Shopping in the Big Apple and Pears at B. Altman

Here's one for Mother's Day

With my mother not working, she had plenty of time to spend with me. Together, we learned about shopping in New York, a far different experience from the dumpy little shops of Denville or the department stores in Morristown, our usual destination for serious clothes and shoes in New Jersey. I still wore my Allentown tween garb—things like denim skirts and madras shirts, or possibly Bermuda shorts in the summer. It’s difficult to remember a time when blue jeans were not ubiquitous among all social strata, but this was the mid-1960s. Girls from “good” families did not bare their midriffs or pierce their noses, and people still had trouble accepting the length of The Beatles’ haircuts.

We never seemed to gravitate to the high-end stores on Fifth Avenue, like Bergdorf’s or Best & Company (destroyed by the young glitzmeister Donald Trump to make way for Trump Tower). I remember a trip to Saks, where I was aghast to watch a woman spend $100 on panty hose, plunking down a cool C-note instead of a credit card. Whoever heard of spending that much money on pantyhose? We traveled more often to Lord & Taylor and B. Altman downtown in the 30s, now both sadly defunct. Maybe they seemed more comfortably middle class than the uptown emporiums. We never went to Macy’s or Gimbel’s, for reasons unknown to me. And once my mother discovered Loehmann’s in the Bronx, a couple of years hence, she seldom shopped downtown again.

I suppose one order of business was to find me clothes for school while I was at Rhodes, where I knew I was a hayseed among the children of sophisticates, but I don’t recall what we did to “fix me up,” other than one really crappy haircut, a short crop that was supposed to be imitation Vidal Sassoon but left me in tears My mother, though, was undergoing gradual but profound fashion changes. About the only friend I remember from Rhodes is a girl named Linda who, like me, was gangly and tall but had a face as blank as a wall of sheetrock. Her mother, though, was a former fashion model and single mom who retained her sleek good looks and was my mother’s age, mid-40s. We visited once or twice, because they lived in the neighborhood, and my mother was as eager as I was to make friends (in reality, I was too unhappy to care much at that point—my mother sufficed). Linda’s mom no doubt made an impression, in her Mad Men-style capri pants and Mary Quant mini-dresses. As did the women we passed on Madison Avenue or encountered in the stores. Thin was in.

But Mom had put on quite a few pounds during the Allentown years and now went on serious diets to shed them. Like the grapefruit diet that had her eating half of one before every meal. Or the Special K diet of two meals of cereal a day. Not happy with gradual weight loss, she visited a doctor to speed things up. And speed—which were amphetamines and perfectly legal at the time, marketed as “diet pills”—were just what the doctor ordered.

Glam mom post-diet

I awakened one night to find my mother energetically mopping the kitchen floor at 3 a.m. My father talked her out of the pills, but she did lose weight, becoming in short order a stylish matron who loved clothes but never became a true shopaholic (she disdained fashion magazines and designer labels). After my parents bought a tiny summer house in Montauk in 1967, she rediscovered a love of sewing (because she had room for a sewing machine and summers off from her job) and made us both culotte dresses and bell-bottom slacks. A few years later, I would borrow her knock-off Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses for job interviews. Only after retirement to Florida did she seem to stop caring much about how she dressed, perhaps because the dislocation sent her into a funk from which she never fully recovered.

But before we stop shopping and mopping—or thinking about the end game in God’s waiting room—allow me to mention the lunch rooms at Lord & Taylor and B. Altman, relics of a bygone when middle-class ladies who lunched did so in department stores. I barely remember the Bird Cage at L&T, but the Charleston Gardens restaurant was unforgettable. One wall was a full-size façade of a Tara-like mansion; murals on the other walls were painted to look like extravagant antebellum gardens. A typical menu, like one I found online, offered depressingly bland fare: fresh vegetables with cottage cheese and tomato stuffed with crabmeat salad, brisket with potato salad and cole slaw, and desserts served from a cart: cakes, pies, pastry, fruit cup, stewed Bartlett pears and coconut ice cream. In honor of those sad stewed pears, floating like jaundiced buttocks in a bath of syrup, I offer one of my favorite adult desserts, sent to me by my dear friend Roland Marandino, the author of the estimable food site cookingfrombooks.com.

Pears Poached in Red Wine (source: From Julia Child’s Kitchen)

For four

Ingredients

1) 3 or more pears, firm and ripe, and unblemished. (Bartlett, Anjou, Bosc, Comice, Hardy, Clapp, or Nelis)
2) 1 quart water with 2 Tb lemon juice in a big bowl
3) 2 cups red wine (Pinot Noir, Gamay, or the like) in a 3-quart pan
4) The zest (colored part of the peel only) and 2 Tb of juice from 1 lemon
5) 3/4 cup sugar
6) 1 stick or 1/2 tsp of cinnamon

Preparation

Peel, halve, and core the pears, dropping them into the lemon water and as you go, to prevent discoloration. Keep the stems intact.

Meanwhile, simmer the wine with zest, additional lemon juice, sugar, and cinnamon to bring out the flavor of ingredients (five minutes or so).

Drop in the pears, bring just to the simmer (add a little more wine, or water, if fruit is not covered by liquid, plus a little sugar, measuring it in: proportions are 6 tablespoons sugar per cup of liquid).  Lower heat and maintain at the not quite simmer for 8-10 minutes, just until pears are tender when pierced with a knife.

Let cool in syrup for at least 20 minutes.

Serve warm, cool, or chilled. Store in a covered bowl in the refrigerator.

Top: Pierre Bonnard, Jeune fille et sa mère (c. 1910)