Culinary delights of the Lower East Side: Economy Candy

October 27, 2010 • 5:51 am

I’ve been a candy maven as long as I can remember. Ironically, it was Grandpa David, immigrant to the Lower East Side, who got me hooked.  When I was wee, about five or six, I used to work in his auto parts store in Uniontown, Pennsylvania—”work” consisting of putting purchases in paper bags. (He once yelled at me for wasting a bag on a single screwdriver.) At the end of the day, he’d give me a quarter, which I’d take to the penny candy emporium right next door.

If you’re not of a certain age you won’t remember how far a quarter could go in the 1950s, particularly when candy was one cent per piece—or even less.  For twenty-five cents you could get a sizable bag of the stuff.  But oy, the choices! Would it be a tiny wax bottle filled with fluorescent, saccharine fluid, or maybe a paper strip speckled with dots of sugar, or a licorice whip, or a few chocolate babies, or jawbreakers, or orange marshmallow “circus peanuts”?  And you had to make twenty-five choices.  It took a long time, and of course the woman behind the counter would get impatient with the grubby urchin determined to get both full value and full variety for his quarter.

Since my childhood, I’ve sampled sweets throughout the world, from the tamarind candies of Mexico to the pista barfi of India, and I haven’t found any that I didn’t like (save, perhaps, the salted, sugared and licorice-flavored preserved plums of China).  But there’s nothing like the penny candy stores of my youth.  You can find a few places that cater to boomer nostalgia by selling individual candies from bins, but they’re overpriced and phony.

But there’s this:

Economy Candy, on Rivington Street, is just a few short blocks from Katz’s Delicatessen.  Opened in 1937, it’s been in the hands of the Cohen family ever since.  It’s large, and it sells nothing but candy. Walking in is like taking a big bite of that madeleine.  And you won’t find any kids in there: just adults reliving their youth.

Economy does make a half-hearted nod toward upper-class tastes: they stock some waxy-looking chocolates and a variety of European sweets, but their real forte is nostalgic American candies. You may not be able to buy them by the piece, but they’re there:  the wax bottles, the licorice whips, the circus peanuts—the whole megillah.  You’ll see stuff  you thought they stopped making ages ago:

Sky bars, with their five individually-filled segments! Mallo Cups, set to ooze white goo all over your shirt! Black Jack gum!  Bonomos’s Turkish Taffy, which we used to slap on the pavement to crack into bits.  Necco Wafers (if you break the white ones apart in the dark, they make a spark.) Sugar Daddies!: those caramel suckers so efficient at removing fillings.  It’s impossible to visit this store and not leave with a sack of nostalgic treats.  (See a list of them here; note that there’s six pages of the stuff.) And lest you ask, “So what’s so Jewish about this store besides its owners?”, there’s this:

Halvah is the King of Candies.  The sesame-paste version isn’t 100% Jewish, but Middle Eastern; the name, however, comes from the Yiddish, and in America the candy is specifically associated with Jews.  You’ll either love it or hate it, and I happen to love it. It’s dense, oily, and crumbly, with a very slight bitterness of the sesame that offsets its sweetness. It’s an adult candy, complex and sophisticated, like good theology.  I eschew the fancy chocolate-covered varieties for the plain ones.

You can mail order the old-time favorites, and much else, from Economy’s website.

October

October 26, 2010 • 6:20 pm

No writer has better captured the color and feel of our country than Thomas Wolfe. From Of Time and the River:

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands.  The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.  Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. . .

October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run.  The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all:  the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.

I’m told to shut up again

October 26, 2010 • 6:53 am

Michael Zimmerman, founder of the Clergy Letter Project, in which liberal theologians proffer testimony that their faith has no beef with evolution, has just put up a brickbat post at (gulp) HuffPo:  “Science and religion aren’t friends, but they could be.”  He’s exercised by my USA Today piece arguing that science and faith are incompatible, and offers another take.

It’s a “brickbat” post because Zimmerman goes way out of his way, almost embarrassingly so, to praise my great talents as a scientist and writer.  But he’s just softening me up for the body blow: the familiar claim that I’m forcing people to choose between science and faith and, by so doing, turning them away from science.  In the end, it’s just a nicely worded but Mooney-esque call for me to shut up about religion.

Like religious fundamentalists, Coyne is arguing that people must choose between religion and science, that they can’t accept both. There are, I believe, two problems with this position. First, pragmatically, studies have clearly suggested that in the United States, when people are given this choice, they will more often than not opt for religion. Now, I’m not suggesting that Coyne, or any of us who care deeply about science, should pervert our understanding of the discipline simply to make converts. No, I’m arguing that there is a way to promote the principles of scientific inquiry fully while not alienating many who are likely to be supporters by belittling their sincerely held beliefs.

Let me reiterate that I’ve never said that people must choose between religion and science, although I’ve argued that a philosophically consistent scientist should eschew superstititon.  What I’ve said—and argued in the USA Today piece—is that the way science and faith try to find truth are incompatible—and, indeed, that there is scientific truth but no real religious truth.   If people think that this means they have to choose, fine.  I do think they should give up superstition in favor of naturalism, but if they want to entertain incompatible views in their brain, so be it.  What Zimmerman really hates is that by making people think about the issue, I could turn some away from evolution.  What a patronizing idea! And we all know that there’s no evidence for this claim.  The thinking could easily go the other way—I have made a few converts to science.

More important, Zimmerman fails to understand that my goal is more than just getting people to accept evolution and science.  As I repeat endlessly (and wish I could stop repeating), my goal, and that of the Gnus,  is the promotion of reason.  Sam Harris, responding to the mush-brained accommodationism of Unscientific America, said it best:

The first thing to notice is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.

Please, Dr. Zimmerman, try to understand this simple idea:  we have more than one goal!  And if I had one wish, it would not be that everyone would magically accept evolution; it would be that religion and superstition would vanish from the face of the Earth.  The evolution acceptance would shortly follow.  Does anyone doubt that?

Zimmerman goes on to claim, as he has before, that the kind of religion with which he rubs elbows is not incompatible with science.  Of course you won’t find him in the megachurches or in the congregations of the South or the south side of Chicago.

. . .the extreme position Coyne has articulated is at odds with much of religion as well as with the basic precepts of science. In fact, religion isn’t the monolithic, dogmatic enterprise Coyne describes, while science can’t provide answers to every question humans can imagine.

Note the gratuitous slur on science: that it doesn’t provide answers to every question humans can imagine.  Well, Dr. Zimmerman, does religion? And does religion do it better than secular philosophy?

Never mind.  Zimmerman makes the claim, as he’s wont to do, that for the vast majority of American “religious leaders” (note: he’s not talking about religious people), science already trumps faith. So what’s there to worry about?

Perhaps most importantly, he [Coyne] makes the case that when religions make empirical claims about the natural world, scientific knowledge has to trump faith. Every scientist I know would likely agree with this statement. Similarly, though, the vast majority of religious leaders I know would also likely agree. The only religious leaders apt to argue are those extreme fundamentalists who believe that their faith traditions are designed to teach us about the workings of the material world. Yes, people like Ken Ham, Albert Mohler and Pat Robertson espouse such dogma, but to imply that they are representative of the majority of religious leaders is ridiculous and gives them power that they don’t deserve.

(I’m not sure why they deserve their power any less than does teh Pope.)

Ken Ham?  Pat Robertson? Let’s talk not about leaders, but about people.  Have you forgotten, Dr. Zimmerman, these dire statistics: 81% of Americans believe in heaven, 78% in angels, 70% in Satan, and 70% in hell. Aren’t those beliefs incompatible with science?  Zimmerman’s pulling a fast one here by concentrating on the beliefs of liberal religious leaders believe rather than on the rank and file.  But of course Zimmerman feels that religious leaders are like border collies who can drive their flock in any direction.  And what do those collies believe?

Many, many religious leaders understand that religion is not dependent upon a single interpretation of any text. Instead, the overwhelming majority of the religious leaders with whom I interact regularly believe that religion is about morality and spirituality rather than science. They want to make the world a better, a fairer and a more just place and they believe they can accomplish that within a spiritual community.

Yes, I agree that they want to make the world a better place.  But if they’re all on about morality and spirituality, why do they need to talk about Jebus, heaven, and sin?  Why do the Catholics proffer crackers and wine, claiming that they’re the body and blood of Christ?  Why the crosses, why the prayers? Why the insistence on the empty tomb, and the idea that somebody is really up there listening to us?  Do these have nothing to do with empirical claims about the world?

Zimmerman, though seemingly a nice man, is also a deaf one. I am with him on promoting evolution and fighting creationism.  I’m not with him on enabling the superstitious nonsense that causes so much trouble in this world.  And, in the end, he oh-so-politely asks me to shut up:

Coyne and other “new atheists” share many values with religious leaders. If he would stop picking fights with those most likely to be his allies, he would dramatically improve science literacy. And he wouldn’t have to sacrifice any of the principles of science to do so.

What he means by “picking fights with allies” is, of course, pointing out that science and faith are incompatible.  Are you really asking me to stop that, Dr. Zimmerman?  And what is your evidence that my doing so would “dramatically improve science literacy”? I’m a small fish, and while I may have a tiny impact on science literacy, it’s surely not a dramatic one.

But please, Dr. Zimmerman, stop playing Mooney and claiming that my atheism is hurting science education. You don’t have a lick of evidence for that. Or, if that claim is something more than an unsupported opinion, give us the data. While I’m flattered by your description of me as a “world-class scientist and a fabulous writer,” I’d much rather that you quit telling me put a sock in it.

What Zimmerman refuses to acknowledge—he’s not dumb, so I can’t believe he doesn’t recognize it—is that people can come together for some causes but not others.  I’m with Obama on heath care, for instance, but dead against him on prohibiting gay marriage.  And I’m with Zimmerman on evolution, but against him on faith.  But I’m not telling him to shut up.

Update on Hauser case: some exoneration?

October 26, 2010 • 6:00 am

In today’s New York Times, Nicholas Wade continues his analysis of Harvard’s fraud case against primatologist Marc Hauser.  Hauser, you will recall, was found guilty by Harvard of eight charges of scientific misconduct, which may have included data fabrication, and was put on leave without pay for a year.  Hauser apologized (an excerpt follows):

I am deeply sorry for the problems this case has caused to my students, my colleagues, and my university..

I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes and I am deeply disappointed that this has led to a retraction and two corrections. I also feel terrible about the concerns regarding the other five cases, which involved either unpublished work or studies in which the record was corrected before submission for publication.

I hope that the scientific community will now wait for the federal investigative agencies to make their final conclusions based on the material that they have available.

The Times reports that some colleagues are now coming to Hauser’s defense, a journal editor who accused him of fraud is backing off, and a critical experiment, whose results seemed fraudulent, may show nothing more than carelessness in setting up the protocol.

The article contains a good deal of special pleading about the experiments by Hauser, and I suppose that this may all be some sort of ghastly misunderstanding.  It’s a mess, and the investigation by the government’s Office of Research Integrity could take years.

Culinary delights of the Lower East Side: Yonah Shimmel’s

October 26, 2010 • 5:25 am

The breakfast stop on the Lower East Side Food Tour is always Yonah Shimmel’s, another classic Houston Street institution (note that it celebrates its 100th birthday this year):

You go to Yonah’s for one thing: knishes, those stodgy lumps of potato-filled dough that somehow hit the spot early in the morning—especially on a chilly day.  You’ll need plenty of coffee to wash them down.  If you eschew the venerable potato knish, there’s also kasha (filled with buckwheat groats), and, for the thoroughly yuppified—i.e., those who like large fluffy bagels—there are even mushroom, cherry, and spinach knishes.

But let’s stick with the basics.  Breakfast with nephew Steven:

Coffee with real cream, a belly-busting potato knish and—the kicker—a glass of cold borscht with sour cream. Oh! Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Yes, there are better knishes elsewhere in the city, and yes, the hands that make them are now more likely to be Hispanic than Jewish, but as a slice of Jewish history Yonah’s cannot be beat.  When I eat there, I always think about my maternal grandparents, David Frank from Russia and Salie Mermelstein from Poland, who both (and independently) started their new lives in the lower East Side after the long boat trip from Europe. Perhaps they too ate at Yonah’s!

See a short video of the food of Houston Street (pronounced “HOW-stun”) by Joshua Russ Tupper, whose family owns an upcoming joint: Russ and Daughters, the Mecca for smoked-fish lovers.  The bit about Yonah’s starts at 1:50.