Ms. O’Neill ushered in an era of food writing in the 1990s that was as much about journalism as deliciousness, built on the work of writers like M. F. K. Fisher, Richard Olney, Elizabeth David and Craig Claiborne, the former food editor of The New York Times.
“I wanted to be all of them,” she wrote in 2003, “with a slice of Woodward and Bernstein on the side.”
I well remember her, and remember reading and enjoying her writing. Then time passed, and I lost track of her. She moved onto other endeavors, and I started watching food shows on television.
With American food writing today including many voices and cultures, it is easy to forget that Ms. O’Neill was doing so long before the globe-trotting Anthony Bourdain and the Los Angeles restaurant critic Jonathan Gold were household names, at least in food-centric households.
“This is exactly what Tony Bourdain was doing, and nobody gave her any credit for it,” said Ruth Reichl, the author and former Times restaurant critic.
I don't know how she was personally, if she had Bourdain's extroverted personality, or whether she appeared on the food scene early, and Gold and Bourdain reaped the glory of her pioneering work — or if her being a woman and those two and others being men had anything to do with things, but it does dangle there in the ether.
I went onto the QBPL website, and searched for her The New York Cookbook, but its three copies were (already) reserved. I found her One big table at a couple of QBPL branches, including Briarwood. There I decided to go.
Briarwood is a weird neighborhood; well, its location (though I suppose Briarwood residents mightn't think so). It's on the southern end of Main Street, which in downtown Flushing is a big, busy thoroughfare. It's right off Queens Boulevard, up the block from the County courthouse, with the Van Wyck Expressway right there (remember, that's Wyck as in like, not as in wick).
Spaghetti of highways; in the afternoon traffic abounds — if you were to look at traffic on a map of central Queens, there'd be a lot of red. I was in some of that, on the Van Wyck and on Union Turnpike on the way to the library. I've been in traffic other times: there is a perpetual construction project to widen the highways, which seems a losing proposition, though I do see some progress (after fifteen years, and more).
I found a parking spot on Queens Boulevard, across the QB from the Library, and crossed that thoroughfare carefully (this is the same Queens Boulevard which further west has six lanes in each direction, and is considered one of the most dangerous streets in New York City (not just in the outer boroughs, but in all the boroughs).
I walked across Queens Boulevard (yes, carefully), and sat at a public space. There is a dearth of public seating, benches where one can sit down and have a snack or a quick meal, and linger for a while, and not just in New York. Why is that?
In this spot there were benches and what I suppose are metal sculptures, which are quite ugly, as well as litter: plastic bags with paper wrappers, an empty beer bottle, empty coffee cups filled with (I suppose) rainwater, all of which in part answer my above query: why aren't there public spaces where one can sit and linger? Because people are slobs, expect someone else to clean up their crap, and the city doesn't have the money to spend on public amenities. People are the same way on the road: they do not let another driver go first, rush to be ahead, cut in line, and behave piggishly.
Yet I enjoyed my food. The lamb was delicious, chunks of meat nicely cooked; the tomatoes were tasty, a deep red and juicy, and the sauces were an amalgam of goodness, just spicy enough plus a bit more. Thoughtfully, the man in the cart had given me a big handful of napkins, and I needed them. Pita is the perfect bread for this juicy goodness, too.
Queens at one of its best. Street food after a visit to the public library, outdoor seating, green all around me. Across Queens Boulevard, parkland, to my left, Maple Grove Cemetery. A sunny day, rain finally ended, getting warm, summer started.
I dropped Molly's tome in my car, and walked into Maple Grove. I saw two names I recognized when I scanned a QR code of one of its signs: Jimmy Rushing, the jazz singer, and John Sutphin, a Queens man after whom Sutphin Boulevard is named. I sat for a bit, and headed out. This little critter was enjoying the Queens afternoon's offerings:
Stopping at a supermarket at the corner of Main Street and Union Turnpike, I was in a different neighborhood then, away from Kew Gardens and Briarwood, into the fringes of Kew Gardens Hills. I think the name is a bit of an affectation, but I don't live there. Over the last twenty years the neighborhood has become heavily Orthodox Jewish, Modern Orthodox.
I parked and went into the QBPL branch. Approaching it, I was surprised:
When I was in Library School, in one class we were given an assignment to visit a local library (we define what local meant), and speak to a librarian about the library's issues. I chose the Kew Gardens Hills branch of QBPL because it was close to Queens College and I knew the neighborhood (as few classmates, if any, did). The branch was utterly different then, smaller, far more modest, perhaps dowdy. Today's library is quite different. I'll leave it at that for now. But it is worth considering, and investigating, why certain libraries are remodeled or replaced, while others aren't.