Once Upon a Bakery

The neighborhood of my youth was the stuff of the Wonder Years; an archetypal American blueprint that burgeoned in the 50s and 60s with concrete block ranch-style houses.  The most notable features were an old dairy farm, a rock-quarry-turned-park, and a 12^th Century Spanish monastery purchased by William Randolph Hearst, dismantled and relocated, piece by piece.  These anchors of the community remain today, but have lost the charm they once possessed in the earlier years of the area’s incorporation.

North Miami Beach, as it was called because the original land mass extended to the ocean and included 3 miles of oceanfront, was made popular, in part, as a migratory destination for the “borscht belt” town of Monticello, NY.   Snow birds made this area their winter home, establishing a center for education and worship known as “Monticello Park”—later expanded and renamed Beth Torah Synagogue.   In my day, Beth Torah had a beautiful sanctuary building with a distinctive architectural feature—a roof in the shape of a six-pointed Star of David.  In time, the area’s dense Jewish population grew into the highest concentration of Jews per capita outside of Israel.  North Miami Beach is now a gateway community to the more well-known areas of Aventura and Sunny Isles.

When I visit this area of my childhood today, there is little that conjures that spirit I once felt.  It was a sleepy community where kids were safe to play in the yard, wander from house to house, or ride bikes with training wheels in the streets.  I loved to race from the house before breakfast to get the newspaper, barefoot.  The hot summer sun would just start cranking up the heat, warming the concrete walkway while the thick lawn retained the cool moist dew of early morning.   I would stand as long as I dared on the sizzling slab and then jump into the grass for relief, marveling at this whimsical incongruity of Nature.  

By far, my favorite place in North Miami Beach was Melody Diane Bakery—the crown jewel of Jewish bakeries.  It occupied a neon-faced storefront on 167^th street, adjoined by Melnick’s, a specific type of Jewish deli known as an “appetizing store”.  Because Kosher laws prohibit the mixing of meat with dairy, an appetizing establishment carried every type of savory except meat:  lox, smoked fish, pickled herring, pickles, cream cheese varieties, jars of sauerkraut and gefilte fish, and year-round matzoh.

Of all the primal sensory imprints, nothing brings me home like the smell of a Jewish bakery.  Unlike other European-style pastries redolent of almond paste and powdered sugar, Jewish pastries are dry confections featuring ingredients such as dried fruits, cinnamon, and nuts.  They are often rock hard, sweetened with glaze rather than frosting.  The stars of a Jewish bakery include such things as cinnamon-raisin rugelach, poppy- or prune-filled hamentashen, and a crumbly half bread, half danish loaf, called babka.  

My grandmother went to Melody Diane’s almost every day.   When I was three and four, I would tune in to the family goings-on just to maneuver myself into accompanying my grandmother on her bakery run.  She knew all the ladies in the bakery by name and they called her by her first name, a fact I believed conferred a certain status upon my family.   And there were things that happened in that bakery that convinced me it was an enchanted place.  

My grandmother would commonly order something she called a “coffee ring.”  For years I would not even taste this pastry, as I disliked coffee intensely.  Later I would discover it did not contain coffee at all; rather, it was essentially a large, airy danish filled with cinnamon and walnuts fashioned into the shape of a ring and brushed with sticky glaze.  My grandmother and her “mah jongg ladies” would cut tiny slivers of this ring because they were always watching their weight, but they would continue to eat two, three, even four servings until it was gone.  I loved to watch the bakery lady create a box that folded from a single sheet of thin cardboard into a square shape with a hinged lid and three big flaps.   The coffee ring fit perfectly inside with no room to spare.  Then, in a single motion, the lady would pull string from a container that hung from the ceiling, tying the box until it looked like a present with a bow on top.  She ripped the string with her bare hands to set the box free.  It dazzled me then as no magician has since.

I was also mesmerized by the bread slicing machine.  If I was lucky, my grandmother would order my grandfather’s favorite seeded rye bread.  I watched through the glass case while the woman placed the loaf right before my eyes and pulled the lever.  Little by little, the bread disappeared through the vertical blades until it was gone, materializing on her side of the apparatus perfectly sliced.  In one elegant movement, she lifted the segmented loaf and slid it perfectly into a plastic bag. 

I was not a fan of the seeded rye, the seeds imparting a taste that was off-putting to a juvenile palette.  If I was to have lunch with my grandparents, I got to ask politely for a “nosey roll.”  These are delectable little rolls made from yellow challah bread, twisted and knotted so the end of the dough is pulled up through the center, forming what I thought looked like a “nosey.”  It became a tradition that my grandfather would kiss the nosey, thereby certifying its acceptability, before I ate my sandwich.

On Sundays, our family tradition was to assemble en masse for a brunch of bagels and lox.  On such occasions, the visit to Melody Diane’s included ducking in to Melnick’s.  Unlike the glorious smell of the bakery, Melnick’s smelled, not surprisingly, of pickles and fish.  Still, there was a certain excitement to ordering a pound of lox, watching while old man Melnick slid an entire side of salmon from the case by its tail.  Laid out on the counter, he went at it with the longest and thinnest of knives, carving paper thin slices and aligning them on wax paper so precisely it looked as if the fish were reassembled.   It took me years to enjoy eating lox; my favorite was the milder sablefish—a smoked black cod with milky white meat surrounded by a paprika-colored skin.  Unlike the lox, Melnick sliced the sable crosswise into little steaks, each cut so uniformly I would have thought they were sent through the bread slicer had I not watched with my own eyes.

With bags of bread and fish filling our hands, I would pull my grandmother back through the bakery before leaving.    This would allow me to cleanse the fish and pickle essence from my lungs, renewing myself with the wonderful bakery aromas.  Secretly, however, I had unfinished business there.  Kids were entitled to a cookie of their choice.  I was not permitted to ask; by tradition, it must be offered.  So I would peruse the glass displays, asking my grandmother whether she was certain she had everything she needed.  She played along, enumerating the spoils of our adventure until the lady who had helped us finished ringing up her current customer.  Catching the woman’s eye, my grandmother would suggest that there was something she forgot.  With a wink, the woman would look at me in faux distress, wondering why I did not have a cookie.  This was the moment I cherished, well worth the wait.  I scrutinized the glass display, turning up my nose at the ordinary chocolate chips, or the various colors of tasteless sprinkles.  There was only one prize for me:  a simple spritz cookie topped with a candy cherry.  Of all the cookies in all the world, there was nothing more special than this flower-shaped treat with its glowing jewel on top.

By the time I graduated from high school, Melody Diane’s and Melnick’s were only a memory.  Today, the neighborhood bakery where confections are baked in-house is nearly extinct.  Even rarer is the old-fashioned Jewish-style bakery where traditional recipes transport me back to another time and place.  When I find such a place—like Kupel’s in Brookline, Massachusetts or Wall’s Bake Shop in Hewlett, NY—I buy out the store, filling my freezer with mandelbrot, babka and kichel.  I want my children to know these flavors and to associate them with their youth and their heritage.  Even more, I want another taste of my own childhood, and another day of culinary conspiracy with my beloved grandmother.

Tomorrow's blog:  Exceeding My Quotient for Products