The tastes of home

Commander's Palace

We were in New Orleans for Christmas. I was looking forward to sampling all the great restaurants there, including Brennan's, Commander's Palace, Emeril's, Antoine's and others. Ha! After Christmas brunch at Adelaide's (part of the Brennan's restaurant empire), that dream went "poof!" There was no way we were going to eat one rich meal after another for four consecutive nights.

Adelaide's is located in the Loews hotel. My wife and I shared a cab with her brother and his wife. It was coincidental that the four of us were in NOLA for Christmas. We booked the trips separately; only when my wife was talking with her brother did they discover we'd be together for Christmas after all.

A tall thin woman greeted us in the lobby, took our names, relayed them to the young men and women at the hostess stand, then disappeared. We thought perhaps she was not an employee after all, just a happy diner returning from the women's bathroom. Eventually we were seated. Later I looked around the room and saw that woman sitting at a big round table in the center of the dining room with about 8 guests. She acted like she owned the joint. We asked our waitress about the woman, who told us that indeed, that woman was a Brennan. She did own the joint!


I ordered a curried mussels appetizer, a grilled trout with crabmeat for the entree, and Pear and Apple Gallette for dessert. If the link still works (it did yesterday), you can see the entire Christmas menu offerings. That evening we did not have much of an appetite for dinner. We bought peanut butter crackers and Golden Flake dip style potato chips at the drugstore. That was our Christmas dinner. Golden Flake is a Southern brand (Alabama), and it immediately established itself as my preferred chip. Zapp's are made in Louisiana, but I liked GF better.

There is a beignet under all that powdered sugar.

We made the required pilgrimage to Cafe du Monde for beignets and coffee.  As we waited for a table, we watched the wait staff load up their trays with orders. A cashier rang up the amounts.

I had to have oysters while I was in New Orleans. I ate them prepared four different ways: raw, roasted, fried (in a po' boy) and pureed in a soup. The roasted preparation was the best. I also tried the city's famous cocktail, the Sazerac. I preferred the original recipe, the one made with brandy rather than the newer, rye whiskey version. I was probably 10 years old when I first heard about the Sazerac on an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. Actress Joanna Moore was Andy's girlfriend. She ordered the cocktail; Andy had a beer.

I'll write more about our dining adventures here in a future post.

I also want to acknowledge other tastes of home. After our plane landed in Chicago, and before we picked up the dog at the kennel, we stopped at Booby's for a hot dog. I used to eat here regularly when I worked nearby, but that was 15 years ago. I was taking it on faith that the restaurant would still be there. It was. Hot peppers (or hot sport peppers) really make the dog a Chicago dog.


Finally, on the morning of New Year's Eve, we ate kringle from Racine, Wis. The Northwestern Wildcats were playing in a football bowl game that day. A pre-game serving of kringle is a tradition started by friends of ours when we tailgated in Champaign, Ill., before a Northwestern-University of Illinois game. That  day the Wildcats won. On New Year's Eve, the boys lost. I know I've written about kringle before, so I won't belabor it. Suffice it to say that I am a foot solider in Kringle Nation. If you ever find yourself in Racine, head to O&H Danish Bakery. It's the best you can find.

Ding, dong. My life is calling

Three recent current events--a boardroom shake up and two deaths--caused me to remember people I hadn't thought about in years.

Bonnie Prudden  died on Dec. 11 at age 97. She was a fitness guru, long before Body by Jake, Richard Simmons, Jillian Michaels or Jane Fonda. One day in the early 1960s, Ms. Prudden was in Lancaster, Pa. She was participating in a physical fitness demonstration. Evidently, she was looking for youngsters to help her and somehow or another, my parents volunteered me.

I was no Jack LaLanne, mind you. Rather, when I went with my mom for clothing, we shopped the Husky sizes. That was actually the term used for boys of a certain girth. Husky. Clothing makers could have used Tubby, Chubby, Fatty or Porky. But that would have been cruel. Husky is a softer word; still, if you were Husky, you knew you weren't slim.

The President's Council on Physical Fitness was big in the early '60s. I wasn't reading Drew Pearson's Merry-go-round, and I wasn't into politics, but I knew that President Kennedy enjoyed a game or two of touch football. I was impressed that his family could field two teams of 22 (11 on offense and 11 on defense), without having to draft neighborhood children. My fitness level was anything but presidential. I could not climb a rope to the ceiling (yes, that was a requirement of gym class) until I was in high school, when I finally had the arm strength. (I was really, truly proud of myself that day.)

Back to Bonnie. I guess I was six or seven years old. The demonstration was in the junior high school gymnasium, not my familiar elementary school haunt. I was called to the floor with others my age and we must have done squats and push ups and deep knee bends. I wouldn't be surprised if we were accompanied by a rousing rendition of "Go You Chicken Fat, Go!" (sung here by Music Man Robert Preston). That was my date with Ms. Prudden.

Vaclav Havel, a former president of the Czech Republic, died at age 75 on Dec. 18. Did I meet him? No. But I saw him in the Prague symphony hall in 1990, a year after the Velvet Revolution, which freed the country and other Central and Eastern Europe nations from the Soviet Union's iron grip. The International Hotel Association was holding its annual congress in Prague, and at the time I was editing a hotel magazine. One of the social events was an orchestra concert. He was seated in a box and waved to us when he was introduced.

Shirley Temple Black was the U.S. ambassador to the country, and she appeared at a luncheon. A lot of the older European delegates were bemused to see her. During my stay in Prague, I spoke with a Czech woman who was a volunteer for the congress. She told me life was better since the revolution, but life was still difficult. Things did not change overnight, nor in a year, for that matter. I told her that the only Czech word I knew was houby (mushroom) because Berwyn, a western suburb of Chicago, stages an annual houby festival. The woman was amused.

Finally, I'll tell you about my high school date with a future beauty products chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. Andrea Jung was replaced as chief executive officer of Avon Products on Dec. 14 (she remains the chairman). She was a year behind me in high school. I took her roller skating once. The end. (I don't kiss and tell.)

You might find any of these stories, taken individually, to be plausible, even truthful. But for all three to have involved one person might have you crying, "These tales are fantastical."

But I assure you, gentle reader, that these are all true and they all did happen to me.

Taking the long way home

In Marbella, the beautiful seaside resort

From Granada, I made my way south, to the coastal town of Marbella. And since I was so close, I decided to cross the Mediterranean to Morocco. By my calculations, I would be the first in my family to set foot on the continent of Africa. (A younger brother had already claimed South America; Asia, Australia and Antarctica were still up for grabs; since then only Antarctica remains available.)
I arrived in Algerciras in the evening and began to look for a room for the night. It was pouring and I was getting soaked. I wore a plastic bag on my head to protect myself from the rain. I looked ridiculous. All the hotels looked too expensive for my budget. I turned down street after street looking for suitable accommodations. At last I found one. The innkeeper walked me up three flights and opened the door to a tiny room. I had to crouch so as not to knock my head against the rafters. I was soaked and exhausted. I fell asleep to the sounds of whistling winds and rain lashing the windowpanes.
The next morning, the skies were clear and the winds were gone. I took the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar and passed into Ceuta on 4 December. What I remember most from setting foot in Morocco was how the children accosted you. They begged in English. If you didn't reply, they begged in French. If that provoked no response, they tried German, Spanish, Italian or a Scandinavian language. They were like quarterbacks checking off their receivers. I stayed mum and fought my way through the crowd.
I don't know how I took up with this band of Moroccans, but I did. Mustafah was their leader; he had three or four guys with him, plus a Canadian guy and his girlfriend. Perhaps the Cdns struck up a conversation with me in a cafe. I'm not clear on that, but I felt safe with the Canadians. They invited me to tour the market with Mustafah as our guide, but first I had to exchange some checks at the American Express office. Mustafah led us through the maze of streets. I had read in the guide books that a guide was important because you could get lost in the medinah and never (well, hardly ever) find your way out. Everything was for sale in the market: freshly butchered meat (in a gutter, I saw a foot with a hoof attached), pots and pans, fruits and vegetables, spices and clothing. Mustafah and company helped me negotiate the purchase of a djellaba, a head-to-foot robe, also known as the Moroccan sleeping bag. I still have it; it hangs in the back of the hall closet. I haven't worn it since college, I'm sure.
After all of this, I found myself being invited by Mustafah to visit his home. Mustafah referred to me as "mon ami Jimmy." Much of our conversation had been in French. The Canadians said it would be a good time. They knew him and his family. So after a night in a hotel, all of us boarded a bus to visit M's mountain home. I felt like a latter-day Margaret Mead on my own anthropoligical visit.
We drove up into the Atlas Mountains. Whenever someone wanted the bus driver to stop, he clapped his hands. Our time came, and we disembarked. Then we walked to the Mustafah family homestead. We passed a VW bus, a gift, Mustafah told me, from his American friends. As I remember this, the Mustafah home was stone and covered in stucco. We sat on the floor. There was a fireplace but no windows. Young boys brought us dinner, which we ate with our hands. Except for the Canadian girlfriend, there were no women in our presence. We went to sleep, me in my new djelaba.
The next morning we ate. We moved to another room and then the Moroccans began their sales pitch. They were selling hashish, or in their language kief, keef or kef (take your pick). I wasn't buying. They had bags of it. I wanted none of it.  In my mind, I was thinking about the movie Midnight Express, but I just Google'd it, and the move came out in 1978. Any how, I must have known the broad outline of the story from news reports of the time.
I was  still operating under the assumption that my visit to their home was because they had a genuine interest in showing me the Moroccan way of life. It took me a while, but I figured out that my visit to their home was to exchange hashish for a pocketful of my recently cashed American Express checks. They ratcheted up the pressure. It began to feel like a fraternity rush, which I had successfully dodged back home. The negotiations continued, mostly in French. They threw insults about my masculinity. "A real man would buy it." So that was their game.
After multiple refusals, they suggested I empty my pockets. My bankroll had been drained over the last two months. I needed enough for a train ticket back to Luxembourg. I could not part with my cash. I played my last card. "If you are a man, you will believe me when I say I have no money in my pockets," or words to that effect. "Si vous etes homme, vous me croyez quand je dis il n'y a pas l'argent  dans mes poche." That ended their demands. At that point, they asked me to hand over my boots, pea coat and watch. In return, they gave me some desert boots. They must be a Moroccan honor code that forbids house guests to go barefoot on their way out.They would put me on a bus back to the city tomorrow.
There was still an evening to get through. I could not wait to leave. We had dinner, I slept and the next morning the Cdn chick kissed me on the cheek. I felt that she was sheepish. Mustafah walked me to the road to wait for the bus. We passed the VW minibus and I realized the "gift" was most likely not given freely. Mustafah inquired about the value of the watch, and I inflated its worth, careful to point out the great amount of "real gold" surrounding the face of the Timex. I boarded the bus and it made its way down the mountainside. We stopped in a village square and passengers boarded holding chickens upside down by their feet. A Moroccan man sat next to be and tried to strike up a conversation. I was leery. A Mustafah plant, most likely. As quick as I was to get to Africa, I was equally eager to leave. I just had to be the first to set foot on a continent, didn't I?
I crossed the strait and found myself in Marbella again. It was late and I couldn't find a cheap hotel. I slept on the beach in my Moroccan sleeping bag. It was proving to be handy. The next day, I took a bus to the train station. An American girl sat next to me. Turned out she was from Providence, Rhode Island. I knew there was a drug kingpin there. I was leery of saying too much to her. This whole episode messed with my mind.
I reunited with my friend in Madrid. At last I was with a trusted friend. He suggested a few days in the Canary Islands before we both returned to the States. I had no money for that, but he had his father's American Express card. I could pay him back. That was the best deal I had been offered in days. We were off to Tenerife.  

On the Canary Islands

The playa

The Canary Islands were windy and cold. We tried to sit on the beach, but we didn't sit out for long. My friend told me that beaches were arranged by nationality. The Scandinavians frequented one section, the Dutch another, the English another. The restaurants all seemed to be smorgasbord types. Cheap food and lots of it. About four months later, at the Tenerife airport, two 747 jets collided with each other, killing 583 people.
Back on the continent, I rode trains from Madrid to Luxembourg to pick up my Icelandic Air flight back to JFK. It was snowing hard and we were delayed. I remember sitting on the floor of the airport. I met a man who had been working in the diamond mines of South Africa.  At last we were cleared to fly.
I arrived at JFK on Dec. 21. I set aside enough money for a bus ticket back to Boston. I asked the cab driver to take me as close to the bus terminal as I could get on my remaining money. I was wearing my djelaba and was jet lagged. He must have taken pity on me because he dropped me off in front of the depot. At the news stand, a tabloid headline screamed "Daley Dead" and sure enough, the mayor of Chicago had died that afternoon. When the line moved and it was my turn to buy my ticket, I was 50 cents short. A man behind me made up the difference. There were kind people in this world. I disembarked at a terminal outside of Boston. I considered walking  home; it was maybe five miles. But I was beat. Drained. Tired. Exhausted. I called dad to come pick me up. I was home at last.

Welcome to the Hostal California

I rode the train from Madrid to Granada and checked into the Hostal California (photo, left). It was Thanksgiving week, but for some reason, my friend stayed back in Madrid rather than come with me to see the Alhambra, the former palace of the Moorish ruler of Spain. So I was alone to explore the city.

This was a real treat and one of the most memorable experiences of my trip. I think it was because I had no prior experience with Spain or the Muslim world. The tiles, the arches, the gardens and the water features of the Alhambra added up to a sensory overload of sights and sounds. In 2010, I returned here on a business trip and I toured the grounds with a licensed guide. By this time, the Alhambra had been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and I could see why.

But in looking at my photos from1976 and those from 2010 (see my earlier posts, including "The Alhambra, Granada's Big Red One"), not much had changed. I enjoyed the second visit as much, and maybe more, because of the guide's insights and explanations of what I was seeing. But even to the unguided, the Alhambra delivers a powerful punch of Arabian architecture and exotica.

On my second trip, I learned of Washington Irving's love affair with Spain and his role in popularizing the Alhambra. His stories helped to save and preserve the property. From my hotel in Granada, it was a long walk up a steep hill to gain entrance to the property. It was November, but some bushes and flowers were still in bloom, and the fountains were splashing water. If you ever have a chance to see this place, go.

The original walls were colored red

I met a couple at the Hostal California, and we went up to the caves one evening for a gypsy show of flamenco dancing. Restaurants and apartments are actually carved into the hillside. That might have been our Thanksgiving day celebration.

At the Generalife, next to the Alhambra

The gardens are in the 20th century style of the French

Snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains

A hike up the hillside yielded this view

My Spanish steps

Madrilenos

After a week in Berlin, I returned to Cologne for another week or so. Then I headed to Madrid, roughly 900 miles away. I passed through Paris, and since I had time before my train left, I went to the movies.  I bought a ticket to Fantasia, thinking that there would be no dubbing or subtitles. Wrong! Mickey Mouse spoke French to Leopold Stokowski. The usher showed me to my seat. Later, I found out that tipping the usher is expected. I sat through the movie twice, catnapping.

Then I boarded the train to the Spanish frontier. I learned that word during my European sojourn. Borders are frontiers. Doctors Without Borders is the English translation of Medecins Sans Frontieres. At the border, we disembarked the French train and walked to the Spanish train. The reason for this, I was told, is that the rail gauge in Spain was made narrower (or larger) to prevent French trains from rolling into the country unimpeded.

Franco rally, Nov. 20

I was visiting a high school friend in Madrid who was taking his junior year abroad. He was living in a private apartment with a widow, and I stayed with them a few days. As it turned out, there was to be a rally in at the Plaza de Oriente in support of Franco, who had died one year earlier. He was still dead. Franco was the butt of a long-running joke on Saturday Night Live. (We didn't call it SNL at the time.) Franco had been ailing for quite a long time, and the news reports of the time always reported, "Franco is still clinging to life." That went on for a couple of weeks, I guess. So, when the generalissimo finally passed away,  SNL's Weekend Update began with, "Franco is still dead."

My friend's classmates told me to stay away from the rally because of threats of violence that were rumored. Never known for my ability to make wise decisions,  I went any and stood among the throng, carefully snapping pictures. I didn't understand a word that was orated, but when the outstretched stiff arm went up in the fascist or Nazi salute, I felt a chill.

Philip IV, Plaza de Oriente, Madrid

The fascist salute unnerved me.

Madrid

I was surprised to see palm trees in Madrid. It never occurred to me that Europe had palm trees, and at that latitude, which I roughly gauge as the same as Boston's. And seeing them downtown in the capital city of a major European city just threw me for a loop. I was nonplussed (to use a word correctly which I had missed used last month). Another thing that I didn't understand was the Plaza Bernardo O'Higgins. Why was an Irishman being honored here? At dinner with my friend's professor, I learned that O'Higgins was the leader of Chilean independence from Spain. This trip was proving to be educational every day.

Madrid

Cuckoo's Nest

I had seen "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" at home, so I looked for another movie and found "All The President's Men" (todos los hombres del presidente). I reasoned that the Spanish subtitles would not get in the way of my enjoyment. Wrong! The movie was dubbed in Spanish. Even though I knew the broad outline of the story, I could not follow many of the details.

After Madrid, I took the train to Granada, to see the world famous Alhambra. It was Thanksgiving.