Sandwich Wednesday – Lox & Bagels – Early Food Memories

Sometimes I wish my dad had been a mobster: they have such fantastic Sunday suppers! A long, loud table and boatloads of pasta, sausage, roasts eaten amidst a blinding fog of garlic. Alas, Sunday on the upper east side was a bit different: the only gathering going on was around the dog-eared stack of takeout menus pulled reflexively from a shelf above the kitchen phone.

I do, however, have two profound food memories, both from the annual Christmas visit to our grandparents in Atlantic City. My parents would send my brother and me there by bus primarily, I now assume and appreciate, to get rid of us. But I will always treasure those times.

If you feel a little blue, I wouldn’t recommend a trip to Atlantic City, which is an unbelievably dismal place, especially in the heart of winter. The town has failed on virtually every level of the civics chart. In the late seventies, casinos invaded, tsunami-like, rapidly demolishing the old boardwalk hotels and shops. A neon skyline arose, with names like Trump, Resorts, and Tropicana. The highways and turnpikes were studded quickly with signs for high payout slots and Robert Goulet shows. Casino buses rolled in and out, carrying gamblers from surrounding states.

Long story short, it was a colossal failure. Instead of providing jobs, the casinos, facilitated by a series of corrupt officials, sucked the already limp life and commerce from the rest of the town, leaving in their wake a moonscape of urban carnage.

I sometimes drive there to pick up a few of the glorious torpedo-sized subs from White House Subs. I park as close as possible, make a run for it, like a marine dodging landmines, and sprint back clutching my subs as an old lady guards her purse.

You’d think it would be somewhat criminal to dump off your young children at Port Authority onto a bus headed straight for this nightmare, but the city wasn’t quite so bad then, and we were spoiled for a week by a fine set of grandparents. Actually, my grandfather was great, his wife was unpleasant, but we avoided her as much as possible.

They’d pick us up at the bus terminal, drive us to their apartment, where we bolted for the kitchen and flung open the cabinets over the fridge, revealing a small aisle of sugary cereals waiting to be devoured. For kids whose parents practice a monastic culinary self-denial (tasti-d-lite good, ice cream bad; the outside of bagels good, the inside of bagels bad; salt bad, sugar bad, fat bad, fat people worse), this was mecca. My grandparents beamed as we gorged ourselves on sweet, freakishly colored cereals. We must have been bouncing off the walls, which, I now realize, is a good reason to limit your kids’ intake of the stuff.

So a bowl of Sugar Smacks is my earliest and fondest food memory: an introduction to how food can lift you up and bring you down (All-Bran). But there was a greater sensation to come.

To Jewish grandparents, lox and bagels is an essential food group, and during that Christmas week, we consumed plenty of lox and bagels. At the end of the day, they would lay out a plate of sliced tomato, sweet onions, cream cheese, and lox. We piled them high between an onion bagel and ate in a silence broken only by my grandfather, who occasionally took deep swallows from his Michelob. Dinner was concluded with a square slice of Entenmann’s crumb cake, a sweet end to a perfect meal.

Because the lox and bagel sandwich is so simple, it requires first-rate ingredients i.e. ungreasy lox, a fresh bagel, Vidalia onion, a good tomato, and cream cheese which isn’t gummy. Lucky for us, Russ & Daughters is a short walk, and everything there is perfect: gravlax, whitefish, chopped liver, herring, a variety of cured salmon, pickles, cream cheese, caviar cream cheese, bagels, flagels, and so on.

For a recent family baby shower, we spread the table with a sackful of Russ & Daughters stuff.

The next evening, I was home alone. Our son was sleeping. I stood over the cutting board, opened an onion bagel, spread it with scallion cream cheese, sprinkled it liberally with thinly sliced sweet onion, draped over the remaining salmon, finished with tomato and the other half bagel. I sat down at the counter and ate in silence, washing it down with my beer.

Lox and Bagels
Makes 4

4 bagels (I like onion, but poppy seed or plain are perfectly fine)
3/4  pound good cream cheese (I like scallion)
1 vidalia onion, sliced thinly
1 large beefsteak tomato, sliced thinly
¾ pound fantastic lox, sliced thinly

1. Open bagel. Spread one half liberally with cream cheese. Top with, in order, a layer of onion, lox, and tomato. Close with the other half bagel. Eat.