The Talented Mr. Skelansky
In addition to doing whatever shopping is necessary each day. Aside from prepping orders for cooking later in the day. Parallel to scanning my walk-in inventory to see what produce I need to make swift use of in some creative fashion each day. There’s the challenge I face each morning willed to me my Mr. Skelansky, the CFO of our family grocery business when I was young: Tell me, Martin, one new thing you learned today. Well, Mr. Skelansky, I’d like to tell him, right now I’m learning about southern foodways.
There are two gifts from my childhood from family friends that I prize above all others — oddly enough they both came from finance people, not sure what to make of that.
Philip Hoffman, my dad’s closest friend from his childhood, a brilliant, modest, intensely curious, lifelong bachelor who lived spartan-like with his mom, ran the local Workman Circle Credit Union as a revolving bank for the local Jewish community, and spent zero money on himself ever except, interestingly enough, on meticulously hand-tailed suits, Philip Hoffman, who was our CPA (a socialist CPA, how about that), gifted to me on my 13th birthday around two dozen hard-covered books ranging across disparate fields of learning. Some of those books I could read immediately. Some would have to wait until my college years. Books on history, science, education, economics, you name it. That gift from Philip Hoffman became the basis for my personal library, a library that would grow geometrically over the years, but never had the fineness and intelligence of that well-curated birthday gift a long time ago.
And then then was Mr. Skelansky. I don’t think I ever knew his first name. He hailed from New York or New Jersey, was a math phenomenon, and also intensely curious in his own way. Whenever he saw me back in those days, he had one and only one question for me: What new thing did you learn today? And that was his gift to me, that singular challenge.
As wonky as it sounds, I find it hard if not impossible to go to bed at night without having an answer to this question, as if my fitness for waking up the next day hinges on some positive use I hade of the day closing in on me. Over the years, of course, the subject matters have changed. These days in our soul food kitchen, the subject matter is 95% cooking. And , nope, learning a new recipe doesn’t count. Not sure I can tell you why except to say that this seems less about learning and more akin to a paint-by-numbers coloring book, something my mom always eschewed for her kids. Nope, it’s got to be something about the history of a dish or the culture behind a type of cooking or some technique in the kitchen, something like that.
It’s a blessing, really. A blessing and something of a bane. Today, I think I’m going to take a stab at braising and glazing in a vegetable’s own juice, carrots most likely. Later on, I guess I’ll figure what the hell I want to do with them. Not Mr. Skelansky’s problem.
