A Bowl of Memory

This is a bowl of cottage cheese, sour cream, and chopped raw red onion.

I acquired the taste for this thanks to one of my earliest full-time employers, one of two partners who owned an aquarium and pet shop that I managed for about five years, the latter half of my first career. The shop was in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the same neighborhood I grew up in.

This was a dish that one of the owners routinely ate at the local diner for lunch. He had to special order it—it was something like a side dish of cottage cheese with the sour cream and chopped onion as add-ons—but they knew it was a regular thing for him. I learned of it from him and it has become a favored lunch dish of mine ever since, now fifty years hence.

It’s mildly annoying that I tend to think of him whenever I make this dish, because he was a sociopath, a deeply unpleasant bullshitter and manipulator. He was my first sociopath, in fact, albeit I would meet my second not long after. Some two percent of the general population are sociopathic, and only one of two percent of those become violent criminals—the rest, like this one, are sometimes successful in business, thanks to their thorough lack of ethics holding them back when making business decisions. Most of us meet one or two in the course of our lives; thanks to a career in show business and a great deal of international travel, I’ve been fortunate enough to make more friends than the average person, and unfortunate enough to meet more than the typical quantity of sociopaths, while the percentages remain the same.

So when I think of this dish, I think of a sociopath, a man who brought much misery to my life—and who was the reason I eventually quit my job and that career path—but gave me one good thing by which I am forever trapped into thinking of him repeatedly whenever I enjoy it.

But I also think of my maternal grandmother, whom I associate with cottage cheese, because she always had it in the refrigerator and seemed to be constantly eating it, sometimes with a slice of cantaloupe, other times with raw vegetables cut into it, like carrots or celery or radishes. It would not be until decades later that I would learn this was a common dish in certain quarters, known among American Jews and delicatessens sometimes as “Jewish Chop Suey.”

I didn’t like cottage cheese as a kid. I liked sour cream even less, which was a favorite food of my father’s. My dad also loved raw onion in any form, in many dishes, and always on sandwiches. As it turned out, I share these tastes today enthusiastically, but I can remember as a child finding all of these things distasteful—including buttermilk, which he would occasionally swig from the carton, for which I never did develop any affection.

But whether piling thinly sliced raw onion on a sandwich or a salad, or adding a bit too much sour cream to my cottage cheese—along with the raw red onion—I not only think often of my father, and the countless tastes and enthusiasms I learned from him, but also of the interesting phenomenon of maturing palates. I still often pause, when pondering foods and flavors, at the seeming natural but somehow mysterious progression of adopting flavors of many sorts that one cannot tolerate as a child. Sour cream was a big one of those. But then of course one thinks of how the day magically transpires during which a snifter of cognac suddenly tastes appealing, and all the more so with the miraculous addition of a good cigar—all triggers that at an earlier age would leave one retching in the bathroom.

I came to learn of the “Jewish Chop Suey” moniker for my grandmother’s common snack dish thanks to my interest in the history of magic, and particularly in the life and times of the legendary Harry Houdini, the greatest of all escape artists, whose name remains a commonplace in popular culture, now almost a century after his death. Houdini died of acute peritonitis, the result of a ruptured appendix left untreated while he suffered the undiagnosed pain, touring doing his final full-evening show of magic, spiritualism exposes, and escapes. This was the only such show Houdini had ever toured with, fulfilling a lifelong dream, because while he had a passion for magic and thought of himself as a magician, he had actually made his fame and fortune almost entirely as an escape artist, an elite headliner doing twenty-minute turns in Vaudeville for top money.

He would be denied the opportunity to complete that final tour because of his fatal illness, which he resisted treating because he had theaters filled with ticket-holders that warranted entertaining, and because he did not wish to see a doctor other than his own New York physician. While the story still persists that a college student who punched Houdini in the stomach backstage was responsible for the ruptured appendix, medically speaking this now seems highly unlikely, although it may have served to aggravate an already existing condition. He was traveling in Montreal when his wife Bess finally brought a doctor to see him, and who demanded that he immediately check into a hospital. When they opened him up it was clearly too late to treat him, so they closed him up and told Beth that her husband was doomed; penicillin would be discovered a mere decade later, and had it been available at the time, I might have had the long-shot chance to meet Houdini in his elder years. Meanwhile, rather than dying the next day as the doctors had anticipated, Houdini, a strapping specimen of strength and good health in his fifties, held on for a week. On Hallowe’en of 1926 he said to Bess that he was "tired of fighting," and then he was gone.

In my extensive studies of Houdini, I happened across an account that in those final days he had asked Bess to bring him a bowl of Jewish Chop Suey, a favorite dish, one that Houdini, the son of an immigrant rabbi, had likely known since childhood. While Bess brought a serving to the hospital, it's highly unlikely that Houdini would have been able to consume more than a bare taste by that time. Perhaps it was enough to draw a smile from a dying man.

I never acquired an appetite for the chopped vegetables that were part of what I now think of as Houdini's last meal. When I eventually adopted the dish, it comprised this minimalist version, featuring my grandmother’s cottage cheese, my father’s sour cream and onions, and the sociopath employer’s particular recipe.

A simple dish for lunch.

A maze of memory for life.