG WITH ONION

Various sites list this as a Russian/Ukrainian recipe, but I had a hard time tracking down whether or not this is true. Finally I located a recipe called "soğanlı yumurta," which seems to mean "bulbous eggs," which is about as delightful a name as imaginable.

The recipe I made was quite simple: Chop up some onions, brown them in a pan, and then fry an egg on top of them. If I can trust Google translate, the original version also includes spices, sometimes red pepper, sometime paprika, and in some the onion are chopped into rings instead of being diced. Nonetheless, the recipe is essentially the same.

It is, as you can guess, a recipe with a strong onion flavor to it. We tend to use a light hand with onions in America, sprinkling a little raw chopped onion onto hamburgers and sandwiches as flavor, or breading and deep frying rings of the stuff. 

But for me, I don't know if I have ever met somebody who has just cooked an entire onion and then eaten it, even though this is a popular recipe throughout the world. I suspect the reason for this is our fear of having bad breath, but you're just going to have to set this fear aside to enjoy this meal, or other Eastern European meals that make extensive use of mounds of onion or garlic. And I haven't even started making food our of cabbage.

I like a cooked or browned onion. The vegetable develops a pleasing sweetness when cooked, and pairs well with egg without overpowering the flavor of the egg. It's a simple dish, but because it thrusts the flavor of the onion so much into the forefront, it feels like nothing an American would ever make. You see, in American, we have egg with maybe a little bit of onion.

In Russia, we have onion with maybe a little bit of egg.

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IRISH-AMERICAN CRIME FILMS: THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY (1912)

I will be somewhat brief in discussing this film, for two reasons. First, the film itself is somewhat brief -- about 17 minutes. Secondly, it's not clear that this is an Irish gangster movie. There are a few reasons to think it might be, which I will detail shortly, but I include "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" primarily because it is reportedly the first film made about organized crime.

"Organized" is a bit of a misnomer here. Our film's criminals, led by the Snapper Kid (Elmer Booth), just sort of wander around Pig Alley. They rob a musician at random. They seem like they plan to rob a bar and then don't. They go to a dance, where the Snapper Kid flings a drink out of the hand of the musician's girlfriend; historians of the film have suggested the drink was drugged and he was saving her, although this is hard to glen from the movie itself.

Later, the Snapper Kid and his gang get into a shootout with another gang, during which the musician takes his wallet back. The Snapper Kid escapes, and is almost pinched by the police, but the girl he rescued provides an alibi. Somebody hands the Snapper Kid money. The end.

The film was by D.W. Griffith, and there are some stylistic tics that are worth mentioning. Griffith is rightfully understood as one of the first filmmakers to develop film into its own medium -- early attempts at filmmaker often consisted of performances of stage melodramas or vaudeville performances before a stationary camera.

Griffith, in the meanwhile, explored the way camera setup and movement could contribute to storytelling, and in the film he introduced two notable experiments. In one, a girl in a street scene stares directly at the camera, which reportedly always caused excited chatter in the audience. The was Griffith mimicking the look of documentary films, where he had often noticed that bystanders would look directly at the camera, and this may have been film's first attempt at cinéma vérité.

Secondly, for a scene in which the Snapper Kid and his gang creep down an alley for a gunfight, Griffith demanded the cameraman focus on the gangsters and let the background become blurry. This is a common technique nowadays -- it's called "shallow focus" -- but was so outre then that Griffith reportedly had to drag his cameraman to an art museum to show him classic paintings in which the background is blurred to convince him it was artistically credible. And he was right -- the scene where the Pig Alley Musketeers slowly close in on the camera has real menace to it.

There was a Pig Alley in New York, where the film was set. It was right off 288 Greenwich Street, which, unless I'm misreading the map, is in what is now Tribeca. I don't know if this is the Pig Alley that Griffith meant; the name was common enough, always given to streets where locals raised hogs.

New York's Pig Alley was a tenement, housed a large immigrant community, and was the site of a massive conflagration in the middle part of the 1800s. But, again, this may not have been Griffith's Pig Alley. It was common enough to apply to invent alleys to represent immigrant tenements, as the comic strip The Yellow Kid did with Hogan's Alley.

It is interesting that this early gangster film isn't so much about the sorts of organized crime stories later films would focus on -- numbers running, the dope racket, murders for hire, and, of course, booze. This is really about street hooliganism, and the Musketeers of this film feel more like the sorts of characters we would later find in juvenile delinquent films.

They look young -- one, in a checkered shirt, looks like he can't be older than 16, and the Snapper Kid really does look like a kid. They just sort of amble around the tenement in ill-fitting sack suits and battered fedoras, a dapperness that looks taken off a charity clothes drive rather than the sort of bespoke elegance of later gangsters.

And the Snapper Kid, as played by Elmer Booth, has a youthful derring-do; he's like a young version of the cocky, pugilistic Irish gangsters played by James Cagney, forever bouncing on the balls of his feet and sizing the world up with a cockeyed smile.

It's the Snapper Kid that gives the film its only hint of Irishness, or, more properly, it's Elmer Booth, who would die a few years later in a car crash. He was a stage actor, and, at the exact moment "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" was touring movie houses, Booth was on the road with a play called "Stop Thief!" The play was about a group of kleptomaniacs, but Booth played a legitimate crook in it, one with a typically Irish last name: Jack Doogan.

The Snapper Kid is, in fact, so very like a Jimmy Cagney character in looks and mannerisms that there has been speculation that Cagney modeled his performance on Booth's. There is, as far as I can tell, no evidence of that. But it makes "The Musketeers of Pig Alley" worth noting as a starting point, because, whether or not The Snapper Kid was intended to be understood as Irish, he exists as sort of an ur-Irish gangster.

There would be a lot to follow him, and they all seemed to have elements of the Snapper Kid in them, from their hoofer's physicality to their expressive bonhomie to their sudden bursts of unpremeditated violence. Whether or not the Snapper Kid was an Irish gangster, all Irish gangsters going forward would be a little bit Snapper Kid.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: CUCUMBER AND TOMATO SALAD

When I made this, it had been hot and muggy, which is the sort of thing that makes the idea of turning on an oven and burners in the kitchen profoundly unappealing. Instead, I decided to make a Ukrainian salad, and a little research led me to something called "salat s ogurtsami i pomidorami," which literally means "salad with cucumbers and tomato."

There's more to it, of course. There's also pressed garlic, onion, and a dressing made of sour cream and mayonnaise. Oh, and the salad can be herbed as well, and a lot of recipes suggest dill, which is starting to seem like to go-to herb of choice for recipes from the former Soviet Union.

I feel a bit odd writing about this salad. I expected this project to be a voyage through the strangeness of a foreign palate, and, instead, this salad is extraordinarily familiar. I grew up eating something very like this, as did my girlfriend -- it's her go-to salad, and her diet is thoroughly Minnesotan. 

That being said, it's often not the main ingredients that make the meal, but the preparation and flavoring. We Minnesotans tend to just splash ranch dressing onto this sort of salad -- considering that ranch dressing contains garlic and dill, as well as a mayonnaise base, it's like we were trying for the Ukrainian recipe and just missed it.

And here's the difference: ranch is made with buttermilk, which has a tart sweetness. The Ukrainian dressing prefers sour cream, with its straightforward sourness, which is definitely one of the defining tastes in the Eastern European flavor profile. 

It is, I will allow, a subtle difference, but the Ukrainian dressing benefits from subtlety. I find that ranch dressing tends to overpower whatever it's put on, whereas the Ukrainian dressing allows the flavor of the cucumber and tomato to come to the fore.

Still, it's a bit like I sat down to make a Ukrainian breakfast and the results looked and tasted almost exactly like Cheerios. It's like I traveled to Kiev and the first thing I saw was a Paul Bunyan statue. There's only so much familiarity I can handle.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: MULLIGAN STEW

Mulligan stew, it's a hobo stew, yes? That's what Wikipedia would have us believe -- that it was a communal stew, where every tramp that could would pitch in a little ingredient, one with chicken, one with potatoes, one with salt, one with onions, and then all would sup together. It's based on Irish stew, Wikipedia tells us. The website even quotes a 1900 newspaper describing this act of trampish collaboration.

I don't know. I find an 1898 reference to Mulligan stew in the Helena Independent, where they describe a Scotch terrier, adopted by a military company, as looking like a tarantula and having the color of a Mulligan stew. Later that year, soldiers complain about their diet in the same publication, saying it consists exclusively of "bacon, beans, and Mulligan stew."

The same year, I find a re ence to the meal in a Fresno Republican Weekly paper, a report from a soldier in Company C, who says "Alvin Akers and Topsy Faber are in charge of the culinary department now and the tasty manner in which they get up a 'Mulligan' stew would tickle the palate of the most critical epicure."

So maybe later the stew was a hobo thing, but, in its first appearance, it was a military thing; a 1905 Fresno Morning Republican article explicitly describes the making of a Mulligan stew in the "army style."

Later slang dictionaries say that "mulligan battery" was military jargon for a cook wagon, so maybe one influenced the other. We don't know what was in this stew yet, and the earliest ingredient I have found is from an 1899 article in the Fresno Republican about an impropriety part at a club thrown by some hunters who had collectively managed to bring down 90 doves. They used these as the constituent ingredient in a Mulligan stew.

We get a fuller recipe for the stew in an epic poem from Alaska from 1901, a description of making the stuff along the Alaska trail that reads as follows:

A "Mulligan stew!" do you ask what is that?
You're just a "cheechawker," I'll bet my old hat!
Why, up in Alaska, it's just the right stuff!
One failing it has -- you can't get half enough.
It's odor you smell as it cooks, and it seems,
'Twill never be done, to fulfill your fond dreams.
It's ptarmigan , dumpling and spuds, in a slush,
Pork, onions, and beans (they all help one to "mush"),
Salt, pepper and garlic, hardtack and rice, too,
And all odds and ends -- that's a "Mulligan stew."

To quickly clarify, "cheechawker" is apparently Chinook jargon for a newcomer, and ptarmigan is a gamebird that it common enough in Alaska, and also called the snow chicken.

The meal seems to have been common in Alaska -- an author in the Bellingham Herald in Washington State described a trip to the northern state on a ship, and he described his meal as follows: "Breakfast consisted of wolly-gahow, slumgulleon, mulligan stew, 16  to 1, smear, bullets, etc. For dinner we just reversed the order."

I'll just come out and say I don't know what most of these foods are, but for Slumgullion, which is probably an old miner's term for any muddy beverage. Whatever he was eating, I would love to see these items offered on a contemporary menu.

I find what seem to be both our first Irishmen and our first hobos in 1905, in Missoula, where the Anaconda Standard reported on Charles O'Neill and James O'Brien, drunk and possessing stolen vegetables, who were on their way to the "tall timber" to make stew. The vegetables included green onions and cucumbers.

The first proper recipe I find comes from a printer's convention in Colorado Springs in 1906, when a collection of typographers made Mulligan stew for their guests.

Believe it or not, there's a hobo connection here -- there was a subculture of itinerant type specialists called "tramp printers" who would move from job to job, relying on the frequent need for typesetters to underwrite a restless life on the road. Their recipe is as follows:

Chicken, young or old
Beef, tender or tough
Salt pork (plenty of salt)
Mutton (made from sheep)
Potatoes (commonly called "spuds")
Carrots, turnips, tomatoes, green corn (and other vegetables)

Take an ax (or similar device) and chop all into fine particles (more or less), throw entire mixture into a large receptacle and coil until all the ingredients are tender (the meat especially). Serve while steaming hot.

This is the recipe, which the Denver ex-delegates to the International Typographical union used yesterday in preparing the famous "Mulligan stew," -- the printer's delight -- which was the bill of fare at Bloomfield park, when 1,000 delegates to the annual convention which adjourned in Colorado Springs, which adjourned Saturday, with their friends, were guests of the Denver printers.

Ordinarily, "Mulligan stew" is made in a tomato can over a small fire at the side of a water tank, forty miles from nowhere, while the "cooks" are awaiting the arrival of a friendly freight train to take them on their way.

 As you can probably tell by now, a Mulligan stew is pretty much any old thing, as long as it involves meat and vegetables. Tramps liked it because it could be made out of whatever they could scavenge, and the military probably liked it because it made good use of leftovers.

I suspect for this exact reason the soup also become popular in firehouses -- you start seeing the stew show up in a lot of stories about firemen. Fort Worth's Captain Frank Massengale, of the Seventh Ward Fore Company, apparently had a recipe that was quite celebrated, at least according to a 1908 article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Massengale failed to share his recipe, so once again we must turn to the hobos to know how it's done. The following is from a Denver Post article from 1911 describing a raid on a hobo camp in which stolen chickens were discovered -- already in the meal:

Recipe for Mulligan stew by John J. Duggan, hobo:

Two fat hens.

Three large onions, half a dozen turnips, two carrots, a bunch of parsley, some bread crusts, a hunk of bacon and a hambone. Boil until done in a wash boiler.

If ever there was a meal ready for some mixological invention, it is the Mulligan stew. It might be worth revisiting the original Irish stew recipe, where the base meat is mutton or kid, but the Americanized version inevitably seems to include some sort of bird meat. Potatoes, carrots, and turnips seem standard.

If you're going to make it, though, find out what wolly-gahow was. That seems like an important side-dish.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: POTAPSI

There are times in my life when I think I will just give up on real food and be happy with appetizers. At really meaty restaurants, the appetizer menu is often the only refuge for a vegetarian, and a couple of appetizers are usually enough to take care of my appetite.

There is a Yiddish phrase I learned, "“A lek un a shmeck," which means "a taste and a smell" and isn't generally used in a complimentary way -- the phrase either surfaces when somebody's portions are too small, or when somebody has done an especially shoddy job on something. "He was supposed to rebuild the engine, but listen to this banging!" someone will cry. "I asked for a complete job and he gives me a lek un a shmeck?"

But I'm not sure that I don't prefer a lek un a shmeck, especially when what I am tasting and smelling is delicious. The potaptsi, as an example, which Discover Ukraine insists in a popular Ukrainian appetizer. It's easy enough to describe: It's essentially an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich with garlic and tomatoes.

But, boy, a simple description does not do it justice. Listen, I am a patron of the American grilled cheese sandwich. A partisan, even. I like it on white bread with American cheese, even though I am pretty sure I am just consuming cheese-colored petroleum on bread-shaped sawdust. I judge greasy spoons on the quality of their grilled cheese, mostly because I usually can't eat anything else, but, then, if you can't make a descent grilled cheese how can you be trusted with anything else?

This being said, I'm not sure I can go back to grilled cheese. The potaptsi is superior to it in every way. To begin with, your typical grilled cheese sandwich is only fried on the outside, leaving the bread slightly spongy, while the potaptsi bread is grilled on both sides to a lovely golden brown. This makes the bread more toastlike, and firmer, which is not only helps it support its ingredients, but also means the sandwich gets more butter or oil fried into it.

There is a reason we so often pair grilled cheese with tomato soup -- the tomato's umami flavor balances the sweeter dairy of the sandwich cheese well. But it's hard to add tomato directly to a grilled cheese sandwich -- in my experience, the results tend to be a wet, sloppy sandwich. I suspect the grilling process liquefies the tomato somewhat, and it's the sort of thing a talented chef can correct for, but the potaptsi solves the problem in a simpler way. Once the bread is fried, you add the tomato and grated cheese, along with fresh minced garlic, and put it in the oven at a relatively low heat for 5-7 minutes. This melts the cheese and lightly bakes the tomato, but maintains the structural integrity of the sandwich.

Finally, the recipe I worked with called for adding "verdure," which, from context, seems to simply mean "herbs." I added green tomatoes, as I had them on hand, but one expects any of the herbs popular in Eastern Europe would be a nice addition: dill, bay leaf, maybe horseradish. Grilled cheese in the US is not typically served with garlic and herbs, and, for Pete's sake, why not? 

There was apparently a time when we were actually afraid of garlic. Anti-Italian sentiments in America blamed the supposed hot temper of the Italians on their "spicy" food, and the spice in question was garlic. Maybe that's why the American grilled cheese sandwich is so very plain. Well, I can't go back. I don't care if the garlic angries up my blood. I don't care if, as the Chicago Tribune complained in 1875, garlic is the unpleasant flavor of the workman's tenement. I don't care if eating it makes me somehow more Italian.

Besides, you cut the crust off a potaptsi, so it's a very small sandwich. Barely enough to make someone too ethnic.

Just a lek really. Maybe just enough for a schmeck too.

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IRISH-AMERICAN DINING: APPLE MARY

There’s a strange story about a stranger woman, published in the New York Herald near Christmas of 1886, telling of those who worked the piers and their preparations for Yule. Among these rough characters comes Apple Mary, an apple peddler, and I will recount the newspaper’s telling of her in entirety, introduced by a grizzled old longshoreman:

“Hello! there goes Apple Mary. There’s a character for you. I remember when she was as strong, as neat and as hearty a young woman as ever trod these streets.”

The reporter turned as the old fellow spoke and beheld in Mary the most wretched, unkempt and unsightly object that was ever permitted to roam civilization’s streets. She had on four dresses of various materials, as could be distinguished by the many holes in each; an old bonnet adorned her head, stuck with goose, hen and ostrich tips; her bare feet were visible through her shoes, a basket of tainted apples hung on her right arm, while her left hand grasped the strings of a change of head dress. She murmurs “Apples, apples” to every one she meets, but does not seem to care whether they purchase or not.

“There’s a character for you,” reiterated the old fellow. “Rumor has it that she was engaged to a young sailor that was drowned at sea. No one ever saw anybody buy an apple of her; no one ever sees any one give her money.”

DRESS FROM THE CANAL BOATS.

“For years she has trudged about these docks just as you see her now. She notices none, seems to care for no one. Rain or shine she is about here. They say she is a miser and has money. Ever Christmas the wives of the canal boatmen Coenties slip dress the old woman up, but in a week she is back, rags, apples and all, and no one ever knows what became of the new clothes. She has been sent to Ireland, but they cannot keep her. She is not a vagrant, she never begs, and she always supports herself in some way. Is she is asked why she dresses so slovenly her reply invariably is, ‘If I was a fine lady I wouldn’t need to peddle apples.’ Strange Christmases has Mary seen, no doubt. Whatever her history is she keeps it to herself, and I doubt if you can find one along this water front that does not know Apple Mary, and yet not one of them could tell you who she is, where she came from or where she lives. Yes, Christmases put strange gifts in the stockings of all as they journey through life,” soliloquized the old man as he wandered off to try and get work to buy a Christmas turkey.

After this article, and perhaps because of it, Irish apple peddlers in New York were, for a while, called Apple Maries.

The term may predate this story, and seems to have been popular throughout the country (here’s a collection of Apple Mary stories: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/apple_annie_apple_mary), but this story seems to have set the public image of Apple Mary as elderly, impoverished, mourning, and perhaps mentally ill.

A poem from 1914 sentimentalized their experience, seeming to borrow from the original Apple Mary story, and reads as follows:

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples” –

‘Twas many years ago

And no one here remembers

In Broadway or Park Row,

For everything had changed about

And nothing’s quite the same;

New York was just a little town

When Apple Mary came.

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples!”

Oh the sunshine in the song;

All up and down the wharf they knew

When Mary passed along,

Swinging her basket on her arm,

So modest like and shy,

‘Twas “Laddies, get your pennies out,

Apple Mary’s passin’ by.”

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples!”

North River, Bowling Green;

But when the ships came into dock,

‘Twas there she would be seen.

“She’s lookin’ for her Sailor Jack,”

They said when eight bells rang,

And when ‘twas frosty ‘long the wharf –

Then Apple Mary sang.

“Apples, apples! Please buy apples!”

No more we hear the cry;

A dear old face has vanished;

We miss a mild blue eye.

No more about the dangerous streets

Her faltering footsteps roam,

For a voice down through the skies has called –

Poor Apple Mary home.

The phrase was still well-enough known in the 1930s that the comic strip Mary Worth started off titled Apple Mary, and told of an elderly apple dealer. When Frank Capra adapted the Damon Runyon story “Made La Gimp” into the 1933 film “Lady for a Day,” he converted Runyon’s Spanish flower peddler into Apple Annie, an aging apple peddler.

Apples were one of the original American street foods, and with good reason – they grew in abundance and required no preparation, so they could easily be sold from a basket, a barrel, or a pushcart. This may not seem like much of an Irish-American recipe -- apples in a basket? But I feel sure we can spruce it up a little.

One might consider pairing it with cheese. Gala apples are supposed to go quite well with Irish whiskey cheese, although I'm buggered to think how that might be presented as a street food -- one does not simply hand somebody an apple, a hunk of cheese, and a knife and let them fend for themselves.

Another option might be to cut an apple into slices and then top them with a soft cheese -- Ireland makes a number of soft bries, and you're going to want to pair a sweeter apple with this, but once the apple is sliced it should be treated with lemon juice to keep it from immediately turning brown. You might even create a caramelized apple chutney, combine it with brie, and serve the coupling in a paper cup with a plastic spoon.

Likewise, you could consider making an apple coleslaw, with carrot, apple, cabbage, spring onions, and parsley. Or you might simply put a stick in an apple and dip it in boiled brown sugar, an American invention most popular on the Irish holiday of Samhain. Of course, we're not children, so I would suggest experimenting with hot pepper powder and sea salt to give the candy apple a more sophisticated palate.

It would be very shabby chic to dress up in multiple dresses and an old bonnet, load a basket with these paper containers of contemporary apple-based street foods, and wander the docks crying "Apple, apples! Please buy apples!" I might do it myself.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: HOMEMADE KVASS

Sooner or later, I was going to experience the real foreignness of foreign food. We Americans like to think we have an international palate, because we grow up eating food that calls itself Mexican, and food that calls itself Chinese, and food that calls itself Indian.

It's all delicious, and it's rarely a challenge. Your average Mexican restaurant in the US, as an example, doesn't serve food made with corn smut, a corn-destroying fungus that is seen as a delicacy in Mexico. You're probably not going to get snake soup in Chinese restaurants or bullfrog in an Indian restaurant. Heck, it's pretty hard to get black pudding in Irish pubs in America, and that's a mainstream British treat.

Foreign foods can run pretty far afield of the American palate, and, unless a restaurant caters to an immigrant clientele, their menu will be Americanized. I've been to many Eastern European restaurants in my life, including having been a regular at the legendary (and recently closed) Nye's Polonaise Room in Minneapolis, and so I reckoned I'd had a lot of what Eastern Europe has to offer, and I was wrong.

It's only my second blog entry in this series, and I have already strayed far from mainstream American tastes. Because I made my own kvass.

For those of you who don't know, kvass is an enormously popular beverage in Slavic and Baltic countries, where it is vended in the streets. It is slightly sour and fizzy and mildly alcoholic. It tastes like rye or black bread, which is what it is made of. It's not widely available in the US, because we drink sweet drinks, and we don't drink bread.

I drank it once previously. I peeked into a Russian grocery store once, curious, and bought some candies and some cookies. I also saw a massive bottle of what looked like a brown soda pop, so I bought it, and it tasted like a tart beer. I shrugged it off then -- who would drink a beer soda pop? -- and threw the rest away. I was younger and ignorant, because millions of people drink the stuff, and it is the basis for several popular recipes.

I am older and not quite so ignorant, and so I made my own kvass. There are a number of recipes online, and they are all pretty similar: Soak bread in boiling water for a while, add in sugar and yeast and let sit, cool and drink. Sometimes you add something else -- I added raisins, which is a popular choice.

You can use any hearty bread, and you cook it or scorch it before adding it in, to make the drink extra bitter. It's not hard to make, although it is a little time consuming -- all told, it was about three days from toast to kvass.

There are other types of kvass as well, including a beetroot variation that I have not made yet. The kvass I made seems fairly straightforward, and I am not yet acclimated to the taste. I used rye bread, and I am a fanatic about the taste of rye, but it is taking a while for me to appreciate it as a soft drink. Also, because I fermented the stuff on my own stove, I was terrified it might kill me, but I have had several glasses now and managed to survive.

I also tried mixing it with other beverages, which I don't believe is typically done in Eastern Europe, but American bartenders have started to experiment with the drink as a mixer.

I added lemonade and touch of lemon seltzer to give it more fizz, which seemed logical -- kvass has a beer-like flavor, and people have been mixing beer and lemonade together forever and calling it a shandy. The kvass shandy was pleasant enough, although the combination seemed to highlight the fact that kvass is not beer. It tasted somehow off, which is the risk you run when you try to just substitute one ingredient for another, less familiar ingredient in a drink you are already familiar with.

I suppose the next step is for me to try other recipes and, over time, I will be familiar enough with the flavor of kvass to know what to expect, and what I like. It's happened to me with other drinks. I have developed a real taste for an herbal liqueur called fernet, which is about as bitter as you can imagine -- as bitter as a married couple discussing the terms of a divorce.

In the meanwhile, I will start looking for cooking recipes that use kvass. I barely understand how to drink the stuff, so why not cook with it?

Said nobody ever.

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COOKING THE EAST EUROPEAN WAY: GREEN BORSCHT

There are books on Jewish cooking, of course. I have a few. Most are pretty general about where foods that are typically seen as Jewish come from. Oh, sure, they'll mention that Ashkenazi Jews adapted local recipes to fulfill their dietary requirements, but often that's as far as it goes.

As a result, we don't generally learn that the bagel is Polish in origin and dates back to the 16th century, and was as popular among Slavs as it is now popular among Jews. Our beloved blintz is also Slavic, and apparently pagan, as the pre-Christian Slavs reportedly saw them as symbols of the sun.

So it goes, with cholent perhaps coming from the French, knishes deriving from either Ukranian or Russian antecedents, and kugels borrowing from the Germans.

I've decided to just go ahead and claim all of East Europe's food as my own. Why not? It's where my family came from, and they claimed their share. I'll follow their lead and modify it to serve my own needs, as I am a vegetarian, but the basic recipes will be those from my ancestor's countries: Russian, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Moldova, as well as broader influences -- my Moldovan connection gives me license to explore Romanian food, while Poland leads me to Lithuania, and Ukraine gives me Mongolian and Turkish food.

I know this is all just an exercise in making excuses to eat food I want to eat, but if you invaded or were invaded by one of my family's ancestral homes, I'm going to go ahead and eat your food.

I started with a Ukrainian dish. Ukraine is a global breadbasket as a result of huge reserves of farmland (it's one of the reasons people keep invading), and so Ukraine is a country with an extensive and varied cuisine -- they have something like 30 varieties of borscht, which is a commitment to borscht you just don't see all that often.

Borscht was to be my first meal. Borscht is still something I am learning to love, and I blame my American upbringing. Americans have a notorious sweet tooth, and so a soup that could fairly be described as "sour" isn't going to be the first thing we turn to. Borscht is generally made with beetroot, which is also not something common in American cuisine, and it's often made with pickled ingredients and served cold, and this is about as far from a candy bar as it is possible for a food to get.

I started with green borscht, which does not have beetroot, but is typically made with sorrel instead. It's not that easy to get sorrel in my part of town, so I used a common substitution: spinach. One website suggested adding a splash of citrus to duplicate sorrel's acidity -- although spinach is alkaline, apparently it doesn't have that sour punch that is so distinctive of sorrel.

The other ingredients for the soup include diced potatoes, a smattering of rice, sour cream, and dill and green onions for flavoring, as well as a hard-boiled egg that has been chopped up. There are other recipes out there, but this is a good combination -- the resulting soup is a bit like cream of potato, but the spinach, dill, and green onions give it a sharp, earthy flavor.

I'm not usually in the habit of chucking an egg into my soup, but I made my own ramen last week and that also called for a hard-boiled egg, so I am starting to think everybody else puts egg in their soup and I've just never noticed.

This is a soup that Jews absconded with a long time ago, re-dubbing it schav or shtshav in Yiddish, although that's barely a new name, as it is called szczaw in Polish, so our Yiddish name is a bit like we claimed the hot dog, insisted it was a Jewish food, and it's Yiddish name was the khat dag.

Green borscht can be served hot or cold. I've only had it hot so far, and, let me tell you, it's a great partner for a grilled cheese sandwich on a rainy night. Or perhaps I should refer to the sandwich by its Yiddish name: grill kez.

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IRISH FIGHTING ARTS: NIGHTSTICK TWIRLING

The Irish, at least in the popular imagination, are a people of the cudgel. I don’t know how many battles are still fought with shillelaghs in the streets of Dublin – precious few, I expect – but the blackthorn club looms large in the American imagination.

What is it that the Boston Celtics leprechaun is leaning on? A shillelagh. What is it that the Fighting 69th of the United States Army National Guard carry in parades? Shillelaghs. What is it that early Irish police officers in New York are supposed to have sent home for to replace the standard issue nightstick? Shillelaghs, shillelaghs, shillelaghs.

But we’re not here to discuss Irish martial arts (in this instance called “bataireacht”), but to discuss Irish-American fighting arts. And so, rather than discuss the shillelaghs, let us discuss the nightstick. Specifically, I want to discuss a particular nightstick art, one that very near was lost, and one that could use reviving. I speak, of course, of nightstick twirling.

But first, let’s establish our bona fides. We will be discussing the nightstick as an Irish-American weapon because, in any city where there was a substantial Irish-American population, Irish-Americans flooded the police departments. The best example of this is New York, where, in 1900, five out of every six policemen were Irish-American, including my great-great-grandfather, James Monaghan, who was a police officer in the 19th precinct .

Another example would be Baltimore, which likewise had a largely Irish police force at its start, and I mention Baltimore because this is where nightclub twirling became an art form.

Let us get our terms right. The nightstick is actually one of two sticks once carried by the police; there was a shorter day stick intended for daylight hours. Baltimore evolved their own version of the nightstick (and generally only used them at night), and came up with their own name for the baton: espantoon, which is probably a corrupted version the word for a British pole weapon, the spontoon.

For the most part, this stick looks like the sort of billy club you typically associate with the police – a 24”-26” wooden club with a smooth, rounded end and a barrel end that looks like a grip, attached to the wrist by a leather strap. But the officers in the Baltimore police department modified the strap, elongating it to about the length of the stick itself, and jointed the strap with a swivel that allows for long and complex spinning tricks.

Baltimore police would twirl their batons for a few reasons, enumerated on the Baltimore Police City History website. Firstly, officers would often call to each other by striking their batons on the ground or walls; the straps allowed them to do this even at a distance. Secondly, the twirling discouraged people from coming too close. Thirdly, it communicated that the officer was skilled in wielding his nightstick, offering the same visual spectacle that gun twirling served in Wild West movies.

There was a time when the Baltimore Police Department was stripped of its espantoons, between the years 1994 and 2000, when Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier took over the force. He disapproved of the nightsticks, and saw them as a tool of intimidation, and so he replaced them with a streamlined baton and training in a California-based martial arts school called Koga.

Many officers rebelled and simply went out and purchased their own espantoons, in the way an earlier generation is supposed to have written home for shillelaghs. When Frazier’s tenure ended, the classic Baltimore nightstick made an official return, although the department did not mandate its use.

The Baltimore Police City History website also offers some introductory suggestions for how to twirl the espantoon, although with repeatedly providing us with the extremely helpful advice that the barrel end, although it looks like the handle, is actually the striking end, and that the ball on the barrel is especially useful when striking pressure points or nerve clusters. They also quote an officer saying the best use of the espantoon is to rap people on the shins, which usually gets them moving pretty quickly.

Patrolman M. J. Madigan demonstrates the side-swing

But we’re here to discuss spinning, and here are a few basics:

The forward flip: “The policeman holds the free end of the thong and the free end of the slick, then releases the end of the stick as he swings his arm forward. The stick swings out, pivots where the thong is fixed to the handle, does a complete turn and slaps back into the patrolman's hand”

The backward flip, or outside loop: Exactly the same as the forward flip, “with the patrolman catching the end of the club, palm down, behind his back.”

The side-swing: “The patrolman gives the club a full turn, this time laterally from a curbstone position.”

The overhand: “Nothing more than another side-swing with the thong passing over the back of the hand in the starting position unwinding as the maneuver is completed.”

The recover: The policeman dangles his nightstick by the strap, spinning it. Then, "with the club in a fast twirl, snaps his wrist expertly and the club straightens out to an upright position, where the policeman seizes it.”

The spin: “The policeman simply increases the speed of the twirl until the club takes on the appearance of a spoked wheel in a horizontal position.”

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