A daughter learns the flavors of her parents' French heritage while shopping - and growing up - in Astoria

Written by Christine Shaffer

Originally published at Ediblequeens.com

In the 1970s the food stores, which lined Astoria’s Grand Avenue and Broadway made my French immigrant parents feel as though they were back in the old country. We lived on Crescent Street, around the corner from the 114^th Precinct and Lanterna, the first “fancy” restaurant I ever ate in. My parents walked the five blocks up the avenue from Crescent, with their metal folding shopping cart, past the double R elevated subway station to 33^rd Street, to Elliniki Agora, their favorite fruit and vegetable stand. This was the first stop on their trek all those Saturday afternoons, to buy the food needed to recreate their native meals they missed so much.

Elliniki Agora reminded my mother and father of the open air markets of Paris. It was their mini version of Les Halles. Elliniki had the same endless pyramids of apples, oranges, plums, peaches; the same orderly cucumbers and celery stalks stacked up like neat canoes. Elliniki sold every variety of potato from Red Bliss to Idaho, from wooden crates as though they had just been brought in from the fields while in nearby containers, red peppers nestled against unblemished artichokes, which looked like they had just sprouted there.

In this shop, my father picked his perfect eggplant to make his ratatouille, plump green beans for his salade niçoise, just ripened tomatoes for his tomates farcie, which he stuffed later with ground beef, yellow onions and garlic.

Three blocks away from Elliniki, my father walked to Dave and Tony’s, the Italian deli. My parents saw it as their charcuterie, where they purchased the weeks’ cold cuts, the saucisson sec, the dried salamis, which became my school lunch: salami and butter sandwiches on white bread with cornichons on the side.

If it was a Friday, Lent or not, my parents and I always ate fish, which my father purchased from the Ocean One Fish Market on 35^th Street. Ocean One was a deep rectangular shop with slanted counters filled with ice and one long row of different types of fish, some cut into sections, others with their mouths still slightly open, as though they had just been unhooked from the line.

Four fishmongers in their white lab coats bantered loudly while they slapped the customer’s chosen fish onto wax paper, weighed it, then wrapped and tucked the fish into a brown paper bag, all in a flurry like a quick origami demonstration.

My father placed his order in his broken English that matched the broken English of the fishmonger. His order was always either three fillets of sole, or cod or scrod.   My father saved this errand for last because his rule was that seafood was not to be dilly-dallied with –– once purchased, you had to rush home and put it in the freezer. The worst thing, my father told me was rotting seafood. And to have to throw it away at these prices, well, you only had yourself to blame if your scrod went bad.

My father’s fish never went bad, instead he perfectly sautéed those three filets in a light batter of flour and milk, his sole meunière. He topped this trio with a sprinkling of parsley and melted butter just before it browned then served them up with a side of warm, puffy pillows of boiled potatoes.

Meat was purchased at the Arlington Meat Market on Broadway and 34^th Street. My father only dealt with Jerry, the tall, patient head butcher because he gave my father what he wanted, which was to be invited to come behind the counter where no customers were allowed and to point to the cut of meat he desired and watch Jerry trim the fat. My father stood on this holy spot and gave Jerry his final approval on the four filet mignons, or the shell steaks, the ground beef, the shank or the all-important pair of marrow bones that he used in his pot au feu, which took him a day and a half to make.

Five blocks away from the Arlington Meat Market was a grocery store owned by a man from Switzerland with perpetual red cheeks. He was from the French speaking part of Switzerland, so for my parents, that was close enough. It was as though he was one of them.

My parents did not go to his store often since all his products were imported, making them too expensive –– unless there was a special family occasion –– where a homemade lunch was required and my cousins, aunts and uncles were invited and French food was going to be served: authentic French peas, tripe, rillettes, brie, andouille, boudin, camembert, pâté –– all delicacies this Swiss man sold.

His narrow shop smelled like France to me, with its aroma of a wood burning fireplace and hay, just like my grandmother’s farmhouse in Brittany. It had sawdusted, creaky dark floorboards and both sides of the store had high shelves with a rolling ladder. These shelves held French treasures: the purple Milkachocolate bars, the Haribo jelly candies, the Malabars, the nougats, the pastilles Valda, the LU butter biscuits, the crêpe dentelle cookies, sardines in tomato sauce, cornichons and strong mustards.

The Swiss man also sold escargots, which became the major food focus of my childhood. Those snails came packed in water, twenty four of them stuffed in a can no bigger than Starkist Tuna. I suffered the taunts of my fourth-grade classmates at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School for them. (“You eat what?? Escar-whats? Snails? Why? Don’t they taste like snot? Oh. My. God. You’re so gross.”) Once a year, starting with my ninth birthday, my father prepared those glorious gastropods by baking them in shallot butter, in their shells. And every time, my mouth was greeted with the same sensation: the strong scent of shallot filled my nostrils first as tart and sweet mixed on my tongue and then the shallot exploded divinely against the ridge of the snail. This was the most magnificent thing I had ever tasted.

And it all came from a can in a shop in Astoria, Queens, New York.

But of course, it was all much more than that. Those Astoria shops made my parents feel at home when they were far from theirs. They were already assimilating to life in America during those years, learning its language, watching its television programs, taking its subways to manual labor jobs, but they were not going to give up their food. They were not going to disappear. Those stores in Astoria provided my parents with the ingredients so they could continue to prepare their French cuisine, which they presented to me every day –– at every meal, as my heritage and, in turn –– my identity.