The Second Avenue Deli Cookbook (25 page)

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Authors: Sharon Lebewohl

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Boneless Breast of Chicken with Mushroom Stuffing
SERVES
6
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
3 tablespoons garlic powder
6 large boneless chicken breasts
FOR THE STUFFING
5 tablespoons corn oil
2 cups onion, chopped into ¼-inch pieces
¾ cup celery, chopped into ¼-inch pieces
¾ cup carrots, chopped into ⅛-inch pieces (this is most easily done in a food processor)
3 cups scrubbed mushrooms, chopped into ½-inch pieces, ¼inch thick
8 cups loosely packed French or Italian bread, cubed into 1-inch pieces
1 tablespoon poultry seasoning
2 eggs, beaten
2 tablespoons schmaltz (optional)
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
FOR THE BASTING SAUCE
¾ cup fresh-squeezed orange juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons honey
FOR THE PAN JUICES
1 cup celery, chopped into ⅜-inch pieces
1 cup onion, chopped into ½-inch pieces
1 cup carrot, chopped into ¼-inch pieces
Clear chicken soup or stock
1. Mix 1 tablespoon salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, and garlic powder in a bowl. Open the chicken breasts like the pages of a book, and rub insides well with this mixture. Refrigerate until needed.
2. Heat 2 tablespoons of the corn oil in a large skillet, and sauté onions until brown. Remove with a slotted spoon to a large bowl. Add 1 tablespoon corn oil to skillet, and sauté celery and carrots until crisp and lightly browned. Remove with a slotted spoon to bowl with the onions. Add remaining 2 tablespoons corn oil to skillet, and brown mushrooms. Remove with a slotted spoon to bowl with onions.
3. Place bread cubes in a colander, run cool water over them to soften, and squeeze out excess liquid, mushing the bread to a doughlike consistency.
Add bread and all remaining stuffing ingredients to the bowl with sautéed vegetables and mix thoroughly. Set aside.
4. In a separate bowl, mix orange juice, soy sauce, and honey to create a basting sauce. Set aside.
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread chopped celery, onions, and carrots (1 cup each) evenly along the bottom of a large baking dish to flavor pan juices.
6. Cut about a dozen crosshatched slits in “open book pages” of each butterflied chicken breast by chopping rapidly with a knife (do not pierce through to the outer side or “book cover”; the slits should be no more than ⅛ inch deep). To further widen the breasts, cut a thin flap beginning about 1 inch from the center toward the edge of each side; fold the flaps out like ears. Fill each “book” with about ¾ cup stuffing. Fold bottom and top of each “book,” roll “book covers” closed, and fasten with skewers. As you complete each stuffed breast, place it carefully over the vegetables in the baking dish, mounded skin side up.
7. When all the chicken breasts are arranged in the baking dish, brush the top of each with basting sauce, pour ¼ inch of chicken soup over the vegetables (not on top of the chicken), and bake for 45 minutes, brushing the chicken tops with basting sauce every 15 minutes.
8. Turn oven to broil. Brush tops of chicken with basting sauce once more, and place in broiler for 2 to 3 minutes, until nicely browned (be careful they don't burn). Serve each person a whole chicken breast, topped with a bit of the pan juice and its vegetables. Serve with a green vegetable and, if you like starchfests as we do, mashed potatoes.
Note:
Ask your butcher to remove the bones from the chicken while keeping the skin intact and the breast butterflied, not cut in half; also have him remove large pieces of fat.
Note:
Bake extra stuffing in a separate dish, spooning pan juices into it every time you baste the chicken.

T
HIS NOSTALGIC PIECE
by philosopher-humorist, close friend of Abe's, and passionate Deli patron Sam Levenson appeared in the
Saturday Review
on March 1, 1980. It is also reprinted on our menu.
Oh Cuisine!

Somewhat in the style of Marcel Proust, most of the customers at the Second Avenue Kosher Delicatessen and Restaurant … are involved in a contemporary
recherche du temps perdu.
The very menu is a remembrance
of things past, of a Jewish way of life all but destroyed by upward mobility.

Abe gets a bear hug from his dear friend, the late comedian Sam Levenson.

Some of us grew up as part of that past. Others heard of it from their Italian, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Jewish, etc., parents or grandparents who came to America carrying a large bundle of hopes and a small bundle of pots, chopping bowls, rolling pins, mortars and pestles. After all, man does not live by freedom alone. They landed, along with their rich dreams and even richer appetites, on the Lower East Side—all at the same time.
There was not a cold tenement that did not smell of hot food. The aromas seeped through closed doors, dumbwaiters, halls, cellars, and the letter boxes. “Eating out” was unheard of. In the first place, you couldn't afford it. In the second place, “Poison they feed you.” In the
last, and most important place, to eat out was an insult to mama's cooking and to family tradition.
If you reached the point where you could eat out, or had to (a tragedy), you naturally sought out some place run by a mama and a papa, often by a whole family. The mama had to look like, dress like, talk like, and cook like “mama,” and the food had to be kosher.
Eating out at the Second Avenue Delicatessen is like eating in. There is papa Lebewohl, mama Lebewohl, and two pretty daughters who “keep an eye.”
The clue to Abe's success is culinary doubt—creative, inventive, positive doubt. He is privy to the highly inexact alchemy of traditional, instinctual Jewish cooking as handed down by word of mothers. The vital ingredient is “sense,” not sense-organ sense, but common sense based on years of common scenting.
You have to feel what the food calls for and add that imprecise pinch, dab, smear, drop, or blip (an onomatopoeic word derived from the sound of one drop of oil falling into boiling water).
You can teach anyone, Jewish or not, how to make chicken soup, but you can't teach anyone (an ancient ethnic mystery) how to get it up to the temperature of molten lava. A good matzoh ball from such soup does melt in the mouth, but it also hardens again in the stomach. Cases of intestinal matzoh-ball blockage can be cleared by doses of 340-degree chicken soup.
The most popular main courses are chicken in the pot, boiled beef, Hungarian beef goulash, and Roumanian tenderloin steak. These are served with the Yiddish K rations: kasha (groats), kugel (noodle pudding), knaidle (billiard ball–size dough balls), kishka (stuffed cow's intestine). Interesting that linguistically there is no singular for certain Jewish delicacies. No one (except maybe an illegal alien) refers to a krep or a farf. It is kreplach, or farfel (confetti-size dough drops).
Among the fish specialties, gefuilte fish still leads the school. There are world-wide variations, but Abe Lebewohl has preserved the time-and-mama tested formula. Classical gefuilte fish experts started from the live fish in combinations of buffel (buffalo) carp, pike, or whitefish—depending upon the cost (“for the holidays they raise the price, the holdupnicks”)—added egg, matzoh meal, and onions all chopped and molded into oval shapes. Onions were crucial. They made the mama cooks cry, releasing the salt tears (the secret ingredient?) which ran down their faces into the chopped fish, adding the flavor of four thousand years of Jewish suffering. The final product is eaten with
horseradish strong enough to make the cooked fish tremble on the plate.
The East Side is now the home of new immigrants. The Second Avenue Delicatessen and Restaurant caters to some of these, but mostly to nostalgia-hungry exurbanites from every urb and suburb of America, who come a-searching in the old foods for some of the old values that made the crowded “co-op” living not only possible but stimulating; to value again fragrant human imperfection over deodorized, dehumanized perfection; to let the earthy horseradish, a real root, bring back bittersweet root-memories of a
temps perdu,
a time when dreams of a great tomorrow spiced many an unappetizing today.
Perhaps these customers are pilgrims in search of soul food for the soul, and Abe Lebewohl's menu proclaims: We deliver.

José Torres

P
ROFESSIONAL BOXER
José Torres took up boxing in the Army at eighteen, and immediately became a middleweight champion, winning forty out of forty-one bouts, with thirty-four knockouts! At twenty, he represented the United States at the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, garnering a silver medal; from 1965 to 1967, he was light-heavyweight champion of the world; and from 1993 to 1995, he served as president of the World Boxing Organization.
But his scope has always reached far beyond the ring, into politics, entertainment, writing (he authored the best-seller
Sting Like a Bee: The Story of Muhammad Ali
), acting (he's appeared in ten movies), and even choreography. He is presently a television boxing analyst for USA Networks'
Tuesday Night Fights en Español.
Years ago,
New York Post
columnist Jack Newfield introduced me to his pal Abe Lebewohl at the Second Avenue Deli. Soon, Abe and I developed a friendship, and visiting his restaurant became like visiting family. He was a big boxing fan, but he never went to a single fight, because
he was too damned busy at that restaurant. He always had time to go out to eat, though. My goodness, did he love to eat! He used to ask me how I stayed in such good shape, and, like most people, he thought I killed myself working out at the gym. Actually, though I do, of course, work out—especially after gorging on pastrami sandwiches at his place—my real trick for staying thin is simple: I don't eat a lot.
Abe could never really believe a big tough guy like me didn't eat that much. When he had his famous pickle-eating contest in 1994, he tried his damnedest to talk me into entering. I wanted to help out—not only for Abe but because my son, José, is a manager at United Pickles in the Bronx, which supplies the Deli and co-sponsored the contest. But I knew I could only get down two or three pickles tops; so, finally, I agreed to be a judge.
Abe was one of the sweetest men I ever knew. His philosophy was to be nice to everyone and to enjoy life, and all his friends enjoyed life a little more because he was around.
Ramona Torres's Arroz con Pollo y Habichuelas

SERVES
6
José's wife, Ramona, taught us this traditional Puerto Rican chicken and rice dish, which is served with beans.
FOR THE BEANS
1 pound dried pinto beans
1 large bay leaf
½ cup tomato sauce
½ teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 cups water
FOR THE RICE AND BEANS
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 cups green pepper, chopped into ½-inch pieces
2 cups onion, chopped into ½-inch pieces
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh garlic
CHICKEN WITH RICE
Juice of 2 lemons
6 to 8 chicken pieces
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ teaspoon oregano
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ cup Goya olive salad
¼ teaspoon Goya saffron
2 cups uncooked long-grain rice
1. Place beans and bay leaf in a large stockpot with water to cover. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, and simmer for 1 hour, or until beans are tender but not mushy. Add extra water if needed during the cooking process. Drain, return beans to pot, cover, and set on an unlit back burner.
2. While beans are cooking, heat 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a very large skillet, and sauté green peppers until browned. Remove with a slotted spoon, and set aside in a bowl. Heat 2 more tablespoons of oil in skillet, and sauté onions until browned. Remove with a slotted spoon, and set aside in a different bowl. At the last minute, add garlic, brown quickly, and set aside in a third bowl. Keep skillet on stove.
3. Squeeze lemon juice into 1 quart of water, and use it to wash chicken pieces well. Rinse with plain water. Place chicken parts on a large platter. Mix 2 teaspoons salt, ¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper, and ½ teaspoon oregano in a small bowl, and rub chicken pieces evenly with this mixture. Set aside.
4. In a medium pot, place one-quarter of the sautéed green peppers, one-quarter of the sautéed onions, one-third of the sautéed garlic, tomato sauce, ½ teaspoon oregano, 1 teaspoon salt, ¼ teaspoon freshly ground pepper, and 2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add mixture to beans, and simmer, uncovered, on low heat for 30 minutes stirring occasionally.
5. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in skillet. Sauté chicken pieces on moderate heat in covered skillet for 20 minutes, moving pieces around occasionally to make sure they brown evenly.
6. Add remainder of the sautéed green peppers, onions, and garlic to chicken. Add olive salad and saffron, and stir everything in. Add rice, and stir in well. Add enough water to cover the rice by ½ inch and stir lightly. Bring to a boil, uncovered, for 2 minutes. Lower heat, cover, and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, or until rice is tender and liquid almost completely absorbed. Serve with beans.
Note:
Beans should be soaked 6 to 8 hours before cooking. Place them in a large bowl or pot, and cover with water by 2 inches.

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