By Their Refrigerator Ye Shall Know Them

The roster of Slashfood bloggers, which appears prominently alongside these words, tells a sad tale about Mr. Josh Ozersky.  Dead last, and with a grand total of no comments, I seem to be a basement dweller here at Slashfood, where even the most unprovocative of pie recipes inspires more interest than one of my prolix and melancholy meditations.  I don’t blame the Slashfood reader.  I myself am oppressed by this spherical prison of ego in which I live.  You only have to read this blog; I have to live it.  

The good part, though, is that I have a chance to write honestly about food, a rarity for a professional.  As a restaurant critic for one of the city’s major papers, I write from the perspective of my ideal reader, a well-informed, hungry, open-minded gourmand, eager to find the next exotic Bosnian porridge, or Uzbek kebab.  But, like a haute couture designer who pads around the house in boxers and a wife-beater, my actual eating habits in private are stark and sad. 

Take my refrigerator.  I have just moved into a brand new apartment in an out-of-the-way part of Brooklyn.  There are still boxes in my closets; the ground-floor windows don’t have blinds, because I’m too inept to put them up without adult supervision.  That’s all right, but I have much to answer for when it comes to the contents of my refrigerator.  Here is what it contains.

·        A 16-ounce can of Busch, found serendipitously on a hallway window sill, and a 16-ounce can of Budweiser (origin unknown);

·        A freezer bag containing an obese wedge of chocolate cake, preserved from my August 22 birthday party;

·        A five-pound bag of Swedish meatballs from Ikea, defrosted, with a jagged, impatient hole torn in its front ;

·        A bent bottle of Sprite;

·        A 12 oz can of Coke;

·        A half-open plastic bag, containing a quarter-open paper bag, containing the neatly packaged remains of a dinner at Waterfront International Enterprises, a Northern Chinese restaurant in Flushing I am reviewing for next week;

·        A plate with two apples and a plum.

When I look at this list, I am struck by several things – its unwholesomeness, its haphazardness, its unloved, undomesticated quality.  It isn’t the larder of a home, but rather something you would find in a bear’s cave, or – more charitably  -- a madman’s sanctuary.  A fallout shelter maybe.  The abode of elderly twin hermits, found dead under piles of newspapers.  You get the picture.  

But I am also struck by the secret signs of love and friendship here.  The cake was made for me by my friend Rozanne Gold, the chef and cookbook author.  It was enormous, intensely moist and potent with dark chocolate cake, dense cool mousse, and a gorgeous bittersweet frosting that took the chocolate taste to a whole new level.  It had a second tier and aquamarine highlights, and weighed as much as a thanksgiving turkey when first delivered.  Rozanne wanted to make it with some kind of raspberry or other fruit flavor, but as it was my birthday, I thought I could get away with asserting my desire to have just chocolate and plenty of it.  Who the hell wants fruit on a cake?  So she had the chocolate cake to end all chocolate cakes made for me.

This cake, unwrapped and unboxed, sat afterward on the center shelf of the refrigerator in my previous apartment.  After slashing crudely at it for a few days, I somehow found the presence of mind to slice it in big pieces, wrap each one in Key Food brand plastic wrap, and drop it into a one-gallon freezer bag.  When it came time to move, at the last possible minute, I sat on my step, waiting for movers who were two hours late.  The panic rose, and it was my good luck that another undeserved friend, Henry Tenney, happened to be eating dinner with his family down the block.  I summoned that good ruddy Scotchman over, and entrusted him with the bags of frozen cake, along with two bags of Big Island Barbecue’s Grand Championship pork from the Hudson Valley Rib Off, which I was saving as a kind of edible relic.  Both eventually made it into my new place, and though the barbecue went bad after a night left in my Cadillac, the cake, like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, accompanied me into my new life here.  I have eaten a little bit of it every day, and it raises my spirits.

 Then, too, there is the small plate of fruit.  There is almost no difference between my real self and my identity as Mr. Cutlets, New York’s Majarajah of Meat, and you might wonder what I was doing with something this healthy.  That was something I bought for my sweet Patricia, so she wouldn’t be forced to eat the leathery Ikea meatballs.  The apples and plum were bought from a vendor on Flatbush Avenue, and I carried them home and carefully put them on a plate.  They look very nice there, a Cezanne still life, and I will take them out when she comes by tomorrow, setting them on the counter to warm up.  When she is here I will also make her Lipton tea, with the second teabag from a grim box of 500  bought at an Indian bodega on the corner.  (The previous teabag was was immersed for her on Monday.)

I know that sometime soon, perhaps this very night, I will make a meal of Busch and Swedish meatballs, possibly warmed up in the toaster oven, or possibly taken chilled like bon bons.  But this is not the meal of the man I want to be.  In the apartment of my dreams, my refrigerator is filled with smuggled gifts and readied presents for other people.  It cheers me to think that it is already halfway there.