Russ & Daughters Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Federman

  Foreword copyright © 2013 by Calvin Trillin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are courtesy of the author and Russ & Daughters. Color photographs copyright © Belathée Photography.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Columbia University Press for permission to reprint “The Soul of a Store” by Mark Russ Federman from Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch. Copyright © 2009 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Federman, Mark Russ.

  Russ & Daughters : reflections and recipes from the house that herring built / Mark Russ Federman ; foreword by Calvin Trillin.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-8052-4311-6

  1. Russ & Daughters—History. 2. Appetizers—New York (State)—New York.

  3. Jewish cooking—New York (State)—New York. I. Title. TX945.5.R86 2013 641.5’676—dc23 2012023902

  www.schocken.com

  Jacket photographs by Lesley Unruh

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1

  To Hattie, Ida, and Anne—the Russ Daughters

  Without them, there would be no store and no stories

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Calvin Trillin

  Introduction

  1. Our History, Sliced Thin

  Mushroom Barley Soup

  2. The Family: Growing Up Fishy

  Lox, Eggs, and Onions

  3. The Employees: The Extended Family

  Herring in Parchment

  4. The Customers: I’ll Have a Quarter Pound of Lox, One Filleted Herring, and Your Kishkes

  Beet, Apple, and Herring Salad

  Fruit Strudel

  5. The Neighborhood: From Pushcart to Posh

  Egg Cream

  Cheese Blintzes

  6. The Products: What We Sell

  Whitefish and Baked Salmon Salad

  Smoked Salmon Tartare

  7. The Holidays: All Year Round

  Potato Latkes

  8. The Business Model: Our Way

  Bagel Chips

  Bagel Pudding with Prunes and Raisins

  9. The Legacy: A Burden or a Blessing; Kvetch or Kvell

  Lox Chowder

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Photo Insert

  FOREWORD BY CALVIN TRILLIN

  When my daughters were small, I used to go to Russ & Daughters on Sunday mornings to have them appreciated. Oh, sure, I’d buy some smoked salmon while I was there. I’d get a little whitefish salad. I might buy a smoked trout or two. On some Sundays, I would spend a few minutes pondering my father’s dismissal of chopped herring as the sort of thing Litvaks (Jews from Lithuania) eat; my father, who was brought as an infant to Missouri from the Ukraine, considered Litvaks, including my maternal grandmother and her entire family, faintly risible. Then I’d get some chopped herring. I might treat myself to some pickled lox. (Yes, of course, with cream and onions; it is customary for me to eat everything with everything.) It was all merchandise of the highest quality, of course—all the more delectable to me because of having endured a childhood without such food in Kansas City, where, as one of my daughters observed at the age of four, the bagels just taste like round bread. Still, I was there to have my daughters appreciated, and in that endeavor I was never disappointed.

  At Russ & Daughters a particularly adorable two-year-old didn’t get the quick smile and cursory “Isn’t she dear” that you might hear from, say, the proprietor of an English tearoom. The daughters of Joel Russ, The Founder, were running the place then, along with their husbands, and they were people who had fully absorbed the profound teaching of Willy Loman’s wife: “Attention must be paid.” Am I just imagining it, or did one of them, while emerging from behind the counter to get within cheek-pinching range of one of my daughters, sometimes say to her colleagues, “How can you stand there and slice fish with a face like that in the store?” Once, when my girls were still small, a friend of mine informed me that he had found a smoked-salmon supplier in the Canadian Maritimes who shipped superb salmon at much lower than New York prices. “No, thank you,” I said. “There are some things that cannot be done by mail.”

  While the salmon was being sliced, I would entertain my daughters with my only magic trick, palming gummy-fish and pretending to pull one out of one of their ears. Then we would go next door to Ben’s Dairy, a tiny store that was run by a strong-minded man who once responded to a French embargo on spare parts for Israeli jets by putting up a sign that said UNTIL GENERAL DE GAULLE CHANGES HIS POLICY TOWARD ISRAEL, BEN SELLS NO MORE FRENCH CHEESE. At Ben’s we’d get cream cheese and a loaf of baked farmer’s cheese with scallions. Then we’d go next door to Tanenbaum’s Bakery, where we purchased, among other baked goods, some gnarly and oniony little black pumpernickel bagels that my older daughter devoured on Sunday and dreamed of for the rest of the week.

  Ben’s Dairy and Tanenbaum’s are long gone, most of their specialties folded into the Russ & Daughters inventory. My daughters grew up, left for college, and eventually started families of their own. But Russ & Daughters still looks about the same as it did when I described it, around forty years ago, as a refutation of the false teaching that a store that sells pickled herring cannot have character and a clean display case at the same time. There have been some changes, of course. The store shopping bag, for instance, has a contemporary design and no longer bears the old motto “Queens of Lake Sturgeon.” The shelves include some upscale items that would not have been familiar to The Founder. Still, in the hands of the fourth generation of Russes, Russ & Daughters is essentially unchanged. I know, because I can often be found there on a Sunday morning.

  My salmon is still sliced by Herman Vargas, the rare Yiddish-speaking Dominican, who has worked at Russ & Daughters for more than thirty years; I know him as Herman the Artistic Slicer, although he no longer wears a name badge identifying him as that. On Sundays these days, while waiting for Herman to produce slices thin enough to read The New York Times through—not the big-print edition; I’m talking about the regular—I pretend to pull gummy-fish out of the ears of my grandchildren. They have been brought to Russ & Daughters to be appreciated.

  INTRODUCTION

  It’s hard to forget your ancestors when they’re staring down at you from the walls above the top shelves. Some of the portraits are near the olives, others are by the dried-fruit baskets, and some are next to the caviar display. Not only are they staring down, but they’re also passing judgment: “The showcase glass has fingerprint smudges.” “The lox knives and cutting board need to be wiped clean.” “The pickled herrings have to be filled in.” “Why isn’t somebody answering the phone?” Some—if not most—days, you’d like to forget them, especially when you’re tired. But we’re the Russ family. We’re not allowed to be tired. We have been selling herring, lox, caviar, and candy on the Lower East Side of New York City for one hundred years. From the frames above the shelves, the ancestral message is clear: “We’re only as good as our last quarter pound of lox.” This is our yichis.

  Yichis is Yiddish for “pedigree,” or “lineage,” and in Jewish tradition it means having notable rabbinic ancestors, or ancestors who were community leaders of whatever European village or town your family
came from. That mantle is usually passed down from generation to generation along the male line. But Yiddish is a language that adapts itself to the usually temporary residences of Jews who have been forced for the last thousand years from one place to another. And so, on the Lower East Side, yichis has been used to describe any family business that has had the rare good fortune to survive the generational transfer from father to son. In our case, the business was originally passed down not from father to son but from father to daughters. In our family there is no royalty—no rabbis, no community leaders. We are clearly peasant stock, and what is being passed down is not religion but fish: smoked, cured, and pickled.

  This is our yichis, the hard work and the satisfaction of selling herring: of getting the fish into the store each morning, of arranging the displays hundreds of times each day, of customers buying and countermen selling, and, it is to be hoped, of making a profit in the process.

  I am now sixty-seven years old and have passed the business on to the next generation. I was the transitional generation. I took over the family fish store at a time when both the business and the neighborhood were in decline. I inherited a mom-and-pop business model and a Depression-era mentality. And I struggled, much like the generations before me, to keep the business alive. Now, no longer the “Mr. Russ” in charge, I have the opportunity to reflect rather than react. I can think about all of the changes that my family has witnessed over the past one hundred years from behind the counter of our appetizing store on the Lower East Side. In my retirement, I no longer have to stand behind the counter; I get to sit on the bench in front of the store under the neon sign Grandpa Russ installed in 1950.

  The top line of the sign reads RUSS & DAUGHTERS in green neon. The bottom line, in red neon, reads APPETIZERS. They are flanked by tricolor—white, yellow, and blue—neon fish. The fish are of indeterminate species. Some people might think they look like herring; others may be sure they are whitefish or salmon. That’s fine with us; we’re not sure what they are, either.

  What the sign does not say is “Since 1914.” For my grandfather, who founded the store, and his three daughters and their husbands, who ran the store until I took over thirty-five years ago, this wasn’t important at the time. Longevity was measured in months and years, certainly not in decades. Staying in business was a struggle, a matter of survival. Now, in 2012, it seems impressive. Ninety-nine years in business is something to be proud of. It’s actually 106 years, if you start counting in 1907, the year Grandpa Russ arrived in this country and filled his first pushcart with herring on Hester Street on the Lower East Side. But why quibble? Let’s split the difference and call it a hundred.

  The Lower East Side of 2012 bears no resemblance to the Jewish ghetto where my grandfather arrived in 1907. Almost everything has changed. Our customers are no longer just Eastern European Jews. They come from every ethnic group in America, and from all over the world. We now get both the subway set and the jet set. Our products have become mainstream. The once humble herring is now haute cuisine. And who doesn’t like bagels and lox? While we once did business strictly across the counter, we now sell our products across cyberspace. Our neighborhood has gone from squalid ghetto to tenement chic. And the hardworking Russ family has changed, too. We are now hardworking and have advanced university degrees.

  The Russ & Daughters storefront

  Yet for all of the changes, there are some things that haven’t changed at all. We still work with our hands. We may take orders over the Internet, but the fish is still sliced and filleted by hand, wrapped by hand, and packed for shipping by hand. We still give personal attention to our customers. We know many of them by name, and we know the names of their spouses, children, and pets. We remember their joys and their sorrows, and we listen as they tell us about both, dispensing advice when needed. It has been said that New York has a love affair with Russ & Daughters. It is equally true that Russ & Daughters is in love with New York and New Yorkers.

  But you don’t have to be a New Yorker—nor do you need to be Jewish—to understand and appreciate our family’s story. Every immigrant group has a similar story: first the struggle to survive and then to make its way into the American mainstream. And each community cherishes its own specialty food stores that have helped it retain and celebrate a part of its unique culture. It’s the store you went to with your mother or father, grandmother or grandfather, where you were greeted by the owner with a pat on the head or a pinch of the cheek, where you breathed in an aroma that has become part of your sensory memory, an aroma that you carried into your house with the shopping bags full of goodies that would be shared with your family and extended family on special occasions. Today you search for the smells, the tastes, and the experiences of shopping in these beloved stores. You yearn to recapture the feeling of those shopping trips, when customer, counterman, and product came together in a unique moment. Something other than money and fish changing hands across a counter was going on here. This is what the Russ family has worked so hard to maintain. This is the soul of our store. And this is why I wrote this book.

  1

  Our History, Sliced Thin

  Six days a week, ten hours a day, for thirty years, I walked back and forth between the tiny office at the rear of the store and the glass showcases filled with perfectly trimmed smoked fish, herrings submerged in brines and sauces, a dozen fresh salads, and cream cheese trays. Next to the showcases were overflowing bagel and bialy bins alongside stacks of rye and pumpernickel breads. And off to the side were sparkling glass jars full of dried fruit, nuts, and candies. Spotless scales, knives, and counters completed the picture.

  This was the very same walk that my grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles took many times a day when they owned and operated Russ & Daughters. Now the fourth generation—my daughter, Niki, and my nephew Josh—make these same rounds as I transition into retirement.

  It’s a short walk from the back of the store to the front. Most of the time.

  “You! Get behind da counter and make me a schmaltz herring!”

  An elderly woman pushed her way out of the crowd of waiting customers and cut me off like a motorcycle cop.

  “I’m sorry, what number are you?”

  “Vhat number? I haf never taken a number. I haf been shopping here for seventy years. I can’t vait. Get behind da counter and make me a herring.”

  This lady was obviously unaware of the fact that the business was now in the hands of the fourth generation of the Russ family, that I no longer went behind the counter to sell herring, that I had proclaimed myself “Herring Maven Emeritus.” But it wouldn’t have made any difference to her anyway. She clearly had never taken a number or waited in line for anything in her life. So I went behind the counter and reached for a herring in the middle of the tray—knowing that this woman would never, ever buy a herring off the top; not from the top of the showcase tray and, when the herrings were sold out of large wooden barrels in front of our store, not from the top of the barrel. For this type of customer I had to go fishing. I selected a herring from the middle of the tray, a particularly large and fat—schmaltzy—herring with clear, shiny blue-gray skin, a broad back, and a belly full of roe. As I removed it from the showcase, she started in again.

  “Vhat? Vhat are you doing?! Vhat do I look like? You tink I don’t know herring? I’ve been eating herring since before you vere born. I ate herring on da udder side—dat was real herring! Now make me a herring. It should be a nice one. I don’t haf all day.”

  What was I thinking? The type of customer who wouldn’t buy a herring off the top would never buy the first herring chosen by the counterman. Even if the counterman happened to be the owner and the third generation of the Russ family, who has been selling herrings on the Lower East Side since 1907. I would have to work for this sale. Why didn’t I just tell her to take what I gave her and stop making a nuisance of herself? Because I grew up in a culture where the customer is king—or, in this case, queen. Because, in all honesty, I’m drawn
to this type of customer—the old-timer who is fast becoming an endangered species. I love these characters. Rolling up my sleeves, I reached farther down into the middle of the tray of schmaltz herrings. I pulled out another herring that was largely indistinguishable from the one that had been rejected. I held it up and displayed it for her as if she was buying a diamond.

  “Now, dat’s a herring.” She smiled, and I was somewhat pleased with myself, having satisfied this tough customer after only two attempts. It often took much longer with an old-timer. I hadn’t lost my touch.

  I placed the chosen herring on a long sheet of wet wax paper to be wrapped. Years ago, before the existence of the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Consumer Affairs, the herring would have been wrapped in old newspapers: usually the Forverts (Forward) or Der Tog (The Day) by my grandfather, or the New York Herald-Tribune or The Daily Mirror by my parents. Even in the beginning of my career as a fishmonger, I wrapped herring in The New York Times. As far as I know, no one ever died or even became sick from eating herring wrapped in newspaper. But now federal, state, and city laws require wax paper and plastic wrapping. So that’s what we do.

  “Vhat! Vhat are you doing?” Her voice became even more agitated. The other customers were now watching.

  “I’m wrapping your herring.”

  “I said you should make me a herring. Take off da skin, take out da bones, and make sure you take out all da bones. Mine grandchildren are coming.”

  “We have schmaltz herrings already filleted,” I said, pointing to a tray of fillets and reaching in, hoping to win her acceptance with the first or second one I chose. By now everyone, including the employees, was focused on the little old lady, the schmaltz herrings, and me. The store grew more crowded as my employees stared at us, the phones went unanswered, and the customers waited.