Back of photo marked: San Francisco Oct 1937.
Imagined History:
The Food Lovers
(Or, Peacocks on 3rd Street)
Over lunch at Solari’s, Corpy told Millie about the fabulously rich and accessorized railroad supply
salesman “Diamond Jim” Brady and the voluptuous stage performer Lillian Russell,
infamous food friends of 1890s New York. Millie listened intently while Corpy
regaled her with tales of the duo’s indulgences. He told her that, though it was
generally believed their forty-year relationship was an affair, what the two
seemed mostly to do together was eat—huge, heaping, saucy, extravagant,
mind-boggling amounts of food. Contemporary account gave witness to the two of
them downing fifty fried oysters each at Brady’s dependable haunt, Rector’s
Restaurant, before moving on to multiple courses. These two prodigious stomachs
were very serious about food. And certainly, Corpy said between mouthfuls of Solari’s
famous sweetbreads dish, it was a relationship to rival the most passionate
affair. Millie’s soup spoon paused midway to her lips at this comment, and she
felt her cheeks get momentarily warm.
Corpy was actually Conrad P. Favrille,
a well-traveled textile importer with offices in the venerable Flood Building
on Market Street.
He earned is nickname from a mention by a San Francisco newspaper social
columnist one April day:
“…it
must be spring, because corpulent businessman C.R. Favrille has popped up from
his dietary winter warren and appears unalarmed by his own monumental shadow.
He was spotted at the counter of Hange’s Restaurant, at Chinatown
Gate, for the third time this week. The fantastically corpy Fav tucked into
three orders of abalone eaten with a mountain of hot French rolls and tartar
sauce, and finished off with two orders of the orange soufflé!”
Thereafter friends and acquaintances
alike called him Corpy, including the typist in his office, Millie. She was a
straightforward twenty-six-year-old from Sacramento with a wide scrubbed face,
a toothy smile, a big appetite, and a little taste for adventure. Millie was
enjoying her city life, and was grateful to have a job at a time when many of
her old school friends were casting about for work or struggling with numerous
children. Still, her plan was to eventually go home and help her father and
brother with the family produce business.
“There’s no hanky-panky,” Millie told her roommate, Leona, impatiently. “We
just started taking lunches together, talking about our shared love of food and
cooking. It’s just pleasant.” She explained that Corpy’s wife was
a meticulous woman with a very delicate stomach who couldn’t bear cooking
smells of any sort. She had met the much younger Millie at the office, observed
to her husband that she seemed to be a genuine good girl, and was eventually
grateful that he had someone nice to take regular meals with outside of the
home. The fact that tongues wagged didn’t seem to bother his wife at all, for
it was her usual desire to be left alone for a meal of Saltine crackers and
cold boiled chicken, a preference which she was now more at liberty to enjoy.
When he was home, the insatiable Corpy would goad their cook into frenzies with
his food demands. As she tried to satisfy his culinary needs the house would be
redolent with aromas and disrupted for days. Mrs. Favrille would be beside
herself. Millie helped bring about the relief that the fragile woman craved.
Corpy and Millie hit the finest
established restaurants to the simplest lunch counters. One evening after work
found them luxuriously ensconced at the Palace Hotel restaurant nibbling crab
legs and strawberries a la Ritz.
Another evening, after Corpy took her along to a business meeting on Van Ness
Avenue, he hired a cab to drive them out to Chutes-at-the-Beach amusement park. They had a
huge feast of fried spring chicken and corn pones with honey at the rowdy Topsy’s
Roost restaurant, then took a digestive stroll in the ocean air. Millie
marveled at Corpy while he stopped and stood beneath the striped awning of a
Hires Root Beer stand. As his large, heavy arm lifted the little mug, his
fleshy pinky finger was daintily held aloft from the glass. Afterwards he
insisted that she have her picture taken in a photo booth. He had an arcade
attendant immediately snip off his favorite shot, and into his billfold went
the image of her with Peter Pan collar and stylish white hat.
California Girl, 1930s
One afternoon, as the eating pair sat through
what turned out to be an uninspiring meal at the Nugget Grill, an old lunch standby,
one of their regular waiters tipped them off to an unusual eatery. Though he
usually enjoyed the Grill’s honeycomb tripe and rice Creole, on this day it
left Corpy gassy and unsatisfied. The waiter caught his regular customer’s
grumbling, and knowing of his penchant for new places, told the two of an
unmarked establishment worth visiting near to the rooming house where he
himself lived on 3rd Street, South of Market. It was in the basement
of a building which housed a used radio parts supplier in the storefront, and
the café’s chef and his family in the second floor flat. It was not an area
that the dining duo would have thought to go, populated as it mostly was with
rundown hotels, workingmen’s employment agencies, garages, laundries, and pawn
shops. But here resided The Peacock, a lunch and dinner room run by Hamzi
Burlettini, the son of an Italian cook and a Turkish-Italian waitress. According
to the Nugget Grill waiter, the house specialty was a large square of peacock
egg frittata for 25¢. A rumor had
circulated amongst the neighborhood men that this item was a magic hangover
cure as well as a boost to virility. He started doing so well at lunchtime that
he never bothered to put up the signboard his wife had painstakingly painted.
To Millie and Corpy this sounded like
an enticing destination. They procured directions from the waiter and a plan
was laid for a dinner rendezvous that night. They would meet at 3rd
Street and Market later in the evening after Corpy had gone home, had a sherry
with his wife, and patted the children. They would then venture down the street
together.
3rd Street, San Francisco, 1930s/40s
The vaporous evening cooled and the
two strolled down 3rd along with a flow of men pushing their ways
both up and down the street, returning from work in the downtown establishments
or South of Market factories, headed to their rooms and corner bars. The street
was a jumble of small warehouse buildings, multistory brick buildings, and
wooden Victorian storefronts with groceries and shops. They came to the radio
parts store, dark and closed for the night. As directed, they turned at the
alley and came to a side door with a peacock plume nailed to it, reached by
six descending cement steps. As they hesitated, a mournful, human
sounding screech come from behind the building. Startled, the two walked past
the basement door to the high wooden fence that surrounded the area behind the
building. Corpy was able to look over, and Millie peered through a knothole in
the wood.
In the glow of light from the
overlooking windows they could see it was a long, narrow yard strewn with rusted
cans, machine parts, broken crates, and an old cast-iron laundry wringer. And tiptoeing
around the garbage was a glorious peacock with his feathers spread and fanning
the air. He was following a fat peahen around the weedy junkyard. The famous frittata egg source revealed.
The door with the feather was
locked, and it took a few moments before their knocks were answered. They
stepped down into the low-ceilinged room, led in by a disgruntled looking
dark-eyed woman. The dining room was small and cluttered with mismatched chairs
around tables covered with the routine red-checked tablecloths and candles in
wine bottles. Scattered between the tables were threadbare geometric patterned
mats and rugs, and on the rough walls were painted crude murals of crenellated
castles and oversized peacocks. The overall affect was odd and Millie and Corpy
exchanged curious looks with each other.
“I’m sorry Sir, Madame, but we’ve ended
our dinner service early this evening.”
The
thin, mustachioed owner had come from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a rag, imploring
the two apologetically. “Perhaps an espresso and biscotti before you go, or a
little of my special honey almond pastry?”
Conrad P. Favrille was none too
pleased with this, as his stomach was growling and his expectations whetted. He
made an outraged fuss, much to Millie’s embarrassment, and soon the two were
seated, their candle lit, and a bottle of red wine brought out. Only a curtain hung over the door to
the kitchen, and immediately they heard husband and wife begin to argue.
“You promised on this night I
wouldn’t have to cook, clean, and serve! The children are sleeping, and I’m
ready to be taken to a proper restaurant like you promised!”
“Rosina, my love,” the husband
soothed. “We can still go. There are many hours left to our anniversary. Let me
cook for our new customers, and then I will take you anywhere in the city you
like."
Millie stood up and whispered to
Corpy that they should go, but he was determined at this point and only
continued to drink his wine and look amused.
“No! It’s either right now or I’m
going up to bed!” At this the wife broke down and began to sob.
They heard the low murmur of comforting
words. Suddenly, the curtain was pulled aside, and Hamzi reappeared.
“My new friends—please join us in
the kitchen. I’ve struck a deal with my dear wife, and we’d be grateful to have
you help us begin our anniversary celebration!”
They stepped into the spare but
clean basement kitchen, and sat down with Rosina at a round oak table in the
center of the room. The wine and candle were quickly brought, a dish of olives
and a large Mason jar of pickled eggs were set down, and Hamzi pulled items
from shelves and icebox and began to assemble them on the counter.
“He has offered something I don’t
believe he can do,” the sniffling Rosina explained. “From the usual old things
we keep in this kitchen, which I am sick to death of—both cooking and eating—he
is going to make a dish which is like nothing I’ve ever had, which he claims
will make him seem a prince to me. Ha! What a joke! I ask for a small thing, to
escape this place for just a few hours, and he can’t even do that for me!”
The two guests continued to drink
their wine, and Rosina appeared increasingly more
relaxed as she talked on, and the chef continued with his task.
“This crazy man thinks he's a
scholar! When we’re at church or when he is supposed to be returning from the
market in the morning—off he is at that library!”
“I like old and medieval things,”
Hamzi offered a little shyly. “I like to read about the herbs that were used,
the grand meals, the castles and harems. My mother read to me both King Arthur stories and the Thousand and One Nights tales when I was
young. And my father, who was also a cook, recited fantastic imagined menus to
me as he smoked his cigar on Sundays—so these interests combined for me.”
Rosina rolled her eyes at this, but
she sipped her wine and her mood was clearly improving.
“When my poultry man mentioned that
he had peacocks for sale out on his farm in Petaluma," the chef continued, "I described to him one of my
fathers imagined feasts which included a roasted peacock. He brought me two
peacock chicks on his next delivery, which I knew right away I would never
cook! I call the male Pete after Petrarca, you know, the Italian poet—and the
female is his Laura.”
“One of these nights, when they
start squawking I’m going to wring their necks, and we will cook them up!” Rosina said.
“Ah, she only says she doesn’t like
them. But look at the beautiful pictures she painted of them for me on the
restaurant walls! My wife only pretends not to indulge me.”
At this Rosina snorted into her
glass, but looked pleased. At the others’ urging, she went up the wooden stairs
to the flat above, and returned with several canvas boards she had painted of
more castles, peacocks, and a few halcyon landscapes. Corpy and Millie each
bought a painting from Rosina, to her blushing delight.
As the husband and wife talked, with
Corpy interjecting jolly comments here and there, Millie kept her eye on what
Hamzi was doing. When she couldn’t identify something he was chopping, cooking,
or stirring, she popped up and peered over his shoulder, sweetly and
flatteringly asking him questions.
What she was able to observe was this:
He poured a green liquid and a bit
of water into a small bowl from a bottle labeled Absenta, which he had located in the back of the pantry closet with
much shifting and rattling of glass. It was a Spanish absinthe, the source of
which he would not reveal to Millie, other then to say a “friend” had supplied
it. In the absinthe he soaked two large handfuls of dried cherries. A half
dozen or so sweet potatoes were then skinned, steamed, and mashed up in a bowl.
He produced a large goose liver from the icebox, which he had intended to make
into pâté. Instead he chopped it into very small pieces, and sautéed it in
olive oil with a clove of garlic, and chopped wild onions which he pulled from
a small herb garden in the peacock yard, nicely planted in half of an empty
wine barrel. From a jar he then poured a small amount of dark seeds into his
palm and sprinkled them into the skillet to be toasted together with slivered
almonds.
“What are those black seeds?” Millie
asked.
“They’re peony seeds. I’ve kept them
to give to Rosina with wine, now and again—a medieval cure for women’s ills and
to help in childbirth!”
In a separated skillet, he sautéed
small cubes of rabbit meat, stirring in the absinthe-soaked cherries a few
seconds before he removed the mixture from the pan. Next from the icebox came Hamzi’s
layers of paper thin dough, which he used as his dessert pastry. Each layer was
brushed with melted butter, and he cut the stacks into hand-sized teardrop
shapes, like the eye of a peacock feather. As far as Millie had been able to
tell, both the rabbit and goose liver mixtures were then combined in the bowl
of mashed sweet potato, together with several beaten peacock egg yokes, the
peony and almond seeds, a few pinches of nutmeg, then salt.
Hamzi then spooned a generous dollop
of the mixture on to each teardrop of dough, covered it with another cutout of
dough, and pressed the sides together like a turnover. Peacock egg white was
brushed over the domes, with a pinch of cinnamon on each. And into the oven the
tray went.
Two more bottles of red were opened
as the four sat and laughed around the table and the baking smells began to
snake enticingly, exotically around the room. Corpy told stories of dining in
Paris and New York, and Hamzi related his early days of shadowing his father in
a string of San Francisco restaurant kitchens.
For Millie it had been a few hours
of drinking wine with only olives and nibbles of an egg in her stomach. Memories
of the evening from that point on seemed to be filtered through a sort of warm
fog. She and Rosina talked and laughed at one side of the table, but later she
had no idea what it had all been about.
Finally, the puffs came out of the
oven, and powdered sugar was lightly sprinkled over the tops. They were put in
a large low-sided pasta bowl, a steaming mountain of golden pastry. The
conversation stopped and Hamzi pulled his chair close to his wife’s and laid a
cloth napkin over her knees. He picked up a roll and held it in front of her
lips, watching her intently as she bit down into a flurry of steam and pastry
flakes. The three of them sat motionless as Rosina slowly chewed with her eyes
closed. She opened her eyes and peered at her husband, then leaned in for
another bite from his hand. The second bite brought on a soft moan of
appreciation, and she took her husband’s cheeks between her hands and gave him
a long kiss, the sugary flakes all over each of their lips. When she released
him with a smile on his face, their guests began to clap and cheer. There was
no more talk of the husband and wife going out to a restaurant, though Hamzi
had succeeded in the bet and produced something delectable from his pantry like
nothing Rosina had ever tasted. At this, the others reached to the bowl and
were soon lost in their own savoring and marveling at the creation. There were plenty
to gorge them all, and they ate until there was nothing left.
The transition was hazy to Millie,
but at a certain juncture Rosina was sitting straddled on her husband’s lap,
kissing him wildly and scrabbling her pastry-flake-covered fingers through his
dark hair.
Corpy stood up and took Millie’s
elbow, their two small paintings under his arm. The room seemed to pitch a little as she got out of her chair. He
left a generous roll of money under the rim of the empty bowl, and they crept
through the darkened dining room and up onto the street.
Before they headed to the street to
find a taxi, they went back to the fence to see the peacocks. Laura the peahen
was hidden somewhere in the shadows of the yard, but Pete was perched
majestically on the top finial of the old clothes mangle, which looked almost
like a Victorian printing press with its large spoked side wheel and flattening
rollers. His blue body feathers shimmered in the faint, filtered light, and his
long train of feathers draped folded and resting on the ground below him.
As they walked towards Market
Street, a black cab emerged fortuitously out of the fog. Settled in the back,
her white felt-gloved hands clasped together against the chill, Millie waited
for Corpy to first give her apartment building on Ellis Street, where her
roommate was no doubt wondering where she was, and then his own Pacific Heights
address. He stayed silent after the cabbie’s “where to?” and then a large hand
came slowly and delicately to rest on a silk-stocking-covered knee.
Notes:
The
peacock puffs in this short fiction are a purely imagined dish. Don’t
try this at home… unless you have the skill to make it a palatable reality (maybe substituting the rabbit?!)! In
which case, please send me a full report and a detailed recipe!
Menu items
for Solari’s Restaurant, The Palace Hotel, The Gold Nugget, Hange’s Restaurant,
and Topsy’s Roost all taken from Eating
Around San Francisco, Thompson, Ruth and Chef Louis Hanges, Sutton House
LTD., San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York: 1937.
The large, bling-bedecked
James Buchannan“Diamond Jim” Brady and buxom performer Lillian Russell were Gilded
Age New York food buddies. Theirs was a very modern platonic-gastronomic
relationship. Or at least, the reported gargantuan extent of their gorging
makes me believe that it was probably the only shared intimacy they regularly
had the energy to indulge in!
