Food History | Citizen Appetites

I’ve lived in Staten Island my whole life. I’ve been to almost every part of the island in my 18 years here, including Port Richmond. However, there is so much I didn’t know about this historic place that’s only 10 minutes away from where I live. Between my basketball games and my brother’s I have been to the Port Richmond area countless times and yet I didn’t know anything about it. As I walked through Port Richmond through the guided tour set up by Wagner College, I learned about the history, the food, and the challenges of the area. Historically, one of the highlights was the Dutch church and graveyard that was one of the first built on Staten Island. A second highlight was the large arrow that pointed to water, that in faded writing read the word “Ferry.”

The food side of Port Richmond was also very interesting. Almost 20 restaurants line the streets of Port Richmond Avenue. Among these restaurants there were many Spanish and Chinese cuisine restaurants. There was even an Irish Pub. One of the restaurants was something quite uncommon, a bakery that also serves many different types of dinner dishes. In the shop there is not only cake, ice cream, but also chicken entrees and pizza pies! Although this may seem unconventional, it is quite interesting.

Another one of the restaurants we stopped into was a newly opened one, which specialized in tamales, it’s decorations actually made me want to eat there more. It’s amazing how many different elements can go into a “where should we eat” decision. The idea that a restaurant being nicely or culturally decorated can make a person want to eat there is very interesting to me.

A lack of restaurants is definitely not a problem for the area. Along the way we stopped into two markets that provided fresh fruits and vegetables. Seeing these places made me very happy because I know that these fresh foods are available to people that live so close to an area that lacks fresh food, Arlington. Arlington has not yet been declared an official food desert, but it is on the road to becoming one, something that the community and those in charge can hopefully change.

In these markets I also saw a lot of spices hanging on the walls. These made me think of how spices have impacted history and the age of exploration. Some of the spices hanging up I had never even heard of, I guess I need to expand my spice knowledge! Even though Port Richmond did have these markets with fresh foods, they did recently lose one. A fire took away one of the supermarkets and I don’t believe there are plans to have it replaced. Another problem with the area would be the arsenic and lead within the soil at Veterans Park. Even though this issue is under control, there are still other problems facing the area, such as the garbage littering the streets, but the community is working hard to change that. Port Richmond is a rich community with a lot of history and day by day it will grow stronger and better.

I spent the weekend trying to bake bread. This isn’t by any means the first time I’ve baked bread, and the bread I bake usually pleases the people I bake it for– so one might ask why I’m bothering to experiment with other recipes and techniques. The short answer is that we’ve built a wood-fired oven in our backyard and have plenty of wood. But the real answer is that I’m seduced by the magic of bread– kneading it, letting it rise, shaping the loaves and finally taking it out of the hot oven and tapping it to see if it’s done. There are lots of people out there on the internet who feel the way I do and who have painstakingly described their techniques for people like me to follow. Not surprisingly, the bread–baking community is a generous, opinionated and friendly bunch. They want to create more of us, and so have taken the time to write down the methods they use in meticulous detail. These bakers use special scales to weigh their flour, salt and water, even their yeast. They report on the exact temperature of the dough at each stage of the fermentation process–which they time carefully. I’ve spent months reading and experimenting with these recipes. And finally this weekend I decided that I just can’t make myself follow these precise directions. Despite my determination to learn how to bake a loaf of bread I can really be proud of, and my recognition that bread baking is all about chemistry, and that I should pay close attention to weights and temperatures, I just can’t do it. This is partly because I think like a humanist and not a scientist, which is a disciplinary contrast that we will be exploring in this Learning Community.

I like to remember that bread baking is an ancient human skill (or art), and only recently have bakers had access to scales and thermometers. I’d love to have find a master teacher I could bake with so that I could “learn by doing” –and tell when I’ve added enough flour to the dough. And feel when I’ve kneaded it enough. And know whether I need to slow down the fermentation or shape the loaves. I’m trying to learn this by practicing it on my own, just as millions of men and women have done in the past. That’s the romantic version of the story.

But it’s not that simple and that’s what really makes me want to keep on trying, endlessly interested in what the next batch will be like. Because even in this standardized/mechanized day and age, there are too many variables (at least for me) to control to achieve a completely repeatable result. For example, the flour is never really the same,the barometric pressure outside fluctuates, the interaction of yeast and water changes, the moisture in the oven varies, etc. And think of bread-baking before the availability of commercial yeast, when the natural “levain” varied from day to day! What we’re also discovering is that the process becomes even less predictable when you use a wood-burning oven. First of all, it’s hard to know exactly how much heat an individual log will produce. Then regulating the heat of the oven and being able to predict when it will cool off enough to receive the loaves for baking is proving to be very complicated (and we even have a nifty infrared thermometer to guide us.). Baking bread, it seems to me, defies science. And it approaches art.

Here are a few photos of my experiments this weekend: